What were you doing in July 1988? What city were you living in? Were you out? Were you having much sex with aids lurking about?

No sex, I was four.

In high school, not out and having no sex. I was a late bloomer losing my virginity at 19 to a coworker. I wasn't really attracted to him but I desperately wanted to experience sex. We went to his place, kissed and dry humped in our jeans, then finally jerked each other off. Never hooked up with him again.

I was 2 years out of college and living in Boston, getting ready to move to Hawaii for a job I’d been offered.

Oh, and I was dating a radio station DJ who was 20 years my senior, but I didn’t mind because he had air conditioning and it was a hot summer.

I just started driving and sneaking to my bf house in the middle of night. Summer of 88 was one the best in DC.

R4 Are you still in Hawaii?

I was in grade school and obsessed with Lisa Lisa, Samantha Fox and Debbie Gibson.

That was the year I moved to Bangkok and had lots of sex. Then again I was having lots of sex in the USA prior to that as well.

I was 18 - starting college in Philly - still a virgin

I was in high school. I started to realize I was gay, but decided I’d deal with it in college.

Playing with She-Ra dolls and raising hell in elementary school.

R9 A virgin? awwwwwwww. Here is the writer who wrote Like A Virgin, Vadge 100% copied his demo. Being the unoriginal cunt that she is.

By 1988 everyone knew that AIDS was not easily transmissible and that a condom was effective at keeping you safe. Or just not getting fucked. 1983 was a good deal more stressful.

I was in NYC and having a mad affair with a sizzling hot man in Boston. All in all, it was a good summer.

Kevin Wiles had his ass full with Chad Douglas.

How in the fuck do I know?!

nothing, I was born on July 8 of 88

Turned 30 and figured it was time to settle down with an 'appropriate' man rather than whoring around with street trash.

I was in a 2-seat airplane doing the loop-de-loop with cecil b. demille.

No sex, Cleveland. I had just started college and was in the closet

It was the middle of winter in Melbourne. I was trying to stay warm.

i was in a barn doing the Ubangi Stomp.

I attended a Pussy Galore concert. Best fucking night of my fuckin' life!

I was 22 years old and traveling with my brother in Spain and Portugal. I had not had sex yet. I mentioned this on a previous thread. We were in a cafe in Lisbon. I was being friendly to the owner this butch burly guy about 45 years old or so. He starts rubbing his crotch, pinching my thigh and putting his arm around my waist. I guess he was a TOP.

I was 17 and taking college courses at the School of Visual Arts before my senior in high school. NYC was crazy, filthy and dangerous but I loved it. I'd walk to classes from Penn Station, which was hell on earth - insane homeless people everywhere, and the stink of crack, grease and piss was a fog you couldn't escape.

This was the summer that I also first hooked up with guys. Still can't believe how ballsy I was. After discussing Luis Bunuel and having critical discussions about Leni Riefenstahl at SVA, I'd skip up to the video booths on 42nd street. I got my dick sucked by so many hot married business guys it was insane. Of course, I also was convinced I contracted AIDS in the process - but that kinda came with the territory I guess.

Anyway. It was an inflection point for me. That summer motivated me to finish high school a semester early and move into the city. Where I've been ever since.

i was 16 and was into scamming the Columbia House Music Club and BMG Music Service like a bitch. I had soo many different accounts under ridiculous names. "Teela Mitilda Swilla Marilla"? I really boosted my CD collection that summer with "12 free CDs for the price of 1".

This song is talks about 1988 and how you can't go back.

I was living in Boston and was six months into a relationship with my (now) wife.

That was when my ex came down with PCP pneumonia and had to be hospitalized with no health insurance and a t-cell count of 51. The nurses were afraid to change his bed pans. Fucking Florida.

I was probably riding my bike around the neighborhood with the other 10-year-olds.

In July 1988 I was one year out of college, still trying to find myself, and had a summer job that I liked, working for the government. The summer of 1988 was memorable because there was a drought in the midwest and everybody's crops and plants and lawns were dying and people were hot and miserable.

