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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. You've probably heard the comparisons, the height of the COVID pandemic to the early days of the HIV AIDS crisis.

Millions of people have died from both diseases, both ravaged communities and exposed the fault lines in medical care.

Well, in a new podcast series from WNYC in the History Channel,

journalists Skywright and Lizzie Ratner

take us to New York in the mid 80s when the HIV virus first took root.

So new, it didn't even have a name.

Hi, it's so nice to meet you.

Valerie Reyes-Menez remembers how it all started.

Or at least when they first started to notice it.

We said that people had the monster because they had that look.

They had the sucked in cheeks.

They were really thin.

A lot of folks were saying, oh, you know, they had liver cancer, you know, they had cancer, that's what they died from.

Because you couldn't name it yet.

He called it the monster, or grid, or in another part of town maybe the gay plague.

Mostly though you avoided talking about it at all, until you just couldn't anymore. People just started like

disappearing like one day they were there and the next day they were gone. These 20

people that used to hang out in this building shooting up they're all gone.

You know like car wash, papal, tear so, you know, co co co cooee.

You know like all these people they're all gone.

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