The first details the sad politics played by the government, the media, the medical establishment, and the gay community since gay men in America started having immune problems in 1980, and dying of what was then known as ""gay pneumonia."" The government has been slow in funding the media slow (and inexact and squeamish) in reporting American and French medical researchers are at each other's throats, fighting over who should get credit for discovery of the virus (the French, according to Shilts) and the gay community, particularly in dries like San Francisco and New York, took a long time to get over the fear of repressive homophobia and unite to shut the bathhouses and educate against the disease. Shilts concentrates on two different stories, alternating between them with novelistic ease. From the author of The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life & Times of Harvey Milk (1983), a massive, ominous, compelling book that tells the most definitive story of the AIDS crisis in America to date.
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