A gripping and triumphant tale of human compassion, is the true
story of Ruth Coker Burks, a young single mother in Hot Springs,
Arkansas, who finds herself driven to the forefront of the AIDS
crisis, and becoming a pivotal activist in America's fight against
AIDS. 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 honors 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.
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