ABSTRACT
In 1981, just three years after these passages appeared in print, a gay man, suffering from a serious fungal infection of the throat, was admitted to a medical center in Los Angeles. Within two weeks he had developed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a lung infection previously seen almost exclusively in cancer or transplant patients. At almost the same time, several gay men in New York and San Francisco were diagnosed as having Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer found usually in older men of Mediterranean origin. Physicians were puzzled: all these symptoms suggested an unexplained lowering of immune function. Here, then, were the fi rst indications of the AIDS epidemic, and they presaged a new era in gay history.
