Alicia Abbott

I don't recall when my father tested HIV positive.

Actually, I learned that date, 1986, in reading his journals.

I think at the time I was aware, as anyone reading newspapers and watching television was, of the AIDS epidemic, and I was scared.

I was scared because I knew my father was gay and that made him more vulnerable.

And that made me scared to talk, you know, to be open about my father's sexuality because...

Being gay in that era was so closely aligned with this fatal, disturbing disease.

And so I think I had a lot of fear around it generally.

But before I left to college, my senior year in high school, a close friend of ours died of AIDS and AIDS.

And he had been – I had gotten to know a lot of people in our neighborhood in the Haight and I got to know a lot of my dad's friends.

But this particular friend I became very close with and had a crush on and he went to my birthday party and even bought liquor for my friends and I once when I was a teenager.

A teenager, it hit me when he died.

I never got to say goodbye to him.

Like a lot of men, young men, he was only 31.

Like a lot of young men in the city, he didn't want to share his decline with very many people.

He basically went into hiding, didn't tell anyone about it other than his lover and his roommate.

And so my father had heard he was sick and I had suggested we go visit him, but we never did and time passed and I really didn't know what was going on until my father got a call that he had died.

And my freshman year at college, I wrote an essay about him.

And as well about the homophobia that I had seen at the time in San Francisco when the AIDS epidemic was hitting very hard.

Some men would be targeted in a city for violence and there would be anti-gay graffiti scrawled on walls or on the back of bus seats.

And this affected me.