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Sean Strub
Gender: Male
Sexuality: Gay
DOB: 16 May 1958
Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish
Nationality: American
Occupation: Writer, entrepreneur, activist
Note 1: Was one of the first people on the scene of the murder of John Lennon
Note 2: Has HIV
The controlling power of the gay closet is difficult to comprehend by those who haven't lived it. In the 1970s, many, if not most, gay men woke up every morning with the belief that they would rather kill themselves than be identified publicly as homosexual. During the "Lavender Scare" in the 1950s and '60s, a campaign instigated by the Eisenhower administration and senator Joseph McCarthy resulted in a purge of homosexuals and suspected homosexuals from the state department and other federal agencies. Some of them, upon learning they were under investigation or about to be arrested, took their own lives. For many gay men I met in Washington in the 1970s, those memories remained fresh and frightening.
Sean Strub - Body Counts
All books I am reading for my Queer Lives Through Memoir class this semester. I will be trying to do a short review of each book as a finish reading them. I have already done reviews of Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure, Gender Outlaw, and Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name.
- Hiding In Hip Hop Terrance Dean
- Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure Dorothy Allison
- Gender Outlaw (revised edition) Kate Bornstein
- Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name Audre Lorde
- Before Night Falls Reinaldo Arenas
- Man Alive Thomas Page McBee
- Fun Home Alison Bechdel
- Tomboy Survival Guide Ivan Coyote
- A Body, Undone Christina Crosby
- Running With Scissors Augusten Burroughs
- Prairie Silence Melanie M. Hoffert
- Body Counts Sean Strub
A product of HIV Justice Worldwide, which is a global network to abolish unjust HIV laws, the Toolkit organizes its information into 12 categories:
How HIV criminalization undermines the HIV response
What the experts say
Organizing advocacy
Understanding the law
Initiating policy and law reform
Supporting fair and robust trials
Using science to prove your argument
Working with police
Educating prosecutors
Educating judges
Getting the message right
Other tool kits
Body Counts: A Memoir of Activism, Sex, and Survival By Sean Strub details his life from his late teens through his later life in the early 2000s. This memoir follows Strub’s early interest in politics; starting with his job in Washington, D.C. as a Senate elevator operator as a young man, and moves through events in his life such as accepting his identity as a gay man, his pursuit of multiple entrepreneurial endeavors, the rise of the AIDS epidemic, and his involvement in activism.
Personally, I thought that the first third of the book was kind of uninteresting. The writing was a bit dry, and his early work in Washington, D.C. wasn’t particularly captivating. I may just feel like this though since I have been reading and doing assignments on memoirs every week and I am kind of getting burnt out on memoirs. The rest of the book details the rise of the AIDS epidemic and how Strub was impacted by it. It’s one thing to read about the AIDS epidemic in a history class, it’s way different to read about it in a very personal context. You are able to see how AIDS started out as just a whisper, a mysterious killer that many people chose to ignore or refused to believe actually existed, and evolved into a full-blown epidemic. As Strub witnessed more and more people around him; strangers and friends; get sick and quickly die, he launched into his career of AIDS activism. This activism persisted through personal tragedies and even his own illness.
During these parts of the book, I really struggled with reading it. He talks about so many people he knew that were sick, and dying, and dead; including his long-time boyfriend. Strub goes into a lot of detail with his descriptions of sickness and death. This was very hard for me to read since I went through something similar with my mom was I was younger (not AIDS, but cancer). There were several times when reading this book that I ended up in tears or having a panic attack. Several people in my class had similar reactions to this book because of events in their own lives. Because of this, this memoir was one of my least favorites from my class.
Trigger Warnings for this book included: Mentions of rape; death; sickness; terminal illness; cancer; medical situations.
They weren’t burned, but they were left to die just as surely.
--
Body Counts Sean Strub
A discussion led by POZ founder Sean Strub about the early days of AIDS research.
In this episode of POZ at Home hosted by The Sero Project, POZ founder Sean Strub has a conversation with Dr. Stuart Schlossman and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend about the early days of AIDS research.
POZ founder Sean Strub is a self-described “leftie gay guy with AIDS for mayor” in a documentary premiering June 30 on Amazon Prime Video.
In 2019, to mark the 25th anniversary of POZ, we caught up with POZ founder Sean Strub. In addition to being the executive director of the Sero Project, a network of people living with HIV working to fight stigma and HIV criminalization, he is mayor of Milford, Pennsylvania.
In 2016, he was unanimously appointed mayor by the town’s council. In 2017, he was elected mayor. It was not his first time as a political candidate. He was the first openly HIV-positive person to run for U.S. Congress in 1990, and he details his candidacy in his 2014 autobiography, Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival.
The ups and downs of his campaign for mayor were captured in a documentary by Dutch journalist and longtime friend Max Westerman. Titled My Friend, The Mayor: Small-Town Democracy in the Age of Trump, the film debuts on Amazon Prime Video on Tuesday, June 30.
