The coronavirus pandemic has led Americans to develop some unlikely new celebrity crushes—among them silver fox Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The 79-year-old immunologist with a Brooklyn accent definitely has his share of admirers: Just do a Twitter search for “anthony fauci daddy” if you don’t believe us. (Seriously.)

Journalist and author Sally Quinn, however, recognized the good doctor’s hotness long before the rest of us. Fauci was the inspiration for a character in Quinn’s steamy 1991 novel, Happy Endings, Washingtonian magazine reports.

Quinn told the magazine that the character of Michael Lanzer, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, was based on Fauci, whom she met at a Washington dinner.

“I just fell in love with him,” Quinn said. “He just exuded charisma…He was so different from most Washington people, because he’s so self-effacing. He’s not in it for the glory or the name recognition.”

In the novel, the character of Sadie Grey—the widow of an assassinated U.S. president—falls for Lanzer, who, inconveniently, is married. A reviewer for Kirkus was not enamored, calling the novel “laborious, stilted, and—perhaps worst of all—fantastically unsexy.”

If you’re interested in buying Happy Endings to learn more about Quinn’s O.G. crush on Fauci, you’ll have to shell out—the novel appears to be long out of print, with copies on Amazon listed for as much as $989.90.

But if you’re not ready to spend that much, you’ll have to content yourself with looking at old photos of Fauci, as one Twitter user is doing. “Young Dr. Anthony Fauci was kinda hot ngl,” Sammy writes. “this is probably bc I haven’t seen a real boy in weeks ......”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.