I decided to pick the topic of AIDS because I felt like it was something I knew a little bit about, but could definitely stand to learn more. Although we’ve come a long way, AIDS still has a stigma because it is a disease transmitted mainly through sex. On top of that, it has always disproportionally affected gay men more than any other demographic. When I was growing up, AIDS wasn’t something that the general public felt it really had to worry about anymore. With increased sexual education and more awareness on how to combat STDs, most people believed that AIDS was a thing of the past. With AIDS being a “non-issue”, a sex issue, and an LGBT issue, it wasn’t something 21st-century kids like me were talked to about. Even growing up in a socially liberal household, I don’t believe I knew what AIDS really was until high school.

On top of that, I don’t think I knew the issues behind AIDS until a year ago. I’ve gained small bits of information over the past year, but the majority of what I know about AIDS I have learned in the past week, both in-class and through a couple documentaries so that I could better understand my topic.

It was hard to choose the questions to ask my class about AIDS, because I knew I couldn’t just ask them “was it wrong to ignore the AIDS crisis?”. There were a lot of really basic questions like that which came to my mind, but I knew those wouldn’t come up with any real conversation. I wanted to make the conversation polarizing, so I had to find questions that would rely on people’s perceptions on history rather than moral dilemmas that most of us would probably be on the same side with. I eventually ended up with these five questions, and with each question, I’ll go over how well it went.