Even so, by 2012 the official death toll in the US stood at 658,000, while worldwide Aids had claimed 35 million lives, eclipsing the devastation wrought by the bubonic plague of the 14th century. As David France explains in his subtle and searing history of this late-20th century plague and those who survived it, it took two years and almost 600 deaths before the New York Times printed a story about Aids on its front page, and a further seven years before the FDA agreed to relax the regulations on new drug approvals.

Now that much of that anger around Aids has dissipated and it is regarded as just another infectious disease – one that can be treated with an arsenal of anti-retroviral drugs that suppress, but never quite eliminate the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which is its cause – it is hard to recall the horror of the first wave of Aids deaths or the indifference with which the suffering of gay men was greeted by straight society. Or as the signs brandished by protesters put it, “FDA – Fucking Disaster Area”, and “AZT is not enough – give us all the other stuff”. The brainchild of a newly formed group called Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up), the protest was an inspired act of civil disobedience, the moment when people with Aids lost their patience with federal drug regulators and stormed the citadels of American science to demand access to life-prolonging medications other than AZT, the only treatment approved at that point. It is fair to say that suburban Rockville had never seen anything like it, and neither had the bureaucrats holed up inside the FDA. Facing them were a two-deep line of police officers wearing rubber gloves and, as David France recalls, an assortment of “slack-jawed” locals appalled by the sight of groups with names such as the Delta Queens and Queer and Present Danger within spitting distance of their homes. Others brought effigies of Ronald Reagan, the then Republican president.

Some were dressed as corpses and carried mock tombstones. O n 11 October 1988, a fleet of chartered buses drew up alongside the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Rockville, Maryland, and disgorged 1,200 Aids activists on to the pavement.

How to Survive a Plague by David France