Panel: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2021-10-20

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore discusses her new anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis, alongside contributors Robert Birch, Keiko Lane, Aaron Nielsen and Andrew R. Spieldenner. 
     
Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis offers crucial stories from the generation 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. 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? 

Peter Staley, author of Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism, writes, “I remember my life and sexual coming out before the AIDS crisis, but what if AIDS is all you've ever known? How did that define your queerness? Sycamore breaks open a dam of suppressed stories centered on stigma, from wildly diverse voices, pouring forth with startling honesty and resilience.”