Author Description

Enthusiastically recommended by respective Black and LGBTQ history websites, this profoundly engaging non-fiction title by Londoner Vernal Scott, a diversity professional and Atheist, has a throbbing and unapologetic LGBTQ pulse. Upsetting and inadvertently entertaining, his Polari ''First Book Prize'' shortlisted memoir regularly prompts readers to weep or erupt in belly laughter. The six hundred pages includes illuminating photos and are reminiscent in places of Philadelphia, "the AIDS film" starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. Legendary surprises include Princess Diana, Whitney Houston, George Michael, Gloria Gaynor, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Luther Vandross, and others. Exposing challenging issues concerning Black and LGBTQ cultures, sexuality, sex, religion and death, Scott takes the reader to the horrific frontline of the 1980s/90s HIV and AIDS health crisis where the various real-life accounts make heartbreaking reading, especially so when AIDS comes home... He writes: "A dignified death by the symptoms of old age was not to be our kind fate. Abandoned and alone in the fight of our lives, wider society, influenced by a vicious media, deemed us deserving of our suffering: our crippling fear; our unimaginable pain; our unyielding tears prompted by precious last goodbyes; our deaths. Our dashed hopes and dreams were destined to lie among the ashes of the cremation furnaces that would consume what AIDS had already destroyed. It was only yesterday that we were sweating up the dancefloor to I Feel Love and I Will Survive, and we had every reason to believe that we would do just that; survive and thrive, but our fleshless reflection in the bathroom mirror was confirmation that the good times had turned and a big disease with a little name was now playing Russian roulette with our lives. Swallowed up by clothes that no longer fit, it was now the survival of, not the fittest or most determined, but simply, it seemed, the luckiest. Stunned by the terror-inducin