“People with AIDS,” a woman with a megaphone would yell, “under attack! What do we do?”

And together they yelled, “ACT UP! Fight back!”

Yale watched for people he knew, but he’d have to be patient; there were thousands of protestors, and in fact it was nice that these faces didn’t all have the look of someone he’d seen around Boystown for years but just couldn’t place. It was good to be part of a horde, a wave of humans.

A chant would die out and then stop, as if it had been cut off by an invisible conductor, and then a new one would travel toward them up the street, fuzzy at first, and then he’d hear it clearly once through before joining in. As they passed the Tribune Tower, with dazed tourists looking on: Health! Care! Is a right! Health care is a right! Outside the Blue Cross building, right on the Magnificent Mile: We’re here! We’re queer! We’re not going shopping! Walking down State, the crowd tighter now, louder: Hey, Hey, AMA! How many people died today?

Rebecca Makkai, in her 2018 novel The Great Believers, plants her main protagonist Yale Tishman, so young, so conflicted, so eager for a love he can rely on, in the middle of the National AIDS Action for Healthcare March, held in Chicago in April 1990. Maybe it’s not a spoiler to say that Yale goes through a lot in this book. I won’t say more, because you are going to need to read it, especially if you weren’t alive back then. And when you finish her book, you can go online and find this coverage of the march, which will break your heart all over again if you were alive back then. And make you braver.