We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it'slike, what we'regoing through.We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.

-Kramer, Larry (Lawrence)
  Ned speaking of gay men with  AIDS. The Normal Heart, act 2, sc.11.

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since theVietnam War.

-White, Edmund
  'AfterwordöAIDS: An American Epidemic', added to later editions of States of Desire:Travels in Gay America.