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Visions and Revisions
Dale Peck
Soho Press
April 2015
On Sale: April 7, 2015
240 pages
ISBN: 1616954418
EAN: 9781616954413
Kindle: B00N6PCPD6
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Novelist and critic Dale Peck’s latest work—part memoir,
part extended essay—is a foray into what the author calls
“the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic,”
i.e., the period between 1987, when the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded, and 1996, when the
advent of combination therapy transformed AIDS from a
virtual death sentence into a chronic manageable
illness.
Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s The White
Album and Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday, Visions
and Revisions is a sweeping, collage-style portrait of a
tumultuous era. Moving seamlessly from the lyrical to the
analytical to the reportorial, Peck’s story takes readers
from the serial killings of gay men in New York, London, and
Milwaukee, through Peck’s first loves upon coming out of the
closet, to the transformation of LGBT people from marginal,
idealistic fighters to their present place in a world of
widespread, if fraught, mainstream acceptance.
The
narrative pays particular attention the words and deeds of
AIDS activists, offering a streetlevel portrait of ACT UP
with considerations of AIDS-centered fiction and criticism
of the era, as well as intimate, sometimes elegiac portraits
of artists, activists, and HIV-positive people Peck knew.
Peck’s fiery rhetoric against a government that sat on its
hands for the first several years of the epidemic is tinged
with the idealism of a young gay man discovering his
political, artistic, and sexual identity. The result is a
visionary and indispensable work from one of America’s most
brilliant and controversial authors.
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