Just read this story. Not much to say but 'wow'. It's the quiet ones that have the most power.
What I remember most about AIDS in the 80s - only being a kid - is the posters and ads the govt had put out over here. Nothing but a dark grey tombstone with AIDS spelled out against a backdrop of a threatening, cloud-dark sky. There was some other text (or a voiceover on the ads), but whatever that was about has faded from memory now (maybe something about using condoms or abstaining altogether?). Then there were the rumours. I think we twigged that anyone could get it, despite the schoolyard 'joke' that AIDS stood for "Ar$e Injected Death Sentence" - laughing in the face of fear - but the big lies were that you could get it from toilet seats and even from kissing (assuming no cuts or open sores, etc, which were obviously also a risk).
But even here it was framed as a case of 'live right and you're safe'. In other words, don't be gay and don't inject drugs - which, though homosexuality wasn't a crime in the UK by then, still managed to make the link between being gay and an illegal activity.
Most of what I know about the effects over here came via an old workmate and friend of mine, who was (and presumably still is) gay and is a few years older than I am. He was already out in the world in the period when it hit here and had memories of friends and acquaintances who had contracted AIDS and died. We only really got onto the topic once, and I forget how, but the stories he shared, of what happened to people, of the general sense of fear and concern, were horrific - and those, he said, were some of the ones he felt able to talk about. Even then, he capped it all off by saying something like 'As bad as it was here, it was almost nothing compared to how it was in the States'.
This story also reminded me of a myth I came across once, how Death comes as a beautiful young woman carrying a lamp. She'll lean over the intended and smile, then give them a chaste little kiss. And with the kiss, that person is gone.
I can't remember which set of mythology that comes from or what the lady with the lamp was called, and searches for 'lady with the lamp' crossed with 'Death' come up with Florence Nightingale (which is kinda/sorta amusing).
But...yeah, this one was a goody (and SK was dead right to ignore the naysaying friend).