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

Sean Strub, founder of the groundbreaking POZ magazine, producer of the hit play The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, and the first openly HIV-positive candidate for U.S. Congress, charts his remarkable life. As a politics-obsessed Georgetown freshman, Strub arrived in Washington from Iowa in 1976, with a plum part-time job running a Senate elevator. He also harbored a terrifying secret: his attraction to men. As he explored the capital's political and social circles, he discovered a world where powerful men lived double lives shrouded in shame. When AIDS hit in the early 1980s, Strub was living in New York and soon found himself attending "more funerals than birthday parties." Scared and angry, he turned to radical activism. Strub takes readers through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the organization that transformed a stigmatized cause into one of the defining political movements of our time. From the New York of Studio 54 and Andy Warhol's Factory to the intersection of politics and burgeoning LGBT and AIDS movements, Strub's story is a vivid portrait of a tumultuous era.--From publisher description.