THE STORM

Los Angeles native Zyda was in his 20s when hints of the impending crisis began emerging, which coincided with his decision to come out to his UCLA fraternity brothers. While working for a local newspaper during college, life became complicated by a “sketchy and terrifying” virus that was making its way through the gay community. Soon, he writes, around 1983, “people simply just disappeared.” Young and vulnerable, Zyda was petrified of the infectious “gay cancer” looming over his newfound community. But when he met Yale Law graduate Stephen at a West Hollywood gym, their whirlwind romance blossomed briskly despite a 12-year age difference and Stephen’s conservative political leanings. Woven throughout the narrative are generous details about the author’s family history and a youth spent gravitating toward a beloved, now-deceased lesbian sister who acted as a second mother. Zyda effectively sets his personal story against the backdrop of 1980s-era homophobic discrimination, experimental AIDS therapies, and precarious social, political, and clinical climates across LGBTQ+ communities. He conjures an authentic vibe for a pivotal era during which he established himself as both an out gay man and a brave, compassionate partner, particularly when Stephen’s health waned with a harrowing barrage of AIDS-related infections at age 35. Along with crushing statistical data, the author paints these personal scenes with palpable devastation, recalling the heartbreaking reality of his bedside vigil with Stephen and the alarming horror that he may have contracted the virus himself. Zyda’s deft navigation of the “AIDS Vortex of Insanity” makes the text an emotionally charged account well-suited for readers who may have survived that fraught period themselves. It’s also a moving, informative, and ultimately uplifting narrative for younger LGBTQ+ readers yearning to understand the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic.

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