Reviving the Tribe

Abstract

During the summer of 1996, I worked the door at the pub at the University of Chicago. In between pints and checking people’s identification, I read Eric Rofes’s magnum opus, Reviving the Tribe, while I finished writing my book White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic. When my book finally came out, Rofes called me to have coffee al the Oscar Wilde bookshop on Christopher Street. Over the next decade, we became fast friends, sharing ideas about activism and writing, organizing and resilience, academe and research. And through that, he opened a world for me.