Body Counts

A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival

Sean Strub

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781451661965
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451661972
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The founder of POZ magazine shares “a captivating…eyewitness account from inside the AIDS epidemic” (Next) and “a moving, multi-decade memoir of one gay man’s life” (San Francisco Chronicle).

As a politics-obsessed Georgetown freshman, Sean Strub arrived in Washington, DC, from Iowa in 1976, with a plum part-time job running a Senate elevator in the US Capitol. He also harbored a terrifying secret: his attraction to men. As Strub explored the capital’s political and social circles, he discovered a parallel world where powerful men lived double lives shrouded in shame.

When the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 1980s, Strub was living in New York and soon found himself attending “more funerals than birthday parties.” Scared and angry, he turned to radical activism to combat discrimination and demand research. Strub takes you through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the organization that transformed a stigmatized cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

From the New York of Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Factory to the intersection of politics and burgeoning LGBT and AIDS movements, Strub’s story crackles with history. He recounts his role in shocking AIDS demonstrations at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as well as at the home of US Sen­ator Jesse Helms. With an astonishing cast of characters, including Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Keith Haring, Bill Clinton, and Yoko Ono, this is a vivid portrait of a tumultuous era: “A page-turner…[with] the suspense and horror of Paul Monette’s memoir Borrowed Time and the drama of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart….What a lot of action—and life—there is in this gripping book” (The Washington Post).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• December 1989, New York City
• Chapter 1: Out of Iowa
• Chapter 2: The Way Out
• Chapter 3: Tennessee and Me
• Chapter 4: Sphere of Influence
• Chapter 5: Making Movement
• Chapter 6: Virus and Violence
• Chapter 7: Kentucky Fried Closet
• Chapter 8: The End of a Day Like This
• Chapter 9: Of Mousetraps and Men
• Chapter 10: Stigma and Solidarity
• Chapter 11: Testing and Telling
• Chapter 12: The Living Room
• Chapter 13: Rolo-dead File
• Chapter 14: Silence=Death
• Chapter 15: Unexpected Expire
• Chapter 16: Keith and Swen
• Chapter 17: Cardinal Sin
• Chapter 18: Hope Is Hope
• Chapter 19: Running Man
• Chapter 20: Taking the Helms
• Chapter 21: Today Is a Good Day
• Chapter 22: The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
• Chapter 23: Ask and Tell
• Chapter 24: Launch
• Chapter 25: Firsts
• Chapter 26: Pharma Watching
• Chapter 27: Creating Communities
• Chapter 28: Dark Mark
• Chapter 29: Feeling Our Pain
• Chapter 30: Barebacking
• Chapter 31: Eugene and Angel
• Chapter 32: Memento Mori
• Chapter 33: Recall
• Chapter 34: Lazarus
• Chapter 35: Stephen
• Chapter 36: Postpartum
• Chapter 37: Naked to the World
• Chapter 38: HIV Is Not a Crime
• Interview with Sean Strub
• Acknowledgments
• About Sean Strub
• Index
• Copyright