AIDS in New York: The First Five Years

New York lived in fear. In the early 1980s, a mysterious infectious disease began to kill gays, their partners, and children, as well as injected drug users and blood transfusion patients. Then unnamed, with research funding and support for the dying unavailable, the HIV/AIDS virus would eventually take nearly one hundred million lives.

With America's largest gay population, New York was hit early and hard by AIDS. And a silent City Hall and sensationalist tabloid headlines spread homophobia and panic. Yet within months the city's gay community and concerned medical professionals mobilized, fighting disinformation and attacks on sufferers' civil liberties, and lobbying for funds for medical and social outreach.

In forceful narrative and vivid images, AIDS in New York: The First Five Years, based on the acclaimed 2013 exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, recaptures the first five years of the epidemic, culminating in the widespread public awareness of its dangers following the death of movie star Rock Hudson in 1985. It speaks especially to those too young to remember those painful years and those who conflate New York's AIDS story with later successful gay advocacy and drug breakthroughs. It reminds readers that epidemics make social and ethical demands, test the values of a society, and kill through taboos as well as disease.

"...brings to life a period when AIDS began to infect not just the body but the body politic." - The New York Times, about the exhibition at the New York Historical Society upon which the book is based.

Jean Ashton, PhD, MLS, curator of AIDS in New York: The First Five Years and lead author of this book, is Senior Director of Resources and Programs at the New-York Historical Society. Formerly Executive Vice President and Director of the Library, Dr. Ashton curated Breakthrough: The Dramatic Story of the Discovery of Insulin (2010 2011) and Be Sure! Be Safe! Get Vaccinated: Smallpox, Vaccination and Civil Liberties in New York (2012). Gerald M. Oppenheimer, PhD, M.P.H, is co-author of AIDS Doctors: Voices from the Epidemic: An Oral History, 2000. He is also a professor at Brooklyn College, the Graduate Center and the School of Public Health of the City University of New York, and the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York.