Author Sarah Schulman notes that the message of her 1990 novel People in Trouble, set in the early days of the epidemic in New York City’s Lower East Side, was “that personal homophobia becomes societal neglect, that there is a direct relationship between the two.”21 This observation—that personal prejudice has a fundamental, devastating effect on public opinion and policy—explains to a great degree how ignorance, misunderstanding, dislike, fear, and hatred of homosexuals could escalate to such an extent that large numbers of Americans could simply not care about the deaths of their fellow
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