Here was a plague

Well, duh, of course that's the most common mode; heterosexual contact is overwhelmingly the most common mode of sexual contact, period. The average heterosexual encounter could be 10000x less likely to result in HIV transmission and it would still be the most common mode of transmission. But the fact remains that in the US, two-thirds of HIV transmission is in fact between gay and bi dudes; and that in the US, 10% of the 16,000,000 gay-identified men born between 1951 and 1970 were dead by 1995 - a literal decimation within living memory. Numbers in the UK are similarly disproportionate. Perhaps you can understand why people writing in English-language publications might, perhaps, focus on AIDS as a "gay thing"?[1]

As for your first point, though - yeah, AIDS is absolutely still a thing. The AIDS crisis has never ended; the situation is still considered an pandemic. We are just now, finally, starting to reach a point where the tide may begin to turn in wealthy countries like the US, and it's undeniable that treating the global problem as something specifically dominated by homosexuality would be a terrible idea.

[1]Gay male thing specifically; most forms of lesbian sex have a microscopic transmission rate. There's just a whole lot less fluid exchange involved.