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In June of 1981, the Center for Disease Control issued a report on a disease that had only recently been identified, which had claimed the lives of several young and previously healthy gay men. This was one of the first public reports on the disease that would come to known as AIDS, and it had a remarkable effect on the gay community. AIDS was a pandemic that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in the United States within the first ten years it was identified, and forced the necessity of a new degree of activism among gays and lesbians, not just as a matter of self-protection but in response to those who used AIDS as an excuse to demonize the community. Physicians and activists worked together to establish guidelines of safe sexual behavior, while there was a furious debate inside and outside gay circles about how to confront the issues of behaviors that caused the disease to spread, a matter that was especially troublesome for gays who felt their community had only recently begun to enjoy a real freedom of personal expression. Filmmaker Jean Carlomusto, a longtime AIDS activist, offers a sobering and compelling look at the changes AIDS brought to the LGBT community in the documentary Sex In An Epidemic, which includes interviews with Larry Kramer, Richard Berkowitz, Lawrence Mass, Michael Shernoff and many more.