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Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic
Three powerful profiles of men and women whose lives were changed forever by the AIDS epidemic
“Some of my reasons for wanting to write about AIDS were altruistic, others selfish. AIDS was decimating the community around me; there was a need to bear witness. AIDS had turned me and others like me into walking time bombs; there was a need to strike back, not just wait to die. What I didn't fully appreciate then, however, was the extent to which I was trying to bargain with AIDS: If I wrote about it, maybe I wouldn't get it. My article ran in May 1985. But AIDS didn't keep its part of the bargain.” —George Whitmore, The New York Times Magazine
Published at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Someone Was Here brings together three stories, reported between 1985 and 1987, about the human cost of the disease.Whitmore writes of Jim Sharp, a man in New York infected with AIDS, and Edward Dunn, one of the many people in Jim’s support network, who volunteers with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organization in the city. Whitmore also profiles a mother, Nellie, who drives to San Francisco to bring her troubled son, Mike, home to Colorado where he will succumb to AIDS. Finally, Whitmore tells of the doctors and nurses working on the AIDS team in a South Bronx hospital, struggling to treat patients afflicted with an illness they don’t yet fully understand.
Expanded from reporting that originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Someone Was Here is a tragic and deeply felt look at a generation traumatized by AIDS, published just one year before George Whitmore’s own death from the disease.
“Some of my reasons for wanting to write about AIDS were altruistic, others selfish. AIDS was decimating the community around me; there was a need to bear witness. AIDS had turned me and others like me into walking time bombs; there was a need to strike back, not just wait to die. What I didn't fully appreciate then, however, was the extent to which I was trying to bargain with AIDS: If I wrote about it, maybe I wouldn't get it. My article ran in May 1985. But AIDS didn't keep its part of the bargain.” —George Whitmore, The New York Times Magazine
Published at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Someone Was Here brings together three stories, reported between 1985 and 1987, about the human cost of the disease.Whitmore writes of Jim Sharp, a man in New York infected with AIDS, and Edward Dunn, one of the many people in Jim’s support network, who volunteers with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organization in the city. Whitmore also profiles a mother, Nellie, who drives to San Francisco to bring her troubled son, Mike, home to Colorado where he will succumb to AIDS. Finally, Whitmore tells of the doctors and nurses working on the AIDS team in a South Bronx hospital, struggling to treat patients afflicted with an illness they don’t yet fully understand.
Expanded from reporting that originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Someone Was Here is a tragic and deeply felt look at a generation traumatized by AIDS, published just one year before George Whitmore’s own death from the disease.
- GenresNonfictionLGBT
211 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 1988
10 people are currently reading
126 people want to read
About the author
George Whitmore
9 books7 followersAn author and playwright who wrote about the effect of AIDS on society and on his friends, then finally about his own expected death from complications of the disease. Member of the Violet Quill literary group that met from 1980-81.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 16, 2016
George Whitmore was a New York City-based author who wrote on contemporary issues. He was gay and he died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 43. This was the time when the AIDS diagnosis was an almost-certain death sentence. It would be a few years, yet, until medical advances made the disease treatable. (For an outstanding look at how these advances were made, read David France's excellent book, "How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS".)
But George Whitmore - like many others - died before the "cocktails" of the mid to late 1990's "tamed" the disease. In the mid-1980's, Whitmore wrote a series on AIDS patients, which then led to a longer book called, "Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic". The book has been reissued in e-version a few years ago, but as I read it now, I remembered reading it first when it was originally published. Whitmore picks gay men and intravenous drug users to write about and looks at how the epidemic was handled in New York City, San Francisco, and in America's Heartland, Colorado. But he doesn't look at how the disease was handled on a governmental level - but rather on a personal level. And that personal level includes the patient as well as his or her family and care givers. Whitmore's most vivid writing is of the care and patients at a hospital in an Hispanic neighborhood, where those suffering from AIDS were either gay or drug addicts. Or their families as AIDS, even in the 1980's, was becoming a family disease as husbands infected wives and mothers infected children at birth. His writing is vivid and visceral and he brings the reader to the bedsides of the dying and into the hearts of those who loved and cared for them.
I wrote that David France's book was not an easy read. Neither is George Whitmore's book. I can't begin to know how he felt as he watched others around him die of the same disease that would take him a few years later. His book is to be admired, both on a personal and professional level.
But George Whitmore - like many others - died before the "cocktails" of the mid to late 1990's "tamed" the disease. In the mid-1980's, Whitmore wrote a series on AIDS patients, which then led to a longer book called, "Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic". The book has been reissued in e-version a few years ago, but as I read it now, I remembered reading it first when it was originally published. Whitmore picks gay men and intravenous drug users to write about and looks at how the epidemic was handled in New York City, San Francisco, and in America's Heartland, Colorado. But he doesn't look at how the disease was handled on a governmental level - but rather on a personal level. And that personal level includes the patient as well as his or her family and care givers. Whitmore's most vivid writing is of the care and patients at a hospital in an Hispanic neighborhood, where those suffering from AIDS were either gay or drug addicts. Or their families as AIDS, even in the 1980's, was becoming a family disease as husbands infected wives and mothers infected children at birth. His writing is vivid and visceral and he brings the reader to the bedsides of the dying and into the hearts of those who loved and cared for them.
I wrote that David France's book was not an easy read. Neither is George Whitmore's book. I can't begin to know how he felt as he watched others around him die of the same disease that would take him a few years later. His book is to be admired, both on a personal and professional level.
