Wild Animals I Have Known. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Wild Animals I Have Known

In 1977, Kevin Bentley left Texas in a 1969 Volkswagen and headed for San Francisco, joining a generation of young gay men drawn west by the promise of sexual freedom and the chance to build lives on their own terms. And Bentley kept a diary. Wild Animals I Have Known draws from nearly two decades of those journals to create an intimate, unapologetically erotic record of gay life in a city transformed by liberation. Bentley cruises bars and cafés, works in bookstores, experiments with drugs, falls into bed with strangers, and falls in and out of love, recording it all with wit, intelligence, and startling candor. Beneath the abundance of sex runs another hunger: the stubbornly romantic hope that the next man might offer something more.

Then AIDS arrives, and the world chronicled in Bentley's diaries begins to change. Lovers and friends disappear, sexual freedom acquires new dangers, and loss becomes part of everyday life. Yet Bentley's account remains intensely personal rather than political, preserving the jokes, bad decisions, desire, loneliness, friendships, and ordinary pleasures that larger histories often leave behind. Frank, funny, literate, and frequently explicit, Wild Animals I Have Known is an eyewitness account of gay San Francisco from its exuberant pre-AIDS years into a radically altered age.