Top Highlights

• Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of the epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such arguments paved the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably lead.
• Jaffe wondered whether the experts had heard that, away from the comfortable laboratories of the NCI, people were actually dying of this thing. Such a process might be all right for delving into the problems of breast cancer or melanoma, but Jaffe was worried about the possibility that this disease was infectious. The CDC was not accustomed to the ...
• In early August 1981, Bill Darrow and perhaps six or seven people in Atlanta were worried; across the country, there were, maybe, a dozen or so other clinicians and gay physicians who also saw the implications of what was beginning to unfold. The trouble, Darrow thought, was trying to convince the other 240 million Americans that they had something...
• Still, Curran knew that, at best, the NIH doctors had a condescending attitude toward the younger hotshots at the CDC. Curran had yet to interest anybody at the NIH in research in the gay diseases, and of course, no scientists in that land of undirected research could be ordered to work on the outbreak.
• Larry Kramer would maintain that from the start, gay men knew precisely what they needed to do—and not do—to avoid contracting the deadly new syndrome. The problem, he insisted, was in how gay men reacted to this knowledge, not in getting the knowledge out itself.