I was an odd kid—a bookworm worried about why I was different from others. Luckily, my family continuously reminded me that I belonged. Once out of the closet, I was able to appreciate the importance of families, both chosen and unchosen. I became a writer because I was compelled to articulate that importance and maybe help others understand how knowledge, trauma, emotions, and love move between the generations. Queer and family histories have inspired a lot of my journalism and fiction, but especially my new novel, This Is It. I hope it fits alongside these recommendations that explore queer multi-generational stories with wit, intelligence, and wisdom.
I love any work that can draw me in by being uncanny while still being emotional. This book is such a work. It's the story of a gay bar that houses a community of cross-generational queer people who become close-knit while the world outside becomes more and more hostile to them.
Though he tells the story with distance and coldness, Neil Bartlett made me feel like I belonged in that bar, in that community. Reading how the characters clutch at meaning and love, how they embrace who they are, and how they support one another had me rooting for them (and for myself) louder every time I turned a page.
It is 3 a.m. in The City, and in a dark corner of The Bar, two lovers collide in the beginnings of a passionate and violent affair.
Boy: nineteen, beautiful, ready for anyone to take him home, and 'O': the Older Man, cynical, unpredictable, and at the mercy of his personal demons. Their romance is orchestrated and observed by the owner of The Bar, Madame, who looks after her boys and ensures that their haven remains inviolate.
At once a joyful celebration of homosexual love and culture, and a devastating evocation of the homophobic climate which stemmed from the 80s…
I have been a mystery reader my entire life, starting with the Hardy Boys series as a child and then progressing to authors like Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Chester Himes, Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and many, many others. I love trying to figure out the crime or mystery before the reveal, but usually don’t. And, I have always truly enjoyed mystery books which have humor and quirky characters in them. More recently, I have become an award-winning mystery novelist myself, having published both a historical fiction mystery series and stories set in contemporary times in an ongoing anthology series that combines murder, mystery, and music.
One of the authors was the person in charge of the hospital John Lennon was brought to when he was actually murdered, and the book fictionalizes many of the real-life events of that day and night. But, in addition there’s a second man, a John Doe, and it’s his murder that has to be figured out by the hospital administrator and a policeman. The timing is also in the early days of GRID, which later became better known as AIDS.
It makes for a fascinating read, a great mystery, and a slice of history.
"The Night John Lennon Died...so did John Doe" is the ER Administrator's baptism by fire when John Lennon’s bloodied body is carried into Roosevelt Hospital ER over the shoulder of a policeman. Moments later, in the next room there is the suspicious death of an elderly John Doe. As the old man’s frail body is placed next to Lennon’s in the morgue van, Annie believes her involvement in these two senseless deaths is over. It is just beginning…
I have written books on topics ranging from climate change, to migration, to labor unions, to pianos. I covered the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s as a journalist. But I am mostly known as a musician. I have released over 20 CDs and toured internationally for decades. I am the son of a closeted priest and have a daughter whose lesbian mother is a former lover of mine so I am drawn to well-written books about the lives of gay men that don’t fit an easy “coming out’ narrative, that are not “closeted” in dealing with sex, and that address political concerns that go beyond gay males.
I became obsessed with the writing in this book when it was first published in 1991, and I was far from the only one. News of his death, one year after the publication of this book, triggered a spontaneous march of angry mourners through his NYC neighborhood.
He wrote with the urgency of an artist running out of time. David captured the anger of the first generation of gay men to confront AIDS like no one else. Other writers expressed the grief, the despair, and the moral dilemmas. David had fire breathing out of his pen. I am proud to have one of my favorite of his paintings on the cover of my new book.
I am glad I am alive to witness these things; giving words to this life of sensations is a relief. Smell the flowers while you can.
Close to the Knives is the artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz's extraordinary memoir. Filthy, beautiful, and sharp to the point of piercing, it is both an exploration of the world seen through the eyes of an artist, and a moving portrait of a generation living, grieving, and dying through the AIDS crisis. It is a triumphant hymn of resistance, and a dizzying celebration of the joys of seeing and living in the world.
