Compelled by his own 2005 HIV diagnosis, journalist John-Manuel Andriote revisits his acclaimed chronicle of the AIDS epidemic in this updated and expanded edition of the University of Chicago Press 1999 hardcover original.
Andriote examines the impact of AIDS on individuals and on the gay civil rights movement, from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the twenty-first century’s first decade.
Victory Deferred looks at how AIDS has changed both individual lives and national organizations. It tells the story of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a national visible and politically powerful civil rights movement, a full-fledged minority group challenging the authority of some of the nation’s most powerful institutions.
Based on hundreds of interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, cultural, civic, and national responses to the epidemic, Victory Deferred artfully 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. He is judicious without being uncritical, and his account of the political maturation of the gay community is one of the most stirring civil rights stories of our time.
Critics praised the original edition of Victory Deferred. Kirkus Reviews called it, “The most important AIDS chronicle since Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On.” The Los Angeles Times said, “People who want to know how a community mobilized in the face of an unprecedented crisis will want to start here.” The Washington Blade said, “Andriote has honored his mentors, his muses and his community by preserving an important chapter in gay cultural history.
Victory Deferred won the Lambda Literary Awards’ “Editors’ Choice” award, and was an American Library Association “honored book.” All of the original interviews, and other materials used to develop the book, are archived and available to researchers in the “John-Manuel Andriote Victory Deferred Collection” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C.
