I have always wondered about this. In the mid 70’s, I worked for a couple whose oldest son was gay and had moved to California. The mom told me an old (and the man was OLD) family acquaintance molested him as a boy and the son actually blamed this as the reason for his being gay. The son died in the late 70’s of an unknown disease, which took him very suddenly. I’ve always believed it was AIDS, which was not yet heard of at that time. No one even went to get his belongings or attend his funeral.
The first media reports about AIDS were about the beginning of 1981 I think (although I think it was a bit later before the name was adopted). The Red Cross when screening blood donations uses the year 1977 as a cut-off (they won’t accept blood from a male who has had sex with another male since 1977). I once read about a mysterious case in St. Louis from the 1960s—a teenage boy was dying and the doctors couldn’t figure out what the matter was. They saved a blood sample and after the AIDS epidemic became known they tested it and discovered that the boy had had AIDS.