Suicide Tuesday Book

I can not overstate how homophobic this book really is. Despite being a gay man, Rotello argues that if gay men had assimilated to the sexual practices of heterosexual people, they would have never been victims of the AIDS crisis. He blames the victims, instead of looking at the structural inequalities that gay men faced from the end of World War II to the 1980s that put them in a vulnerable position for the HIV virus. Rotello also spends a lot of time shaming gay men for having sex the way they wanted to, which just comes across as rather spiteful.

Rotello's work is a product of in-fighting in the gay community over the issue of respectability and assimilation to heterosexual society. His knowledge of the virus and how it spread is extremely dated. There are much more current works that address gay men and the AIDS epidemic that readers should go to for general information.