Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Editor)

Overview

Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations—the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer.

Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis offers crucial stories from this missing generation in AIDS literature and cultural politics. This wide-ranging collection includes 36 personal essays on the ongoing and persistent impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in queer lives. Here you will find an expansive range of perspectives on a specific generational story—essays that explore and explode conventional wisdom, while also providing a necessary bridge between experiences. These essays respond, with eloquence and incisiveness, to the question: How do we reckon with the trauma that continues to this day, and imagine a way out?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551528502
Publisher:	Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of two nonfiction titles and three novels, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her latest book, The Freezer Door, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her novel Sketchtasy was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018. Her anthology Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book.

Table of Contents

Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: An Introduction (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore)
What Survival Means (Keiko Lane)
Surviving My Cousin (Bryan M. Holdman)
Class of ’88 (Rigoberto González)
Hockey Night in Canada (Berend McKenzie)
OPEN 24 HOURS (Nels P. Highberg)
Relationship to Fear (EJ Colen)
From the Inside: One Prisoner's Perspective (Timothy Jones)
To Make a Whore of (Emily Stern)
Andy Bell Made Me Gay (Dan Cullinane)
Lucky (Eddie Walker)
To Say Goodbye (Andrew R. Spieldenner)
Rea (Hugh Ryan)
Lie Back and Get Comfortable (Liz Rosenfeld)
Leaving Atlanta (Stephen H. Moore)
Old Testament (Alexander McClelland)
The Conversations We Need to Save Each Other's Lives (charles ryan long and Theodore (ted) Kerr)
Scar Tissue (Adrian Ryan)
Got AIDS Yet? (Aaron Nielsen)
Please, We All Gonna Get It: Trans Women on Inevitability, Health Care, and the Cure (Rory Elliott)
Fearing “El Sida” (Manuel Betancourt)
Looking for Gaëtan (Ryan Conrad)
Jason & David (Dan Fishback)
Homeless Youth Are Still Dying of AIDS (Sassafras Lowrey)
Leftover Lovers (Edric Figueroa)
Elders (Miranda Recht)
Family Business (Kate Doyle Griffiths)
Taking the Guilt and Shame out of Barebacking as a Sex Worker (Laura LeMoon)
Those Who Left, and Those Who Stayed (Ahmed Awadalla)
Red Shadows (Lester Mayers)
The Long Ladder of Shame (C.L. Severson)
PrEP Will Not Save Us: The Ghosts of AIDS and Suicide (Kody Muncaster)
Disclosure (Robert Birch)
Half-Breed Blues (Charles Conn)
Status Symbol (Tony Correia)
Undead Disco: Variations on a Theme (Patrick Milian)
Across the Gap Between Us (Liam O’Brien)

Editorial Reviews

An exciting and important collection that reconvenes community and brings our hidden feelings and experiences of HIV again to light and to consciousness.” —Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

"Between Certain Death and a Possible Future is a must-read for this moment, yet another juncture where we face the collision of brutal inequality, right-wing resurgence, and pandemic. This book is deeply personal, moving, and evocative, and at the same time has an enormous amount to teach us about the political and social conditions that have produced the social meanings of AIDS and sex that have shaped our lives." —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

"I thought I knew everything about how the queer generation after mine was impacted by AIDS, but Sycamore's eye-opening anthology pierced my naive cockiness. I remember my life and sexual coming out before the AIDS crisis, but what if AIDS is all you've ever known? How did that define your queerness? Sycamore breaks open a dam of suppressed stories centered on stigma, from wildly diverse voices, pouring forth with startling honesty and resilience." —Peter Staley, author of Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

"Between Certain Death and a Possible Future is an essential contribution to AIDS literature because it invites the reader to wrestle with the unceasing impact of HIV beyond the 'crisis years,' beyond heroic activism, into under-explored narrative terrain where effective medical treatments redefined the ongoing epidemic from certain death to something else we're still figuring out, damaged but resilient, in search of a possible future." —Tony Valenzuela, writer and former executive director of the Foundation for the AIDS Monument and Lambda Literary

"We've grown up reading and seeing the stories of those who lived through the AIDS crisis—and those who didn't—but what of the generation in the middle that grew up in the immediate wake of AIDS but before the promise of PrEP. The generation that, as Lambda Award-winning writer Bernstein puts it, 'came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, internalizing this trauma as part of becoming queer?' Bernstein's necessary and thought-provoking anthology amasses dispatches from writers and activists who weathered the fallout." —Oprah Daily

From the Publisher

2021-08-17
Essays by queer writers who have never known a world without AIDS show the enormous impact of the global crisis across race, class, gender, and ethnicity.

Sycamore sought submissions from a generation “that came of age in the midst of the epidemic,” including those who grew up after the advent of effective HIV treatments. Even across large differences in culture and AIDS education, these essayists were constantly told some variation of “I was going to die because I was gay. I was abominable and I was doomed”—as Dan Cullinane writes in “Andy Bell Made Me Gay.” However, most of these personal narratives end with redemption and survival. The stories involve overcoming racism (Bryan M. Holdman: “Surviving HIV doesn’t mean I will necessarily survive Blackness”), classism, misogyny, and homophobia as well as stigma surrounding the contraction, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. The collection exposes a wide disparity in AIDS education and prevention; more than one writer notes that HIV awareness was nonexistent inside the penitentiary system and that AIDS was an equal-opportunity killer, striking down young, old, poor, rich, White, Black, and everything in-between. More than one contributor observes that despite therapeutic cocktails and prophylactic measures, AIDS continues to kill, with no cure in sight. Like the Covid-19 crisis, the AIDS epidemic has exposed previously understudied dimensions of inequality, and HIV continues to disproportionately impact marginalized communities. The redundancy of experiences across the three dozen essays can make reading the entire book wearying, but the passions captured by this anthology offer a valuable wealth of perspectives for AIDS and sex educators and a multicultural wake-up call to all readers. As Tony Correia writes, “The lab has a way of leveling the playing field. It all comes down to blood.” Other contributors include Rigoberto González, Hugh Ryan, and Manuel Betancourt.

A satisfyingly diverse collection of most welcome voices on a topic that still deserves attention.

Kirkus Reviews