SWANSEA BOY, a voice from a past I lived through, with much to say to the many who didn't

SWANSEA BOY
SEAN MATHIAS
Aurora Metro Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Swansea Boy is a coming-of-age play of deep humanity, gentle humour, and unwavering compassion.

In 1980s Swansea, a young man discovers his sexuality and finds the courage to tell his parents that he is gay. While finding his way as an artist in London, he reconnects with a young man who becomes the love of his life, only to face heartbreak and loss when he discovers his partner has contracted AIDS.

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My Review: As a gay man whose early adulthood was precisely coincident with the AIDS epidemic, this playscript's subject matter is my life.

All the events, the loss of a lover, the surprise of laughter as the world closes its darkest curtains against you in your hour of most acute need, all were visceral and real to me.

I don't know what more to say about the topic. My issue, as always, is with *how* it's said: I'm not an actor so reading a script is not the way to hook me in to a story. I think it speaks loudly to the quality of the writing that I got up over three stars in my rating schema. An ordinary play or film script would struggle to reach above two stars. Author Mathias has a powerful voice that transcends my impatience with his chosen form of presentation.

BOY WITH THE BULLHORN: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York, clarion call to the quiet youth

BOY WITH THE BULLHORN: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York
RON GOLDBERG
Empire State Editions/Fordham University Press
$36.95 hardcover, available now

TRADE PAPER AVAILABLE NOW FOR $22.95

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A coming-of-age memoir of life on the front lines of the AIDS crisis with ACT UP New York.

From the moment Ron Goldberg stumbled into his first ACT UP meeting in June 1987, the AIDS activist organization became his life. For the next eight years, he chaired committees, planned protests, led teach-ins, and facilitated their Monday night meetings. He cruised and celebrated at ACT UP parties, attended far too many AIDS memorials, and participated in more than a hundred zaps and demonstrations, becoming the group’s unofficial “Chant Queen,” writing and leading chants for many of their major actions. Boy with the Bullhorn is both a memoir and an immersive history of the original New York chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, from 1987 to 1995, told with great humor, heart, and insight.

Using the author’s own story, “the activist education of a well-intentioned, if somewhat naïve nice gay Jewish theater queen,” Boy with the Bullhorn intertwines Goldberg’s experiences with the larger chronological history of ACT UP, the grassroots AIDS activist organization that confronted politicians, scientists, drug companies, religious leaders, the media, and an often uncaring public to successfully change the course of the AIDS epidemic.

Diligently sourced and researched, Boy with the Bullhorn provides both an intimate look into how activist strategies are developed and deployed and a snapshot of life in New York City during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. On the occasions where Goldberg writes outside his personal experience, he relies on his extensive archive of original ACT UP documents, news articles, and other published material, as well as activist videos and oral histories, to help flesh out actions, events, and the background stories of key activists. Writing with great candor, Goldberg examines the group’s triumphs and failures, as well as the pressures and bad behaviors that eventually tore ACT UP apart.

A story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, from engaging in outrageous, media-savvy demonstrations, to navigating the intricacies of drug research and the byzantine bureaucracies of the FDA, NIH, and CDC, Boy with the Bullhorn captures the passion, smarts, and evanescent spirit of ACT UP—the anger, grief, and desperation, but also the joy, camaraderie, and sexy, campy playfulness—and the exhilarating adrenaline rush of activism.

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My Review: After reading Peter Staley's memoir of the ACT UP days during the AIDS crisis, I was too emotionally fatigued to give this memoir of the same time my full attention. I still find it astounding that this book came out thirty-five years after ACT UP appeared.

Early, noisy days
I have to admit that I am still very tender on the subject of this epidemic because of my own losses during that time. There is no sense hiding away from the terrible, always-there pain of losing someone in this awful way, though. It was quite theraputic to recall that the world might not have cared much, but the world could not just ignore the issue after ACT UP got the noisemakers and angry young folk organized.

