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I can’t say whether it was the blossoming cherry trees near the Washington Monument or Bill’s April 23 death from AIDS that sparked it.

But I knew in the spring of 1994 that it was time to write a book about the AIDS epidemic.

I’d been writing feature articles on the epidemic and its impact on the gay community, my community, for newspapers and magazines since the mid-eighties. I had worked on the staff of national organizations addressing the epidemic. I knew a lot of people across the country caring for men and women living with HIV, running and working for AIDS service organizations in big cities and smaller towns. I had lost a lot of friends and colleagues.

The book I had in mind was different from all the books on AIDS I had read by that time. The nearest comparison was Randy Shilts’s bestselling 1987 And the Band Played On, a chronicle of the early years of the epidemic.

I read Michael Larsen’s How to Write a Book Proposal, and spent a couple months developing a proposal for what I was calling “Helping Ourselves.” It would be a journalistic chronicle of how AIDS had affected gay Americans, how those people—we—had organized community-based service programs to provide compassionate care for those with the virus, protested to demand adequate federal support for research, mourned our fallen, and been transformed as individuals and a political movement.

I contacted editors who were thanked in earlier AIDS and gay-related books, and offered them my proposal. Within a month or so, I had a contract offer from the University of California Press, in Berkeley.

I used my accumulated vacation time, and my own funds, to travel to a number of cities—including Chicago, Miami, New York and San Francisco—to interview people there who’d been pivotal to their city’s response to AIDS. I heard stories of bravery in the face of open homophobia and hysteria about AIDS, of thrilling political triumph and terrible personal loss.

After Berkeley’s peer reviewers chewed up and spat out my draft manuscript—even a professor friend who regularly reviews manuscripts for university publishers was surprised by the animus in these so-called “blind” reviews—I was turned loose, told to find an agent.

And off I went, on a train, to New York.

Warren Frazier, my handsome young agent at the John Hawkins & Associates Literary Agency, told me he was happy the book had been rejected by a university press because, he said, that likely meant it was well written. I’ve slogged through enough books by academic writers to know exactly what he meant.

Warren let editors in the New York publishing world know the book would be up for “auction.” I was back in New York for a couple very nice lunches with editors. After lunch with Michael Denneny—Randy Shilts’ own editor, whose authors were a who’s-who of contemporary gay writers—he told me he hoped I would make “hundreds of thousands” on the book, but that he would like to publish it.

Hearing that from the editor of the epidemic’s earliest and most famous chronicler—a bestselling author, no less—was a thrill, to say the least.

It turned out the commercial publishers didn’t bid on the book. Instead the University of Chicago Press—which pioneered the field of gay studies and was known as a seriously academic house—wooed me and promised to do all kinds of good things for the book we were now calling Victory Deferred. (The title is taken from a poem of Walt Whitman’s about why war and brave soldiers have always been the supreme subjects of “ever-enduring bards.”)

Victory Deferred was the lead nonfiction title in Chicago’s spring 1999 catalogue. This was just the first of many exciting things that happened around the book’s publication.

The publicist at Chicago lined up a number of radio and newspaper (gay and mainstream) interviews.

Like most authors nowadays, I wasn’t being sent on a book tour. So I organized my own eight-city book tour. I contacted people I knew in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, and in exchange for giving talks in all three cities I was able to get my travel expenses covered by community organizations. In other cities, I also worked with people in AIDS organizations to set up book signings and talks.

Of the many excellent reviews that Victory Deferred received, the one that put me over the top was Kirkus Reviews’. They called the book “The most important AIDS chronicle since Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On.”

That was the review I’d hoped for, the one that would link my book and Randy’s book. I hoped it would forge a linkage between my and Shilts’ work and that I could in effect carry his journalistic torch forward.

Even today, as I am traveling the country to do interviews for a revised edition of Victory Deferred—to be published in 2011, the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic—I am awed and exhausted remembering the extraordinary amount of time and energy I put into the book, the copious tears I shed writing about people’s (and my own) experiences in the AIDS years.

And to this day, Victory Deferred is the thing in my life I am proudest of. It’s the product of my own most supreme effort to use my talents and skills, passion and intellect, and heart, to get the facts accurately and tell the story of “how AIDS changed gay life in America” in a way I hope will make my readers more compassionate citizens of what Anglicans call “this fragile earth, our island home.”

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NEXT: GOING GLOBAL

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.