“He said, ‘You are immune-deficient,’ ” Callen remembers. “I said, ‘What does that mean?’ He said, ‘Nobody really knows.’ ”

And so, a decade after fleeing a part of Ohio where homosexuality is seen as spiritual sickness, Michael Callen found himself alone in an apartment in New York with a physical sickness that threatened to kill him. He remembers, “I called my parents and said, ‘I’m going to get cancer.’ It was like a death sentence. I was just waiting to die.” The federal Center for Disease Control reported at one point that some homosexual AIDS patients had listed more than 1,000 sex partners. Callen sat down and began to compute his own total.

“I was thinking maybe a thousand, and then I was thinking, no it can’t be,” Callen remembers. “Lo and behold, it was more.”

As news of this illness spread, Callen noticed that many of his friends no longer greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. When he took a French fry off a friend’s plate, the other man left the rest of them untouched. A few sought Callen out and asked if some small malady was by any chance an early sign of AIDS. “At first, people would be real nice and say, ‘Oh, how are you?’ ” Callen says. “Then they would say, ‘Could you look at this little sore?’ ”

A slight fever or a bit of congestion was enough to send hundreds of others to physicians. A number of homosexuals consulted Dr. Kean. He recalls, “They say, What can I do?’ I say, ‘The best thing to do is get married.’ ” Other panicked men filled the West 57th Street office of Dr. Dan William. Usually, the complaint turned out to be just a cold or a touch of flu that served the patient with a warning to stay out of the baths and other places of random sex.

“I’d rather have a patient who is a little panicky or neurotic and is also alive five years from now than to have somebody who has his head in the sand and dies,” William says. “You can treat panic and neuroses.”

The medical charts of the men in the city who frequented the baths began to read like something out of Biafra.

Then, in greater and greater numbers, there were the ones who came into the office with a symptom that was more than just a scare. Many said they had spent considerable time in the baths. Others said they pursued quiet lives with few sexual adventures. For them, AIDS may have been less the result of an unfortunate life-style than of unfortunate luck. William would tell the patient to eat intelligently, avoid alcohol and drugs, refrain from smoking, and keep away from crowded places where he might pick up infections. There was no treatment for the disorder itself, and all William could do was watch the patient’s immune system disintegrate.

“People say, ‘Give me a pill, give me a shot, make me better,’ ” William says. “People believe that there is a simple answer for everything. People are very naïve.”

After being diagnosed, one 24-year-old AIDS patient was driven from his family’s home and left to live on the street. Another was evicted by his lover and forced to sleep in hallways while he had a fever of 104 degrees. When one patient died, his family refused to claim his body. A patient named Arthur Felson was fortunate enough to have a friend who stuck by him. Then the friend saw an erroneous report on television that the illness could be spread by everyday household contact. Terror of the disease apparently drove the friend to commit suicide.

“I just couldn’t shake it out of him,” Felson says.

In many hospitals, AIDS patients were placed in isolation. Nurses entered the rooms wearing gowns and gloves. A number also wore surgical masks. At the Veterans Administration Medical Center on First Avenue, some of the staff were reluctant to bathe the AIDS patients. Others had to be prodded to change the beds. One patient at Bellevue Hospital heard a knock and opened his door to discover that somebody had left his food tray on the floor and then fled. A patient at another hospital was told by his doctor that he could leave and go home to die, but was unable to find a housekeeper who was willing to risk exposure to AIDS.

At Lenox Hill Hospital, a nurse named Deborah Curran noticed that some of the technicians avoided drawing blood from AIDS patients. “A lot of times, they say, ‘I can’t get it.’ A lot of times, they don’t even try, and then some doctor has to do it,” she says. Curran herself felt the fear of contagion for the first time in her five years as a nurse when she was asked to remove an intravenous tube from a young man with AIDS.