I remember when it was called “gay cancer”. This would have been about the time Nixon/Ford then Carter was president. They knew gay men, and mostly men were dying but not what of. It looked like a cancer but could not identify it.
Am wondering how you knew your friends died of this if they had not idenified it yet?
I put two and two together.
They kept getting sicker and sicker and doctors had no idea what was going on with them.
I worked one mile from LAX with one of them, Patient Zero of the current AIDS epidemic was a male flight attendant Hell bent on spreading his mystery ailment.
The other I knew from my church in Hollywood, I don’t think the chain of contagion from Gaetan Dugas at LAX to Santa Monica Blvd is very long.