In the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I read David France's How to Survive a Plague, written after the documentary of the same name was created (and which was also discussed in Never Silent). After reading it, I looked up Peter Staley since he was one of the activists mentioned a lot and was still alive, which is a depressing criteria for looking into people further, but AIDS did that, unfortunately. I saw that he was doing a lot of discussions and activism for the Covid virus and followed him on Twitter, which is how I found out about his own memoir.

I'm old enough to remember part of the AIDS epidemic from the mid-to-late 90's, but personally unaffected enough to not think about it very often after the fact. I was also a kid then, so I was living in the history without really understanding it. How To Survive a Plague was a very informative overview, but I had a hard time keeping track of all the people involved, so I was interested to read something from a more personal point of view. Staley was honest about his experience as a closeted man on Wall Street, his ego when working with ACT UP, his drug addiction, and many other aspects of his life. At times it almost felt very blunt, but I guess when you have friends dying so rapidly from a disease that other people are ignoring, the almost off-hand statements like "but he had actually died the week before," just called more attention to how overly often these activists were receiving sad news and continuing to fight through it.

I don't know what else to say - it's a hard and sad story to hear, but an important one to remember.