So let me get this one straight. Any number of ‘influencers’, from Kim Kardashian to our own Maura Higgins, can strip down to their smalls (or less), post a photo of it, and be commended for ‘breaking the internet’ with their gestures of female empowerment.
And when Liz Hurley does it, she’s ‘thirsty’, ‘desperate’, ‘an outrage’, and, in the words of Piers Morgan, needs to “put her clothes back on”.
I’m not one to rely on Piers Morgan as a seat of wisdom or common sense, but several others seem to, and have echoed this weirdly paternalistic sentiment online.
All The Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks review: how one brave woman helped care for Aids patients in the 1980s Marcus Field
Ruth Coker Burks is visiting a friend in hospital when she hears a man calling for help from behind a door marked with a biohazard sign. “He’s got that gay disease,” a nurse tells her when she asks why nobody is answering the call. “They all die.”It’s 1986, and Burks is in Little Rock, the capital of the deeply conservative US state of Arkansas. She’s scared of catching Aids too, but she knows how it feels to be an outcast and a deeper instinct kicks in. She ends up sitting with Jimmy for 13 hours until he dies.
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