Care-free sex in bathhouses yielded inexorably to terror as hospitals and graveyards filled with friends and lovers of gays and bisexuals left with grief, fear and the stigma of "the gay plague."

"It was insane," said Richard Broussard, a 44-year-old San Francisco man diagnosed as HIV-positive two decades ago. "You'd go to a funeral and everyone was freaked out."

People showing AIDS symptoms were kicked off commercial airplanes and some funeral homes wouldn't handle the bodies of those killed by the disease, said Stop AIDS Project spokesman Jason Riggs.

It took Broussard a year to find a dentist for a root canal.

The dentist did the procedure at three in the morning in a hospital so his other patients wouldn't know, Broussard recounted.

"It was a time when people were talking about quarantine," Riggs said of the debut of AIDS. "It was a scary time. In many ways, society closed ranks against men infected by the disease."

Doctor Eric Goosby, head of Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation, was a medical intern at San Francisco General Hospital when its beds filled with young men with pneumonia-like symptoms.

"We didn't know what we were dealing with," Goosby said. "We were flying pretty blind. The hospitals were overwhelmed with young men."

Nearly 80 percent of the hospital's patients were infected with HIV and doctors and nurses afraid of catching the disease asked to be transferred, Goosby recalled.

By 1983, nearly half of the people in San Francisco's famously gay Castro District were HIV-positive, according to medical records.

"Basically, gay men were dying left and right and not getting any support from the federal government," Riggs said.

The volunteer Stop AIDS Project was created in 1984 and consisted of strategy meetings in people's homes, according to Riggs.

"You had this extraordinary exposure to friends and lovers dying," Goosby said. "You had this huge amount of information coming to the community saying that there is something wrong here and you need to change your behavior."

Bathhouses that were havens for promiscuity in gay communities were closed. Safe sex messages were delivered by means ranging from rock bands to ad campaigns.

Virus-suppressing medicines called protease inhibitors introduced in 1994 acted as stays of execution for those infected with HIV, according to AIDS experts.

"Protease inhibitors were like a small bomb you could drop on the virus and effectively kill it," Goosby said.

"A lot of people who decided they were going to cash in their annuities and do what they wanted for the remaining few years of their lives were confronted with not dying, which led to some funny conversations."

Post-infection life spans went from 12 years to 20 to 30 if patients adhered to unforgiving drug regimens. The disease transmission rate plummeted in the city.

While the medicine purged the virus from the blood it hid in places such as the brain or liver waiting to resurface.

"It is a smart virus," Goosby said. "A heck of a virus."

Glamorization of unprotected "bare backing" sex and "irresponsible talk" about AIDS being over caused a spike in new infections in the late 1990s, according to Riggs.

That was followed by a surge in gays using crystal methamphetamine, a drug that unleashed risky behavior.

Overall, there have been nearly 18,000 HIV-related deaths in San Francisco, Riggs said.

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic one in five gay and bisexual men became infected with HIV every year. The most recent data showed that fewer than two out of 100 would get infected in 2006.

Broussard said it surprised him when his doctor told him last year that he was more likely to die getting hit by a truck than of AIDS.

"It seems like such a different game," Broussard said as he stepped to the door of a south of Market Street club for a "HIV-Positive friendly" dance party.

"Back then, it was more about death. Now, it is more about coping."

Most of the men in the club were too young to know the "bad good old days," said Broussard, who pointed out a nearby homeless shelter that was once a bathhouse.

"It is like with heart disease, or diabetes," said the party's organizer, 28-year-old Eric Ghramm, who was infected with HIV four years ago.

"You have to take care of yourself but it is not like you have to put yourself in a hole in the wall and never come out again."

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