Set against the history of the gay pride movement in America, this book charts the discovery of AIDS by a Los Angeles doctor and its growth from a localized "weird gay disease" into an international epidemic. The race to isolate the virus causing AIDS and to find a cure is mainly carried out by two opposing medical research teams in Paris and the U.S., both of whom race to claim the discovery as theirs. Woven into this is the story of Ananda, a young Indian girl, an untouchable and a leper from Benares, who is rescured from prostitution by Mother Teresa's sisters. She is helped to overcome feelings of being a pariah to be accepted as a sister herself. Mother Teresa sends her to New York to work in the first mission for AIDS sufferers in the city. The story closes with the experience of Sugar, an illiterate transvestite drug addict, who is the first at the mission to benefit from a new drug.