Because the story of HIV/AIDS is too big for one book, I have written the volume I was meant to write. I have deliberately chosen to focus on the bleakest years of the American struggle, 1981 to 1996, in part because I am of the same generation as so many whose lives were unnaturally cut short. I wrote particularly about them because I want those who passed so early and too soon to be remembered for their suffering, their dying, and, most importantly, for their living.
I moved to New York City in 1979, fresh from college and at the height of the city’s gay sexual revolution. It was impossible not to sense the liberating electricity that pulsed through an area such as Greenwich Village, and I’ve tried to capture that feeling in my writing. Ironically, I left New York the same week that the New York Times published its Fourth of July story about peculiar medical symptoms clustered in gay men. When I returned to visit the city in subsequent years, the joyful vibe I remembered from Christopher Street had given way to a palpable gloom of grief and darkness. That sense memory helped to fuel my research and writing choices, too.
Since I have elected to concentrate on this time span, the resulting book focuses by necessity on the impact of HIV/AIDS on gay men in general, and white gay men particularly. More than 70 percent of the earliest cases of the syndrome were among men having sex with men. White gay men still constituted the majority of the infected as we neared the era of lifesaving medications in the mid-1990s, but by then infections among people of color were on the rise.
This book continues the examination of LGBTQ history I began with Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights. When I started my work on Stonewall, I had no idea that it would lead me to a new project. But I found it supremely difficult to stop researching Stonewall’s single chapter about AIDS, and I knew I wanted to explore the subject further. Only later, as I waded deeper and deeper into the topic, did I begin to question my thinking. How in the world would I be able to wrap my arms around such a lengthy and complex history without squeezing the life out of it? And how would I immerse myself in such a dark period without being overwhelmed by the gloom?
Over and over I found myself meeting courageous, funny, and memorable activists through the pages of history, only to discover the disease had killed them. It was dark work. And yet, during the many months while I lived in my head in that era, the people I’d come to care about seemed very much alive. After my work finished and the historical figures I’d breathed life into were gone all over again, my sorrow returned. Perhaps, in consolation, these individuals will likewise come alive, at least fleetingly, for those who read this book.
In January 2017 I visited the AIDS memorial quilt in Atlanta. We tend to picture the quilt as it appears when it is on display. I wanted to see it at rest. Julie Rhoad was kind enough to welcome me to the modest headquarters for the NAMES Foundation and to walk me through the aisles of shelves and bins holding quilt blocks. Each section was carefully labeled with numbers that corresponded to records for tracing the location of individual panels. At one point I asked Rhoad how she could work in the company of so much sadness and grief. She paused, then surprised me by replying, “We’re not surrounded by sadness. We’re surrounded by love.”
When I began this book, I knew the subject matter would almost invariably become heavy and disheartening. It can be hard to face the pre-ART loss of almost a half-million fellow Americans, not to mention the millions of people around the planet who have died because of HIV/AIDS. “I’m working up my courage to bear the history,” I wrote in my journal as I prepared to dive deeper into the story of the pandemic. Yet even as I researched the nation’s halting response to the crisis, even as I wrote about the deaths of people I had come to admire, even as I shed tears, even then, I did not falter.
As the book neared completion I realized the source of that resolve. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t anger—although I certainly felt that often enough. It wasn’t even my sheer determination to complete the task. Throughout the project I was surrounded by a force that became stronger with time and grew thanks to connections and kinships forged with friends and strangers alike. A force that moves with the stealth and power of a virus, but with a far different effect. A force that may be the most powerful one of all.
Love.