To commemorate World AIDS Day, Women and Children First hosted a Raising Our Voices discussion featuring Press Forward Chicago Executive Director, Windy City Times co-founder and owner and author Tracy Baim; StoryStudio Chicago Artistic Director and best-selling author Rebecca Makkai; and HIV/AIDS activist, award-winning author and public speaker Victoria Noe, Dec. 1 at their bookstore located in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood.
Baim spoke about how World AIDS Day wasn’t commemorated by the federal government this year and called them “ostriches in the sand.” She added that the Trump administration has also “cut USAID funding, [which] is actually killing people around the world and also likely has the potential to make AIDS resistant and more problematic because of the inconsistency of medicine.”
The reason why Baim said she writes books like Liberating Healthcare: 50 Years of Resistance, Resilience, and Healing at Howard Brown Health is to put everything about specific topics in her archives in books for future reference and research purposes.
Makkai said fiction is “tricky” because if an author goes into it “with a point to prove” the book “hits you on the head. The characters are puppets. It doesn’t feel real.” She added that she “is incapable of writing something that’s not political … The politics of [my books] are probably going to be vaguely in line with my worldview.”
When the world became aware of HIV/AIDS, Makkai said, she was also coming of age. She said that when she was watching the Oscars when she was a tween, the In Memoriam segment included Howard Ashman, her favorite Disney lyricist, who died of AIDS. She spoke about her lifelong interest in the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how it impacted the world, which became the focus of her The Great Believers book.
Makkai said “books can be enormous vessels for disinformation” and “they are not fact-checked the way journalism is.” She added that she has a fact-checker for all her novels. Makkai said in the fiction world every project has a different relationship with reality and realism. She added that for The Great Believers she could have made up a fictional city but decided to set the book in her hometown of Chicago with real places mentioned alongside her fictional characters. Makkai said the newest edition of The Great Believers includes a 20-page oral history that she originally wrote for Chicago Magazine in 2020 called They Were Warriors. In that piece, activists involved in a significant 1990 AIDS-focused protest in Chicago reminisced about that era.
Noe referenced her groundbreaking non-fiction book F*g Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community and added that for her, “There is really no point to me writing if it’s not for advocacy.” She said the first thing she wrote was for this publication’s AIDS at 30 series 14 years ago.
The impetus for F*g Hags, Divas and Moms, Noe said, was the desire to tell these women’s stories so they would not be lost to history and with UNSTOPPABLE: Straight Women on the AIDS Frontlines she wanted to document what is happening in the public health environment today. She added that her other goal as a writer is to ensure that women got tested for HIV so if they were positive they would get diagnosed and treated by doctors and if needed, get on disability.
“The thing about writing nonfiction these days is you have to be prepared to be attacked,” said Noe. “You have to assume you will be attacked from someone somewhere. It doesn’t have to make any sense. It doesn’t have to be logical. It doesn’t even have to be right. With the F*g Hags book, the only criticism I ever had came from young gay men who accused me of erasing the suffering of gay men in the AIDS epidemic by writing about women. And my response was, ‘yeah, you didn’t read the book.’
“I fact checked everything [in F*g Hags],” she added. “It was obsessive about this. That was six years ago. This year was very different [with UNSTOPPABLE]. I had to think a lot harder about who was going in the book because there are now AIDS denialists. No one was thinking about AIDS denialists six years ago. Now we have Bobby Kennedy Jr. at HHS, who’s not sure what causes HIV but he thinks is probably poppers.” For the AIDS denialists chapter of UNSTOPPABLE, Noe made sure she only used direct quotes from those people’s published works.
Additionally, Baim read from her recently released book, Liberating Healthcare: 50 Years of Resistance, Resilience, and Healing at Howard Brown Health; Makkai read from her AIDS epidemic focused historical fiction book, The Great Believers; and Noe read from her most recent book, UNSTOPPABLE: Straight Women on the AIDS Frontlines.