A deadly mystery and one reporter’s fight to expose the truth during the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic. With hospital beds filling up, the clock was ticking. . . . What would it take to wake up the nation? A masterful and eye-opening historical graphic novel.

San Francisco, 1981. Randy Shilts—biographer of Harvey Milk and the first openly gay journalist hired by a major U.S. newspaper—receives a chilling call at the San Francisco Chronicle: a Los Angeles patient is being treated for a rare and aggressive cancer.

As Shilts digs deeper, a disturbing pattern emerges. The illness seems to strike only gay men, with early cases linked to a Castro-district bathhouse. A meeting with an infectious disease researcher confirms his worst fear: this so-called “gay cancer” is neither rare nor isolated—it’s the beginning of a national health crisis. Barred from reporting on it directly, Shilts resorts to sensationalist tactics to force attention on the unfolding HIV/AIDS epidemic.

His relentless pursuit of the truth would change history, exposing a catastrophe the world tried to ignore. In this vivid graphic biography—at once urgent, insightful, and unapologetically bold—the creators bring to life a story that remains as vital as ever.

Randy Shilts’s groundbreaking reporting and books (The Mayor of Castro Street, And the Band Played On, Conduct Unbecoming) became cornerstones of journalism and LGBTQ+ history. This is the first graphic novel to spotlight this pivotal figure and the transformative moment that defined his legacy.

Clément Xavier was born in 1981 in Mozambique. After pursuing comics studies in Angouleme, he cofounded NA, a publisher of comics and photo stories whose books have won multiple awards over the years. In parallel, he has authored a growing number of graphic novels for other publishers, with a focus on history and biographies, often based in the United States. He currently lives in Marseille, France. Héloïse Chochois was born in eastern France in 1991. She studied the graphic arts and has spent much of her young career dedicated to the worlds of health and science. As an illustrator specializing in scientific outreach through comics, she has published La Fabrique des corps, which ranges from prosthetics to transhumanism, and Intelligences artificielles, miroirs de nos vies, which drills down into the place of AI in our lives. At the same time, she has also taken up sensitive historical and contemporary stories, both with Lynchages ordinaires, which explores the place of lynching in Brazilian society, and 11 septembre, le jour où le monde a basculé, which explores the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Collectively, these projects led her to create Bitter Pill, which offered her the perfect outlet for her talents. She currently lives in the Paris region.