VICTORY DEFERRED

THE BOOK

REVIEWS

SMITHSONIAN

VICTORY DEFERRED

HOW AIDS CHANGED GAY LIFE IN AMERICA

THE BOOK

When the University of Chicago Press published Victory Deferred in 1999, Kirkus Reviews hailed it as "The most important AIDS chronicle since Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On." Shilts was the San Francisco Chronicle reporter who dramatized the earliest years of the unfolding HIV-AIDS epidemic as seen from the city that led the world's responses to the epidemic. 

Victory Deferred was acclaimed in both the LGBT and mainstream press alike. It won a Lambda Literary Award, was an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award finalist, and a finalist for the New York Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. The Washington Blade said, “Andriote has honored his mentors, his muses, and his community by preserving an important chapter in gay cultural history.”

All of the audiotaped interviews, notes, and other research materials I used for the book are now part of a special "John-Manuel Andriote Victory Deferred Collection" curated by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Compelled by my own 2005 HIV diagnosis, I revisited Victory Deferred for an updated and expanded paperback edition of the University of Chicago Press 1999 hardcover original. I conducted six dozen additional interviews across the country, and added a new final section called "The Plague Continues" that brought the history of "how AIDS changed gay life in America" into the second decade of the twenty-first century.

In Victory Deferred I examine 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.

I look at how AIDS has changed both individual lives and national organizations. I tell the story--stories, really--of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a nationally 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 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.