Biography Aids

When the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 1980s, Strub was living in New York and soon found himself attending "more funerals than birthday parties". Scared and angry, he turned to radical activism to combat discrimination and demand research. Strub takes you through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the organization that transformed a stigmatized cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

In 1985, with £100+ million in his back pocket from Live Aid – the greatest rock concert the world had ever seen – Bob Geldof took a trip across Africa to decide how to spend the money he had raised for the Ethiopian famine. He asked Paul Vallely to go with him. Over the next four decades Vallely became one of Geldof’s closest advisers – travelling with him to meet the world’s top rock stars and politicians. Here, for the first time, Vallely gives his full eye-witness account of those 40 years.

Roger Taylor is the quiet axis of Duran Duran—the drummer whose pocket turned disco precision and rock power into a global grammar of rhythm. Roger Taylor — Wild Boys Behind the Kit traces his journey from Castle Bromwich school ensembles to the Rum Runner club, through imperial 1980s arenas, studio reinventions, and into the streaming era’s festivals and residencies. This definitive biography reveals how Taylor balanced restraint and stamina across decades of spectacle. Each chapter recreates the scenes that shaped him: rehearsals with Simmons pads under blinding lights, the ...

In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth is visiting a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who will tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS.

In 1978, Harvey Milk asked Gilbert Baker to create a unifying symbol for the growing gay rights movement, and on June 25 of that year, Baker's Rainbow Flag debuted at San Francisco's Gay Liberation Day parade. Baker had no idea his creation would become an international emblem of freedom. Rainbow Warrior is Baker's passionate personal chronicle, from a repressive childhood in 1950s Kansas to a harrowing stint in the US Army, and finally his arrival in San Francisco, where he bloomed as both a visual artist and social justice activist.

She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins's story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story.

For over a decade, Jake battles the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons, eventually culminating in an indictment and sixty-month prison sentence.

Born into severe racial tensions, gentrification, violence and drugs- like today's times. Shyronn had a lot to deal with in her early years. Not wanting to add unplanned pregnancies and STDs to the list, she abstained from sex until the age of 18. Losing her virginity, then discovering she acquired HIV at the age of 22, caused hurt throughout her life. Nevertheless, It's sweet to defeat and beat to the rhythm of my own feat my path will outlast the cast shaped for me I will live life victoriously. -Shyronn Jones

Dr. Stefanie Green has been forging new paths in the field of medical assistance in dying since 2016. In her landmark memoir, Dr. Green reveals the reasons a patient might seek an assisted death, how the process works, what the event itself can look like, the reactions of those involved, and what it feels like to oversee proceedings and administer medications that hasten death. Deeply authentic and emotional, This Is Assisted Dying contextualizes the myriad personal, professional, and practical issues surrounding assisted dying by bringing listeners into the room with Dr. Green.

In the 1980s, Elton John saw friend after friend, loved one after loved one, perish needlessly from AIDS. In the midst of the plague, he befriended Ryan White, a young Indiana boy ostracized by his town and his school because of the HIV infection he had contracted from a blood transfusion. Ryan's inspiring life and devastating death led Elton to two realizations: His own life was a mess. And he had to do something to help stop the AIDS crisis. Since then, Elton has dedicated himself to overcoming the plague.

Anthony Rapp captures the passion and grit of the theater world as he recounts his life-changing experience in the original cast of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent.

The life and death of Jim Jones and his followers in Jonestown still mystifies people to this day. "Drinking the Kool-Aid" became a famous metaphor for holding an unquestioned belief without critical examination. But was there a far more sinister play at hand than the official story revealed? This audiobook is a complete history of Jim Jones and People's Temple, with further analysis on what might have been the real cause of this tragedy.

The death of promising young pediatric AIDS researcher Eric Miller stunned the Raleigh, North Carolina, community, largely because of the horrific way he was killed. For months, Eric was slowly tortured as arsenic consumed his body. No one thought that Eric Miller's wife, Ann - an attractive, demure, educated scientist - could be capable of such a horrible crime. No one except for veteran homicide investigator Chris Morgan, a man in the twilight of his career. But from the moment Morgan saw the 30-year-old widow in the police department interview room, he knew he was seeing pure evil.

Derek, a distinguished designer and J, his husband, a pioneering entrepreneur and creator of both The Embassy Club, London's answer to Studio 54, and iconic Heaven, Europe's largest gay discotheque, met and fell in love more than 40 years ago. Their lives were high-octane, full of adventure, fun and fearless creativity. Suddenly, their friends began to get sick and die - AIDS had arrived in their lives.

In the mid 1980s, Canada's worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country's blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks's surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive. At a time when HIV/AIDS was misunderstood and public perception was shaped by fear, prejudice, and homophobia, victims of the disease faced ostracism and persecution. Wanting to protect his family from this stigma, Melanie's father decided his illness would be a secret they'd all keep.

Ryan White was a typical 13-year-old living in a small town in the Midwest. Then, it was discovered that Ryan had contracted AIDS through tainted blood products he had been given for his hemophilia. Denied the right to return to school, he went to court.

In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: Massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-related complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power - ACT UP - in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made.

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned wartime hospital and setting for the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded.

The memoir reflects upon my small-town roots, beginning in Southern Illinois as the son of a Pentecostal preacher who was, by day, a coal miner. It examines how these roots influenced me to build two ministries in the Episcopal Church that served people with AIDS and their care-givers.

When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends—of which many were talented young gay men with big dreams of their own—she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs could get. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the 'gay flu', and Jill and her friends found that their formerly carefree existence now under threat.