Review: Five Plague Years ‘AIDS in New York,’ at New-York Historical Society

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ed Rothstein

Courtesy of New York City Faith in Action for HIV/AIDS

NEW YORK---Disease is always an intrusion, an indignity, an assault, a devastation. And if the new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, “AIDS in New York: The First Five Years,” were about any other epidemic, that is what it might evoke. So much has been written about AIDS that it would have also have been helpful, despite the exhibition’s title, to step back from the hysteria and desperation of those early years. How did reactions to AIDS compare with other epidemics in history, which have always been associated with alien social intrusions: Jews with the Black Death, immigrants with influenza? But despite its limitations, the exhibition brings to life a period when AIDS began to infect not just the body but the body politic. And it ends with the death of Rock Hudson on Oct. 2, 1985, when “knowledge of the epidemic moved from the margins of society to a wider world.” [link]