ANTEBELLUM BLOG: 26.01.14

2/1/14

if you want to know more about gay politics during the 80s & 90s and the beginnings of the
AIDS crisis in america come to antebellum and meet the remarkable SEAN STRUB.

presents

the Los Angeles release of

BODY COUNTS

A MEMOIR OF POLITICS, SEX, AIDS & SURVIVAL

meet & greet the author

SEAN STRUB

reception & book signing

february 1st, 2014

6pm till 8pm

ANTEBELLUM

1643 N LAS PALMS AVE

HOLLYWOOD, CA 90028

323 856~0667

antebellum@earthlink.net

http://antebellumgallery.blogspot.com/2013/12/sean-strub-reminds-us-how-it-was-during.html

Sean Strub, founder of the groundbreaking POZ magazine, producer of the hit play “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,”

and the first openly HIV-positive candidate for US Congress, charts his remarkable life—

a story of politics and AIDS and a powerful testament to loss, hope, and survival.

As a politics-obsessed Georgetown freshman, Sean Strub arrived in Washington, DC, from Iowa in 1976, with a plum part-time job running a Senate elevator in the US Capitol.

But he also harbored a terrifying secret: his attraction to men. As Strub explored the capital’s political and social circles,

he discovered a parallel world where powerful men lived double lives shrouded in shame.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 readers through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP,

the activist organization that transformed a stigmatized cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

From the New York of Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Factory, to the intersection of politics and burgeoning LGBT and AIDS movements,

Strub’s story crackles with history. He recounts his role in shocking AIDS demonstrations at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the home of US Senator Jesse Helms.

Body Counts is a vivid portrait of a tumultuous era, with an astonishing cast of characters, including Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Keith Haring, Bill Clinton, Yoko Ono, and others.

By the time a new class of drugs transformed the epidemic in 1996, Strub was emaciated and covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, the scarlet letter of AIDS.

He was among the fortunate who returned, Lazarus-like, from the brink of death.

Strub has written a vital, inspiring memoir, unprecedented in scope, about this deeply important period of American history.