"All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South," by Ruth Coker Burks

I recently visited the National AIDS Memorial Grove in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a beautiful and moving place. I am old enough to remember well the beginning and peak of the terrible AIDS epidemic, well before effective treatments made it a chronic disease rather than a death sentence, usually a quick and very painful one at that. Making AIDS sufferers' situations even worse was the way most people, even many medical people, were too afraid to touch or even get near AIDS patients, although there were many caring people among the gay and lesbian communities and among medical personnel, especially in the big cities, who did help tremendously. Already living in San Francisco at the time, I saw many of the devastatingly affected young men (and at the time, they were mostly young men) on the streets, especially in the mostly-gay Castro District, emaciated and aged-looking, often leaning on canes, with lesions on their faces and bodies. Ruth Coker Burks’ (with Kevin Carr O’Leary) new book, “All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South” (Grove Press, 2020), describes the way Burks almost accidentally started to get involved with helping AIDS patients in a small Arkansas town in the 1980s and 1990s. Although she had no medical training, she started providing support and care to patients who were neglected even in hospitals because of nurses’ and others’ (often including their own families') fear of contact with them. She held their hands and talked with them and stayed with them while they were dying. Later when she was contacted by those with AIDS in earlier stages, she helped them find medicine, housing, and other services, always with her own unstinting caring. Because it was in a conservative area, it was even harder to do this work than in big coastal cities such as San Francisco and New York. (But here I pause to give tribute to ALL the medical and social workers and volunteers who gave so much of themselves, even in the early years when little was known about how the disease spread, and when these personnel did not know whether and how they were risking their own health and lives. Another important and compassionate memoir from those days, also set in the South, is Abraham Verghese’s 1994 book, “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story,” about his work with AIDS patients in a small town in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee in the early days of the epidemic.) Burks’ work started to be more and more known, and she started working with organizations and governments and getting grants, and even eventually became a consultant for Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and later when he was President. Many of these men who suffered from AIDS became Burks’ close friends, even, as the title says, her “chosen family.” Like all human beings, these men had both good characteristics and flaws, and Burks does not sugarcoat the descriptions, but her love for them all shines through. This is a story of bravery, compassion, and resourcefulness. Burks never seems to be praising herself for this work; she just describes it in a matter-of-fact way, and it was clearly a labor of love. As sad as the events of the book mostly are, the book is also full of joy, caring, and human kindness. It is sometimes even humorous, as Burks has a cheerful, can-do, even joking-at-times, tone. She and her co-writer have created an extremely informative and inspiring book. Of course the topic is a tremendously tragic one, and that is never forgotten throughout this memoir, but it is also one that makes readers care and want to keep reading. I highly recommend this book.