Melody Murray's Books

This book brought back the early 80s in hallucinatory detail. I remember when we first heard about Gay Cancer, and how hard it was to get any decent information. I remember when the world got wobbly and my friends were dying and it seemed like nobody cared. I was quite certain that, given my penchant for fey boys, I wouldn't be around to see the turn of the century. I vividly remember making up file folders for 1989 for my job and thinking that the ones for 1990 would be in someone else's handwriting. It was a scary time that was made electric for me by Shilts and Larry Kramer. I bought this book the week it came out, and it changed my view of everything. Absolutely everything.Reading it again some 20-odd years later brought back the anger and the sadness and that helpless, blistering rage. This is the book that made me understand viscerally that me and mine mattered nothing to the government. It's also where I learned that the best intentions can get snarled in the weeds- that people passionately devoted to an idea will serve that idea beyond all reason, that profit comes before people, and that it always takes a movie star to catch the public's imagination.All the mistakes, all the missteps are herein laid out in letters of fire. The Cassandras, dismissed, reviled and hushed at the time, are sadly proven right. Reagan is illuminated in the harsh light of retrospect and found wanting. A whole generation vanished because the health officials didn't want to talk about anal sex, the blood banks didn't want to admit they should have tested the blood, the gay rights organizations couldn't conceive of closing the baths, the government couldn't fund the scientists, the scientists couldn't let go of their need to be the first, the medical journals couldn't suspend business-as-usual, the FDA couldn't understand that double blind studies were inappropriate in the face of an epidemic of this magnitude, and on and on and on. A monumental comedy of errors that could so easily have been prevented. This book should be required reading for anyone entering any sort of health care profession or who might be a health care consumer some day. Infuriating, well-written, and tragically still timely. It could happen again.This book changed my life. I wish it hadn't had to.