THE CENTERS FOR Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has reported that between 1981 and December 1994 the number of Americans diagnosed with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, climbed to 441,528. The death toll was 243,423. The majority of those who have died and of those who have been infected are gay men.

In other parts of the world, AIDS, spread through contact with infected blood and body fluids, is primarily contracted and spread by heterosexuals. But in the United States in the late 1970s, AIDS first surfaced in the gay male community. The handful of doctors who were treating these early AIDS cases contacted the CDC to report that increasing numbers of their gay patients had contracted severe forms of hepatitis and tuberculosis, rare forms of skin and brain cancers, and a rarely seen form of pneumonia. After careful examination of...