I first travelled to Zimbabwe in 1984, eager both to “build scientific socialism” but also to answer two big questions. How can people proclaim rage at certain injustices yet at the same time perpetuate them against certain other people? And, could I learn to be a better (more empathetic) man than my upbringing inclined me towards? Years of teaching in the rural areas, and then becoming a father taught me “yes” to the second question but for the first, I needed to continue to pursue that knowledge with colleagues, students, mentors, friends and family. Today, my big question is, how can we push together to get these monsters of capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and ecocide off our backs?
A big mistake in much radical analysis is to characterize problems in dualistic terms that externalize responsibility from Africa (Rodney, of course, is wide open to that critique). Thus, colonialism is not just irredeemably bad but simple to identify and directly related to white skin. The end of formal colonialism provided new targets in sometimes caricature form: black-skin-white-mask neocolonialism and neoliberalism, notably. Such things undoubtedly exist. However, Kenworthy’s brilliant, gob-smacking analysis of the unintended consequences of life-saving technologies reveals levels of complexity and complicity that belie easy dualisms. How does something that promises liberation from mass suffering and death (anti-retroviral drugs) become a machine to entrench corrupt elites and opportunistic NGOs, to sell cheap textiles in America, and to exploit poor women’s unremunerated care work? Read, weep, and lose your illusions about corporate social responsibility.
As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly ""scaled up"" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts.
In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political…
I’m the global health reporter for The New York Times, the latest iteration in 30 years as a foreign correspondent. I’ve covered wars and humanitarian disasters, but it’s health stories that have always drawn me most. Health stories are intimate and personal, but they’re also about politics and economics, and social norms – about power. I’ve written about the Zika virus crisis in Brazil, child malnutrition in India, teen suicide in the Arctic – but no story has drawn me in and kept me riveted like Africa’s AIDS pandemic has over the past 25 years. I intend to keep reporting on it until the day a cure is found.
This book is exactly what the title promises, and a great place to start.
It’s written by a Swazi health economist who has worked on HIV in Africa for more than 30 years; I have learned a lot from Whiteside and his research over my years of covering this issue. The book looks at the biology and epidemiology of HIV, and also at all the ways it shapes societies.
Whiteside takes complicated concepts of population dynamics, sexual networking, AIDS, and geopolitical security and explains them briskly, clearly, concisely. His focus is the global AIDS epidemic, but his own work and the book are both deeply rooted in Africa.
In 2008 it was believed that HIV/AIDS was without doubt the worst epidemic to hit humankind since the Black Death. The first case was identified in 1981; by 2004 it was estimated that about 40 million people were living with the disease, and about 20 million had died. Yet the outlook today is a little brighter. Although HIV/ AIDS continues to be a pressing public health issue the epidemic has stabilised globally, and it has become evident it is not, nor will it be, a global issue. The worst affected regions are southern and eastern Africa. Elsewhere, HIV is found…
When my daughter was three years old, I enrolled her in a “creative movement” class. I had taken dance lessons for ten years when I was younger, so this felt like an obvious choice. At age eleven, her teacher suggested that she had the facility, talent, and drive to pursue a career in ballet. What followed was seven years of being a “ballet mom,” as she studied, performed, competed, and ultimately left home to pursue her career. The Still Point comes from this experience. It's a novel about dark ambition, but it's also a love letter: to my daughter, to ballet, and to the mothers who became my closest friends inside the ballet studio walls.
This luminous novel, written by former professional Joffrey Ballet dancer, Meg Howrey, follows the life of a dancer, beginning in NYC’s West Village in the 1980s.
It is a beautifully written rumination on not only dance but ambition, family, and secrets as well. Meg and I met for the first time when my daughter had just started on her pre-professional path, and her writing about dance is unmatched.
'A luminous chronicle of betrayal, sacrifice and creative ambition'
The Observer
'Lush and enjoyable... a glossy, fast-paced family drama'
The Times
'My idea of a perfect book'
Jami Attenberg
'By the book's close, readers will be clamouring for an extra curtain call'
Guardian
Once a year, ballet-obsessed Carlisle Martin spends a few precious weeks with her father Robert and his partner James at their enchanted apartment in Greenwich Village. Time spent with them is impossibly glamorous, filled with art, dance, beauty, books, and grown-ups who take her seriously as they battle the AIDs crisis and
Then, one summer, a devastating…
From the start, tented under bedcovers with a flashlight and diary, writing has been sheer joy and discovery. When I became aware that I was bisexual in my twenties, I wrote a memoir to make sense of my body, especially in light of my Christian upbringing, which became Swinging on the Garden Gate. When a fire burned all my belongings, including decades of writing, I found comfort in keeping a journal and was amazed that the practice still gave me hope. How? Why? My curiosity led to three books on writing as a transformational practice and countless workshops. The mystery of how creating something creates the creator fuels everything I do.