I was not completely out of the closet yet and I don't think I was having much sex, but I had just come out to one of my fraternity brothers because I was infatuated with him, and he let me down gently that he was straight and could not reciprocate my interest, but that we were still friends. In August 1988 I would move back n campus and start my graduate degree, and I remember that my college boyfriend spent the weekend with me and that was the last time we had sex because I told him that it was time for me to move on. What a dumb move on my part! I wish I had starting things up with him again, because in retrospect he was a good boyfriend and a good sex partner.

Youth is wasted on the young.

I was not even fucking born yet!! Jealous bitches? I was born 2 years later so I was contemplating datalounge.

I was 25, working on Capitol hill in Washington, DC and living in Alexandria, VA. I was about to step out of the closet. I remember the late 80s as a fun time. I did not have the best job in the world, but I made a lot of good friends. The guy I was living with (as roommates...he's straight) is still my best friend. I met a great many other people working on the Hill who remain some of my closets friends. I remember being very scared to step out of the closet, due to the AIDS Crisis and the attitudes of the times (One joke went, "What does Gay stand for? Got Aids yet? Real funny!!). There were AIDS activists on the Hill with "Act Up" buttons and placards. Jesses Helms was railing against us. There was not a whole lot of care for the gay community. this was the year that the GOP had Mary Fisher address its convention. You could care about AIDS, if it affected well-off, white women or children not gay men.

I don't give a shit if I sound like an old fart, but the men who were out and proud of who they were as gay men back then are heroes to me and should be to all. They were real men! And AIDS activists are our patron saints. Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush disgust me for their indifference to the crisis that killed far too many good men.

I was working a retail job in my hometown, while counting the days until I could start my second year of college.

I was 24, freshly out of the closet and living in Albany, NY. Was having so much sex (all of it with condoms). So much sex. Ah, those days.

Hottest , driest summer on record in KC. Survival was the name of the game!

I was 32, had a good job in NYC with awesome benefits. Campaigned for Mike Dukakis to get all of those Reagan-Bush assholes out of government. Dukakis had a large lead over wimp Bush (as he was called) in July. Was in a committed relationship with a terrific partner. Two years later it was all over. Thanks, Bush (elected that Nov).

I was 32 and had been living in Berkeley for 6 years. I’d moved to California from Illinois after coming out to my family and my mother told me I should leave town before relatives learned I was gay. Having lots of safe sex.

Celebrating my 7th anniversary on the 4th of July w/my hot Navy officer boyfriend in NYC.

Celebrated my 38th anniversary with him two weeks ago today.

Congratulations and Best Wishes, R38. I bet he's still hot!

I was in DC. It was so hot. It was the summer I started watching Another World. I was mostly on-call at work and it was usually too hot to go out.

A truly horrible neighbor moved in upstairs who listened to New Order all night long. I should have called the cops, as I thought he was dealing. Instead, I moved out in the fall.

Oh, and BPC, I was out and so were most of my friends. We we in our thirties.

New London, CT and just moved out of my parents and in with my boyfriend. Yup, lots of sex, but with the boyfriend only.

The summer of ROSWR

I had graduated from college that June and was working at the same college in a full-time continuation of a job I had during school. It was a project-based position, so I had no long term guarantee or benefits. That was just as well because i still wasn’t sure if I’d be staying in town or heading back to my home town. I did a summer sublet instead of signing a lease.

I was in Chicago and I wasn’t out yet; that didn’t happen until a few years later. But I was having plenty of sex, always with protection and I’m still negative. Despite the dark cloud of AIDS, I discovered the baths in college and once college was over and I had more time and money to go, I was there every weekend and sometimes more often than that.

I went to New York for the first time that summer. No sex there, but while away from straight friends, I did go to the old gay strip joint that advertised in the Village Voice. The Adonis? Was really surprised to see erections on the dancers at the end of each performance.

All of the big city gay sex possibilities were part of why I was never able to go back to my hometown. I’m still in Chicago 31 years later.

Was on school break and spent a lot of time cruising for sex in The Ramble in Central Park.

I was 39, living on Kaua’i, volunteering as Director of Malama Pono Kaua’i AIDS Project, which I ran out of my rented condo. We were a motley crew of gay and straight men and women, but we did what we could. (I became an LPN nurse some years later; how I wish I’d known that on Kaua’i!)

I had moved from New York City to Kaua’i in October of 1987, when I was almost 2 years sober in AA. One of the best things I ever did in sobriety. I continued to go to meetings all along, and still do. (I was so used to living in New York for 15 years that I referred to Kaua’i’s North Shore as Uptown, the South Shore as Downtown, and its central town, Lihue, as Midtown.)

And where do you live now R46?

I had graduated from college two moths earlier and was still closeted and living at home. I was not having luck getting a job in radio,but should have moved to Atlanta or NYC to work on the production side. I didn’t have enough courage then.

I was one year old.

I was 15 and stealing CDs from Columbia House Music Club and BMG Music Service.

I was on my 2nd trip to Ibiza and realised my friends were fun druggy trash.

This spans the whole year of 1988.

I was living in Denton, Texas. I'd returned to college that winter/spring to continue my junior year after taking a great 9 months off in Dallas. In that time off I'd met my first official boyfriend and we'd had a wildly exciting and intense 6 month together through the end of '87, then a horrible breakup, and we never spoke again. My first love.

When I returned to school in the winter of '88 all my college friends had sort of moved on. I had one high school friend attending the school as a freshman, years after me, and my life suddenly revolved around them and their collection of freshmen friends, which seemed like kids to me. I was living in a dorm again. I hated it all and combined with the breakup it was a lousy semester where I felt like I'd taken a huge step back.

But that changed when the semester ended in the summer and I spontaneously decided to cash-in on my dad's promise to buy me a round-trip ticket to London for graduation from high school (I came from a family of hicks and finishing school was like a huge accomplishment). I used it to organize a trip traveling all through europe for two months. I showed up in London with a measly $150 to my name and a Eurail pass. I spent two months traveling all over Europe, getting odd jobs, sleeping on trains and on beaches, living like a homeless person and connecting with the network of other travelers. A friend from Texas met me for part of the trip. I had just turned 21. It was an adventurous and dazzling way to experience another part of the world for the first time, that I could never do now.

I returned to school in Texas in the fall of '88 with a totally renewed sense of self and afraid of nothing. I moved into a huge old house in our college town with a bunch of original friends from my first year at school, all of us artists. The "art school" phase of my studies had kicked into gear and all my classes were art art art. I lived, breathed and ate conceptual art critiques, local gallery openings, organizing performance art festivals, wild parties and weird music gigs, all for pennies on the dollar in a wild Texas college town filled with freaks. I never realized college could be so fun. 1988 was a great year for me in many ways.

The years following were also amazing, and 1988 was the year it all seemed to kick into high gear.

I remember Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation" came out that fall, which I listened to constantly. I always feel that album's wild, electrified energy captures that period of my life.

[R47]: Now in St. Petersburg FL, after 19 years in San Diego, 6 years in Phoenix, and 3 in Hawai’i.

R53, You certainly have gotten around. Where is your favorite place?

I was studying for the bar in NYC. The morning of the exam, administered in the Javits center, I could not find a cab and was almost late. I passed.

During the bar exam at the Javits Center in the summer of 2004, at the lunch break, a young man bought a sandwich and beverage and went outside to get some light and fresh air. There is a small grassy area in the front. The young man sat down there to have his lunch. He sat in a pile of dog shit. He didn't even notice he had until he stood up and his friends broke the bad news. A bit later, I saw him in the men's room, in his underwear, trying to wash his shirt and pants in the sink. Just not the way to face the 2nd half of the multiple choice test. I have no idea if he passed.

R56 Yikes. He won't do that again.

