Love from the Pink Palace: Memories of Love, Loss and Cabaret through the AIDS Crisis, for fans of IT'S A SIN

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In particular, one of Jill’s fallen friends tried everything to survive until they were drugs available to control the HIV virus – they very sadly did not but did inspire others to fight on. It read just as a list of famous people that the author knew and with too many people included it was difficult to attach to any of them. The tender anecdotes and conversations, the dignity and love, the human contact and sense of family are poignant and in reading this book had me laughing out loud one minute and in tears the next. With her band of best friends – of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own – she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs she could get.Most of all, she shines a light on those who were stigmatised and shamed, and remembers those brave and beautiful boys who were lost too soon. That why the fear was so genuine and so prohibitive when a young man a genuine positive HIV result from a test. For them 'coming out' was partly about saying that the baggage sex came with in somebody else's past. There are also possibilities of false negative results and and false positive results with the tests to worry about.

The frequent mention of so many show tunes and musicals through out the book could have been the lyrics of a list song to me. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the ‘gay flu’, and Jill and her friends now found their formerly carefree existence under threat. Like a book I read previously and reviewed here, by a different author, I came to this book via BBC radio.I cannot help but salute the humane and non-judgemental centre of this book, where perhaps to be that close, and to be that observant of the new gay community in action required the observer to be heterosexual and female.

The author is a talented heterosexual woman whose talent for writing songs, singing and performing for the public put her in contact with a society of selectively extrovert gay men and drag artists who wanted nothing more in life than to be on the stage, men who wanted to live their whole lives to be part of a distinctly extrovert, well performed, stagecraft. It is hard to put yourself in the position of Jill or her many friends at the time, but it was life - ups and downs. The book is part career CV where names of different shows and different songs in them are dropped as if we should know them all.

Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Growing up through the 80’s I witnessed the war years and this book takes me right back to the time and london. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. As 'mother hen' she relays very well the disappointment of the young gay men who don't know how to respond to their parents' disappointment in their children's new found honesty with their feelings. Jill also informs us about the many advances that have been made since the epidemic which was very useful to know.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). On a lighter note, I think anyone who likes theatre or anything West End/Broadway would really enjoy this as that is the industry Jill and her friends all work in and there's mentions of loads of different shows as well as some names that people may recognise. Jill is and was a true inspirational hero and support for a lot of gay men who suffered through the very worst of the AIDs pandemic. Jill really shows how much she truly cared and loved each and every friend, and how much those friends affected her life. Every chapter made you think about how hard it must have been for all those poor men who not only had to deal with coming out in a very unforgiving world, but to also tell their family and friends that they were dying of AIDS.I think I went into this with the wrong expectations, and also I think this is for people who are very into the theatre musical scene.