Flu has just hit London, and you are not feeling very well. You have swollen glands and a cough, perhaps with a sore throat; you are running a temperature, tend to sweat in bed at night, and your bowels are a bit upset. To most of us an attack of this kind is unpleasant and inconvenient, little more than that. For others it brings doubts that are a plague worse than the disease, fears that cause rifts between themselves and their loved ones, and a growing realisation that they are going to be cast off by mankind, possibly for good. These men - for it is principally men that are concerned - are members of the metropolitan homosexual communities - in London, Paris and, above all, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Over the last five years their lives have been overshadowed by the spread of a mysterious, entirely fatal disease which has, ironically, become known as AIDS.

LRB 7 June 1984 | PDF Download