Courtesy / Ruth Coker Burks
In the 1980s in Hot Springs, Ruth Coker Burks was in her 20s, a single mom with a daughter, when she walked into a hospital room no nurses wanted to enter and sat with a gay man with AIDS so he wasn t alone in the last hours of his life. For the next several years, she cared for dozens more men who were dying of the virus and educated countless others about HIV prevention. Coker Burks tells her story in a new memoir,
All the Young Men, and discusses the book in a two part interview.