Only a decade and a half after the Stonewall Rebellion initiated gay liberation in America, the AIDS epidemic threatened to lay waste the first generation of liberated gay men and undermine the efforts of lesbians and gays to structure new ways of life and build a new culture. In this moment of crisis it was the writers who stood in the forefront of the gay community's response to this disaster, The writers who sounded the alarm and tried to comprehend and stand up to this catastrophe. As an ever increasing wave of disease and death threatened a whole generation, personal and professional agendas were put on hold as authors had to confront the plague threateing their circle of friends, their lovers, their own bodies. As writers, they turned to the written word to confront the encroaching fear and panic and despair, and in the heat of crisis produced work of exceptional urgency and power. John Preston has assedmbled a remarkable collection of these reports from the midst of an ongoing struggle, personal dispatches from the front lines of this medical and social disaster by some of the most accomplished lesbian and gay writers of our time. Never has the social and spiritual importance that the sheer act of writing can have for a community been more starkly visible; never has the power inherent in the writer's craft been more evident. - Dust jacket.