Anne-christine d’Adesky will join West Hollywood City Councilmember Lindsey Horvath on Tuesday in a discussion at Skylight Books of d’Adesky’s memoir, “The Pox Lover.”
d’Adesky’s book takes the reader on a tour of 1990s Manhattan, and its once-funky East Village: through squatter clashes with police to all-night drag parties. The author relives the joyous anarchy of the Lesbian Avengers and ACT UP’s public funerals. She also predicts the rise of populism and extreme nationalism now sweeping the globe.
Traveling as a journalist to Paris, an insomniac d’Adesky trolls the Seine, encountering waves of exiles fleeing violence in the Balkans, Haiti, and Rwanda. The author implicates her own bloodline in this history, mercilessly digging into her aristocratic family’s roots in Vichy France and colonial Haiti.
d’Adesky is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker who reported on the global AIDS epidemic for New York Native, Out, The Nation, and the Village Voice. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts and Writing from Barnard College in 1979, and her Master’s Degree from Columbia Journalism Graduate School in 1982. She was an early member of ACT UP and cofounder of the Lesbian Avengers. Her books include “Beyond Shock: Charting the Landscape of Sexual Violence in Post-Quake Haiti,” “Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS”, and a novel set in post-Duvalier Haiti, “Under the Bone.” She received the first Award of Courage from amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. d’Adesky lives in Oakland with her three children.
Skylight is located at 1818 N. Vermont Ave. in Los Angeles. The reading begins at 7:30 p.m.
