Last modified on Mon 8 Mar 2021 07.27 EST
In the spring of 1986, Ruth Coker Burks was in the medical centre in Little Rock, Arkansas, visiting a friend with cancer, when she noticed three nurses drawing straws to see which one would have to enter a patientâs room. Curious, she snuck down the corridor to take a look. The door was hung with a scarlet tarp and a biohazard sign. Food trays were piled on the floor outside, along with a cart of isolation suits and masks. Inside, she found an emaciated young man calling for his mother.
When Coker Burks challenged the nurses, one of them told her she was crazy to go in. âHeâs got that gay disease,â she said. âThey all die.â They refused to contact the patientâs mother, and so Coker Burks made the call from a payphone herself. âMy son is already dead,â the woman told her. âMy son died when he went gay.â Appalled, she went back to the room and sat with the young man, holding his hand unt
Ruth Coker Burks on Her Five-Hankie Memoir of Caring for and Loving Gay Men With AIDS in 1980s and ’90s Arkansas
Jan. 13, 2021
Ruth Coker Burks, shown today, cared for hundreds of people living with and dying of AIDS in 1980s and 90s Arkansas.
Caroline Holt
As I read
All the Young Men, Ruth Coker Burks’ memoir of inadvertently becoming central-west Arkansas’ one-woman AIDS services provider in the dark years of the mid-to-late ’80s and early-to-mid-’90s, I could only think of the PTSD she and her then-young daughter, Allison, who accompanied her on her care visits, would suffer later in life. And indeed, when I spoke on the phone shortly before Christmas with Burks and her cowriter, the talented
“You hang up on me again,” Ruth Coker Burks says to the woman at the end of the phone, “and I swear to Almighty God I will ask your Jimmy where he’s from and put his obituary in your town paper with
Books to look out for in 2021
Irish fiction
New work that has been a long time coming generates a particular shiver of anticipation.
Small Things Like These (Faber, October) will be Claire Keegan’s first new work since her novella Foster, still a bestseller 10 years on. Her publisher says: “An exquisite wintery parable, Claire Keegan’s long-awaited return tells the story of a simple act of courage and tenderness, in the face of conformity, fear and judgment.” Small Things Like These (Faber, October) will be Claire Keegan’s first new work since her novella Foster, still a bestseller 10 years on. Photograph: Alan Betson
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera / Viking
Several authors tackle colonialism in very different ways, from
Alex Renton confronting his own family’s involvement in slavery in
Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Enslaving Past (Canongate), and
Sathnam Sanghera in
Kehinde Andrews, who rather more controversially takes on capitalism and racism together in
The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (Allen Lane).
Gender and Identity Politics
Likewise gender and identity politics get a good look-in, from
Julie Bindel’s manifesto,
Feminism for Women (Constable) to
You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed To Be: Into The Chaos of Modern Masculinity (Bloomsbury) by founder of the Book of Man website