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Gr 9 Up—Following Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights, Bausum chronicles another chapter in queer history: the HIV/AIDS crisis. Her three-part investigation begins before the epidemic, describing scenes of queer liberation in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The "hedonistic crescendo" of the 1970s brought bathhouses, dance clubs, drugs, disco music, and free love. For gay men, the sexual freedom also introduced a mystery disease. Initially diagnosed as Kaposi's sarcoma (KS)—a slow-progressing cancer—the disease shook the queer community and beyond when i...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

"The first to die left behind little more than their names and brief stories of chaotic, terrifying deaths. Individual by individual, they went from being seemingly well to perplexingly ill in a matter of months." When this mysterious illness struck a handful of gay American men in 1980-1981, nobody could know that the AIDS epidemic would ultimately kill more than 700,000 people before, in the late 1990s, medical advances made the dreaded disease something other than an automatic death sentence. Even so, more than one million Am...Log In or Sign Up to Read More