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After Victory Deferred was published in 1999, I supported myself by freelancing newspaper and magazine articles, and writing reports for U.S. government and nongovernmental health agencies and organizations.

The book didn’t bring me the “hundreds of thousands” of dollars Randy Shilts’ editor Michael Denneny said he hoped it would do (before he chose not to bid on it when my agent was auctioning it in New York).

In fact, financially speaking, things were as tight as ever.

My mother took $5,000 from her retirement account in 2000 to give me the down payment I needed to buy the small, threadbare one-bedroom apartment in Washington that I’d been renting for seven years. I discovered the amazing difference in perspective homeownership makes when I went, literally overnight, from living in a “low-rent” apartment (embarrassing) to being the owner of a “fixer-upper” (much more dignified).

I embarked on what was to be a four-year renovation project, transforming the 1924 apartment into what realtors called a “jewel” when I went to sell it in 2007. The escalating real estate market drove up the value of my condo more than six times what I paid for it. Like so many Americans, I refinanced the mortgage and took out gobs of cash from the equity to renovate, pay off debt, buy a new car and furniture and, eventually, support myself while I worked to establish my one-man consulting business.

But I’m jumping ahead of the story.

In 2001, the year after I bought the condo, two years after Victory Deferred was published, my finances were imploding—again. As I faced a second bankruptcy filing, 10 years after I’d walked that awful pathway the first time, I was desperate for a job or a long-term consulting project to generate a steady source of income.

As it turned out, a piece (about men’s role in HIV prevention for women) I freelanced for an international public health consulting firm led not only to a job, but also the highest salary I’ve ever been paid—more than double what I’d earned at my previous “real” job.

The woman who hired me as senior editor at Family Health International felt my experience reporting on HIV-AIDS in the United States, and authoring a well-regarded book in the field, gave me the right background to write about and edit others’ work on what is known as “global AIDS.” She later told me that hiring me was one of her proudest accomplishments at FHI.

As I’ve found in all the staff jobs I’ve held, my job at FHI gave me many opportunities to grow. I learned and used new skills, particularly writing for the Web. I hired and managed the work of other writers, editors, printers, translators, even CD packagers.

FHI offered the most diverse workplace I’ve ever worked in, with colleagues from all over the world. It’s hard to imagine a corporate work environment as stimulating as the global headquarters of an organization addressing something as hugely important as the HIV-AIDS pandemic. It’s equally hard to imagine a corporate job in which I could feel my particular skills and knowledge were as useful and valuable as they were doing this work.

There were, however, times when I was worried my background hadn’t prepared me adequately for what I was expected to do.

One of those times was when I was sent to Nigeria for two weeks. I was expected to guide my colleagues in FHI’s Lagos office—as well as people from community-level organizations across the country, who came together at two conferences I was sent to while I was in the country—in reporting and documenting their work.

I didn’t know a lot about what was expected by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was funding their (and my) work. But I did know something about reporting and how to make a reasonably engaging story out of an ordinary report on, say, how many condoms were distributed during a village HIV prevention program.

In fact my skills as a journalist were precisely what was helpful to the folks in Nigeria. Same thing when I was sent to Haiti and St. Kitts, in the British West Indies. I helped my colleagues to know how to interest local reporters in their work, and to create newsletters documenting their work of assisting to address their countries’ HIV-AIDS epidemic.

Unfortunately even in global organizations there are people whose limited imaginations and abilities are matched by their need to micromanage the professionals they supervise. My new boss was such a person. He had been a friend I helped to get hired at FHI. Although he lacked the stated qualifications for the position, office politics made him my boss.

We clashed regularly because of our very different work styles and understanding of what it means to be able to work independently. Copying my boss on all my e-mail, being able on-the-spot to tick off who I called and when I called them in relation to one of the many projects I managed, weren’t my idea of what a competent supervisor should expect or even want.

By regularly not providing the resources or support I needed to accomplish some of the unrealistic tasks he assigned, I told my boss he was setting me up for failure and I didn’t appreciate it.

He was finally able to manipulate the situation to his advantage and fired me, an obvious way to get rid of someone who made him uncomfortable--perhaps uncomfortably aware of his glaring limitations.

I licked my wounds by talking with friends and colleagues, and re-reading the terrific reviews of Victory Deferred that had given me such gratification.

Within a couple months, and after a number of interviews with FHI’s counterpart organizations, I saw the opportunity to offer reporting and documentation services like those I’d provided through FHI. I formed a one-man consulting practice I called Health & Science Reporting, Inc.

“Doing good work in the field isn’t enough if no one knows about it,” I said in the brochure I had designed for my business. “Without reporting on the progress you are helping achieve, others can’t benefit from what your experience has found to work best. Without showing the faces of individuals your work has aided, you can’t convey why it matters.”

For a couple of years, I enjoyed a number of interesting projects, and managed to keep the big paychecks coming in from consulting projects. I even got to make a second trip to Africa, to Zambia, for one client.

But refinancing my mortgage several times so I could tap the equity of my condo had given me more than just a beautiful “new” apartment. It had drastically increased my mortgage payment. It was getting stressful once again trying to piece together enough projects to generate the income I needed to cover my growing expenses in an increasingly expensive DC.

In the fall of 2005, I had no idea, not the slightest clue, that the stress and struggle of making a living would soon pale in comparison to what awaited me three weeks after my forty-seventh birthday.

NEXT: MY “NEWS”

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.