I'm Eric Marcus and this is the write my book Making Gay History, I made a list.

It was the late fall of 1988.

AIDS was burning through a generation of gay men, tens of thousands were dead, thousands

more were infected, many of them already sick.

And that included some of the people I wanted to interview. Time was not on my side. At the top of my list

was Vido Russo. He was a co-founder of Act Up, a group committed to ending the AIDS

crisis, and he was also one of the founders of GLAD,

an organization that challenged how gay people were represented in the media.

Vido was also a brilliant film buff who wrote the celluloid closet. It was a landmark book on the

history of how gay people were portrayed in film. So I called Vido and made an

appointment to interview him at his apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of

Manhattan. Coincidentally, he lived right around the corner from the health clinic where I had just gotten my first HIV test.

I was 29 and during the three weeks it took to get the test results I celebrated my 30th birthday.

If the results came back positive, you knew you were a dead man.

Back then the treatments were primitive.

At best they'd buy you a little time. If you were negative, well, I was hoping for the best, but as usual, expecting the worst.

My deal with God, and I really wasn't a believer, but I had a deal.

And the deal was to just let me live long enough to get this book done,

to leave something meaningful behind.

Turned out that I was one of the lucky ones, that I'd have time to tell our stories,

but Vito's time was running out.

So here's the scene.

...