Some thoughts of note on the 20th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic:

Two decades after its presence was first detected, AIDS remains very much among us. It continues to kill. It continues to build a legacy of social transformation. Unfortunately for us all, AIDS at 20 is still a work in progress.

We knew it was a lethal disease. We didn't know how it was transmitted. We had nightmares about infecting our kids.

This is a generation that has never not known HIV, just as their parents had never not known The Bomb.

Twenty years later, Gottlieb reckons that he underestimated what he had found - by about 36 million cases.

When your country abandons you, you have two choices: sink or circle the wagons.

Unable to get assigned to a trial of the promising new drug cocktails, Tierney, 39, rode his bicycle to the Golden Gate Bridge, and jumped over the side.

But sometimes I turn out the light and sit in the dark and imagine what it'd be like to see Johnny and Roger and Walter and Chris and Eric and Bobby and Austin again. I sit there and get that familiar downward pull in my heart, and it's all I can do not to leap up and go for the light.

AIDS activism is getting diseases out of the shadows and into the light.

When we say, 'in sickness and in health, till death do us part,' it really means something to us.

What's to say that the virus won't win? Maybe this is the thing that's going to wipe us all out.

21.8 million dead

20 YEARS/20+ MILLION DEAD