Love from the Pink Palace: Memories of Love, Loss and Cabaret through the AIDS Crisis, for fans of IT'S A SIN

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Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Considering this was good for someone who had no context (me), I think that it would be a hit for anyone who is familiar with the author and her scene, and I would recommend the Audible read by Jill with her lovely Welsh accent. For fans of channel four’s ‘It’s a sin’ this is a must read…the book is very different to the show and is heartbreaking, funny, enlightening and shocking.

With her band of best friends - of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own - she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs she could get. Jill also makes sure to point out in her book as well how AIDs diagnoses also affected many women and how testing procedure failed women and children who may have contracted the disease whether it be through sexual relations, blood transfusions, or in utero. It may also be true that gay men were half-aware that sex is something that had always resisted literal and absolutely honest two sided conversations. In this moving memoir, IT'S A SIN's Jill Nalder tells the true story of her life during the AIDS crisis, and that of friends and colleagues, doctors and nurses, activists and fundraisers.But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the ‘gay flu’, and Jill and her friends now found their formerly carefree existence under threat. When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. Although a factual depiction of the Aids pandemic, Love from the Pink Palace is about love and family and pride and loyalty.

Jill is and was a true inspirational hero and support for a lot of gay men who suffered through the very worst of the AIDs pandemic. Make sure you do not have a mouthful of drink when you read about the guy who lives opposite the Pink Palace. Like a book I read previously and reviewed here, by a different author, I came to this book via BBC radio. The love that shines through on every page of this book as Jill describes her life growing up in London, working in the theatre and West End, with a bunch of beautiful boys who made her laugh and whom she cared about deeply, is immense.The author is a talented heterosexual woman whose talent for writing songs, singing and performing for the public put her in contact with a society of selectively extrovert gay men and drag artists who wanted nothing more in life than to be on the stage, men who wanted to live their whole lives to be part of a distinctly extrovert, well performed, stagecraft.

I cannot help but salute the humane and non-judgemental centre of this book, where perhaps to be that close, and to be that observant of the new gay community in action required the observer to be heterosexual and female. This story is a mix of things - creativity, and artistic dreams as well as friendship and family (both born and found), strength, grief, and most of all love. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here.Despite the darkness and despair of parts of the book, Nalder skillfully combines snippets of humour, loads of love and joy and a deep humanity that , despite my tears, kept me reading on. This book is an absolute eye opener about a time that people are still affected and traumatised by, and while we know now that a HIV diagnosis isn't the death sentence it once was, we still have a long way to go before we overcome the stigma and fear that still rings around such a diagnosis. Growing up through the 80’s I witnessed the war years and this book takes me right back to the time and london.

An important period of world history where the human stories often get lost in the headlines from the time.Far far too many references to theatres and plays, which lost me as someone who is not familiar with that world.