“I went because I was hoping to meet a man or make a friend,” he says. Renaldi remembers attending an Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up) meeting at a nightclub called The Saint. By the mid 90s, the “gay plague” was killing more than 8,000 New Yorkers every year.
In the late 1980s, Aids was the leading cause of death for New York men between the ages of 25 and 44.