Long-term AIDS survivors share their stories in ‘Children of Lazarus’

There are moments when history tilts, not gradually but all at once, and the change is so abrupt, so without precedent, that those who survive it spend the rest of their lives trying to explain what it felt like – how the air itself seemed altered, how the light went out of familiar rooms.

When Les K. Wright, Ph.D. speaks of San Francisco in 1981, he is trying to convey exactly that: how thousands of gay men – many of them young, searching, desperate for a place to belong – moved west in pursuit of community and freedom, only to wake up one morning to find themselves living inside a catastrophe.

Wright, who is gay and HIV-positive, remembers the speed of it, how the Castro – once an improbable republic of open doors and open nights, gay-owned bookstores and bars that stayed lit past clos