Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Perhaps this hits harder if you're already familiar with the author and It's a Sin, neither of which I'd even heard of.

The book is part career CV where names of different shows and different songs in them are dropped as if we should know them all. 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. Author Jill Nalder is the inspiration behind the character of Jill in It's A Sin (a brilliant show if you haven't seen it), and that's how I found out about this book and knew I needed to read it. In particular, one of Jill’s fallen friends tried everything to survive until they were drugs available to control the HIV virus – they very sadly did not but did inspire others to fight on.The frequent mention of so many show tunes and musicals through out the book could have been the lyrics of a list song to me. I highly recommend this book - it's beautifully written, brings people who should be alive and performing today back to life in a lovely way, and educates the reader brilliantly about a scary time in the world.

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. Warning to anyone with the slightest resistance to writing about friendships formed through singing show tunes; they will wonder quite what the fuss is about with this book, and will wonder quite where the author is coming from.There is also humour in the tragedy as different selves are revealed in the deaths of certain gay men than they revealed in their lives. 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. s as explored through three close friends', as the lives of three close friends of Jill Nalder are shared in the book, along with a few more distant friendships, mark the progress that doctors and hospitals make in managing the medication and emotional support of young men with A. Jill also informs us about the many advances that have been made since the epidemic which was very useful to know.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I think it’s better than Ruth Coker Burns ‘all the young men’ but despite the subject matter, I still think the book falls short of being outstanding. What she does not say, which I will, is that as the young men 'come out' they also learn how many feelings and personal choices their parents were taught to suppress in their youth, feelings and actions which the parents expect the young men to suppress in their turn. On a lighter note, I think anyone who likes theatre or anything West End/Broadway would really enjoy this as that is the industry Jill and her friends all work in and there's mentions of loads of different shows as well as some names that people may recognise.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. In this heartbreaking, inspiring and deeply-felt book, actor, activist and AIDS awareness campaigner Jill Nalder – inspiration for one of the central characters in TV drama It’s A Sin – delivers an incredibly moving and personal account of life and friendship in 1980s London at the onset of the AIDS crisis. 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. I laughed and cried like a baby, and was transported back to a time of innocence, clouded by the enormity of the harsh reality . 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 could get.

Many very funny stories do not make the It’s A Sin script because they are even too graphic for Channel 4. It’s truest amazing to read Jill telling these boys stories, sharing their lives, their loves and their experiences.It’s Jill, real Jill with all her courage, strength, dignity, honesty, tenacity and love taking us from the pink palace and way beyond in her words with her boys. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. 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. That friend made it to 7 August 1995, painfully close to life-saving triple-drug therapy that would arrive less than 12 months later.