ORIGINAL HARDCOVER EDITION UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 1999

SECOND EDITION UPDATED AND EXPANDED PAPERBACK 2011

Trailer

WINNER
Lambda Literary Awards “Editors’ Choice”

FINALIST
Stonewall Book Awards, American Library Association

FINALIST
New York Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award

“A voice of conscience for the gay community…Andriote speaks calmly for a moral ballast that will serve this community well when the AIDS crisis has indeed been weathered …The most important AIDS chronicle since Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On.”

— KIRKUS REVIEWS

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. 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 2011 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.

Now available as a free public access book at Knowledge Commons and Internet Archive.

SMITHSONIAN

In 2008, the Archive Center of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History created “The John-Manuel Andriote Victory Deferred Collection.” It contains all the audiotape interviews and other research materials Andriote used to develop the book, and serves as a valuable resource for historians, journalists, and others interested in American, LGBT, and medical history.

I visited the exhibit in 2012, while I was in Washington, D.C. to report on the 19th International AIDS Conference for The Atlantic and Huffington Post.

Materials from the collection comprised a major portion of a 2011 Smithsonian exhibit marking the 30th anniversary of the first reported AIDS cases. The exhibit was reprised in 2012 for the 19th International HIV/AIDS Conference, held that year in Washington, D.C

Guide to the John-Manuel Andriote Victory Deferred Collection