Queer History with Les K. Wright : A Forgotten Generation of AIDS Survivors

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More about Les K. Wright:
Les K. Wright is a queer historian, writer, fine arts photographer, gay activist, AIDS activist, literary scholar, and small press book publisher.

Wright grew up in a working-class family in East Syracuse, NY, and then Preble, NY. On a Study Abroad program in his senior year he studied at the University of Würzburg (1974-75), where he came out as a gay man and met his first long-term partner. He joined WüHSt (Würzburger Homosexuelle Studenteninitiative) and became a gay activist. He began his graduate studies in German, English, and Russian at the University of Tübingen (1975-79) (MA, 1977). He continued his gay activism as a member of the IHT (Initiativgruppe Homosexualität Tübingen) and came out in the leather subculture in Munich. He wrote extensively for the emerging gay press (GPU News (Milwaukee), Schwuchtel (Berlin), and Revolt (Stockholm).

In 1981 he found sobriety, returned to graduate school, and was infected with HIV. His recovery began at Eighteenth Street Services, where he served as a peer counselor for dual-diagnosed and AIDS-infected gay men (1986-1989). He earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley (1992). He witnessed the AIDS epidemic at Ground Zero (Castro District) as a PWA (person with AIDS), and became an AIDS activist, volunteering with several community-based AIDS education and emotional support groups.

In 1985 Wright was a founding member and founding board member of the GLBT Historical Society San Francisco. He was a member of the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Project (1984-1991).

In the mid 1980s Wright became involved in the actives of gay men who were calling themselves bears. Realizing this bear phenomenon was more than a passing fashion, he began taking notes, collecting ephemera, and led “What Is a Bear?”discussion groups at Bear Expo (1992 and 1993). To date there is still no settled answer to this question. In 1992 he founded the Bear History Project, and the earliest results were editing The Bear Book (1997), editing The Bear Book II (2000), and co-curting the “Bear Icons” art exhibition (Boston, Provincetown, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C. (2000-02).

More about Children of Lazarus: The Forgotten Generation of Long-Term AIDS Survivors
Children of Lazarus focuses on the vast, sprawling, still largely unchartered territory of AIDS survivorship. With probing honesty, intelligence and sensitivity, and from vantage points rarely considered with such particularity and nuance, this singular collection canvasses the often tragic yet simultaneously luminous stories of those living with HIV/AIDS. It surveys those with HIV/AIDS themselves, including Wright, their caregivers (those who are poz and those who are not), with an unblinking eye on their experience of social, political and legal bias and indifference, and especially of health care insufficiency and malfeasance. It's a saga of humanity and courage, of surviving and sometimes thriving, though often not, for which the Biblical metaphor of Lazarus could not be more apt. At the same time, it's a singular guide and handbook for understanding and navigating one of history's greatest pandemics. A must for historians, clinicians, sociologists, psychologists, health care providers, writers, readers, and everyone else, it will honor any bookshelf, library or backpack with the heart and humanity to bear it.

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