When I was twenty-five years old I appeared in the pages of the New York Times Magazine in my underwear. Well, almost. A cartoon drawing of a girl in her underwear—a girl who, with her short blond hair and apple cheeks over a pointed chin, looked remarkably like me—appeared in conjunction with an essay I’d written about the way Generation X was reacting to the safe-sex message. The year was 1996 and the AIDS crisis, though technically past its apogee, seemed to have finally succeeded in infiltrating every corner of the general public consciousness and scaring the hell out of it. Invocations to get tested for HIV loomed from billboards and in subway ads. Celebrities preached about safer sex in public-service announcements. Music videos and advertisements appropriated AIDS awareness as not only a form of provocation but an agent of style. It was the year of the Broadway debut of Rent, a modern-day retelling of La Bohème that featured several characters who were either infected with HIV or dying of AIDS.
