Whilst scientists struggled to isolate a virus, the community most affected by AIDS was struggling to adjust to a new disease which appeared to be spreading rapidly. The responses of gay communities were to be instrumental in limiting the spread of AIDS and the harm caused by the epidemic. This section looks at those responses in some detail, in order that the roots of community-based responses to AIDS are not forgotten.

The earliest gay community response to AIDS came in the summer of 1981, with an article in the New York Native, a major gay newspaper. It drew attention to 'gay cancer', and called on gay men to donate money for research into the cause and for treatment research. A group of New York gay men also founded Gay Men's Health Crisis. At the same time the only national media attention to AIDS came in the form of a brief article in the New York Times with the headline 'Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexual men'.

The first safer sex guidelines, published in early 1983 (How To Have Sex In An Epidemic by Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen), worked from the assumption that AIDS was caused by a repeated assault on the immune system by sexually transmitted diseases and other factors. They recommended 'no exchange of body fluids', and the use of condoms. Similar guidelines were evolved independently at the same time by an order of gay male nuns in San Francisco, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and the (then) San Francisco KS Foundation.