ABSTRACT
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Robert Wallace (a pseudonym) moved to New York, where, by twenty-nine, he had become a successful lawyer. For the boy who had grown up in a small town in Indiana, life seemed picture perfect. Then one Saturday morning, which he remembers like it was yesterday, Robert went down to the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building to get the paper, and he read a The New York Times headline that terrified him: “Rare cancer affects gay men.”1 It was July 3, 1981. Standing in the lobby, reading the article, he recalled a muggy day in the summer of 1979 when his lymph nodes had swollen enormously and he felt extremely ill and fatigued. Alarmed, he had gone to his doctor, who confirmed that in fact something was terribly wrong. The doctor had said, “I have no idea what it is; I’ve never seen anything like it.” Robert’s symptoms went away, and life went back to normal-for a while. Then that morning came when he stood there reading and all he could think was, “I’m going to die.”2 A mind-numbing wait became the focus of his attention: for the next ten years, every morning after waking up he wondered if that was the day that he would become sick.
