WASHINGTON POST: Monkeypox is rousing old fears — and ways gay men care for each other

[New York City AIDS Memorial Board Member] Eric Sawyer feels a familiar fear. In the gay hamlet of Fire Island Pines, where he owns a bungalow, men have been swapping gossip about ghastly symptoms, scanning each other for any blemish, scrounging for medical interventions in short supply. For Sawyer, 68, this type of anxiety is not an artifact but a scar on his heart.

“While monkeypox is not deadly, just like with HIV there are myriad horror stories,” says Sawyer, a longtime activist who in 1987 was on the ground floor of ACT UP, the collective committed to ending the AIDS epidemic. “It opens up a lot of the raw wounds, brings back interrupted grieving from having so many friends die.”