I read everyone's comments with great interest... I am experiencing a bit of a shift in my way of viewing the plot unfolding in my mind (which is largely a matter of inspiration and waiting for what the characters have brewed up for themselves and one another, and this is a contrast with editing and presenting an already-complete tale and getting comments back about it, knowing already in great detail what the future holds, since we have already written it.
Very, very different experiences, I must say.
I am working on the next chapter as we speak, and plan to open the first half of the story up to non-Friends group, since this is really going on quite a long time and the rest of the BBM fandom must have thought I am no longer writing stories!
I did wish to comment a bit on Betty's interpretation above: I think you really nailed Ennis's reaction to Wayne in terms of accuracy. For the purposes of keeping the focus on the relationship, I have not introduced any more characters who are openly suffering from AIDS, but will handle this, I believe, in a separate story centering on Wayne and Pinky to provide a perspective on how the opening months of the plague affected its earliest victims, and why Wayne has gone off the deep end. It is an education for all of them. I had wanted to put more of this in "Shelter from the Storm", but the plot got too big too quickly, and realized I had to confine the topic. In reality (but perhaps more in urban locales) AIDS struck hard and deep, and those who had recently found liberation in being gay and proud, suddenly found themselves peculiarly singled out for what the mainstream culture in its narrowness termed the "gay cancer." As AIDS devastates Africa, killing mothers and fathers with families, leaving children homeless and facing starvation and death, or themselves afflicted, we know in restrospect that the disease does not select homosexual men preferentially, and those who chose to call it the wrath of God visited upon the unholy, are hopefully chastened by the devastating truth that it affects us all, and numbers among the worst endemic plagues of humanity along with infliuenza.
I have been irked by the lack of realistic treatments of AIDS in this fandom as well. I don't consider it a plot point - it is to the 21st century what syphilis was to the 18th and 19th, cutting down promising lives indiscriminately with little hope of treatment or cure: I do know more about the affect of syphilis in the 19th century having researched it for previous novels, but unlike syphilis, AIDS is still here, and still incurable, and still being spread... and its victims, still ignored.