In the yet-to-be written history of women and lesbians who've done important things during what they used to call the AIDS crisis—Rebecca Brown, who wrote the best book to date about AIDS, Terry McGovern, who founded the HIV Law Project, basically the whole staff of the staff of the Center for HIV Law and Policy—has there been any greater hero than this week's Modern Love columnist, Virginia A. Smith?

For what seems like a century, Virginia has been desperate to reproduce. But something terrible happened! Every gay guy whose seed she wanted to steal kept getting the AIDS! Finally she met this guy at church 17 years ago and on the very first day she met him she asked him to impregnate her. And he was like "Great!" and they became best friends.

But he was brand-new to New York! And so she'd see him cruising guys and she'd be all "DON'T DO IT! IF YOU HAVE SEX WITH THE MEN, YOU WILL NOT THEN BE ABLE TO IMPREGNATE ME." Except apparently she never said anything to him? (This is okay, because according to today's Times corrections, apparently some people think that AIDS began in 1990 and ended in 1995. Heh.)

Then she found out he was sleeping with one of an AIDS-having friend's boyfriends??? Suddenly her baby-daddy was not attractive to her. "I had a vision of his healthy face desiccating before my eyes until every last piece of flesh had sunk into bone."

So then she did what any American hero would do. She stopped speaking to him totally. And never told him why.

This is exactly the kind of powerful, assholish first-person writing we have come to expect from Modern Love.

A decade and a half later, apparently the guy has not become a desiccated corpse, and is doing fine on the other coast, except for today, because he's probably just read Modern Love and thought, "Wow, that woman was fucking crazy and this is the most passive-aggressive non-apology for being shut out of someone's life that I have ever been subjected to!"