In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies – often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.

Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis.

This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honours the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America.

This is an absolute must-read, especially if you are a member of the LGBTQIA+ community or an ally and you were born after 1995. This book is absolutely essential. It paints a clear, unflinching picture of just how brutal the AIDS crisis really was, and how the people we now call angels stepped in when pretty much no one else would. And Ruth Coker Burks is one of those angels. If God or angels exist, I would not be surprised to learn that they wear her face. She is so inspiring and I loved her spunk.

In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth is visiting a friend in an Arkansas hospital, when she notices a door that has a biohazard sign painted on it with food trays stacked on the floor outside the door. The nurses are drawing straws to decide which of them has to go in. Nobody wants to be the one. Ruth walks by and hears what she thinks is a child crying for help. She’s annoyed with the nurses and can’t figure out what their deal is, so she just walks into the room. She’s surprised to find not a child, but a very sick and emaciated young man inside calling for his mother. Ruth stays with him and holds his hand and then later, after being scolded by the nurses for entering the room without biohazard protections, she learns the young man has “that gay disease”. That single act sets off everything that follows. Ruth visits the young man–even tries to call his mother and get her to come see her son, and when she won’t Ruth stays with him until he dies and then sees to his cremation and his ashes when no one else will. Soon, word spreads and suddenly Ruth is the person people call when a gay man is sick, alone, dying, abandoned by his family, refused by funeral homes, and ignored by the medical system. Over the next several years, she becomes a one-woman support network in the middle of a deeply conservative southern state that mostly just wished these men would hurry up and die. But Ruth will do everything in her power to help them live a dignified life and get the help they need.

What she did is staggering. She cared for men dying of AIDS, hands-on, in their last moments. She found housing for people who’d been kicked out by their families. She got medications into the hands of people who couldn’t otherwise access them. She drove for hours to track down funeral homes that would actually accept these bodies, sometimes calling in the middle of the night. She cooked meals from food pulled out of dumpsters behind grocery stores to feed people who had nothing. She gave safer sex talks to drag queens in back rooms. She buried men in her own family’s cemetery plot when no one else would take them. And eventually, she ended up advising the governor of her state, who happened to be Bill Clinton, on the national AIDS crisis.

What I loved most is that Ruth is a devout Christian. She went to church religiously, but unlike most of the people around her, she actually practiced what Christianity is supposed to be about. She didn’t decide these men deserved what was happening to them. She didn’t lecture them. She didn’t ask them to apologize for their lives. She showed up and made sure that no man under her watch died alone. That, to me, is what faith is supposed to look like. The contrast between her and the pastors and nurses who refused to help is one of the most damning things in the book.

The men she takes care of, are handled with care and she pays tribute to them beautifully. She doesn’t treat them as just a sad chapter in a history book. She respects them and gives them the moment and recognition they deserved. That’s part of what gives this book its weight.

I laughed and I cried, often on the same page. Ruth is a spitfire. Her voice is sharp, salty, and direct, and her sense of humor cuts through some of the heaviest material in a way that makes the heavy material possible to keep reading. She does not romanticize what she did, nor does she pat herself on the back. She does not flinch from how awful the country was at the time. She tells you what happened and she makes sure that these men are remembered.

I’m a little mad I hadn’t heard more about this book before I read it. It should be required reading. It honors a piece of our history that too many people have already forgotten, and it honors the lives of so many that we lost. Everyone needs to read this. Please pick it up.