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Neil Broome Interview 7April 25, 2004conservative place. This was before it became a hot spot on the map, in the mid-eighties.It was awful. It was a decaying, awful, dead city, and it had a lot of very conservativepeople. They used to raid the gay bars. It was crazy. It was a crazy place.SS:NB:Then you went back to New York?Then I went back to New York, after I got my bachelors degree, and Iwaited until ‘83 and then I started applying for graduate school, realizing that, if I wantedto do things that involved working with people and social services, I would need to domore things.I started volunteering, and became very involved, for about five years, in differenttypes of things. I worked at the New York City Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Projectfor two and a half years, as a project counselor. And they put you through a three or fourTape I00:15:00day training. And, I really liked that. I found that I was finding something that I liked. Ididn’t like working in hotels. I thought I would like that, but I didn’t like that.SS:I just want to go back to when you came back to New York in ’83. So,you’re coming back to New York and now you’re an adult and it’s the beginning ofthe AIDS crisis. Was AIDS on your radar at that point?NB:I was reading about it in the Native – they called it GRID. I was readingabout it, and then I just – I was nervous, but the issue around transmission wasn’t entirelyclear. People were – I was reading these things and then saying, how is this transmitted?And then, on a personal level, I don’t even think it was in peoples’ consciousness –utilizing a barrier and protection, until the late eighties.As I recall, in the media, there was a lot of hysteria from the New York Post andall these newspapers. So, it was very hard to get a handle on what’s real and what’s not.