![]() ![]() ![]() The cohort of friends and lovers in Makkai’s novel live in a constant state of morbid apprehension, first awaiting their test results and then, if the news is bad, awaiting their initial symptoms. An AIDS diagnosis, in 1985, was considered a death sentence. There was no medication except a drug known as AZT, which was mostly a palliative, and not a very effective one. ![]() By 1985, in one of the crueler ironies of the century, gay men had learned that the liberation of the libido, the casting-off of eons-old shame, had exposed them to an implacable, hitherto unknown virus. was first identified in 1983) were terrifying in their own particular way. Although it would be impossible, not to mention morally reprehensible, to try to single out the most ruinous period in the AIDS pandemic, those initial years (H.I.V. ![]()
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