Synopsis

Walking the Rainbow is a personal history of HIV/AIDS beginning before the virus was discovered. The setting is the world of high finance and international business including a passionate love story and a high profile murder. The book begins in 1976 when, at the age of 28, the author joins an emerging New York Stock Exchange Health Care conglomerate. At the height of the Gay sexual revolution, numerous friends were becoming ill and began to die from what was being called the “Gay Plague” in Los Angeles and on Fire Island. The reader learns about the discovery of the virus at the highest scientific levels on several continents and the uncontrolled escalation of the pandemic during the nineteen eighties — which escalated by political ignorance and homophobia. Running parallel are two love stories with exceptional HIV + partners. The second occurs during the nineteen nineties when the couple worked with one of America’s most enlightened HIV philanthropists. After the latter’s mysterious murder, the protagonists help create the largest HIV Physician Practice Management group in the US. The challenges presented by the significant health problems of AIDS and cancer, combating homophobia in a conservative business world, managing loved ones illnesses and deaths, as well as adjusting to constantly changing life expectancies could only lead to either depression or “an arc to triumph.”