21

Sex Machine

Bob Hoff thought he contracted hepatitis on Halloween night of 1977. It went with the lifestyle, he figured. He’d had genital warts and syphilis and various other STDs.

As a closeted young man from Iowa, Bob viewed sex not just as a preference but as an expression of self. “I was extremely promiscuous,” Bob said of that period in his life. “I’ve visited every single bathhouse in the United States.”

There was the Library in Minneapolis, Man’s Country in Chicago, the Ballpark in Kansas City, and the Arena in Denver, and others in St. Louis and San Diego. The 1970s were a coming-out party for the gay community, an awakening for many gay men. As Bob put it, “I wasn’t the only one out there.” They’d lived closeted and in fear for so long, and they let loose with abandon.

Bob, a senior government litigator, was traveling the country, and he jetted around having unprotected sex. His wife, a flight attendant, also traveled frequently, giving him ample opportunity to have fun at home too. One day in 1978, Bob was working out at his gym in Crystal City, Virginia, where many in the D.C. political community lived, and he met a guy named Ron Resio. Ron had a triple doctorate and worked at a Navy base in Virginia helping update the F-4 Phantom fighter jet. Not the construction end, but the design side, the genius end.

Robert Hoff, 1973. (Courtesy of Robert Hoff)

“He looked like Conan the Barbarian,” Bob recalled. Long hair and big muscles. The pair became friends, and one day while Bob’s wife was gone, they went to Bob’s house and had sex.

Ron, it turned out, wasn’t just another friend with benefits.

What happened next was one of the most excruciating trials that the human immune system ever passed through. It’s also a story of how a search for a cure drew from the tremendous discoveries science had made over the prior fifty years. The bedeviling search to stop AIDS would also eventually come to draw from the exquisite immune system of Robert Hoff.