How one woman tended to the gay community through the 1980s Aids pandemic
All the Young Men
RUTH COKER BURKS
(TRAPEZE, 368 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064
I encountered God in this devastating autobiographical account of how a young, single mother in central Arkansas helped the gay community battle the Aids pandemic of the 1980s. Not in the churches, which banned her from speaking; nor in the pastors and priests who refused to visit the sick; nor in the Christians who set alight crosses in her front yard. I found him in the gay bars and make-out spots, among the queens and the sex workers, the condoms and the antiretrovirals, and the story’s heroine, Ruth Coker Burks. A blonde realtor in her twenties, with no medical background, Burks walks into an Aids patient’s hospital room one evening in 1986, during a visit to a friend, stays with Jimmy while he dies, then buries his ashes next to her father. Because no one else – not in the hospital, not in his family, not even the funeral home – will touch him.
