When I choose from the top of the teetering tower of books in my to-be-read stack, I am rarely reading them in a just-released timely order. Not surprisingly, now that I've finished "All the Young Men" by Ruth Coker Burks (with Kevin O'Leary), I've seen online that numerous awards and interviews have come Burks' way since the book's Dec. 1, 2020, release on World AIDS Day. My comments here are therefore an effort at a catch-up review.
We all have unique stories. I suppose in the end the importance of any life shows not just in the content, but in the telling. Ruth has told her story through the lives and deaths of those she calls, "My guys."
Reviews of her book almost always start, just as she did on the first page, with a hook of disbelief. Hers was in learning that nurses at the hospital where she regularly visited a friend were refusing to enter a nearby patient's room marked as a biohazard. His meals were just being left on the hall floor next to his door as if he could feed himself like a dog. Hearing his calls for help, she went in and from that moment on her life totally changed. More importantly, the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men were eventually touched because she responded to Jimmy, a dying man crying for his mama.
In the early 1980s, AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) was a new disease to most of the world. Although at that point it seemed only to be afflicting homosexual men, the specter of a killing viral disease was especially terrifying to some in the up-close-and-personal medical fields. Compounding the disease was the stigma and vehement expulsion of those known to be gay so there was not even a place they could go to die. Many like Jimmy were disowned by their families, who would not come to be with them nor even bury them.
Ruth's 13 hours holding Jimmy's hand while he died led next to finding a funeral home that would take an AIDS body. One finally took him, cremated him, and sent Ruth his ashes in a cardboard box. This young mid-20s single mother found herself in charge of the final dignity or indignity of a person who never knew her hand was not his mother's. She buried his ashes in a nice pottery jar in her family's cemetery in the dark of night. And Jimmy wasn't the last. What better use for her inheritance of 262 plots in a Hot Springs cemetery?
As her stories unfold, we are led through the twists and turns of society's prejudices, its meanness and its beauty, the hypocrisy found in a church contrasted with the grace found in a gay bar.
"How could I not help?" Ruth repeats in her interviews about the varied characters who wound up in her care as she found food, housing and medical help for more and more gay men dying of a disease no one understood nor wanted to get near. She did not have the money to support their needs so she would dumpster-dive behind grocery stores, pass along meds left behind by the dead, find housing locations, throw special event and holiday parties, and enlist silent allies, who would give money or other help as long as they remained anonymous. And she did all these things while caring for her preschooler and trying to hold down a job.
She was shunned not just by funeral homes, but by some medical and pharmaceutical entities, by her church and by society in general. She received threats and had crosses burned in her yard, all those things done by fearful, vengeful people who conjure up shame in order to cast out others and hide from what they despise in themselves.
Ruth, who now lives in Northwest Arkansas, ended a KUAF interview on Dec. 1, 2020, explaining how she did what she did: "As bad as it was, we found out who our allies were. We found out how to get things done. And you just have to be brave. You have to be brave, and you have got to put that one foot forward when everybody else is just standing there. You've got to be the one to step forward and, you know, be the kind and loving and caring person in the group."
That's a recipe for a worthy and worthwhile life. Thank you, Ruth.