Women and Children Virtual Reading: BETWEEN CERTAIN DEATH AND A POSSIBLE FUTURE by mattilda bernstein sycamore

Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations--the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer.

Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis offers crucial stories from this missing generation in AIDS literature and cultural politics. This wide-ranging collection includes 36 personal essays on the ongoing and persistent impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in queer lives. Here you will find an expansive range of perspectives on a specific generational story--essays that explore and explode conventional wisdom, while also providing a necessary bridge between experiences. These essays respond, with eloquence and incisiveness, to the question: How do we reckon with the trauma that continues to this day, and imagine a way out?

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the author, most recently, of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her previous non-fiction title, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her novel Sketchtasy was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018. Sycamore is the author of two non-fiction titles and three novels, as well as the editor of five previous non-fiction anthologies, including Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. She lives in Seattle, and her next book, Touching the Art, will be published by Soft Skull in 2023. Between Certain Death and a Possible Future is her sixth anthology.

NELS P. HIGHBERG is a professor of English and modern languages at the University of Hartford. His literary work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in journals such as Concho River Review, Riding Light Review, Duende, After the Art, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. In 2020, he received an Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.

BEREND MCKENZIE is an award-winning freelance playwright, writer, actor, and producer. His writing credits include Bloodbath at St. Paul’s, Fashion Police, Meet the Munts, and Jonesin’, as well as his two full-length plays, Get Off the Cross, Mary and the critically acclaimed children’s play NGGRFG.

SASSAFRAS LOWREY is a straight-edge punk who grew up to become the 2013 winner of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award. Sassafras’s books Kicked Out, Lost Boi, A Little Queermas Carol, and Leather Ever After have been honored by organizations ranging from the National Leather Association to the American Library Association. Sassafras’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies and in publications including the Rumpus, Catapult, and Narratively, and Sassafras has taught at the Center for Fiction, LitReactor, and colleges and conferences across the country. Sassafras lives and writes in Portland, Oregon, with hir partner and their menagerie of dogs and cats. Learn more at sassafraslowrey.com.