Hold Tight Gently Read Online Free

when a fire broke out in his apartment. Developing insomnia, he turned to sleeping pills. But then the symptoms that he’d initially ascribed to “food poisoning” began to proliferate—mysterious fevers, weight loss, night sweats, fatigue, and relentless diarrhea.Ever since his arrival in New York, Mike—enchanted with the multiple opportunities for sex—had freely indulged. He made no connection, initially, between his superactive sex life and his burgeoning list of physical ills. Finally, after he’d begun to hyperventilate, he got scared and crawled over to a gay men’s health clinic in the West Village.
    The doctor on duty happened to be Joseph Sonnabend, a South African–born specialist in infectious diseases who’d trained at Edinburgh’s prestigious Royal College of Physicians, done his medical field-work in South Africa’s shantytowns and impoverished villages, and then gone to work as a laboratory virologist under Alick Isaacs, one of the discoverers of interferon, the antiviral agent, at London’s famed National Institute for Medical Research. The field of molecular biology was just coming into its own, and Sonnabend shared in the discovery that cellular protein synthesis was needed for interferon to work. He’d moved to New York City in the early 1970s to work with the noted virologist Rostom Bablanian at Downstate Medical Center, and became an associate professor and associate attending physician at medical centers in Brooklyn.
    In 1977 Sonnabend began working for the Bureau of Venereal Disease Control, part of New York City’s Department of Health, and then, in 1978, he opened a private practice in Greenwich Village specializing in infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, with a mostly gay male clientele. With the arrival of a perplexing cluster of symptoms in a growing number of his patients, Sonnabend’s background as a microbiologist, virologist, and infectious disease specialist, as well as his experience in the South African townships, proved ideal for coping with this mysterious and mounting phenomenon. As early as 1982, he created a network of experts, independent of government agencies, to run tests on the samples he’d regularly send them from his patients. He also continued to do basic research on the properties of interferon both at Jan Vilcek’s lab at New York University and at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center. 3
    When Mike Callen arrived in his office on West Twelfth street in the Village, Sonnabend took one look at him and said, “You’re very, very sick. Who is your doctor?” “You are,” Mike croaked in response. That was the beginning of a relationship that would have profound consequences in the years ahead, not only for the two men but for the gay community and what would become the AIDS movement. Sonnabend,at age forty-eight, was already well along in his career, having been an assistant professor of microbiology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine before opening his private practice. Though he’d fathered three children (with three women) and been briefly married, Sonnabend openly self-identified as a gay man.
    At this point in time, the gay liberation movement was still in swaddling clothes, though following the Stonewall riots, its initial thrust had been radical. In the early seventies, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the most visible and active organization, had called for substantive social change, had denounced oppression of all kinds (not merely of the antigay variety), and had tried to form alliances with the Black Panthers and the Latino Young Lords. But as is typically the case in this country with protest movements, GLF had run into the centrist roadblock of American ideology and had given way in short order to the less radical Gay Activists Alliance. That group, in turn, had been superseded by the National Gay Task Force, which confined its agenda solely to what it defined as “gay rights” and adopted the traditional tactics of electoral