Amazon Guest Review of Body Counts

By John Berendt author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

When the anti-viral drug AZT was approved for use against HIV/AIDS back in 1987, Sean Strub's doctor urged him to take it. Strub was HIV-positive, and early tests of the new drug had produced dramatic results. He followed his doctor's advice, but reluctantly. After two weeks of agonizing over the pros and cons, he stopped taking AZT. It was a gutsy move, since no other drug was on the horizon, but it turned out the best thing he could have done: AZT's benefits proved to be short-term, and the drug itself was toxic at the dosages prescribed. "[H]ad I continued to take it," Strub writes in Body Counts, his engrossing and immensely readable memoir, "I very likely would have died, as thousands of others did."

A small library of books by people with AIDS has sprung up in the thirty years since the start of the epidemic. They constitute a remarkable sub-genre of historic importance, and Body Counts shares qualities common to the best of them (Paul Monette's Borrowed Time, Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, David B. Feinberg's Queer and Loathing, and Shawn Decker's My Pet Virus). Strub writes from the perspective of an activist-insider. He sheds new light on the nature of the disease, the struggle against it, and the politics that pervade every aspect of what has come to be known as AIDS Inc.

At an early age, as one of six children in a conservative, church-going Iowa family, Strub demonstrated an entrepreneurial flair and an obsession with politics. He sold subscriptions door-to-door and hawked soda and popcorn at University of Iowa football games. In high school he was a page in the Iowa legislature. In college he ran the "Senators Only" elevator in the U.S. Capitol and expected that this would put him on a "political fast track." Life took unexpected turns, however, and by the time he entered politics in 1990, it was as the first openly HIV-positive candidate for Congress.

When he became sick with AIDS, Strub focused his energies as an activist and entrepreneur on AIDS itself. In 1994--just as purple lesions of Kaposi sarcoma began to show on his face--he drew up plans to launch POZ, a consumer magazine for people with HIV. POZ would serve as a source of up-to-date medical, scientific, legal and financial information about the epidemic. It would create a sense of community for its readers by featuring stories about people just like them who were managing to live fruitful lives while surviving with HIV.

Strub raised most of the money for POZ from a company with the ghoulish specialty of buying life-insurance policies from terminally ill people who were near death. He cashed in his policy for $450,000, sold his country house, maxed out his credit cards, withdrew his savings, and put all of it into the successful startup of POZ.

Through POZ, Strub gained (and shared) sobering insights into Big Pharma, which was both his biggest source of advertising revenue and at the same time the most frequent subject of investigative reports in POZ. He avoided conflicts of interest by publishing the uncensored truth about the strengths and weaknesses of every drug targeted at AIDS. More than one drug company pulled its advertising in anger over a negative mention, nearly sinking the magazine while ironically confirming its credibility.

As Body Counts describes in memorable detail, Strub frequently backed up the magazine's stand on issues with acts of boots-on-the-ground civil disobedience. One such episode, to publicize the campaign for safer-sex education, involved placing a giant condom over the suburban home of Senator Jesse Helms, the Senate's most implacable homophobe and foe of AIDS funding. Another far less light-hearted action took place at St. Patrick's Cathedral in protest over the church's deceptive and potentially harmful "Condoms Don't Work" campaign.

Two years after the launch of POZ, the introduction of combination therapy drastically reduced the death rate from AIDS so that when the twentieth anniversary of POZ occurred in 2014, both Strub and the magazine were around to celebrate it.