Released last week in time for World AIDS Day, two new books detail the AIDS crisis of the 80s and its aftermath. Journalist and filmmaker David France takes a more historical approach, whereas activist Cleve Jones offers a more personal account. New York writer Lawrence Ferber spoke with both authors about documenting this defining era of LGBTI history

Dec. 5, 2016 – While the AIDS crisis has been chronicled in movies, documentaries, and books – like Rosa von Praunheim's terrifying 1986 satire, A Virus Knows No Morals and David France's Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague – there are actually precious few that truly paint a picture of its legacy with the benefit of present-day hindsight.

So the New York-based France, who chronicled HIV/AIDS for newspapers and magazines since the earliest days of the crisis, set out to tell an accurate, written history of the virus. Starting with its emergence in New York City and continuing on to the mid-90s release of lifesaving protease inhibitors, he expands on the film with his gripping new book, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS.

A broad range of key individuals drives its dramatic, terrifying and utterly compelling narrative, from activists Larry Kramer and Peter Staley to scientists Dr. Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier (whose feud over who discovered HIV led to much chaos) to politicians and journalists. It’s possibly the most essential text of its kind to date, and it rights some of the mistakes made in the late Randy Shilts’ 1987 account of the early AIDS years And the Band Played On – for one thing, with a more holistic view of Gaëtan Dugas (a.k.a. “Patient Zero”), who was recently vindicated of his longtime status as the “villain” who spread AIDS throughout North America.

Cleve Jones is another a key figure in the AIDS narrative and has written a new memoir, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement. The founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and co-founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Jones got his start in activism as the protégé of Harvey Milk. Film fans might recall that Emile Hirsch portrayed Jones in Gus Van Sant’s 2008 biopic Milk, and next year, Guy Pearce will play him in a TV miniseries charting the American LGBTI rights movement, bearing the same title as Jones's book.

Alternately funny, revealing, tragic and inspiring, When We Rise recounts Jones when he first came out, gay sex and relationships during the free-loving 70s, living and working in Germany, his years with Milk, the horrific first wave of AIDS that consumed his friends and lovers, his own positive diagnosis and health struggles, the US same-sex marriage rights victory and continuing into his present life in the Castro district. Throughout, Jones befriends and encounters an incredible number of extraordinary individuals.

“I’m a storyteller,” Jones tells SIEGESSÄULE. “My mom used to say to me, ‘you sure can talk,’ and other people have suggested that talking might be my only legally marketable skill. I know I have these great stories because of luck. I met the most amazing people through my life’s journey, and I’ve witnessed the most amazing things, but I didn’t write this as a history book, and it’s not even really an autobiography. One of the things I realized as I started writing was that I wanted to tell the stories from my youth, before AIDS came. I wanted younger generations to hear about what it was like growing up in a time when being gay was illegal, when we were lobotomized and sent to prison simply because we were homosexual.”

France, however, did set out to specifically craft a historical tome, and in the process, drew from incredible troves of archival material. Just as the documentary was largely constructed from hundreds of hours of video footage (a technique since coined “archival vérité”), France was able to fashion many of the book’s dramatic scenes and word-for-word dialogues thanks to a collection of audio tapes and diaries. Subjects include Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, one of NYC’s first physicians to focus on patients stricken by the mysterious onslaught of deadly opportunistic infections, and HIV-positive singer Michael Callen, who co-authored an early safer sex advice pamphlet before a virus was even confirmed as the syndrome's culprit. 

“Starting in 1981, they were smart enough to tape-record everything,” France explains to SIEGESSÄULE. “They knew something remarkable was happening, and that history might attempt to discredit what was really happening on the ground or that an artificial narrative would be created. It was incredible for me to discover I could tell these stories with the same kind of archival vérité veracity, going back to the first minutes of the plague.”

That Jones’s Rise is released on the same day as Plague pleases France, who hopes there are more such accounts and histories to come. “We should all be telling stories,” he emphasizes. “There has not been a way to teach the history of the AIDS epidemic in college. We need books for people to carry these stories forward, and that’s what I’m hoping people will start to produce – so our history can go on the same shelf as all those other dark and triumphal histories that make up the American past.”

Lawrence Ferber