I love the way that Schulman writes, the way that she uses her personal experience to motivate her writing and add humanity and anger, and the momentum it gives her prose. Seriously, I don't remember the last time I sank into a nonfiction book in quite this way. She has great skill with choosing the most vivid quotes, interview excerpts, and anecdotes to accompany her analysis.

I was born in 1988, so the AIDS crisis is not something that was part of my consciousness beyond what I absorbed through school, art and literature, and my mother's stories of working as a nurse who treated a patient with AIDS. She framed his anger much differently than Schulman frames the justified anger of those who suffered and died or watched their friends and loved ones do so, under the shadow of official denial and neglect. I thought of him, whose name and face I don't know, multiple times during my reading. Where was his family? Did he leave behind a partner who lost a home in the wake of already devastating grief?

Schulman provides (to me) eye-opening coverage of how AIDS irrevocably changed communities not only through the deaths themselves, but in their aftermath: tenants evicted from apartments they had shared with partners, rents jacked so high that only wealthy outsiders could afford them, the diversity of neighborhoods flattened and whitened. And she makes a convincing argument for how this gentrification has rippled into other aspects of queer culture, wherein only the most respectable to mainstream (read: conservative and heterosexual) culture have access to acceptance, platforms, and power. You can see this pretty clearly in a lot of the queer art that's being produced; I certainly see it in books (the art form I interact with most frequently as a writer, reader, and librarian), how authors will be lauded and their books praised if they are palatable enough. You see it when you walk into a bookstore and find their LGBTQ+ section way in the back and oddly devoid of the literary fiction by queer authors, which hides in other, more respectable sections of the store. As a lesbian writer, I've thought about what kinds of stories I want to tell, and what compromises they might have to make in order to find an audience, and Schulman talks about those kinds of compromises.

However, I'm struggling with what comes across, toward the end of the book, as Schulman's disdain for marriage and lesbian motherhood. I absolutely see her point that marriage and motherhood can function as mechanisms to gain respectability, and I am critical of conditional tolerance by the dominant culture that's predicated on respectability. Hell, I've dealt enough with comp het and people asking invasive questions about my reproductive plans to know that marriage and motherhood as institutions can be used as sticks to beat people into submission and normalcy. But I'm also a lesbian who wants to have a wife and a kid, to love and parent in defiance of heteronormativity, and to have legal protections for my family while I do so. I rankle at the idea that these desires are just some bid at accessing power, a shameful diminishment of my creative or intellectual potential, a negation of my queerness, or evidence that I regard marriage equality as the end of the struggle for queer liberation.