Eventually I’m able to adjust to the audio onslaught as pictures of people and places and things start popping in my head. On a morning like that — not too long ago — my head was filled with the faces of the people I’d known that had died from AIDS-related causes.

This wasn’t a tough one for me — I’d had a conversation the day before with a young gay man in his early 20s who said he didn’t know anybody who was HIV-positive and wasn’t particularly worried about getting infected himself because he didn’t have sex with guys over 30.

I warned him that his thinking was risky at best — what about those guys that you sleep with and the other guys they sleep with? Are they all HIV-negative? Did your partners only have safe-sex with their other partners?

I thought about a time in the early ’80s when I was like him — and I didn’t know anyone who was HIV-positive either. That soon changed, though. AIDS slammed the gay male communities in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York in the early 1980s. It didn’t hit Charlotte so much until the late ’80s. By that time, I was already in Atlanta where the epidemic was in full swing and had been so since the mid-80s.

I met lots of people in Atlanta that were positive. Some had full-blown AIDS. Keep in mind this was well before drugs like protease inhibitors were around to fight the infection, so it wasn’t uncommon that someone you met last week would fall ill the following week and die the third. By the time you thought to ask, “Hey, where’s so-and-so?,” they were already gone. There were so many people that came into my life for only a brief moment and then left this world. I can still see many of their faces, but I can’t remember all of the names.

Through the grapevine I heard that some friends still in Charlotte had been diagnosed as HIV-postive. Wayne Keziah, Bobby Woodall and Mike Meredith were just a few of the guys I would never lay eyes on again. They were diagnosed. They got sick. They died. In a blink of an eye, they were gone.

I later heard that one of my favorite Charlotte drag performers — a six-foot-something African-American diva named Grand Prix — was taken by the disease. Toni Lenoir — another popular Charlotte female impersonator — was diagnosed HIV-positive. He later took his own life when his health began to falter.

As the years rolled by and I made close and long-lasting friendships with the people around me in Atlanta something totally unexpected happened. Some of them started to die, too.

First there was Ron Wisener. A gay ’bama boy to the bone, Ron could be quite mean-spirited if something (or somebody) rubbed him the wrong way. But he was also sensitive, vunerable and caring. Sometimes he scared me when he would go all uber-vindictive. But I do miss him. I can still recall standing in the kitchen of my apartment shortly after he found out he was positive. “I don’t wanna’ die,” he told me. “What am I gonna’ do?”

I held him while he cried and tried to think of an appropriate response. “Not everybody who is HIV-positive dies,” I said. “I’ll be here with you. Don’t worry.”

He died three years later.

Then there was Charles Coleman. He and his partner Matt Becht helped compose the musical score for an independent film I produced in 1990. At the time, Charles and Matt were two of my best friends in the world. Treatment for AIDS back then was often toxic and many people felt worse while on drugs like AZT and pentamidene. Charles made the decision he wasn’t going to take any medication until he started getting sick. In other words, he just decided to ignore it all. In fact, no one knew he was HIV-positive other than Matt.

One day Matt and Charles showed up for a party I had at my downtown loft space — they only stayed a few minutes — but I noticed that Charles apparently wasn’t feeling well and he looked rather ashen. I didn’t realize it would be the last time I would hug my friend. I never fully understood the way Charles chose to cope with his illness. He withdrew — from everyone. I saw him only one other time as he passed me in a car on Ponce de Leon Ave. He was dead six months later.

Christian Borden and Robert Ponce were part of a retro ’70s comedy drag troupe in Atlanta that kind of took up where people like Lady Bunny and Rupaul left off when they split for New York City. Ponce took on the alternate personality of Super Chick, an afro-wearin, platform-stompin, pistol-packin, crime-fightin disco diva who liked to lip-synch songs like “(Push, Push) In the Bush.”

Borden played a sort of Warren Beaty-esque fashionista who tripped around the stage in rollerskates and polyester jumpsuits unzipped to his navel. Offstage, their personas were strikingly different: Borden was a stylist and Ponce was a graphic design artist. I had known them both from my earliest days in Atlanta and we had worked on numerous creative projects together.

