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Join our virtual LGBTQ Book Club as we meet author Steven Reigns and discuss his book, A Quilt for David. For adults.
West Hollywood Library LGBTQ Book Club meets on the last Tuesday of odd-numbered months to discuss books of interest to the LGBTQ community, ranging from fiction and classics to nonfiction and memoir. Join us for an author talk this month! Former Lambda Lit Book Club facilitator and West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Steven Reigns will be on hand to discuss his newest work: A Quilt for David, a historical poetry-prose account of a 1990s gay Florida dentist accused of infecting his patients with HIV.
This is a virtual event and will be hosted on WebEx Meetings via the following link:
https://lacountylibrary.webex.com/lacountylibrary/j.php?MTID=m0051140a4c6206d2188a15a686397c1f
Call or visit West Hollywood Library or email David Davis at ddavis@library.lacounty.gov to reserve your copy of A Quilt for David. It's a short, but gripping read!
Summary of A Quilt for David (from publisher):
The hidden history of a vulnerable gay man whose life and death were turned into tabloid fodder.
In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David’s gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.
With a poet’s eulogistic and psychological intensity, Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable. It’s impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.
Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a hauntingly poetic narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.
Some reviews from the publisher:
“A stunning homage to people with AIDS.” –Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
“Told in short, occasionally haiku-like entries, Reigns has done what literature should: put the reader into the mind, the suffering, of another human being.” –Andrew Holleran, author of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited
“This writing is energetic, alive, and uncensored. Through poetry and prose we glean a deep understanding of a life misunderstood and mischaracterized. Reigns goes to the mat to find out what really happened, and with his expert pacing we’re right there with him.” —Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones
West Hollywood Library began service to the area (then unincorporated ) in 1913. The library was previously located at Sherman School, a cottage on Clark Street, a building on Westbourne Drive, and a building near the present site. The Library has an active Friends of the Library group.
The new library was dedicated October 1, 2011.
