Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival

Radicalized by the AIDS crisis and plunged into political activism for the LGBT community, Iowa-born Catholic-raised Strub chronicles the crucial years of AIDS awareness since the early 1980s, which parallels his own coming-of-age. As a protégé of Iowa senator Dick Clarke, Strub, then a teenager, worked as an elevator operator at the U.S. Capitol between 1976 and 1978; naïf, a virgin, attending Georgetown University, he gradually frequented “the Block” for gay cruising in Georgetown, resigned to closeted, secretive meetings with other men, yet reveling in the attention and friendship. A move to New York City introduced him to bathhouses, like the New St. Marks, and a growing political awareness, such as in gay marches and parades; dropping out of Columbia, Strub took his first political job in the Kentucky Democratic committee, and by June 1981, recognized he shared some of the same symptoms as the men mysteriously dying of a “gay cancer” first noticed by Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, writing frequently in the New York Native. Strub frankly and openly speaks about these painful and inspiring early years of the gay and lesbian movement, how the AIDS epidemic devastated the newly emergent community and ushered in a terrible backlash against gays. (Jan.)