You don’t get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind—in your dreams, in your memories—sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.In Iowa City, the first centralized HIV clinic—with nursing, social services, and teaching components—opened in June 1988. The clinic was held in Boyd Tower—it was called a tower, but it wasn’t. So-called Boyd Tower was a new five-story building tacked onto the old hospital. The Boyd Tower building was part of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and the HIV/AIDS clinic was on the first floor. It was called the Virology Clinic. At the time, there was some concern about advertising an HIV/AIDS clinic; there was a legitimate fear that both the patients and the hospital would be discriminated against.HIV/AIDS was associated with sex and drugs; the disease was uncommon enough in Iowa that many locals thought of it as an “urban” problem. Among rural Iowans, some patients were exposed to both homophobia and xenophobia.Juan Diego could remember when the Boyd Tower building was under construction, in the early seventies; there was (there still is) an actual tower, the Gothic tower on the north side of the old General Hospital.