My personal favorite demonstration–combining my hatred for the catholic church and outrage at the inaction of the medical establishment
Whatever else has happened to me since AIDS took my first friend in 1984, I have carried the clear and unforgiving certainty that my life mattered less than a straight person's life on a policy level. This is brutal, evil, capitalist greed...costs too much to get those drugs, coverage denied...the Government can't afford this medication, coverage denied...and, while that is nothing new to Black or Indigenous people, or even to women, it was a wake-up call to a privileged white boy.

There is one thing that makes me recommend this as a #Booksgiving idea...your young, gay friend who is doing little, or nothing at all, to protest the inaction on climate change...that is reaching crisis stage earlier than we thought...needs a reminder that PrEP did not come about because the elites thought it was a good idea, but because there was a history of loud, angry agitation among the folk who needed it, a bunch of scientists whose careers were able to focus on AIDS because ACT UP acted, and the way to pay it forward is to start shouting along with Greta Thunberg. Or along with David Hogg abour gun control. Whatever! Read this memoir of the joys of acting up and yelling about important matters, about the crises we face. Goldberg has led a happy, fulfilling life being very disobedient. Encourage your young gay friend to do the same.

Being flamboyant in a good cause is no crime.

DISASTERAMA!, a funny, poignant memoir of coming (and coming, and coming) of age during a plague

DISASTERAMA!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
ALVIN ORLOFF
Three Rooms Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: DISASTERAMA: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997, is the true story of Alvin Orloff who, as a shy kid from the suburbs of San Francisco, stumbled into the wild eclectic crowd of Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks of post-Stonewall American queer culture of the late 1970s, only to see the “subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto” ravished by AIDS in the 1980s.

In Disasterama, Orloff recalls the delirious adventures of his youth—from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York—where insane nights, deep friendships with the creatives of the underground, and thrilling bi-coastal living led to a free-spirited life of art, manic performance, high camp antics, and exotic sexual encounters.

Orloff looks past the politics of AIDS to the people on the ground, friends of his who did not survive AIDS’ wrath—the boys in black leather jackets and cackling queens in tacky frocks—remembering them not as victims, but as people who loved life, loved fun, and who were a part of the insane jigsaw of Orloff’s friends. In Disasterama, Orloff tells their story: the true tale of how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a deadly disaster.

My Review: First, read this:

I would become a writer! It made perfect sense: I'd always been socially awkward, pretentious, moody, self-loathing, judgmental, and besotted with the sound of my own voice. What else could I be?
–and–
Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul—bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror—is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.

If this isn't raising a chuckle, Author Orloff (I Married An Earthling was an earlier title of his, which I reviewed rather grouchily twenty years ago) might not be the guide to a bygone day that you personally will warm to. I find his work pretty funny.

I'm Author Orloff's age. Despite being born within hailing distance of the place, I spent little time in San Francisco, more in Austin (a surprisingly queer place even then!) and New York, but the world we lived in as young men has utterly vanished. Many of the guys I knew are dead...many aren't...but all of us have empty slots where loved people once stood. But enough long-face!

The plague and the insurgency it fuelled were forging a previously unknown camaraderie and it was fun. Just then, fun was a political issue. For decades the media had painted gay men as a sad victims of loneliness, depression, suicide, insanity, and/or murder. The Gay = Tragic meme receded a bit during the height of '70s hedonism, but was making a strong '80s comeback with the modern twist that our inevitable bad end came from AIDS. The innocent victim gayboys might be sympathetic, but the pity they evoked felt maudlin and slightly toxic. People wanted to end their days in a party, not a puddle of tears.

What a fast-paced and nostalgic look back at a moment when being young was fun! It can't be helped that AIDS took the lives of so many. It feels like the world Orloff describes (and illustrates with candid snapshots and collected ads, posters, and the like...who the hell keeps this ephemera?!) is as distant as World War II. These days, fun seems dead and young people have to think about what we had the luxury of ignoring.

Selfishly, I'm glad I could ignore it. Responsibly, I wish I hadn't had that choice. Take the walking tour of a vanished world with a cis-white queer punk-party boy who grew up way, way too hard. Maybe not too fast, considering he's still whinnying with us.