If there is a weakness in this series it is in the regular relationships sometimes being exaggerated as far as the public showing of emotions which really were not as obvious as are illustrated at times. The mysteries of the starting of HIV/AIDS is spot on. A lot of victims started dying and more and more rumors of what the causes were wilder and wilder.
While the crisis was more evident in San Francisco as this series shows, the entire country did get swept up in the homo-phobia that resulted from the disease as it spread. Acceptance of Gay Lifestyles took a long time to get accepted and often was downplayed as it happened in the national media. To it's credit, an early episode of the TV series MASH actually dealt with this intelligently, the main stream media as is usual with issues today, did not deal with being Gay until Barack Obama got in office, and yet still kind of avoids dealing with it whenever possible.
That is why this series, while fictionalized in parts, is ground breaking. Being Gay is a normal human condition which exists. It has never really been anything but normal though cultures have often tried to make it so negative that it was minimized. Strange while a normal human event was viewed so negatively by some cultures while so many of them accepted slavery as a normal condition and even used religion to defend it.
While the crisis was more evident in San Francisco as this series shows, the entire country did get swept up in the homo-phobia that resulted from the disease as it spread. Acceptance of Gay Lifestyles took a long time to get accepted and often was downplayed as it happened in the national media. To it's credit, an early episode of the TV series MASH actually dealt with this intelligently, the main stream media as is usual with issues today, did not deal with being Gay until Barack Obama got in office, and yet still kind of avoids dealing with it whenever possible.
That is why this series, while fictionalized in parts, is ground breaking. Being Gay is a normal human condition which exists. It has never really been anything but normal though cultures have often tried to make it so negative that it was minimized. Strange while a normal human event was viewed so negatively by some cultures while so many of them accepted slavery as a normal condition and even used religion to defend it.