I was a little late to the party with this book—especially seeing as Part Two of this three-part series is now on our doorstep—but for those of you who haven’t discovered this fictional slice of gay history yet, you’re missing out. Perhaps it’s a Roman à clef, or perhaps the author just has an innate talent for writing in a meandering, autobiographical style—either way, it’s addictive, so much so that a normally pedantic reader like me buzzed through it in a matter of a few hours. This volume covers the hedonistic era of disco, drugs and rampant sex leading up to the first signs of GRID/AIDS in 1981. But whilst it whirls through the party aspects of queer culture, one eye is kept firmly on the struggles that the LGBTQ community faced in that era: the rampant and unchecked discrimination, the bashings, the murders, the harrassment and abuse perpetrated by police. As queer people in the twenty-first century, we must never forget how much harder our recent forebears had it, and how m...
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