One weekend during the summer of 1982, Peter Aliberti went to an apartment complex near Monroe Drive and Dutch Valley Road to lounge poolside with a group of friends, and he wound up leaving as part of a group of prophets.
“I’ll never forget that day because it was the day that everything changed,” Aliberti recalled during a recent interview in Midtown. “We were just kids – we were in our late twenties, early thirties. We’d go there every Saturday and Sunday and be silly, lie in the sun, drink cocktails, whatever.”
The typically lighthearted banter between Aliberti and his friends turned frightening on this particular day, as the men shared news they were hearing from friends in New York and San Francisco about gay men in those cities suddenly dying of a mysterious disease.