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By John-Manuel Andriote

The first thing I noticed were his arms. A look, a suggestion to dance, agreement that we could talk upstairs because it was quieter, conversation, flirtation. And it was done. The direction of my career was set. Of course all I knew at the moment was that this man with blue eyes and a passion like I’d never seen was enchanting the hell out of me.

I was in Washington, DC, for the fall quarter of 1985, part of my one-year master’s program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The school offers a DC program to provide graduate journalism students the chance to work as a “real” reporter. I reported on Washington’s doings for a small newspaper in Wisconsin.

Bill Bailey was working for a K Street law firm by day—advocating for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDF, as he always called it). In his spare time, though, Bill was volunteering as a “buddy” for a man who had AIDS through Washington, DC’s Whitman-Walker Clinic.

Several times a week, Bill got together with his buddy—Asa, an African-American man who lived with his family in the Anacostia section of DC. They went to movies and places, and Bill helped Asa with some of the practical things he needed help with.

People with AIDS at the time were often extremely ill, so having a buddy like Bill to pick up groceries or provide a lift somewhere made a difference for someone trying to live independently and hold onto the dignity the virus was trying to steal.

“You should use your skills as a journalist to tell our community’s story in the AIDS epidemic.”

It wasn’t so much a suggestion as it was Bill’s way of telling me this is how it needs to be because you have something to contribute, and your people need you.

I’d been following the growing AIDS crisis with interest since the early 1980s. The first cases were reported among gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York—just as I was “coming out” and becoming sexually active in the summer of 1981.

A few months before I met Bill, two of my friends had died from AIDS—both in their mid-twenties, like me. I had slept with both of them. So besides the grief I felt about their losses, I also worried I might have gotten infected with HIV from one of them—or even from someone else. I’d been making up for the years of adolescence that had not been a time of openly expressing my desires for the objects of my affection, as it is for straight guys.

In 1985, the year I met Bill, newspapers and magazines fanned the growing hysteria about AIDS. Newsweek proclaimed “Now No One Is Safe” after Rock Hudson announced that he had AIDS. Despite years of rumors about his being gay, the swarthy actor was widely (perhaps wishfully) viewed as heterosexual.

Bill put me in touch with people he knew through Whitman-Walker Clinic. Judy Pollatsek was a bereavement therapist working with the surviving partners of men who were sick with or had died from AIDS. Fred Steen and Bob Edwards were “team leaders” responsible for managing teams of buddies, like Bill.

I interviewed them for a story about the grief of surviving partners of men who had died from AIDS that I wrote for my magazine-writing class at Medill. I published the story in Chicago’s gay newspaper, and then expanded on it in a cover story (“The Survivors”) for Washington City Paper in late 1986.

These first stories on AIDS became the stepping-stones of my writing career. I saw myself redirecting my focus from writing about religion to covering another subject that affects people as intimately and powerfully as religion: their health. AIDS provided a window into America’s health care system, the disparities in access to medical care, and what I still consider the absurd linkage in this country of health insurance and employment.

AIDS showed what so many people with other health challenges know as well: Employer-provided health insurance disappears when someone becomes too ill to work. At the time, people with AIDS had no effective treatment and could only hope to beat the odds by living a few months or a couple years longer than others had done. Too sick to work, they’d lose their insurance and, soon, their ability to sustain themselves without some kind of public assistance.

I was outraged as I saw educated, skilled, responsible middle-class people—men, mostly—become impoverished because of a medical catastrophe.

I was just as angry about the hatred and bigotry inflicted upon people with AIDS because of the fear and ignorance that so many chose to govern themselves rather than to educate themselves. It was already challenging enough to be a gay man in America, let alone to become the target of others’ fear-driven hysteria about a deadly disease.

I realized that reporting on the AIDS epidemic would provide me with all the intellectual, political, cultural and social interest I could hope for in a subject. Not only that, but people I knew and cared for were being affected and abused, even by homophobic medical service providers.

Bill tested HIV-positive in the summer of 1986. I was devastated when he told me. He was determined to make the most of his life, however long or short it would be.

Bill became a lobbyist for the American Psychological Association. He pushed the APA, and Congress, to encourage (and fund) psychologists and other behavioral health professionals to take an active role in designing and implementing HIV prevention programs. He argued, rightly, that helping people change their risky behavior to protect themselves and their partners from HIV was a valid and useful role for these professionals to play in addressing the still-growing epidemic.

When Bill died from AIDS in 1994, the APA created the William A. Bailey Congressional Fellowship, to give psychologists the chance to learn about the federal policymaking process by working on Capitol Hill.

When he was in the hospital at the end of his life, Bill said to me one night how proud he was that we had been colleagues. Of the various ways we had been involved together in the nearly eight years we’d known each other, fighting and working to achieve the same goals were what Bill was proudest of about “us.”

I knew that even with Bill gone, I would continue to be his colleague in the battle for equality for all people and to bring an end to AIDS.

I only wish he could see how I’ve carried the torch forward.

And to think, that fire was lit on a rainy November night when a dance led to a conversation that launched both a new love . . . and a career.

NEXT: OF BREAD, BUTTER AND GLORY

Bio: John-Manuel Andriote began his writing career in 1983, reviewing books for the Advocate, the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine. After earning a master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Andriote built his career in Washington, DC, over the next two decades. He specialized in reporting on the AIDS epidemic, and in 1999 published Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America (University of Chicago Press). It was followed by Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco (HarperEntertainment, 2001). Andriote is also the author of The Art of Fine Cigars (Bulfinch Press/Little Brown) and a privately published history of Washington's Metropolitan Club. He has written feature articles, commentaries, reviews and profiles for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and many other publications. Today Andriote lives in Connecticut, and is working on a revised edition of Victory Deferred for publication in 2011, the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic.