I’m glad someone brought this up. I came to know dozens and dozens of young artists, writers, singers, playwrights, composers, actors, architects, etc. who had such promising futures, yet were cut down in their youth. The world will never know how much was lost.
Now that you mention it, Isaac Asimov probably would have had time to write a few hundred more books.
I got married in the 70s so it didn’t affect me personally.
A college friend of ours died from AIDS, but we weren’t that close. In fact, we heard about his death a couple of years after it happened from mutual friends who were very close to him.
One of my mother’s best friends (they taught in the same grade school) died from AIDS. Her husband had kidney disease and contracted it from the dialysis process. He died of the kidney disease, but had infected his wife before he had any symptoms of AIDS.
Mom told me about her friend’s death, but asked me not to tell my brother and sister-in-law. They were new parents and overly vigilant about such things. Mom was afraid they wouldn’t want her to spend any time with their kids.
I had already married. AIDS didn’t effect me at all in the eighties. It was just a story on the news.
I did have a co-worker that got sick in 93. He worked for as long as he could. He often mentioned the medications made him feel terrible. He eventually couldn’t work.
I lost touch after that. I heard he eventually went into hospice care.
He was a nice guy. I miss him.
I was born in 1954.
At first AIDS had zero effect on me. I didn’t know anyone with AIDS and to my knowledge none of my relatives are gay, or not out at least.
But in the early 90’s I began to meet a number of gay people, as I was doing counter-picketing of the Westboro Baptist Church. You know the ones I mean!
Heck I was in the same high school with some of Fred’s older kids. At the request of a friend I attended the funeral of a young man I’d met once. I’d noticed he had what I thought were a couple of purple birthmarks on his face, but no, that was Karposi’s Sarcoma. The WBC was out in force to picket his funeral and my friend wanted to show the family it could rely on support against the ugliness.
My opinions on sexual orentation did a 180 degree about face after I got to know more about the issues involved with AIDS.
Rural but I started college in 1975. That was where I first made friends in a lot of communities I didn’t belong to and became aware how many people still had to struggle for basic rights and recognition. I have looked back at it sometimes with mixed emotions; ignorance is bliss and all that stuff.
I first heard of “barebacking” about 20 years ago. I find the whole idea horrifying.
Did it affect me personally? Not really. However, the first couple years we knew about AIDS, we literally did not know what caused it and weren’t sure how it was spread, so a lot of what we would now consider paranoia was justified.
I’ve been involved in the care of quite a few AIDS patients over the years; however, the one person I knew personally who died from it (that I know about) was a married, straight female HS classmate who died in the late 1990s. 
I later learned that no, she didn’t get it from her husband; she had gotten it from a prior boyfriend, and her husband married her knowing that she had AIDS, and she wouldn’t have lived as long, or as well, as she did had he not taken such good care of her. Her death was around the time that the revolutionary new (at the time) drugs, which worked much better with less brutal side effects, were placed on the market.
Born in 1964, hetero male. Besides being saddened by the fact that a lot of fellow human beings were dying, it didn’t really affect me directly. I’ve known a couple of guys who died of AIDS, but I didn’t know either of them well. Since I rarely got horizontal until I met my wife at 30, I didn’t have ro think about catching it myself. My wife and I did get tested before we got married, since neither us could say we’d never had unprotected sex. One thing I found strange was that, even though we’d both tested negative, the counselor told me that we should never have unprotected sex. What about when we want to have kids, I asked. No, never. Fortunately, we didn’t ljsten.
Re: the media…I have to say that that was both a kinder and more responsible “lie”
than the one previously saying that only gay (m/m) partnerships and IV drug users were susceptible. Oddly enough, just 3 or 4 years ago, my mom (a nurse for 30 some years) thought that lesbian women were more likely to acquire AIDS than straight women. I asked her by what vector of transmission, essentially, and she had no answer.
I spent my teenage years through the 90s, and it made me a bit more stringent about condom use than I ordinarily might have. I’d say most of my partners were bisexual, so that’s all to the good. I did worry a wee bit after I got pregnant in 98 whether I hadn’t caught something with my licentiousness, but a few blood tests cleared all that up.
Just to be that guy, I do have autoimmune disorders now that are pretty much as mysterious, debilitating and devastating as AIDS, but they aren’t (AFAWK) transmittable, so not so interesting or worrisome. 
The OP says “and older” so I’ll share. I’m bang in the cohort of those who were hardest hit. I was born in 1949, and moved to San Francisco in 1980. I didn’t actually have a lot of gay friends, and the few I did have tended to be as socially backwards as I was, so I was not one of those people who claimed to have lost more than 100 friends (I was also suspicious of such claims, I mean, who has over 100 friends anyway? People you hang out with sometimes or dance with when you see them at the club, or something like that I can believe). I did lose one friend, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known.
HIV changed my sexual practices as you might guess, but not as much as you might think. Frankly, I was not as careful as I should have been, and I was very very lucky to have come out of that period without getting infected.
In the later 80’s I did volunteer work with HIV patients and their loved ones as a kind of outside buddy, someone they could talk to and say anything they wanted without worrying about my feelings (Shanti Project in SF if anyone knows about it). It was pretty harrowing and I could only stick it for a couple of years. I lost one client, and the lover of a different client. We had our own support groups and some of those in my group had a worse time than I did.
Once the current medical treatments started keeping people alive so much longer, I guess that happened in the 90’s, that sense of palpable fear lessened quite a bit. For me, by that time I was with my current husband, so it all became less of an issue. We did not practice safe sex with each other because we were both HIV negative and we weren’t fooling around outside. I know this is not regarded as best practice, people being what they are, but again maybe we were just lucky. And that’s where things stand today.
“Everybody is equally at risk” may have been a kind, well-intentioned lie, but it was still a lie. I heard constantly “AIDS is exploding among heterosexuals.” Baloney. It wasn’t.
Be honest- how many men can you think of who got AIDS through plain old vaginal intercourse with women?
Yeah, I’m not surprised that answers vary by whether people were teens in the 80s or 90s. For those of us born in the late 70s and early 80s, our reality was shaped differently than people born just a few years earlier. The cold war was wrapping up when we were barely old enough to understand politics (we heard words like Perestroika and Glasnost and saw the first president we could remember taking photo ops with Gorbachev), the Berlin wall came down and the USSR dissolved before we could drive, and well before anyone in our classes had sex AIDS and how it spread became common knowledge, as well as the fact that HIV precedes AIDS.
Sure, in our teens there was still some fear about AIDS, and we can remember how adults spoke about AIDS earlier, but by my mid-teens the concept of taking drugs to keep from having HIV turn into full blown AIDS was already out there, though due to huge expenses of the earliest drugs it wouldn’t become something within reach of the masses for a few more years. To us HIV/AIDS was another STD people had to worry about, and the worse one to get, but it was a fact of life, no longer a vicious surprise bursting onto the scene.