This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

By the late 1980s, AIDS had been in the US for almost a decade.

If you look through timelines from this period, you see the records of 100 people dead,

1,000 people dead, a million people dead.

AIDS becomes the number one killer of young men in New York City,

then of young men in the country, then of young men and women in the country.

But what you don't see much of in the late 80s is public acknowledgement of AIDS.

That's reporter Audrey Quinn.

Millions of people were dying of this mysterious new disease,

but there was so much stigma against talking about it.

You kind of felt like you were living in a war zone and there was no reporting.

It was a bizarro world.

That's Patrick O'Connell. He was really involved with the Manhattan Art scene in the late 80s.

The community where it could be hard to think about anything but the AIDS crisis.

We would spend days going to St. Vincent to visit someone,

going to Reddens for a funeral and then getting on your answering machine,

a message of somebody flipping out because they've just been told that they're going to be sick or are sick.

So Patrick and a group of other artists turn their focus to AIDS.

Yeah, why are you making art in response to AIDS?

Actually, I don't know his death that question. Why would you not be?

In 1988, O'Connell and his collaborators began calling their collective visual AIDS.

They held public events to raise AIDS awareness.

...