Some of the worst memoir-writing advice I’ve ever heard is, “Don’t write in the midst of emotional turmoil.” If Mark Doty had listened, readers would have never received the gift of Heaven’s Coast. No doubt this memoir began as a journaled record of Doty losing his beloved partner to AIDS.
His record of love, loss, and grief packs a punch because it’s so raw. It has lasting power because Doty took time to revise, adding eloquence, perspective, and insight. This is also a great model for integrating reflection into a story.
HEAVEN'S COAST is an anatomy of loss: tender, heartbreaking, consoling and, ultimately, incredibly moving. Beginning with the first onset of AIDS and its lengthening shadow over a blissful relationship, the book follows the shifting patterns between two loves as the illness takes hold - the change in them and the change in the way they perceive the world, through the lens of grief. Doty examines the nature of AIDS as opposed to other illnesses, the responses of society, the frustration of medical care and the exhausting - and occasionally uplifting - burden of caring for the dying at home.
I’m a professor in international politics, having written widely on ethical issues in international politics. Much of my previous work has considered the ethical questions that arise when there is a relatively stable, liberal international order, dominated by liberal democracies. But I’m increasingly concerned that, as the global order changes, many of our previous ethical understandings appear anachronistic, with fewer resources to deal with issues, more challenges, and fewer actors willing to act. I’m now trying to better understand what are the implications of rising global authoritarianism and geopolitical shifts mean for states’ global responsibilities and what this means for remaining liberal actors.
This book was really influential in developing how I understand the challenges facing tackling diseases worldwide and theories of prioritisation to deal with them.
The ethics of priority setting is far more developed in the health sphere than in other spheres, stemming from difficult decisions that medical professionals and global health actors have had to make in how to allocate scarce resources.
This book brings together some of the top figures in the field, each with insightful contributions.
Global health is at a crossroads. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has come with ambitious targets for health and health services worldwide. To reach these targets, many more billions of dollars need to be spent on health. However, development assistance for health has plateaued and domestic funding on health in most countries is growing at rates too low to close the financing gap.
National and international decision-makers face tough choices about how scarce health care resources should be spent. Should additional funds be spent on primary prevention of stroke, treating childhood cancer, or expanding treatment for HIV/AIDS? Should health…
Amidst COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is a touchpoint for journalists, scholars, writers, and a public who seek a usable past in understanding the present and making an uncertain future less so. The challenge of how to love, live, and survive amidst pandemics isn't new, I play here on the title of one of the first safer sex books,How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. As someone who studies how activists document their work and how they bring those materials to life today, I'm both fascinated and troubled by pandemic comparisons. These books offer crucial stories and productive tools to think with as we navigate questions of how to survive, and maybe even thrive amidst intersecting pandemics.
One of the best academic books written at convergence of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics isThe Virus Touch.
Here, Bishnupriya Ghosh showcases how “epidemic media” inform how epidemics are understood and experienced—making this text so relevant right now. She looks at how media—images, numbers, and digital models—whether generated by scientists, artists, or activists enable us to see and understand viruses and bear witness to their effects in new ways.
What is unique about Ghosh’s scholarship is how looks to the environment to study health which illustrates the complex and tangled relationships between epidemics, humans, animals, and media. Ghosh’s rich examples, ranging from modelling viruses to reading test results to tracking infection rates and mortality numbers, ensure that Virus Touch speaks to diverse readers.
In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains…
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
This is an amazing book if you want to understand that disease isn’t just medical, it’s also cultural.
Contagiousreally describes how culture influences how we understand illness and how that affects treatment and care of individuals, including who we blame and how we understand risk.
People like to think of medicine and science as being detached and objective, but this book shows that simply isn’t true.
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines-of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes-produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The "outbreak narrative" begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we…
