But 25 years later, AIDS’ true impact on the American sexual landscape has been muted, and, experts say, the changes that did occur were not always the ones we expected.

Perception of what the sexual atmosphere was like before AIDS often relies on a convenient metaphor, like, say, Studio 54. Fueled by sex, drugs and disco, the New York nightclub had a debauched three-year run as a hangout for movie stars, sports heroes and the fashion crowd before its two founders, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, were thrown in jail in 1980 for tax evasion.

The next year, AIDS arrived (Rubell eventually died of it). But the story — first we partied, then we paid — is too tidy.

While Studio 54 achieved a kind of infamy, the vast majority of Americans could never pass beyond the velvet ropes. The vast majority were not having anonymous sex in nightspots, nor going to gay bathhouses, nor swinging in suburbia.

But AIDS, or, more accurately, talk about AIDS, was everywhere from national magazine covers to school board meetings in rural towns. Just 17 years before the first American AIDS patients checked into hospitals, comedian Lenny Bruce was prosecuted for referring in his stand-up routine to things that now appeared on nightly newscasts.
So the conversation about sex did change, at least for a while. Couples took sexual histories over second-date cocktails. Going to a medical lab for testing became a dating ritual. Condoms turned into fashion accessories.

The most important change in the conversation occurred in the nation’s schools. “Before AIDS we were debating whether to teach about sex,” recalls Martha Kempner, the vice president of education for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).”

AIDS won that argument.