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In the 25 years since this book was published, I've read it three times. This is the first time I've felt anything other than outrage, and have been able to notice the writing. Certainly I felt outrage as well this time, along with horror, anger, rage, etc. It's hard not to. The AIDS epidemic, a...
I remember this as an intense and painful book. I read it around 1993 or 1994, at a time when I knew several gays and straights in (or formerly in) the military and DADT had just become law. I imagine it would be very different to read it now, post-DADT, but probably still intense and painful.
I really struggled with how to rate this book. There's no doubt it's full of a great deal of information and the steps taken to try and 'humanise' the book and tell the stories of some of the people affected are laudable. However, it also makes it difficult to decide whether to read this as a fact...
4.5 stars. Oh so close to perfect. Full of strong reporting, both of Milk's life, his time in politics and the city of San Francisco's rise to prominence in the LGBT community, Shilts does a wonderful job of balancing the man Harvey Milk and the icon he became to the movement. As much as I love Gus ...
This book brought back the early 80s in hallucinatory detail. I remember when we first heard about Gay Cancer, and how hard it was to get any decent information. I remember when the world got wobbly and my friends were dying and it seemed like nobody cared. I was quite certain that, given my penchan...
Incredible, eye-opening, and tremendously sad.
I recall from looking over my journal from back then that this book was extremely engaging. It made me angry at times. I wrote more in my journal, but I will keep it there. I did note that I enjoyed the book, which I found to be very well documented. Also it felt like reading fiction in a way I coul...
This may be the first book I ever read about epidemiology. It opened my mind to the intersection of disease and prejudice.
I was forty in 1982, married, raising a child and reading the first articles about this weird new plague as they appeared in Rolling Stone and other publiations. I remember the attempts to classify this as a strictly gay problem, the first name for it being GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficency. When...
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