Mr. Staley is a political activist and was an early member of ACT UP.
The first time I met Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal during the summer of 1989. ACT UP, the AIDS activist group I was a part of, had scared the bejesus out of conference organizers by seizing the stage during the opening session, then made things worse by disrupting various scientific presentations. Many, if not most, AIDS researchers wanted us hauled away and never heard from again. Little did they know that Dr. Fauci, who was leading the response at the National Institutes of Health, had been meeting with members of ACT UP since shortly after our founding two years earlier.
The regular meetings he had with an ACT UP member, Bill Bahlman, continued even after Larry Kramer, one of the group’s founders, wrote an open letter to Dr. Fauci in The Village Voice calling him a murderer and comparing him to the Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann. But there Dr. Fauci was, meeting with me and my comrades, branded radical homosexuals, to discuss our policy proposal for upending longstanding Food and Drug Administration strictures against public access to drugs before they are approved.
Mr. Kramer had labeled him our enemy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that as the head of our government’s AIDS research efforts, Dr. Fauci had my life in his hands. Only four years earlier, at the age of 24, I was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex, considered a certain death sentence at the time.
Days after the conference, I found myself in Dr. Fauci’s office, along with the ACT UP members Mark Harrington and Jim Eigo, hammering out the final details of our parallel track program, which would allow thousands of people to obtain experimental drugs outside of traditional clinical trials. Within days, a New York Times front page headline about Dr. Fauci read, “AIDS Researcher Seeks Wide Access to Drugs in Tests.” The F.D.A. quickly fell in line. ACT UP had scored its first major victory, with Dr. Fauci’s help.
But then we turned our focus to the myriad problems with Dr. Fauci’s AIDS clinical research program at the N.I.H., biting the hand that had just fed us. Our meetings were upgraded to long dinners at the home of Jim Hill, the deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (Mr. Hill, who was not openly gay, later tested positive for H.I.V.) Over multiple bottles of wine, Dr. Fauci tried to placate us with what I called “the full Fauch,” an optimistic friendliness with a Brooklyn-smarts spin and a love of lively debates. Two opposing truths confronted us: We couldn’t help but love the guy, but his research program sucked. “Tony,” I said, “you’re a great scientist but a lousy administrator.
Within months, hundreds of ACT UPers were surrounding his building at the N.I.H., and I was the first one arrested, after climbing onto its portico. Cops wrestled me down, bound my hands behind me with a zip tie, then hauled me through the building to a police van. The burly cop pulling my shoulder was dumbfounded when a familiar short man in a white lab coat walking toward us down the hallway yelled, “Peter, are you all right?” Laughing, I replied, “I’m fine. Just doing my job. How about you, Tony?”