A question has always hung over the reaction of gay men to the plague that terrorized and decimated them in the 1980s and 1990s: Why did they not surrender? They came of age in an era of intense stigma; and AIDS, as many Christian fundamentalists gleefully noted, appeared almost as confirmation that the wages of sin are death. They were surrounded by a culture that emphatically believed that they had asked for this, that mass death was, as National Review put it, “retribution for a repulsive vice.” How did they not entirely internalize this? Why, after a brief moment of liberation in the 1970s, did they not crawl back into the closet and die?
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Matt Skallerud
onto Health, HIV & Addiction Topics in the LGBTQ+ Community |
David France’s remarkable book tries to answer that question. It’s the prose version of France’s Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name — and somehow manages to pack all the emotional power of that film with far more granular detail and narrative force. I doubt any book on this subject will be able to match its access to the men and women who lived and died through the trauma and the personal testimony that, at times, feels so real to someone who witnessed it that I had to put this volume down and catch my breath.