Hi History Makers, Eric here. A few months ago we launched Making Gay History's Patreon

channel, a place where we're sharing new video interviews never before heard clips from

my archive that didn't make it into the episodes and more. If you're not a member of our

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And thank you so much.

I'm Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History. Dr. Ronald Grossman lost his first AIDS patient

well before anyone knew that we were witnessing the start of a worldwide epidemic. In the

15 years before there were effective HIV AIDS treatments, he lost hundreds more. Many

of those patients were inherited from gay colleagues, friends who churn their medical practices

over to him after they too got sick and died of a disease. Dr. Ron, as I call him, has

been my personal physician for nearly three decades. We've had many conversations about

AIDS during that time, in the context of his work as well as mine. We've even uncovered

some surprising points of intersection, like Vito Russo. Vito, who was the author of the

Cellular Closet and a co-founder of ACT UP, was one of the first people I interviewed for

my Making Gay History book, because I knew he was ill. The physician who tended to Vito

in his final years, I later learned, was Dr. Ron. Years ago, Dr. Ron confided that he's

kept the files of all his patients who died from complications of AIDS, reams of files

locked away in an office closet. Dr. Ron explained that he used those files when he found himself

confronted with a patient who was in denial about AIDS. He would unlock the closet door, pull

...