Ponce was amazingly self-destructive. He suspected he was ill but was afraid to get tested. Instead he drank and did drugs incessantly, which only worsened his health. Eventually he lost his job and was forced to move back to Florida with his family. Borden, on the other hand, tried to take care of himself after he found out his diagnoses. After one too many opportunistic infections, his health problems forced him to move back in with his parents, as well. Although Ponce and Borden spent their final days hundreds of miles apart, they died within days of one another.

I met David Nash within 24 hours of moving to Atlanta. We were introduced by a mutual friend. Tall and handsome — he was creative, witty and constantly chased by adoring admirers. After a five-year relationship that ended amicably, Nash surprised me at a dinner party one early evening with the pronouncement that he had tested positive.

I was shocked. This guy was smart. He was suppossed to know what not to do. Most of the other people — I suspected — were infected before anybody knew what AIDS was. Nash was too young for that. “I think I was confused about what is safe and what isn’t,” he told me.

Despite the challenges he faced with his HIV status, he entered into another relationship with an HIV-negative man. The two of them and my partner of the time frequently travelled in packs — always having a fun time together. Nash remained healthy until sometime around 1995 when seemingly every opportunistic infection in the book snuffed out his life. His partner stayed by his side until his last breath.

Eric Spivey was a spitfire. He came marching into my life with his partner John Ishmael — fresh out of New Orleans — and announced that he was gay, HIV-positive and the two of them were going to produce a television show about gay life in Atlanta. They would go on to produce the show “Out in Atlanta” for four years and another series about living with HIV, called “Positive Living,” for three. Spivey was instrumental in bridging cultural barriers at the public access station I worked for at the time. Even some of the most fundamentalist Muslim producers at the station eventually came to love the man for his talent, drive and dedication to humanity at large.

A comic to the very end, Spivey decided to have a party after the doctors sent him home, telling his partner that there was nothing further they could do. “I’m about to check out,” he told me with a chuckle, “So I wanna see everybody before I go.” I can still see him sitting there in a wheel chair, wrapped in a blanket as hundreds of friends and acquaintances paraded by to share some final words. He looked at me as I walked up and said matter-of-factly, “Gimme’ a cigarette bitch.”

“You’re not supposta’ smoke,” I replied.

“Like it makes any difference at this point?”

In less than a week Spivey passed away.

Jay Childress was probably my first real gay crush. We met in Winston-Salem when I was only 20 and he was 24. We were introduced by mutual friends, but I was later to find out he was already involved with someone else. The sparks were definitely there — but I wasn’t about to be a break-up factor in another relationship. Years later we found ourselves, coincidentally, both living in Atlanta. Time had passed and neither of us was looking for romance at the time but we shared a great love for vintage films, furnishings and cars — so we forged quite a friendship in the years that followed. One of my fondest memories of time spent with Jay Childress was in front of a television set — dunking french fries in ketchup — while we watched the film noir clasic “Sudden Fear” with Jack Palance and Joan Crawford.

Dexter Varnum was the last individual I knew to die from AIDS-related causes. That was 2002, just before my partner and I moved back to Charlotte. Varnum had written me a letter in 1998, telling me that he appreciated the work I was doing on a publication I was editing in Atlanta at the time. He later called me and asked me if I would join him for a beer at a local watering hole.

Our friendship was brief, but extremely interesting. He was born the day before me, we both shared a twisted sense of humor and we were both capable almost immediately of finishing each others’ sentences. He was like an old friend from a previous life. I’m glad we found each other and had a few years together as friends before he eventually passed away. “I think I was infected back in 1980,” he once told me. “I remember some weird things that started happening to my body, but it eventually all went away so I didn’t think about it anymore.”

Varnum had just bounced back from a major AIDS-related infection when we met. Less than four years later none of the new drugs worked on his crippled immune system. The last time I saw him was in a hospital room, where he had been recently re-hydrated by a large nurse in white shoes.

She left the room as I entered.

“Did you get a look at her nurse’s duty shoes,” he chuckled.

“You don’t look so bad,” I scoffed. “Are you sure you’re sick?”

“You should’ve seen me before they pumped me full of fluids Mary. Skin and bones.”

Minutes later his sister walked in and I wanted to leave them with some time alone, so I made a quick retreat.

“I’ll be out in a few days,” he said, as he kissed me on the cheek. “Let’s get together.”

We never did, of course.

I miss all of them. I can’t help but think what a better place the world would have been had they all survived. If having safe sex can spare future generations from dealing with the massacre I witnessed, trust me, it’s worth the effort.