Compelled by his own 2005 HIV diagnosis, and to mark the 30th anniversary in 2011 of the first reported AIDS cases, journalist John-Manuel Andriote offers Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America, his chronicle of the AIDS epidemic, in an updated and expanded second edition of the University of Chicago Press 1999 hardcover original.
Victory Deferred examines how AIDS has changed both individual lives and national organizations, from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the 21st century’s first decade.
Based on hundreds of original interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, cultural, civic and national responses to the epidemic, Victory Deferred blends personal narratives with institutional histories and organizational politics to show how AIDS forced gay men from their closets and ghettos into the hallways of power to lobby and into the streets to protest.
For more than two decades, Andriote reported from the center of national advocacy and AIDS politics in Washington. In 2008 the Smithsonian Institution created the “John-Manuel Andriote Victory Deferred Collection” at the National Museum of American History, making available the interviews and other materials used to develop the book. Items from the collection are displayed in the museum’s exhibit marking the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic.
Kirkus Reviews called Victory Deferred “the most important AIDS chronicle since Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On.” The Washington Blade said, “Andriote has honored his mentors, his muses, and his community by preserving an important chapter in gay cultural history.”