I was nearly 14 and performing in the chorus in a production of THE MUSIC MAN in Eugene, Oregon. I wasn’t having sex but a girl in the show taught me what an orgasm was.

Depending on which part of the month it was, I was either about to turn 12 or had already turned 12. Can’t quite remember exactly what I was doing. Probably sitting in front of my mom’s floor model tv watching Star Trek TNG and lusting after a young Jonathan Frakes.

I was in grad school in New Orleans and working in the French Quarter for the summer. No sex. It was too damn hot.

In college in Philly just coming out. Woodys and Kurt’s. Met my first boyfriends. Taking tentative steps to tell people but didn’t really feel free until after college and the 90s.

The terror of AIDS is what I remember the most though. Combined with the religious right backlash, I view it as a really dark time. The 90s and Clinton were so much better. I have very little fond memories of the 80s. Maybe the only interesting thing was being able to see the dying remnants of the gay golden years on trips to NYC. But even the Village had a certain ominous feel of death and the decline of the glory years of gaydom on Christopher St. Felt like I had just missed the party. Though in retrospect also missed the peak danger - at least we knew something about safe sex. But the fear of slipping up or accidental exposure is something that still lingers to this day.

Anxiously awaiting Halloween 4 to hit theaters.

Concerned Madonna didn't a release a song that summer and that Kylie Minogue was taking her place.

Whitney's One Moment in Time inspired me to get in shape that summer.

Became a pro at Super Mario Bros.

R62 my gawd what a loser!

Six years old, on a farm in the bottom of New Zealand, knowing I was different but not understanding how yet.

Anxiously awaiting Janet’s follow up to the Control album.

R52. - TMI

Celebrating my 24th birthday on the 27th.

R66 What the fuck is it to you what guys say on this thread. STFU or else you will have an issue with me. People can be as verbose as they damn well wanna be, fucker.

I was 22, living in LA after graduating from UCLA, I was definitely out, had been for a few years.

Went to LA for the first time at 20. Loved it but the WeHo scene was definitely lacking compared to SF or NY. LA has come such a long way in 30 years. The whole city went from a quiet backwater to the most vibrant city in US.

Love this thread. I was 8, living in LA, on cloud nine that the Lakers had just won the NBA Championship and praying the Dodgers would win that fall (they did). '88 was a great year in my life.

R71 Being 8 was a great year? Who gives a fuck what an 8 year old thinks.

I was a zygote. I was jammin' to Pebbles "Girlfriend" and "Mercedes Boy".

I was working for a telecoms company in Birmingham, England. I used to go to the bath house most Saturday nights. The Spartan in Eddington and the Greenhouse. They used to have a free buffet back then. Both still there. I used to have lots of sex, with condoms, as there was a heavy public health campaign here. Put the fear of God into me, so I always played safe. I was a twinky wee top back then, so I used to have up to 6 different guys on a night. I wasn't out, but I had fun.

I was 33 that year and finally got the message that my long distance romance was really over the minute he left for Texas to attend school. He never had the slightest intention of ever coming back. Duh!

Haha.

I was 27, and working at Procter & Gamble's Central Distribution Office on Main St in downtown Cincinnati. I've seen a couple of pictures of myself back than, and I was pretty hot, with black hair and a tight little body (both gone forever). I took the job because I was in love with a guy who made it clear he didn't date losers, and I needed to get a job before he would get serious with me. I quit the job a long time ago, drifted a bit and drank too much, but finally got back on my feet. My BF back then is still my closest, best friend after all this time, and looks out for me. We were recently talking about both of us retiring, and what we're going to do once we do that. And I'm still very deeply in love with him.

[R54]: I’d live on Kaua’i again in a minute if I could afford it. Though, to be honest, such an intense, wild place can be intimidating.

I once met a gay tourist on the (then) nude beach, who said he wanted to live in paradise. When he responded that he was not currently in a loving, supportive relationship, I had 2 pieces of advice for him:

Either: A. Get real spiritual.

Or B. Get a dog.

I was 6 so there was no sex.

