4/5 stars
Recommended if you like: nonfiction, history, public health, HIV/AIDS education, LGBTQ+ history, activism

This book is very consumable and easy to read. I flew through the pages and it actually only took me two days to get through. The content was engaging, and while the ARC I received did not have all the pictures, the placeholders indicate the finished copy will include a good number of photographs to accompany the text, which I appreciated.

Long covers a range of time spanning what is primarily thought of as the AIDS epidemic, from 1981 to 1996, though he also includes a couple chapters set prior to the start of the epidemic to provide some additional context. Activism took a lot of different forms during this time period, ranging from marches and die-ins to health clinics and support groups to the AIDS quilt, and Long makes sure to at least touch a little bit on all of them. Some of the groups mentioned, such as ACT UP and the AIDS quilt (now the NAMES project AIDS quilt), I was already familiar with, whereas others, such as the Blood Sisters, I was less familiar with. I appreciated getting an overview of all the different groups and efforts that were ongoing at that point in time, but I found the book didn't go as in-depth as I would've liked.

Likewise, the subtitle of the book centers on activism, art, and protest, and while we do get a lot of activism and protest, there was a significantly smaller focus on the art portion of that. For a book who riffs the famous SILENCE = DEATH poster for their cover and which features multiple art activism pieces, I don't think Gran Fury is ever even mentioned except as an artist credit in some of the photos. Larry Kramer, Jorge Soccarás, and Avram Finkelstein are mentioned, at least in the chapter talking about how the SILENCE = DEATH poster came about, but the artistic efforts of Gran Fury are almost completely absent from then on, even when the AIDSGATE poster is mentioned (and I won't even touch on the fact that the Read My Lips and Kissing Doesn't Kill campaigns are both included in the book as images but aren't mentioned at all otherwise). We do get to hear of Kramer's Broadway play, The Normal Heart, but mostly as a byline. There's no greater look into Kramer's inspiration nor how he was able to get the production on Broadway. Having read a different book on AIDS activism and art last year, It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic , which went very in-depth into both the timeline of the AIDS crisis as well as ACT UP's actions and Gran Fury's , I was hoping for something more like that.

Like I said above, I did like learning about the various actions that took place to protest the negligent response to AIDS, but I would've liked to learn more about them. I wanted more than a short chapter about each, I wanted to get a better, in-depth understanding of the groups and their protests.

I don’t typically rate non-fic but for this arc I’ll give it a 4.

This was one of my most anticipated reads this month. After rewatching “it’s a sin” recently I knew I wanted to further educate myself about the AIDS epidemic and in particular those who fought to be heard.

I found this to be eye opening, sad, tragic and yet full of optimism and hope. The author carefully timelines the different events, groups and details that for some people would have been forgotten or overlooked.

Being from the UK, I’ll admit I had no idea about how America handled this epidemic and I was shocked to learn about the lack of support provided to those with AIDS and the amount of time that passed between the discovery of the disease and those in authority actually doing something about it.

As a woman I found chapter 37 the most devastating, especially reading the statistics provided.

The writing makes this accessible to all different kinds of readers. It was detailed without waffling and all the information was condensed in a way that is easy to follow along and retain. I appreciated the inclusion of the artwork to illustrate some of the different campaigns produced at the time and the different chapters made this easy to pick up and put down.

For me, this was a really powerful and welcome education and having finished it, me and my partner actually discussed some of the things I’d read about.

I’ll definitely be purchasing a physical copy to re read again in the future!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for letting me read in exchange for an honest review.

What a great and powerful book! Some of the formatting could have been better but overall this book is fantastic and full of so much history and facts and people that everyone should read it.. if you “enjoyed” this book I couldn’t recommend “it’s a sin” a British tv show that goes into the aids endemic in detail. This show will break your heart into a million peaces in the most beautiful ways. Thank you NetGalley for letting me read and review. So educational!

It is so important to learn about our past in the LGBT community and how we have fought hard for our community. This book shows the history, heartbreak, and resilience of the community and how there is still so much to do with fighting AIDs but how far we’ve come with trying to get care, recognition, and help for it. This is a great book that breaks down the history of AIDS and the effects of it in a way that is easy to understand and learn while telling the stories of man.

What a thoroughly researched and compelling book. It's heartbreaking and anger inducing subject matter but it's conveyed in such an accessible and relatable way. It felt personal and I felt very close to the people in it as a reader, not that I could always tell who everyone was and whether this person had come up before because there were a lot of people involved, but the actual quotes and descriptions from those who were there coupled with the photos and art built this amazing, deep portrait.

A couple of years back I read Ruth Coker Burks' book about her work and life during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and I came away feeling the same way, though this book was more based in exploring the historic moment and bigger political movements whereas 'All the Young Men' was more focussed on the small and intimate (not to say that any of those people or what they went through is "small", but rather I suppose the daily lives of these people more so than the larger organisations and protests).

