Love Your Asian Body

AIDS isn't just a disease; it's also a movement." So begins Eric Wat's moving community memoir of how the AIDS epidemic reshaped Asian American activisms in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s. Initially shrouded in misinformation and denialism, as the disease started taking the lives of Asian Americans in southern California, the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) was formed in 1992 to advocate for people living with HIV and change social norms about sexuality in these communities. Based on interviews with more than 35 people intimately involved with AIDS prevention, care, and advocacy work, Love Your Asian Body explores the journeys these individuals took-connecting the deeply personal with the uncompromisingly political. Wat narrates the transformation of APAIT from a scrappy group of grassroots activists to its emergence as one of the more formidable forces in the AIDS service landscape in 1990s Los Angeles. These activists brought a sex positive ethos to the work of community organizing andHIV prevention, centering pleasure and the sexual agency of LGBTQ Asian Americans. Detailing the broader systemic inequities AIDS illuminated alongside the coalitions activists brought into being, Love Your Asian Body offers a vital set of histories about the intertwined realities of race, sexuality, and gender in social movements"--