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A review by woolfinbooks
Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community by Victoria Noe
Did not finish book. Stopped at 53%.
I quit after the 5th chapter. The first 20 minutes were very "Look at me! I'm an activist" and "What about the cis straight women?" Self-proclaiming on her website that her book is "the first book to honor the ways women changed the course of the epidemic" is incorrect. There have been dozens of books about lesbians and bi women's contributions to the AIDS epidemic since around mid-AIDS-pandemic. Does the author not consider lesbian and bi women to be women then? Does she view only straight women as real women?
For most of what I read she didn't say anything positive about gay men. It was only been complaining about how they mistreated her for being straight or that she wanted gay men without AIDS to help her do the literal heavy lifting at work. It felt like any second she was going to say "Breeder is heterophobic!" She spent a few minutes complaining about the lack of representation in AIDS media centering on straight women's contributions. Because nothing says you're an ally like whining about millions of deaths not being centered around you... It would be different if she was talking about the need for women's representation as a whole in AIDS storytelling because THAT is actually looked over. But AIDS-free straight women? Sit the fuck down.
"It's time for straight women to come out of the closet. These stories need to be told" is so completely tone-deaf that I can't comprehend how it got past the editing stage. Why would you compare your "struggles" of being an AIDS ally to coming out? The author may have been an AIDS activist, but it truly doesn't feel like she has ever been an LGBTQ+ activist. Not if she's this comfortable winning about how excluded she was from queer spaces during the height of AIDS. Not when she wrote an entire book centering on cisgender heterosexual women during AIDS.
For most of what I read she didn't say anything positive about gay men. It was only been complaining about how they mistreated her for being straight or that she wanted gay men without AIDS to help her do the literal heavy lifting at work. It felt like any second she was going to say "Breeder is heterophobic!" She spent a few minutes complaining about the lack of representation in AIDS media centering on straight women's contributions. Because nothing says you're an ally like whining about millions of deaths not being centered around you... It would be different if she was talking about the need for women's representation as a whole in AIDS storytelling because THAT is actually looked over. But AIDS-free straight women? Sit the fuck down.
"It's time for straight women to come out of the closet. These stories need to be told" is so completely tone-deaf that I can't comprehend how it got past the editing stage. Why would you compare your "struggles" of being an AIDS ally to coming out? The author may have been an AIDS activist, but it truly doesn't feel like she has ever been an LGBTQ+ activist. Not if she's this comfortable winning about how excluded she was from queer spaces during the height of AIDS. Not when she wrote an entire book centering on cisgender heterosexual women during AIDS.