Second Avenue Caper: When Goodfellas, Divas, and Dealers Plotted Against the Plague

When the plague came, no one knew what to call it. The fevers and lesions heralded the arrival of an illness ready to claim its next victim. And, quickly, the next one after that. Most conspicuously, those dying were gay men, so early on people called it GRID (Gay Related Immune Disorder), but when married men and women were stricken with its ghastly symptoms, too, that changed.

Activist and comics writer Joyce Brabner (Our Cancer Year) delves into the 1980s and the terrifying early days of AIDS in Second Avenue Caper, a graphic memoir illustrated by her friend and frequent collaborator Mark Zingarelli. Framed as a recent interview between Brabner and her old friend Ray Dobbins, a gay New Yorker who worked in those days as a nurse, it details how, in the midst of a puzzling storm of patients and a dirge of lovers and friends dying, Dobbins rallied his community of writers, musicians, actors, drag queens, artists and pot dealers to pull off a heist they hoped would save lives.

Second Avenue Caper is as much a biography as it is journalistic portrait of the times. That Dobbins's crew even had to smuggle drugs from Mexico to treat a public health concern is placed squarely into its political and social context. Like Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, this book bears the gravitas of a troubling moment in history, drawing compelling lines toward its present and future ramifications. It both burns with righteous anger and tenderly embraces the many whose lives have been touched by the AIDS plague. --Dave Wheeler, publishing assistant, Shelf Awareness