Robert T. Hoff became an immune system marvel on Halloween night of 1977. He was dressed as a mummy.
Born in 1948, raised in Iowa, son of an insurance man and a substitute teacher, he’d been in hiding since he was four. That was the first time he could remember that he and a boy next door fondled each other. He loved it, craved physical affection from other boys and eventually from men. He learned to hide the reality that for a few early years he dressed in his mom’s dresses and scarves. He overachieved in school. He didn’t tell anybody about his passions after he made the mistake of doing so once, in seventh grade, and the kid he told, Steve Lyons, blabbed it.
“I was referred to as a flaming faggot.”
Bob needed a new strategy. He found it in imitation. There was a kid named Art who was the most popular guy in school. Bob learned to emulate Art.
“I picked up on everything he did. I picked out his extracurricular activities. I swam at the YMCA. I learned how to speak differently. There’s a gay accent, and I learned how to think in advance to not use a word that would contain a lisp.
“Then I started to become popular, the star of the school play, elected president of the student government, the most popular kid in class.”
He dated girls and stopped having sex with men until college, fearing he’d be ostracized.
He went to law school and married a woman. He went on active duty in the Air Force. He and his wife tried to make it work. She didn’t want to be married to a homosexual. They divorced. He married again. At some point, Bob’s mother found out about his true proclivities. They didn’t speak for twenty years because she thought him sinful.
By 1977, Bob lived in Washington, D.C., now an accomplished lawyer—assistant general counsel for a major federal office, the General Services Administration. On October 31, Bob went alone to a party; his wife at the time, a flight attendant, part of the cover of his life, was out of town.
Bob wrapped himself in gauze he’d bought in a thirty-foot roll at Joann Fabrics and was hanging out at the party when he met John. John was a very fit redhead. Bob and John went upstairs and had unprotected sex.
Two weeks later, Bob felt dizzy, lethargic, and tired, with achy flulike symptoms—not enough to keep him from work. The discomfort lasted ten days. “I chalked it up to the flu,” Bob recalled.
Around Thanksgiving, Bob went to his cousin’s wedding in Cedar Falls. On the drive back, he felt really sick. He threw up and had diarrhea. He assumed he’d eaten bad shrimp. Bob, an overachiever all his life, went to see the doctor who had given him a physical when he applied for his private commercial flying license.
Bob had hepatitis. The version he had was hepatitis A, a strain that had been identified only a few years earlier, in 1973. It is an infection of the liver that takes some time to manifest. When it does, the symptoms that a person—in this case, Bob—experiences typically are those that come from the work that the immune system is doing when it fights back, inflammation.
For Bob, this diagnosis wasn’t such bad news, all things considered. If the immune system does its job properly, hepatitis A is a strain that can be overcome.
But this wasn’t all Bob had. Bob had contracted the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, arguably the most serious direct threat to ever confront our immune system. It would take a few years before Bob would discover the truth. Then he would become a source of powerful inspiration and wisdom at the highest reaches of the scientific world. In the medical realm, Robert Hoff is a veritable state treasure. His body parried HIV, and death, as perhaps no one had done before him, so his precious immune system offered insights and promise for the rest of us too.