The article noted that “most cases had involved homosexual men who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week. One in five of the affected were already dead. The cases were concentrated in Manhattan, with a few in the San Francisco Bay Area as well, and consisted of violet-colored spots appearing somewhere on the body, easily mistaken for bruises though they were sometimes raised and textured. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” ran the headline. Just two weeks after unpacking, on the Friday of the Fourth of July weekend, the New York Timescarried the first news of the plague. My college roommate Brian Gougeon, an artist, and I took up in a tiny one-room apartment in midtown, sleeping chastely on opposite edges of a narrow, lumpy bed. But Manhattan struck me as a city of promise, at once grimy and magical, where people could hide and be found. I had arrived in New York City for the first time for a college internship at the United Nations and a chance to explore Christopher Street, the mountaintop of gay life. Here, in an excerpt from his upcoming history of the same name, to be published by Knopf on November 29, he recalls memories of the plague years - and many of those no longer here to tell their own stories. In conceiving the project - and choosing the site - the urban planners Christopher Tepper and Paul Kelterborn were inspired by an article in New York lamenting that there was no memorial yet in the city and suggested that, as a result, the site of the hospital itself, “the bland sarcophagus along Seventh Avenue, hold that place.” The story was by David France, who would later direct the award-winning 2012 found-footage documentary How to Survive a Plague.

But it reminds us, too, as all memorials do, of how much has already been forgotten. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village, now closed, where patients once flooded the rooms and spilled out into the surrounding corridors, turning the genteel facility very suddenly into a kind of war zone.Īll told, more than 100,000 New York men, women, and children have died of AIDS, and the memorial is built in their names. On the first of December, three decades after the disease first hit the city, the New York City AIDS Memorial will open at ground zero of the epidemic - St.

David france how to survive a plague