Spencer Cox

“When you spend time with these kids, it changes your heart in important ways.”

“You have treated me with the kindness, dignity, and respect, the love that I very often did not deserve. And it has made me love you.”

Gay activists like Spencer Cox were consumed by AIDS for so many gruesome years that many of them were shocked, once the war abated, to see how little around them had changed. Climbing from the trenches, they saw a gay culture that must have seemed ludicrous, packed with the same drug addictions, sexual compulsions and soulless shenanigans that AIDS, in its singular act of goodwill, had arrested for a decade or so.

Spencer Cox, the the New York-based AIDS activist who was featured in the documentary “How to Survive a Plague,” died Tuesday of complications related to HIV. He was 44.