Breathless commentators predicted that the deadly disease would ravage our society. Even though it first erupted among the male homosexual and illicit needle-using communities, it was caused by a virus and could easily jump, we were warned, from bath house to Baptist picnic. Our bodies would have no resistance to this new virus, and it would strike us down as easily as smallpox--brought from Europe by the pilgrims--smote the natives in the New World. Initial estimates were that in the United States alone, a hundred million of us would succumb to the dreaded HIV.
Well, that never happened. Casualties pretty much stayed in the first groups of male same-sexers and needle junkies.
