BETWEEN CERTAIN DEATH AND A POSSIBLE FUTURE: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis

“The generation of queer people coming of age now is doing so in the long shadow of the AIDS crisis, their lives loomed over by the epidemic's specter but wrestling with its effects in a more abstract way, especially now that treatment and prevention are more widely available. We've grown up reading and seeing the stories of those who lived through it—and those who didn't—but what of the generation in the middle that grew up in the immediate wake of AIDS but before the promise of PrEP. The generation that, as Lambda Award-winning writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts it, "came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, internalizing this trauma as part of becoming queer?" Sycamore's necessary and thought-provoking anthology amasses dispatches from writers and activists who weathered the fallout.”
—Michelle Hart, Oprah Daily

“Thirty-six essays by writers who have never known a world without AIDS highlight a disparity in education and the impacts of the classism, misogyny and racism that surround it.”
—New York Times Book Review

“This exceptional anthology bridges a false division between the queer generation characterized by death and the one characterized by prevention…The 36 essays in this anthology foster a necessary and dynamic discussion of that shared relationship, negative and positive, haunted and hopeful, manifesting ever more possibilities for the future.”
—Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness

“Between Certain Death and a Possible Future presents more than thirty-five different voices and perspectives from around the world, with a wide range of identities and experiences that sometimes confirm the mainstream tale of how queer generations have been shaped by their relationship to HIV and AIDS, and just as often show that the most common stories are the least common realities… Death in the face of love? It’s an unsettling formula, thus appropriate to the book as a whole, which specializes in the work of unsettling. It does not seek to unsettle primarily through stories of illness and loss, though plenty of those are collected here, but more through a wide range of testimonies: men, women, nonbinary, cis, trans, essayists, playwrights, performance artists, drag performers, activists, prisoners, academics, students, sex educators, sex workers, Black, Native, Asian, Latinx, urban and suburban and rural, housed and unhoused, positive and negative. As we turn the pages, moving from witness to witness, each new paragraph loosens ground lithified by the pressure of public service announcements, afterschool specials, medical brochures, news reports, political postures, gossip columns, family lore, cranks, quacks, ghosts, and rumors spread by the winds of time… It is the achievement of the book Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has assembled that each of its many writers, regardless of age or circumstance, takes grief and fear seriously, recognizes history, dreams of a better future, and offers models of love that are not solely models of death.”
—Matthew Cheney, Chicago Review of Books

“A wide-ranging and inclusive volume, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future introduces a multitude of voices that enhance our understanding of disease, medicalization, and human engagement… Between Certain Death and a Possible Future is an important book, a valuable reminder that progress is never linear but requires continual vigilance, flexibility, and creativity . .. Heartbreaking and enlightening, enraging and uplifting, it's an emotional read.”
—Eleanor J. Bader, Women's Review of Books

“The AIDS crisis and its trauma still looms large, a shadow over generations of queer people, but we often talk about those who came of age before and those who came later. Here, in a collection of 36 personal essays, the focus is on the generation in the middle—those who grew up during the epidemic and fully internalized its trauma early in their lives and as part of their identities. Between Certain Death and Possible Future contains stories of chosen families, lost communities, conventional wisdom rejected, and new wisdom shared.“
—Kaulie Lewis, The Millions

“Before the widespread availability of lifesaving medications but after the first terrifying years of silence, confusion and willful neglect of the deadly virus, Sycamore and her peers experienced life in between. The title of her new anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, encapsulates the web of complexity of growing up queer in that in-between place. That place itself is not between two fixed points, as there is no tangible line “before” or “after.” The book is vast in scope, perspective, style and experience. There are countless stories to be told from this time period, which was experienced in innumerable ways. Between Certain Death is a great work of collecting, of showing, of loving the stories of its 36 contributors and everyone around them, before and after.
—Sarah Neilson, Seattle Times

"The thirty-six personal essays... come from diverse perspectives and are filled with fear, grief, and loss, of course; but they also contain great empathy, sharp analysis, and even humor, as the writers confront the ongoing impact of the AIDS pandemic."
—Hank Trout, Art & Understanding

"An exciting and important collection that reconvenes community and brings our hidden feelings and experiences of HIV again to light and to consciousness."
—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

I thought I knew everything about how the queer generation after mine was impacted by AIDS, but Sycamore’s eye-opening anthology pierced my naive cockiness. I remember my life and sexual coming out before the AIDS crisis, but what if AIDS is all you’ve ever known? How did that define your queerness? Sycamore breaks open a dam of suppressed stories centered on stigma, from wildly diverse voices, pouring forth with startling honesty and resilience.
—Peter Staley, author of Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

"For decades, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has been putting together anthologies that transform the field of queer politics and let us understand ourselves and each other in new ways. Between Certain Death and a Possible Future is just such a book. It is a must-read for this moment, yet another juncture where we face the collision of brutal inequality, right-wing resurgence, and pandemic. This book is deeply personal, moving, and evocative, and at the same time has an enormous amount to teach us about the political and social conditions that have produced the social meanings of AIDS and sex that have shaped our lives."
—Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

“Between Certain Death and a Possible Future is an essential contribution to AIDS literature because it invites the reader to wrestle with the unceasing impact of HIV beyond the ‘crisis years,’ beyond heroic activism, into under-explored narrative terrain where effective medical treatments redefined the ongoing epidemic from certain death to something else we’re still figuring out, damaged but resilient, in search of a possible future.”
—Tony Valenzuela, writer and former executive director of the Foundation for the AIDS Monument and Lambda Literary

“In an age in which the range of remembered AIDS narratives narrows to a few, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s exquisite Between Certain Death and a Possible Future opens up the archive with vibrant, life-giving power, its multiple perspectives filling up the silence with heartbreak, irreverence, sexiness, and fury. This book doesn’t simply concern some long ago past—rather, it has so much to do with how we might live right now, and how unrelenting pressure needs to be applied against broken systems that would like to see us gone.”
—Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at The Edge of The World

“To be queer is to learn about yourself—your identity, your history, your community—in fragments. Mattilda has been painstakingly helping us put our pieces together for decades, and defiantly does it again in Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. Formally an anthology, this book is actually a bildungsroman, unlike any you’ve read before—this one doesn’t take coming-of-age for granted.”
—Vivek Shraya, author of The Subtweet and I’m Afraid of Men