A Pox on Your House

For some reason (maybe because it's Pride Weekend), I was thinking about a story I heard back in the 90s from one of my Wayne State University coworkers.  (I'll refer to her as S.)  S knew of a house for sale by a friend of hers in a popular area of Oakland County and she told another coworker, R, about it.  R, who was renting an apartment at the time, was interested in buying a home in this area and seemed quite interested in this home for sale by S's friend.  But everything changed when R found out that the seller of the home was gay and his partner, with whom he'd lived, died from AIDS while living at the house.  (I don't think he actually died IN the house, but he lived there throughout his final years.)  All of a sudden, R wasn't interested in the house anymore.  All of a sudden, R decided that maybe it wasn't the right time for her to buy a place.  I remember talking with S about R's sudden change of heart and S told me she firmly believed that R didn't want to buy a house that a man with AIDS had lived in.  I guess R figured she'd contract the disease from touching the door knobs or flipping the light switches of the home.  Yes, this was the early 90s and AIDS awareness has come a long way since then, but the ignorance of R astounded me then and still astounds me now more than twenty years later.