He would have to leave the country. He would be expelled, an alien carrying a deadly contagion. It didn't matter that in 2010 the HIV was no longer anywhere to be found in his body, that his viral load was down to zero — it was still there, hiding in his brain and in his balls, ready to make its mark on any new cells, having wormed its way into his DNA. And the law was clear. This country, created by the castoffs and criminals of a dying empire, did not want the likes of Andrew Sullivan. And so, although he'd been in the United States since 1984 — his English accent severely eroded and Americanized, the founder of the blog against which all other blogs are measured, a civil-rights pioneer in a country not his own, a man who had married another man in a beachside ceremony on Cape Cod in 2007, a legal right that had been born of his own imagination twenty years before — he would have to leave the country. Back in the 1980s, six weeks after he had arrived in Boston to take up a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard, he had written his parents back in England and said, I know this sounds odd, but I feel as if I've come home. No matter. He'd been fighting this day for seventeen years, managing to renew his visa in Canada without incident every couple of years, until that one time his luck ran out and it looked as if he might be marooned in Toronto forever. They had stamped his passport like a tattoo. Even then he had fought for and received an extension from the government. But now his time was up.

If a man's life can be defined by the things he fears, this was the greatest of the fears that had organized Sullivan's life, the thing of which he was most terrified.

His first fear had arisen all those years ago, back home in England. His people were barely literate Irish stock, and his father was a jock and both parents deeply Catholic. And here's young Andrew, with his disconcerting sexual secret. *When I was about eight, I asked my mother if it was true that God kn...