When AIDS Began: San Francisco and the Making of an Epidemic

As we enter the third decade of the AIDS pandemic, it is high time to step back and reassess the first encounters with the disease. By examining the early outbreaks in San Francisco, Michelle Cochrane unfolds the creation of this disease, highlighting the dissonance between the "official" history presented to the public and the private research records. She critically analyzes how and why the early major claims about the transmission of HIV were made and then disseminated to the rest of the world. Challenging much of the commonly held ideas about the transmission of the disease, Cochrane suggests that the tendency was to magnify the role of gay male sex and sexual Intercourse in general in driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic and to minimize the contribution of urban poverty, poor health care, injection-drug use, and substance abuse in producing and sustaining the epidemic. When AIDS Began is an original and controversial contribution to the ongoing dialogue about AIDS. Book jacket.

Michelle Cochrane is a Visiting Scholar and Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also held teaching appointments at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles