***2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST*** DISASTERAMA: Adventures
in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997, is the true story of Alvin
Orloff who, as a shy kid from the suburbs of San Francisco,
stumbled into the wild, eclectic crowd of Crazy Club Kids, Punk
Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies,
Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks of post-Stonewall American queer
culture of the late 1970s, only to see the "subterranean lavender
twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto" ravished by AIDS in the
1980s. Includes an introduction by Alexander Chee (How to Write an
Autobiographical Novel. In Disasterama, Orloff recalls the
delirious adventures of his youth-from San Francisco to Los Angeles
to New York-where insane nights, deep friendships with the
creatives of the underground, and thrilling bi-coastal living led
to a free-spirited life of art, manic performance, high camp
antics, and exotic sexual encounters, until AIDS threatened to
destroy everything he lived for. In his introduction, award-winning
essayist and novelist Alexander Chee notes, "There's a strange love
I have for these times that can be hard to explain. How can I love
what I lived through from a time that was as 'bad' as that? But as
I read this, and those days came into view again, what I think of
that love now is that there was a beauty to the beauty you found
then that was made the more fierce by the horror of what was
happening. If you could still find the worth of your life, still
find sex, love, friendship, your own self-worth amid these attempts
by the state at erasure and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, then
it had the strength of something forged in fire." Orloff looks past
the politics of AIDS to the people on the ground, friends of his
who did not survive AIDS' wrath-the boys in black leather jackets
and cackling queens in tacky frocks-remembering them not as
victims, but as people who loved life, loved fun, and who were a
part of the insane jigsaw of Orloff's friends. Disasterama
showcases Orloff's wit and poignancy as he relays the true tale of
how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a
deadly disaster, and, struggled to keep the spirit of camp and
radicalism alive, even as their friends lost their lives to the
plague.
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