R79 Good there was no sex but were you out? Maybe you were one of those little putzes that don't need to come out.

R79 is Pete Buttigieg, and half the assholes around here will be pissed he wasn’t out at six.

I was 18, living in a railroad flat with four other people in Midtown and clubbing at The World, Limelight, etc. and studying theatre. I was thin and gorgeous and totally celibate. Everyone around me was dying or sick but, still, I was having a great time otherwise.

12 years old, living in Dallas. Hated the place and glad I later moved to LA.

r82, was it AIDS?

No Rose, it was Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

I had just graduated from college the December before and was still floundering in finding a job leading to a career with my Art History degree. In May I had gotten a job at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh working in their shops processing store inventory. During that summer I would go from having that position, to working retail in the shops to being a manager by August.

I was living in an apartment above a porn theater on the sketchy Northside with a friend from college. He was someone I had had a huge crush on and wanted as my boyfriend, but he didn't see me that way. He had graduated before me and had a Puerto Rican boyfriend who had left him earlier that year and he had a large apartment and let me live with him when I got the job unexpectedly. We slept in the same bed together, which drove me crazy with longing. He had a cold that summer, and a cat scratch wound that never seemed to heal.

We spent many weekend nights at Zaks 5th Ave. a huge gay bar in a former bank. I was hanging out with a few students including a hunky blond football player looking guy that I had a crush on and a guy whose brother was making a movie in New Orleans with a B actress that would blow up to be a huge success and launch him as a premier director. I don't think I had sex with either one of them, but I do remember hooking up with a guy who lived out by the zoo and not having a memorable time.

I scrambled that summer and ended up getting an internship at the Brooklyn Museum for nine months beginning in September, which is where I really wanted to be. The boss who had hired and promoted me three times in four months was so gracious about my leaving telling me that that was what I was meant to do with my life, not be stuck in retail. The friend who I was in love with would get sick and die of AIDS by 1990. Although I had asked him directly face-to-face if he was sick, he had denied it. The last contact I had from him was a rambling birthday card that arrived in July even though my birthday was in February. When I found out that he had died, I was so happy I had my car in the city so I could go to the funeral in rural Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, when I went out the next day I discovered my car had been stolen and because I was to young to rent a car I never made it to his funeral. I did get to see his quilt panel at the AIDS Memorial Quilt during the March on Washington.

^ Wow. Thanks for sharing lol.

So sad, r86.

And that was Zak's 4th Avenue, right?

^^^Yes, you’re right, it was 4th Ave.! Went with the Saks pun and thought 5th!

I was taking a summer class in Chaucer for my English major. It was fun to watch the churchy older ladies who were returning students get all flustered when we would have to gloss the dirty parts.

r62, love the lyric "to taste the sweet, I faced the pain."

Young, celibate and naive in seminary in Chicago.

I remember it was a very hot summer and we didn’t have air conditioning, so my roommates and I spent every evening at the corner bar.

Young, celibate and naive in seminary in Chicago.

I remember it was a very hot summer and we didn’t have air conditioning, so my roommates and I spent every evening at the corner bar.

Hey R93, did you run into R92 at that corner bar? If you had, perhaps you two wouldn't have been so celibate!

I had just moved into my own 1BR place in Alexandria VA and was working a second job at a video store in Georgetown. I was 27yo and just beginning to admit to myself that I was gay taking the first tentative steps from a fearful asexuality to having sex with men. I would step into gay bars on occasion after work for a single drink and would leave alone within an hour. I was having very little sex with people, but was experimenting with phone sex. It was two more years until I came out to my family.

That July I took a 3-week staycation (no money) and went to my apartment pool every day. I've never been more tan as I was that summer.

I was 21 and had just graduated Berkeley and moved to SF. I lived in the Mission and got caught up with the fun boho arts scene there. I worked at a shelter for teen runaways in the Tenderloin. I wasn't a big drinker then but there were occasional visits to bars and clubs. Luckily I was a prude back then.

Cool to hear your stories, men. Keep it up.