We Must Realize AIDS Affects Us All

Re: “Finding a Place of Peace,” (Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day): Thank you for showing the readers the true picture of AIDS, a disease that turns the young into skeletons.

How does this relate to Coming Out Day? For 14 years AIDS has been called a gay disease. Our country, being relatively ethnocentric, did not and continues not to place AIDS into the world context and observe that much of Africa, Asia and Europe contribute staggering statistics regarding infection rates and mortality due to HIV. Taken all together, the pandemic of AIDS is a disease affecting heterosexuals and gays and women and children and white people and people of color. But our country, with its overt and covert disdain for homosexual people and people of color, has until very recently turned a blind eye to this disease, which now rages out of control ravaging communities and families, leaving orphans and widows in its wake.

I don’t know who will be the next and neither do you. I pray you never have to bury a loved one, young in years, a skeleton. To prevent that we all have to come out with our fears and let our deep human core of love take over. We cannot afford to be divided a second longer.

--MADELYNN RIGOPOULOS

Huntington Beach