On August 11, 1981, about eighty men gathered in the Manhattan apartment of writer Larry Kramer to talk about what was then being called "gay cancer" and to begin raising money for research. The meeting came five weeks after The New York Times reported a rare cancer in 41 gay men, and two months after the CDC's First Reports.

On January 4, 1982, six men from that first gathering, Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Lawrence Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport and Edmund White, met again at Kramer's apartment and founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, now known as GMHC. It was the first community organization created to respond to the epidemic. Its founders first focused on raising funds for research and organized their first major event at the Paradise Garage on April 8, 1982.

The organization's first service was a hotline. In May 1982 it began as an answering machine in the apartment of volunteer Rodger McFarlane, who later became GMHC's paid director, and it received…