When I conducted life history research with communities of older LGBTQ adults in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017, I found that their social networks continued to be impacted by the HIV/AIDS crisis, revealing gaps in my own knowledge about the crisis as a younger queer person. I analyze in this paper the conflict between what my interlocutors discussed and popular understandings of HIV/AIDS in America today, with collective memory as a theoretical basis. I compare this conflict to the unfolding narratives of COVID-19, its implications beyond the pandemic, and what anthropologists can do moving forward.

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