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From 1981 to 1990, over 100,000 people — most of them gay men — died from AIDS in the United States. “My Government Means to Kill Me” by Rasheed Newson is a work of historical fiction set during this epidemic.
Eighteen-year-old Trey is the child of two wealthy, image-conscious former Black Panthers who disapprove of his effeminate behavior. He leaves his privileged life behind to move to New York, where he learns to fend for himself, gets involved in the local gay community and becomes an activist. He organizes a rent strike against his slum landlord and later joins ACT UP, a grassroots organization formed in response to the government’s indifference to the AIDS crisis.
“My Government Means to Kill Me” is an engaging, fast-paced read that I finished in two sittings. I enjoyed it most when it detailed Trey’s adventures in the gay underground as he embraces his sexuality.
Newson is excellent at characterization; everyone is memorable and has a clearly defined personality. My favorite character was Angie, a short-tempered butch lesbian who runs a hospice for gay men dying of AIDS and whose gruff exterior belies her compassionate nature. She and Trey become good friends: “Angie and I would bicker with growing affection for one another as we bathed infirm men, removed soiled bedsheets, or pressed cool, damp washcloths to burning foreheads.”
I should note that Trey is recounting his life as an activist decades after the fact. I’m not a huge fan of this decision, since it gives him a moral clarity that I found dull. Take, for example, this excerpt, after Trey mentions the government shutting down bathhouses: “Sex is a desire as natural and strong as hunger. The government should have been pouring resources into efforts to develop drugs that helped those infected survive and that prevented the spread of HIV to those who were not infected.”
I do wish the events were being narrated as they happened, since people living in the midst of crises and political turmoil often may not see a clear way out. Some activists believed gay men were partially responsible for the epidemic due to their promiscuity. This is not an opinion I agree with, but I think it would have been more interesting to engage with these different viewpoints, to have Trey struggle with what he thinks should be done, instead of having him tell us what the correct takeaway and solution were.
“I had mixed feelings about “My Government Means to Kill Me.” There were parts I enjoyed, and parts that frustrated and irritated me. I think it would most appeal to those interested in gay history, but if you are interested in gay history, you likely already know and agree with much of what the book says, which makes the footnotes and didacticism redundant.”
I also took issue with the footnotes that were used to explain references that might be unfamiliar to readers. There were a lot of them, and they can be distracting. Do we really need footnotes explaining who Prince and Ronald Reagan were?
These explanations weren’t limited to footnotes. Trey meets Bayard Rustin in a bathhouse and describes him: “He’d sat alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at countless strategy meetings for the Civil Rights Movement, and Rustin would be a household name but for his open homosexuality, which included an arrest record for “engaging in public sex,” and his ties to communist and socialist ideologies. He was scrubbed from mainstream African American history and consigned to be a minor notable of the Gay Rights Movement.” The prose here read like a school report and clashed with the rest of the book.
This brings me to my next criticism: the usage of real people as fictional characters. I’m not opposed to it in theory, but the way it’s done here rubs me the wrong way.
Rustin is portrayed as a chipper mentor figure who introduces Trey to gay culture and leftist organizing. There is no mention of his turn towards conservative politics, no real interest in him as the complicated person he was, just in his significance as a gay civil rights leader.
Larry Kramer, the notoriously sharp-tongued founder of ACT UP, was also present. He chooses Trey to represent ACT UP at a rally and defends this decision to the other members: “He’s wilier than you think, and he’s got something you and I lack, Dylan. Trey is naturally likable.” I felt weird about the choice to include a real activist in your book and then make him praise your fictional protagonist for being more likable. It felt self-congratulatory.
I had mixed feelings about “My Government Means to Kill Me.” There were parts I enjoyed, and parts that frustrated and irritated me. I think it would most appeal to those interested in gay history, but if you are interested in gay history, you likely already know and agree with much of what the book says, which makes the footnotes and didacticism redundant.
I respect that Newson centered black gay men in a narrative about AIDS, and he’s good at holding a reader’s attention, but his desire to write fiction and his desire to educate don’t always mesh.
Natalie Ortiz (PO ‘25) is from Los Angeles. She loves horror and anything spooky.