In 1995, the war against AIDS took a decisive turn when the FDA approved the use of protease inhibitors. By then, however, the disease had claimed thousands of lives, including those of singer Michael Callen and poet Essex Hemphill. In Hold Tight Gently, historian Martin Duberman (Stonewall) explores the lives of both artists to create a detailed portrait of the early years of the fight to understand, contain and control the AIDS epidemic.
Callen and Hemphill, who never met, took radically different routes in their approach to the AIDS fight. Callen, a white Midwesterner who had moved to New York to pursue his singing career and discover himself, soon emerged as one of the leading political voices in the white gay community and within the AIDS movement. Hemphill, a black resident of Washington, D.C., preferred to work behind the scenes, channeling his burdens into his poetic works.
Developing Callen's and Hemphill's biographies side by side allows Duberman to consider elements of race, sexuality, class and identity and go beyond the basic facts of what the two lived through in the years from 1981 to 1995. In so doing, he demonstrates that AIDS has not yet been defeated--and that losing a sense of urgency in fighting it sets up the entire nation to repeat its own tragic history. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket