Rat Bohemia

On the Lower East Side of early-1990s New York, three friends in their mid-thirties hold each other up through the AIDS crisis. Rita Mae Weems works as a city rat exterminator despite a childhood terror of rats and an estrangement from the father who threw her out at sixteen. Killer scrapes by watering plants and renting out her bed. David, a young gay writer, is dying, and he spends his last months mourning the lovers and friends already lost. Schulman ties the plague years directly to the heterosexual families who cast these people out, finding blackly funny warmth and stubborn faith in queer community even as the losses pile up.