COSTA RICA.
In 1985, a friend of mine from New York came to Costa Rica with AIDS. Soon, other acquaintances suffered from unbearable diarrhea. It became evident that the virus, already identified, had arrived in the country, and made homosexuality evident. Married, respectable, and masculine men became ill, and families had to accept, all at once, that they were homosexual and, furthermore, that they were condemned.
By 1987, things got worse. The government, to stop the infection, decided to carry out massive raids in bars and threatened all public employees with mandatory testing. This punitive policy aimed to identify and isolate those who were HIV-positive; it did not consider a prevention campaign.
When the police conducted the worst raid at Bar La Torre and took away more than two hundred people, I felt it was time to put a stop to it. Until then, the raids had been accepted stoically. However, I thought it was time to increase their cost and planned two simultaneous strategies: to publish a letter of protest for the government and to open awareness courses for gays at the National University. In the first case, a lawyer drafted the letter and advised me to seek signatures from homosexuals and heterosexuals.