One day in 1982 or 1983, a young man in New Haven, Connecticut, learned that his friend had been diagnosed with a medical condition that had only recently acquired the name AIDS. At the time, just a couple dozen people had received such a diagnosis in the entire state of Connecticut. He was stunned. When his friend “was first diagnosed, it was all—I mean, I’d probably heard a little bit about AIDS,” he told me decades later. “But it was still a New York, Greenwich Village thing.” Much like