All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South
By: Ruth Coker Burks, Kevin Carr O'Leary / Narrated By: Ruth Coker Burks
Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
Moving, heartfelt, emotionally evocative, and I could go on. Let’s leave it at simply stunning.
I believe I already waxed nostalgic in Angels in America about my first year of college, meeting aaaaallll of my roommate’s many siblings, hanging out with them, experiencing acceptance and fun, fun, fun. I’ll call him T. That was an older brother of hers, those days in 1984-1985, and oh my were he and his friends sooo out of the closet, seizing life, enjoying burning the candle from both ends, dancing nights away after slogging through day jobs. We’d cram six of us into one tiny car, and oh what fun. I’ll always remember those nights, those young men, the music, the dancing, the laughter.
T. didn’t make it, dying young. Several of his friends didn’t make it either. Those young men? Gone. It was the 80s, and what was aTROciously called a “gay cancer” was burning its way through communities, and there was no mercy, and it caused wretched, wretched deaths, and this was the time of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, with the Just Say No mentality, with the blinders, leaving individuals, a good measure of the population without answers, assistance. Without compassion.
Which is why the very opening of this book, All the Young Men, had me in tears. Jeez, truly, five minutes in, and I was thinking of how T. might’ve been treated. Ruth Coker Burns is in the hospital supporting a friend who’s a patient there. Nurses are drawing straws to see which of them has to go in to check on a dying AIDS patient. There’s outrage, shouts of no no no let’s go 4 out of 5, and when Ruth looks over at the room, she sees meal trays haphazardly strewn outside the door. Nobody is going in.
So Ruth does, but not without (Some pretty awesome) outrage of her own. Who she sees in there breaks her heart as he’s definitely near death and is calling for his mother. First problem was the nurses. Second problem? Nobody will call the young man’s mother, so Ruth takes this upon herself as well (Using the pay phone as the nurses will not allow her to touch the nursing station phone… she’s been in THAT room, with HIM, she’s contaminated). Third problem? Something she soon gets so sadly used to?
The mother doesn’t care, is angry, doesn’t want to be bothered. She hangs up.
Ruth does what she’ll do many many times; she goes back into the room and whispers that Momma is here, and she holds his hand in her own ungloved one. Until he dies.
As with so many things in life, this one brief encounter goes (In today’s terminology) “viral”, and soon Ruth is THE person for young men at the Very WORST Times in their lives. It just fires this fiery woman up, and Ruth—a Southern bleach-blonde belle, a steel magnolia of the very best kind—is cooking and delivering meals, distributing condoms at the only gay bar in town, finding funeral homes who’ll take the bodies of victims of AIDS and an uncaring society, teaching safe sex at a strip club, and she’s helping young men choose their favorite spots at the Files Cemetery, where she’ll bury their ashes when they’ve died.
Along for this ride is her daughter Allison, a little girl who is shunned at school for what her mother does. Allison grows up with Ruth’s “Guys” as her very best friends. When she’s lonely, who but the town’s most revered drag queen should be there for her, offering her hugs, humor, sage advice on how to be an outcast. When she sees suffering, it’s Allison who is there to also hold hands, to make sure her mother does the right thing. Indeed, Allison’s journey is as complex, as inspirational as her veritable tornado of a mom’s calling. The girl just is one tough, compassionate, loving cookie, able to be with the desperately ill and lonely, the pariahs, the hilarious, the true-to-themselves. And make sure you stay for the Epilogue where Ruth fiiiiiinally gets around to asking Allison, now a mom herself, what she thought about all of it at the time. Mind-blowing, so loving!
Ruth narrates this herself, and she’s perfection. Her no-nonsense, no holds barred approach to seemingly insurmountable odds is voiced appropriately so that we’re privy to what might’ve been going on in her head as she was on the streets, in the grocery stores, at the hospitals, with families who don’t care. Perfection! which is sooo not always the case with authors doing their own books…
I HAD to Wikipedia her as I just wanted to know about her, and boy was I saddened about the controversies. But ya know what? I can forgive all that because the 80s were a godawful time to be gay and sick, a hooker and sick, even a cheating man… who got sick. There was NO sympathy, NO dignity, NO help. Questions couldn’t be answered because those in power quite simply didn’t care enough, and Fear was the name of the day for society’s castoffs, and those who may’ve helped, helped only if they got enough money and if they could bleach dip themselves afterward. It was a bad sad ignominious time, and I’m sooo willing to see past a couple of misdeeds and possible confabulations to look at one woman who Stepped Up to the Plate when the rest of the world didn’t. She was sharing Thanksgiving meals with men who were shunned and had nowhere to go, she was getting ashes and burying them in places where Her Guys, given the dignity of p’raps a solitary choice in their out-of-control lives, wanted to rest once their journeys were done, after such a horrible disease took them. I feel sad about the possibility of poor choices she made, but dang! did I cheer this woman on, wanna give her daughter a hug, laughed at the well-written young men who had outsized personalities. Just brava, brava!
To T? Thanks for dancing with me, thanks for letting me be one o’ the gang. You are well and truly missed…
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