In the Company of Excellent Strangers
To my surprise and delight, my recently released memoir, My Unexpected Life, has unexpectedly been nominated — already — for an award. POZ Magazine has nominated it for the 2021 Best in Literature Award. And while I am, of course, elated, I am also intimidated by the competition. I am in the running with three other extraordinary writers of three very, very, noteworthy books.
All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burkes, with Kevin Carr O’Leary, came out late last year (2020) and honors the young men who died in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, but also tells the story of Ruth Coker Burkes herself, at the time a young single mother, who cared for these young men when no one else would. These stories are that much more important because they take place in Arkansas. We’ve heard many stories from New York and San Francisco, but not nearly enough from other parts of the country which were also hard hit by the AIDS crisis. All the Young Men is the kind of book that restores one’s faith in humanity at a time when we all could use a reminder that kind people do, indeed, exist.
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 by Sarah Schulman is basically a must-read for anyone who wants a full account of the history of the response to the AIDS crisis in America. Her compilation of interviews from the online ACT UP Oral History Project pulls together a montage of those early years of activism and is essential, not only for the historical documentation, but for the female perspective which is not as prominently voiced as it should be. Schulman’s latest book brings together key pieces of the stories of what molded activists and activism in America that shaped not only AIDS work but also laid the ground work for how we respond to many health issues now here and around the world. We owe her a huge debt of gratitude for undertaking this excellent work.
Where We Go From Here by Lucas Rocha is an equally necessary book, but for an entirely different reason. This is a Young Adult, or YA, novel about three young gay adults in Brazil who are confronted with HIV and what it means to test for, and be diagnosed with, HIV and then, ultimately, live with HIV. There are very few YA novels that deal directly with such issues yet there is such a need to bring in real life issues for young queer and gay adults, and, indeed, all young adults, who live in the real world where real issues like living with HIV exist. Rocha’s novel adds to the body of literature addressing HIV but does so for an audience that does not get nearly enough attention on the topic. For any teachers in the crowd, this would be an excellent book to consider teaching.
And there we have it. Three remarkable books in their own right and my memoir, all nominated by POZ Magazine for their 2021 Awards, Best in Literature.
If you haven’t yet read my book, well, get on it, please! Seriously though, my own memoir tells my story of testing positive for HIV in 1992 and how in the years that followed I managed to not only not die, but I became the first openly HIV-positive person hired to work at UNAIDS. Subsequently, I was part of a small team who created an HIV-in-the-workplace program internal to the United Nations system to ensure we educated and supported our own personnel. The memoir is bookended with the COVID-19 pandemic because, what can I say, I am a virus over-achiever. There are many memoirs by people living with HIV, but there are not so many by women living with HIV and even fewer told from the perspective of working within the squishy underbelly of the beast that is the United Nations system.
Each of these books add important elements to the complex story that is the history of HIV, the lived experience of a pandemic, in fact, two pandemics. I encourage you to read them all. And if you are so inclined, vote in the POZ Awards for whichever book you feel most deserves to win. They are all worthy contenders.
