Patchy memoir by gay British filmmaker Jarman, who tested
HIV-positive five years ago, has survived a handful of illnesses,
and is still going strong. Jarman covers five decades here, at
times attuning his voice to each period. The story, what there is,
often melts down into gay commentary, and we never get a satisfying
history of the author's films (Sebastian, Caravaggio, Edward II,
etc.), his filmmaking, or incidents tied to filmmaking - although a
few reviews are reprinted and answered, along with gay manifestos,
some by Jarman. This is as much a cannon blast as a memoir, and
some bitterly juicy quotes can be lifted from the text ("Understand
that if you or I decide to have sex, whether safe, safer, or
unsafe, it is our decision and other people have no rights in our
lovemaking"), with Jarman wanting to forget his illness and make
love blithely with seemingly whomever is pleased to have him. One
idea often repeated is that all men are homosexual and that
heterosexuality is the deviant form of sex. As Jarman puts it: "It
eventually dawned on me that heterosexuality is an abnormal
psychopathic state composed of unhappy men and women whose arrested
emotions, finding no natural outlet, condemned them to each other
and lives lacking warmth and human compassion." He describes rigid
British laws anent homosexuality and states his belief that there
should be no age of consent, that homosexuality begins when it
begins and should not be locked up in legalities. Jarman laments
dead friends carried off by AIDS, defends his movies, and gives the
fist to moral censure. Past fear, he fights on. For readers fresh
to the fray, the title tells all. (Kirkus Reviews)
Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek
Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality. In At Your Own Risk,
Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper
extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK. The
buttoned-up repression of the fifties and sixties makes way for
liberation and free love in the seventies, only to be chased by the
terror and pain of HIV/AIDS. This is Jarman at his passionate best,
written when he was already ill with HIV and in the midst of the
moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis. Defiant and furious, he
not only celebrates his own sexuality but skewers wider society for
its brazen homophobia. Reissued here 25 years after Jarman's death,
with an introduction by Straight Jacket author Matthew Todd, At
Your Own Risk remains a singular work. It is a powerful reminder of
how far we have come and how much further we have left to go. 'It
blew my mind quite honestly !', It's A Sin star Olly Alexander via
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