As a physician living in San Francisco and then Los Angeles throughout the 1980s, Andrew M. Faulk saw the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in some of its biggest epicenters. And as someone diagnosed with HIV himself, Faulk also had unique insight into how his patients felt. From 1984 to 1991, he limited his practice to patients with HIV. He cared for his friends and even his own partner until their deaths while assuming that he himself would not last much longer. As one of the few individuals who survived long enough to see the arrivals of better drugs, Faulk has now self-published his memoir, My Epidemic, to share the insights that come from his dual experience as both caregiver and patient.

 The Kirkus review mentions that early days of the epidemic have become “difficult to imagine” in today’s world. What do you hope today’s readers will understand about that time?

I was present at bedside on several occasions when my patients were subjected to cruel rejection by their families as they simultaneously learned of their son’s diagnosis and his sexual orientation. But these painful individual encounters eventually contributed to a huge advancement in the acceptance of gay people and our movement for legal rights. In a binary world of “us” and “them,” for mainstream Americans we were “them.” But the epidemic served an unexpected purpose: Yes, we were “them,” we were gay, but to the surprise of society and even a few of us, the epidemic showed we were everywhere.

Being a gay man yourself, your book is also a firsthand narrative of the communities that were affected. How did you view their responses to the crisis?

Andrew M. Faulk

To their great credit, it was the lesbian community as well as many heterosexual groups that jumped in to orchestrate AIDS fundraising, education, and one-on-one care. Although I have conflicted feelings about ACT UP, they were a welcome force in coalescing gay men, recruiting devoted lesbians, and heightening the awareness of the general public in their drive to force the government and drug companies to prioritize research and treatment. Their haunting triangle logo, “Silence=Death,” was genius in its truth. While our brothers were dying all around us, ACT UP asked how those unaffected could continue on without any interruption in their lives.

Why did you decide now was the right time to tell your story?

AIDS is now thought of as a chronic condition that is relatively benign. But in the 1980s and early ’90s, even if we were HIV-negative, it monopolized everything we saw, everything we heard, everything we thought about. With so many people dying, I thought that gay society would never be the same again—that it shouldnever be the same. But now I see our society going on without all these people. These times—and mainly these people—shouldn’t be forgotten.

Why did you decide to self-publish?

I shopped it around for a year and a half. We came really close to a couple of formal publishing houses, and then they didn’t take it. One house kept it for a year without giving me a response, saying it had fallen behind a desk. When it came to publishing on my own, my editor and I didn’t know where to go….But we got a great typesetter and a great artist for the book cover….We eventually did print on demand.

Your memoir centers around your dual perspective on AIDS. How did your own diagnosis change your perspective as a doctor?

With my identity intimately tied to my work, it has been a strain to separate the two. In fact, should you ask those who love me, they would tell you it’s an enormous issue with which I still contend. My colleagues could depend on my ability to treat people medically—and emotionally—at the very worst moments of their lives. In our efforts to connect with people, our most powerful tool is empathy, and my life story and my own HIV status, while undisclosed, gave me an empathy which translated into an ease in achieving that all-important connectedness….Now I realize that simple words strung together have the ability to provide relief where there is no remedy. That is my hope with this story of the epidemic, that it may be useful for doctors and patients in some other ordeal of plague.

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator in Paris.

.