My Government Means to Kill Me

Earl "Trey" Singleton III walks away from his wealthy Black Indianapolis family and arrives in New York City in 1985 with less than twenty-five hundred dollars. He takes a room in a boarding house full of misfits, volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being tested by seasoned gay rights activists, joins the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. As friends and lovers fall ill around him, Trey navigates past traumas, strained family ties, and the meaning of a life lived amid so much death. Newson tells the story in Trey's brash, funny, footnote-studded voice, folding real figures and events into a coming-of-age that doubles as a portrait of a movement being born.