The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Beyond the door marked ‘Biohazard’
In 1980s Arkansas, Aids victims were treated like lepers – until one woman made it her mission to care
ALL THE YOUNG MEN
Ruth Coker Burks &
Kevin Carr O’Leary
355pp, Trapeze, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £7.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
In 1984, Ruth Coker Burks was a 25-year-old real estate broker and single mother, born and bred in Bill Clinton’s neck of Arkansas, who paid a visit to the hospital in Little Rock where her friend was recovering from cancer surgery. Down the hall, she noticed a doorway covered with a blood-red tarpaulin, with half a dozen styrofoam food trays dumped outside, along with a cart full of masks and full-body isolation suits. A sign on the door said “BIOHAZARD”, and despite the pitiful pleas of a dying young man inside, the nurses were drawing straws over who had to go in.
These were not the early days of Aids. News of the “gay cancer” had been spreading inward from America’s coasts for several years. In the religious South, it was received like hellfire, or “the bubonic plague and leprosy all in one”, as Burks writes. Victims were left unwanted by any family or lover, shunned by the church, even rejected by a medical establishment which had no idea how to treat them.
Despite no health training of any kind, Burks took it upon herself to care for them. Her first beneficiary was Jimmy, that dying young man beyond the BIOHAZARD sign, who was calling out for his longestranged mother. Burks was the only one who would hold his hand through his last night. When every other funeral home in Arkansas refused to deal with his body, she found one 40 miles away willing to cremate him – as long as nothing went in the paper. They posted Jimmy’s ashes in a cardboard box, and Burks buried him on her family plot in Hot Springs, digging the hole in the middle of her father’s grave.
So began a new vocation. No one else in Arkansas wanted anything to do with Aids sufferers – even if they were haemophiliac children who had contracted the virus through blood transfusions. Burks, while raising her own daughter, got to know the gay men living on the fringes of Arkansas society, many too ill to work. She bustled between them tirelessly to help them get tested, to fix them meals scavenged from supermarket bins, to get their medicines and arrange funerals when they died. She gained a local nickname – “the Cemetery Angel” – a detail modestly left out of her memoir, co-authored by the gay writer Kevin Carr O’Leary.
For decades, Burks was an unsung hero of the epidemic, until the press gave her a first round of overdue attention a few years ago. (“I Would Bury Them in Cookie Jars,” ran one headline.) With her blonde hair, sassy one-liners and way of clicking her heels down hospital corridors so everyone knew she meant business, Burks already feels like the heroine of her own biopic, and indeed one is forthcoming – touted as “Erin Brockovich meets Dallas Buyers Club.”
There are moments here which might crash-land on screen if they were played for face-value melodrama, such as Burks yelling at her intolerant neighbours when she found a cross burning on her lawn for the second time. The heavenly touches can be a little precious, too: rather than feeling “contaminated” by the ashes of dead friends, Burks claims that their fine dust “floated down in a trail of gossamer and gold. I didn’t understand how people couldn’t see the shine”.
But it’s the warmth of the book and its odd, zingy humour that win you round. Burks’s fascination with the drag scene, at a now-defunct Hot Springs gay bar called Our House, gained her the trust of the community bit by bit. At first she was the lightly devout meddler trying to hand out condoms. Over the years, she became the friend many of these men had never had. When she was invited by Clinton – a childhood friend – to his Inaugural Ball, one of the drag queens lent her a huge, beaded gown to wear.
Under Reagan and Bush, many of Burks’s efforts to doorstep policymakers may have fallen on deaf ears, but she was in the right place at the right time for duties of care no one else was performing – not just on a state level, but on a human one. It’s more than most of us can say for ourselves.