While AIDS Ravaged The Arts World In The 1980s, The New York Times Obituaries Euphemized

“Like most obituaries, these carried the weight of individual lives, many taken too soon. But unlike other obits, they were laced with evasions — omissions effectively erasing a person’s life, effectively erasing AIDS. … Those who lost their lives — many of them pathbreaking artists and individuals who, if still here today, would be running our museums, our publishing houses, our media companies, opera houses, and drama guilds — died before we had enough to remember them by. To trace the stories behind such obituaries is to unearth the very voices that shaped our culture, to recover what’s been lost.” — Slate

Article source here:Arts Journal