“I never saw such fear in a room in my life,” the fashion designer Stan Herman told me, recalling a 1981 gathering of prominent gay men at author Larry Kramer’s Manhattan apartment. A medical professional was educating the guests about the sexually transmitted infection that was killing their friends. That condition would soon be known as “AIDS.” In 1986, the virus that caused it was named “H.I.V.” Over the next 20 years, the scourge of AIDS—Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome—would exceed even the most dire predictions.
“Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS”—an exhibition opening Friday at Manhattan’s Poster House—documents the graphic arts that were essential to the era’s grassroots community mobilization against the surging epidemic. Posters, handbills, ephemera—all were charged with code-red urgency.
