Burks, Ruth Coker :
All the young men : a memoir of love, AIDS, and chosen family in the American South
Trapeze
2021
355 Seiten
ISBN 978-1-409-18910-7
In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies . . . often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.
Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis.
This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honors the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America.
(Text und Cover : Verlag)
Frances Ruth Coker Burks (born March 19, 1959), also known as the Cemetery Angel, is a former caregiver of AIDS crisis victims and an AIDS awareness advocate based in Arkansas.
During the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, she used her salary as a real estate agent to care for AIDS patients whose families and communities had abandoned them. Due to the stigma surrounding the disease at the time, she was often the patients‘ only caregiver until they eventually died. She is additionally recognized for burying more than forty AIDS victims in her family cemetery in Hot Springs, Arkansas. (Wikipedia)
Das Buch finden Sie unter der Signatur WY 153.5 21/1 (HIV / AIDS-Nursing) . Weitere LIteratur zum Thema HIV / AIDS steht im Bereich WC 503.
Ans Herz legen würde ich Ihnen auch die Serie „It’s a sin“
