A number of San Francisco physicians would remember the end of 1982 as an invisible demarcation line for their patients. There weren’t any formal studies, but, in their evaluations of patients, doctors noted that gay men who had stopped getting inseminated by the end of 1982 tended to avoid infection with the AIDS virus; those who were infected tended to be those who carried on into 1983 and beyond. It was just a rule of thumb, of course, because later studies indicated that at least 20 percent of San Francisco’s gay men were probably infected with the AIDS virus before the end of 1982. The
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