Jonathan and I had both seen scores of friends and acquaintances die young in New Orleans.
Gay men who lived through the worst years of the AIDS epidemic got used to hundreds of their close friends and acquaintances dying while in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
1. Because, like me, if you're gay and in your 50s, you watched virtually all of your male friends and acquaintances die agonizing deaths, often at what should have been the prime of their lives, with little support or compassion from elected leaders, often families, in a war, a holocaust, that didn't mark them as heroes or innocent, only cold dust.
An acquaintance, Ken Hummel, died a few weeks ago in Stuyvesant, N.Y., my hamlet, population 2,000.
And he was one of Sontag's many gay acquaintances who died of AIDS.
So many of your friends, cousins and acquaintances have died in one way or another.
In Bernard Malamud's short story "Take Pity," a census-taker named Davidov asks a man named Rosen how an acquaintance of his died.
Some years ago the son of an acquaintance of mine died from a massive heroin overdose on the first occasion he experimented with the substance, because he did not know how much to take and did not know that the heroin he had been supplied was particularly potent.
The pair were talking about acquaintances who had died recently an Eastern European girl who had overdosed near the garages last week and "probably died between the trash cans," said Claudia.
