Books like How to Survive a Plague by David France

Randy Shilts’ classic investigative work chronicles the emergence of HIV/AIDS, its social impact, and the political climate of the 1980s, marked by the death of Rock Hudson.

Two Boys Kissing tells the true story of seventeen‑year‑old Harry and Craig as they attempt a 32‑hour kissing marathon to break a Guinness World Record, while other teens grapple with love, identity, and belonging.

A groundbreaking history of gay life in New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s.

A biography that reveals the hidden life of Samuel M. Steward—novelist, poet, professor, and post‑Stonewall tattoo artist—through unpublished diaries and research correspondence, illustrating early homosexual existence in America.

A scholarly examination of gay Americans in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, tracing the dynamic power struggle between homosexual citizens and the military and its lasting impact on U.S. defense policy.

A groundbreaking history of gay male identity in the United States, from World War I to the AIDS era.

The search for a “patient zero”—popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic—has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay interprets a wealth of archival sources and interviews to demonstrate how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas—and fears—about contagion and social disorder. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaétan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed—and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak. McKay shows how investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of patient zero—adopting, challenging and redirecting its powerful meanings—as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first fifteen years of an unfolding epidemic. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.

A candid memoir of Cleve Jones, activist, and AIDS advocate, tracing his rise in 1970s San Francisco, his partnership with Harvey Milk, and his battles against the AIDS crisis, culminating in founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Dale Peck blends memoir, essay, and reportage to chart the 1987‑1996 era of the AIDS crisis, exploring ACT UP, serial killings of gay men, and the shifting fortunes of LGBTQ activism.