is for Generation X.  The AIDS epidemic has created profound generational strife between the ancien regime and the X generation, between opera queens and grunge rockers, who are now driven apart by absurd, irrational, and potentially deadly equations of youth with health, maturity with disease.  This association of age with HIV status is generating a whole new adolescent aesthetic, as seen in the fresh young teenyboppers with hairless chests and willowy bodies who, dressed in street gang paraphernalia, the chains dangling from their hips and pants sagging around their behinds, are plastered all over the new magazines.  Today's glossies have profited from a kind of generational apartheid, exploiting the widening breach between these two sectors of the gay population and capitalizing on the mythologizing of youth as the embodiment of hygiene, of wholesomeness.