Summary:

Follows the last few months in the life of Wendal Bailey, an African-American bisexual male in his early 30's. Examined in this drama are Wendal's two worlds; one which revolves around his lovers, the other based in the home of his extended family - his mother, father, "aunt", brother and 12-year-old son. After nearly dying of AIDS, Wendal comes home to regain his strength and find comfort, but a festive evening celebrating his return turns into a disaster. Shortly after this debacle, the only support and love he finds as he lies in his death- bed comes from an unexpected source - his previously stern, disapproving and homophobic father.

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This novel tells the story of Jess Goldberg, a transgendered "butch" growing up in Buffalo, New York. Jess first learns to admit and negotiate her attraction to women and her butch identity. Immediately, she is faced with violence. The police raid the lesbian bars, arrest any woman wearing fewer than three articles of women’s clothing and routinely beat, strip, or rape them. Jess and her friends also face the violence of bashers who attack without cause on dark or well-lighted streets.

Nevertheless, Jess refuses to compromise. From a doctor, she gets a prescription for testosterone, goes to a gym and transforms herself into a bearded, muscular man. Having saved two thousand dollars, she has a mastectomy done. The doctor falsifies a biopsy, performs the surgery and makes her leave. By the end of the novel, Jess is secure in her identity and determines to fight to make the world safe for others like her.

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This work is an AIDS play based on the Faust legend. The main character, Simon, is both homosexual and homophobic, a combination which the author believes to be less threatening to the "latent homophobes in the audience." Simon strikes a deal with the devil in order to reverse his HIV positive antibody status. The bargain struck entails deceiving and then abandoning his friends and changing his sexual identity. The vehicle for Simon's change is an "Andrew Dice Clay-like" nightclub act, the source of the play's dark humor.

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This beautifully crafted short novel chronicles a twenty year period, from the early 1970's to the early 1990's, in the life of a law professor, Max Strong, and the interesting highbrow characters who influence his life. Most notable among those characters are a college friend, now a world renowned architect, Charlie Swan, and Charlie's lover, Toby. The final sections of this novel offer a remarkable account of Toby's death from AIDS and Charlie's reaction to his death.

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The narrator, William, is the younger brother of Clive, an enigmatic high school "hippie" who also is a mathematical genius. Most of the story deals with their relationship within a peace activist family living in an affluent Cleveland suburb in the early 1970’s. Two of Clive’s friends, Sandra (presumably his lover) and Elliot, figure prominently in the story. In fact, it is from a secret language which Clive and Elliot share that the title is derived. They also share a sexual relationship and are "discovered" by Clive’s father. This event sends this affable story into a hyperspeed tragic ending, placing William fifteen years later at the bedside of his brother who is dying from complications of AIDS.

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The apparent "subject" of Reynolds Price's novel, The Promise of Rest, is HIV/AIDS, yet it is also a novel of family, marriage, father-son relationships, and friendship between men--in addition to one of caring, suffering, and the unspeakable pain of parents watching their child die. The novel opens with Wade Mayfield, a thirty-two year-old gay, white architect infected with AIDS reluctantly returning from New York City to his family home in North Carolina to live out his final months. Almost blind, unable to manage even with daily visits from caregivers, he allows his father Hutch to come to New York to close the apartment that he shared with his African-American lover, Wyatt, who infected Wade and committed suicide ten weeks prior to Wade's leaving.

Once home, the story becomes a long conversation between Wade and Hutch. Interspersed in that most loving, painful, sometimes joyful, intense conversation on the way to Wade's death is emotional haggling between Hutch and Ann, Wade's mother and Hutch's ex-wife, who feels denied a role in the care of her only child; the continuing conversation between Hutch and Straw, his best and oldest friend with whom he had a physically intimate relationship years before and with whom he is still strongly connected; the dailiness of students (Hutch is a literature professor); finding help with the caregiving; and trying to understand the story of Wade's life before he returned home that has potentially great bearing on the Mayfield family even after Wade's death. The novel closes with Wade's death and the days thereafter, a death that fulfilled Wade's "undaunted determination to die as himself."

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Second Son chronicles the changes in family relationships that follow disclosure of a son's AIDS. The father's initial response reveals unexamined attitudes that complicate the supportive response he'd like to give. Father and son are brought into unfamiliar and unwelcome intimacy, the former wanting to "fight it," the latter wanting to turn inward, accept his condition and decide how to live out his life.

Father and son find that they handle sickness in much the same way they have handled the other aspects of their divergent lives. A new lover, who also has AIDS, finally provides what the family, tragically, cannot. The story highlights confusions about what family members owe one another and makes clear how the families of the sick need to be healed if they are to become healing communities.

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In this remarkable book of essays, Rafael Campo explores his coming-of-age as a gay Cuban-American physician. He presents us with a series of stories illuminating his childhood and college experience, skillfully interweaving them with narratives from his life as a young physician, especially his interactions with patients dying of AIDS. We follow the author from Amherst College, through Harvard Medical School, to his medical residency in San Francisco. At each step Campo is a close observer of human character and motivation--his own and others. At each step he asks, "Who am I? Who am I becoming?"

He discovers his identity as a gay man, an Hispanic man, a poet, and, finally, as a healer--not four identities, but one. He discovers, too, the healing power of connecting with patients, the "poetry of healing," something far different from the orthodox image of the physician-as-detached-or-distanced from his patients. Though Campo rejects the concept that physicians are agents for social change ("naive," he calls it), he brings sensitivity and poetry to bear on his continued search for "some way to give."

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This collection of twenty-seven images was culled from an exhibition featuring seventy-five individuals with AIDS photographed over a ten-month period in the late 1980s. Solomon’s project recalls the work of photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans who chronicled the devastation of rural America during the Great Depression. However, Solomon eschews the spontaneity of documentary photography for the formality of portraiture so that the figure itself is always at the center of the picture plane. Ranging in format from single full-figures to group images, from dramatic close-up facial shots to nearly abstract still-lifes, these images capture the humanity of the diverse persons affected by AIDS.

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Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America. Molly Bolt is adopted by a poor Southern couple, Carrie and Carl, who want a better life for their daughter than they've had. Molly does too, but she has different ideas about how that will unfold. As a child she plays bawdy practical jokes and has sex with her girlfriend in the sixth grade; as one of the most popular girls in high school, she plays heterosexual games but is the lover of the head cheerleader; she is thrown out of college after she is found out to be lovers with her alcoholic heiress roommate. She journeys to New York City, where she waitresses her way through film school, having one adventure after another, armed with startling beauty, wicked wit, and fierce determination to become a great filmmaker.

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