Ed Wolf remembers stopping by a drugstore on the way to a double bill of “Now, Voyager” and “Casablanca” on Castro Street in 1981.

In the store window were Polaroid pictures of a man with hideous purple splotches on his body. Scrawled underneath was a note: “Watch out guys, there’s something out there.”

That “something” was AIDS, the so-called “gay plague” which invaded San Francisco like a lethal marauder in the early 1980s and would eventually kill more than 15,000 in that city alone.