On AIDS Activism, Sex, and Estrangement a book launch for Illuminations on Market Street, the new novel by Benjamin Heim Shepard.

A reading and conversation between Benjamin Shepard and Micah Bucey, as well as a panel of AIDS activists Eric Sawyer and Karen Ramspacher discussing the sex and social justice of AIDS work in pre protease New York and San Francisco, when death was in the air, and treatments were nowhere to be found.

Shepard traces the story of a young caregiver in San Francisco in the early 1990s. Cab is on the deep end of a losing streak. After having been dumped yet again, he moves to Haight-Ashbury fresh out of college. It is the middle of a recession, before the dot-com boom, and AIDS is an immediate and untreatable reality. A story about AIDS and sex, acting up and praying for the dead, this is a story about living and fighting in the face of insurmountable challenges as one writer searches for his own story.

Doors at 3:30.

Event starts at 4 PM.