I feel so well informed in a different way than before, the politics and history in this were so accessibly written and, though I thought I knew a lot already, there was so much I didn't!

I've written before, probably in my review for 'All the Young Men', about the impact Larry Kramer's 'A Normal Heart' had on me as a teenager and that has continued for the last decade and a half. It blew me away the first time I saw it performed and every night I stayed late where I was volunteering at the time just to experience it again - shout out to Buddies in Bad Times Queer theatre in Toronto because the art I saw there at 18 years old changed my life. I think about it all the time, and though I've seen it performed once since, it was online during lockdown, and read the play countless times, I would be terrified to see it again and have it not match that world-shaking feeling of the first time. Though I say this, I actually would jump at the chance to get to, and hope I can.
But anyway, that was where my education started properly, with that play and then researching the true story afterwards, learning about ACTUP and artists like Keith Haring from there. But there was so much I didn't know to contextualise that play further, so much of a fight I should know about, but of course, as Long speaks on at the end, the taboo is still there, the shame is still there, and the misinformation is still there, so right now we are never going to be as educated as we should be.

There were photos in here that I will never forget (for some reason the ribbon cutting one just won't leave my mind) and there are words from the mouths of people who fought and fought and saved those who came after them that I will never forget. It was amazing to hear the story of how the AIDS Quilt came to be and all the different organisations that existed. I really came to realise I didn't know much at all about the fight for medication, I knew the "shocking" bits from protests, the "If I die of aids, forget burial, just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A." (though didn't realise they actually did/tried to do that), of die-ins and disruptions, but I didn't know about the ashes, of Ward 5B, of Ryan White. I didn't know the extent of the gruelling fight to get medication that ended up doing little at all, and then the way the breakthroughs came to be, just like that, all of a sudden, and the way they worked !! the descriptions of how people who were moving to hospice were suddenly so active again was unbelievable and I can't even begin to imagine how that felt at the time.

It was interesting to consider, as the dates in the book progressed and got closer to the year I was born, just how close this all is to us now still. I've spent a lot of my life watching people explain what it means to be undetectable and PrEP has been something I've known about for decades now, but it's all still so new! I think I felt much more detached from it than I should, which in some ways is a good thing, we've made progress in such a way that it's not impacting everyone's life in the way it once did, but also, we should all know more and should be educated further. I've known people who are diagnosed and so scarily uneducated about it and I've known people the opposite, it's still carrying a lot of the struggle in terms of education and reaching the most marginalised as it once did. How recently the medication that "works" was created and distributed was is sobering.

Learning more about the women at the time was something I was pleased to see, because a lot of the time, though there is sometimes a iconic lesbian or two who get commemorated for doing brilliant things to help, it is mainly focussed on the care and activism they did to assist mostly gay men. I had no idea about the extent of the impact medically on women. But then again, isn't this always the way with medicine. The facts laid out like that are really something though; the statistics, the politicians doing nothing even after they'd put that CARE act into place, as the number of women dying just rose and rose. We don't hear very much about the women who fought and died to this too.

The width of history across America conveyed in this was really great, I knew some of the history in San Francisco but a lot out there focusses heavily on New York and ACTUP there especially (not to say that's wrong to do!), But hearing about the first AIDS march from Castro to Civic Centre and realising I've walked that same route, as I'm sure countless people have, with that same faction of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (will always be grateful for the time I got to spend with the wonderful Sister Roma in my short year there!), was special to me. We didn't walk for the same thing, but in similar sombre quiet for the people who were killed at Pulse in 2016. And I listened to people shout and cry on those very same steps as they did back then. I repeat, it's all so close and all so connected.
In Harry Nicholas's A Trans Man Walks into a Gay Bar, he speaks of gaps in queer people's past and in our futures because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, how because of this devastating loss we are only really just beginning to see what futures look like for LGBTQ+ people, to grow old together, to exist publicly together, because those that should have been doing that already never got the chance to, you really fully get the sense of that in this book.
This was beautifully written and taught me so much, I feel more connected to that time and even more empathetic to everything they went through, fought for, and are still fighting for. Decades of fighting. The statistics at the end are shocking and I hope so much we can continue to make progress for people affected in all walks of life. I feel such admiration and gratitude for those that came before me and hope we can continue to work in ways that do right by them.

"We send this message to America: We are the lesbians and gay men of San Francisco, and although we are again surrounded by uncertainty and despair, we are survivors, we shall survive again, and we shall be the strongest and most gentle people on Earth." - Cleve Jones, Nov 27th 1985.

Netgalley ARC - This tells the important history of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism. It's well-written and as digestable as possible for such a difficult topic. My only gripe is that the Stonewall chapter is missing the importance of black trans women like Marsha P Johnson. Trans people were mentioned in other places, but we can't erase transness from Stonewall.