April 11, 2019
I quite liked this: Whitmore strikes the right balance (to me) between journalistic distance and sympathy. But I read it with two eyes. The one, I'm guessing that folks born after 1980 would use, peers back and sees a sepia-toned horror, but one with faces in focus. The nightmare isn't so overdone that it obscures the people who lived it and its always useful to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. Nobody's perfect. We are them. So from that point of view, the book probably still succeeds 30 years on, when people with Aids are practically invisible - albeit for a happier reason.
My other eye, however, the one that saw this first hand, was drawn to small observations Whitmore made - little remarks inserted here and there - that acted like a code. Decode the meaning and you're right back in the late 1980s surrounded by ghosts. We all knew people very much like the folks profiled here, so our familiar versions are back. It's an emotional wallop. So this book was for me as much memorial as it was journalism.
My other eye, however, the one that saw this first hand, was drawn to small observations Whitmore made - little remarks inserted here and there - that acted like a code. Decode the meaning and you're right back in the late 1980s surrounded by ghosts. We all knew people very much like the folks profiled here, so our familiar versions are back. It's an emotional wallop. So this book was for me as much memorial as it was journalism.
January 3, 2014
This is a book about AIDS and is snapshots of real stories taken from interviews that the writer conducted. These stories take place between 1983 to 1987 at the height of the epidemic.
It's not an easy book to review because it is short real life stories of sufferers and their family and loved ones. it's full of heartbreak, love and forgiveness the stories are hard to read. There is data in here that is, due to when the stories were written, out of date and pretty irrelevant to today. In saying that the stories themselves are still relevant as to the horror of the disease. This book does remind me a bit of And the Band Played On to a certain degree with the start of the disease, stats and so on.
I had done volunteer work in an AIDS hospice and the people that were there got the disease through drug use of through heterosexual means. It was heartbreaking to witness one man who's wife deserted him towards the end and she wouldn't let him see his children in his final days. He craved human contact and I used to wrap my arms around him and hold him as he cried at not being able to see his kids. There was also laughter, love and tears as well as the hard day to day facts of living with AIDS.
Personal stories like this should not be forgotten, the disease should not be forgotten. AIDS has been pushed to the back burner and is hardly mentioned now due to better drugs and therapies that now make living a long live with it possible. It is still there and sadly these stories continue.
This is an ARC book provided by Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
It's not an easy book to review because it is short real life stories of sufferers and their family and loved ones. it's full of heartbreak, love and forgiveness the stories are hard to read. There is data in here that is, due to when the stories were written, out of date and pretty irrelevant to today. In saying that the stories themselves are still relevant as to the horror of the disease. This book does remind me a bit of And the Band Played On to a certain degree with the start of the disease, stats and so on.
I had done volunteer work in an AIDS hospice and the people that were there got the disease through drug use of through heterosexual means. It was heartbreaking to witness one man who's wife deserted him towards the end and she wouldn't let him see his children in his final days. He craved human contact and I used to wrap my arms around him and hold him as he cried at not being able to see his kids. There was also laughter, love and tears as well as the hard day to day facts of living with AIDS.
Personal stories like this should not be forgotten, the disease should not be forgotten. AIDS has been pushed to the back burner and is hardly mentioned now due to better drugs and therapies that now make living a long live with it possible. It is still there and sadly these stories continue.
This is an ARC book provided by Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
February 7, 2016
A very personal account of what AIDS was to society that goes way beyond the gay community where it hit the hardest. Written in the mid to late eighties, it has the immediacy of a world that was only beginning to realize the horror that the plague would be bringing in the days and years to come.
April 19, 2022
CRUSHED BY THE “JUGGERNAUT”
George Whitmore gave us two superb novels, The Confessions of Danny Slocum and Nebraska. He also wrote a masterpiece of nonfiction, Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic. Someone Was Here was published six months after Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, which is still in print. Someone Was Here is out of print, except for an electronic version. Although smaller in scope than And the Band Played On, Someone Was Here is an important work.
In the prologue to Someone Was Here, Whitmore describes a photograph of a monk in a charnel house in a monastery on Mt. Athos. The monk is holding a large box of bones. Whitmore writes, “Someone . . . has to tend to the boxes. Someone has to arrange and rearrange the display. Someone has to take the box down off the shelf to show you. This is that man.” Whitmore is also that man. He will show us boxes of bones. He will bear witness and prove that someone was here. This grisly prologue is powerful.
Whitmore doesn’t just write about gay white men with AIDS. He gives us harrowing, intimate accounts of all kinds of people who are crushed by the “juggernaut,” his term for the AIDS epidemic. Who can forget AIDS patient Jim Sharp and his volatile relationship with Edward Dunn, his GMHC counselor? Or the loving, determined Nellie Rocha and her wayward son Mike? Or Nurse Carmen Baez? Or Sr. Fran Whelan? Or little Frederico?
In the epilogue to Someone Was Here, Whitmore reveals that when he was researching and writing the book, he was also confronting his own AIDS diagnosis: “I’m afraid to finish the book. I’m afraid of what will happen next.” Although Whitmore knew that he was, as were many of his subjects, under a death sentence, he managed to keep himself out of the book. He acknowledges the courageous people who inspired him to keep going, for instance, Jim Sharp with his “life-affirming anger.” Someone Was Here was published in hardcover in April 1988 and in paperback in April 1989. George Whitmore died on April 19, 1989.
Someone Was Here should be included on every list of significant books about AIDS.
George Whitmore gave us two superb novels, The Confessions of Danny Slocum and Nebraska. He also wrote a masterpiece of nonfiction, Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic. Someone Was Here was published six months after Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, which is still in print. Someone Was Here is out of print, except for an electronic version. Although smaller in scope than And the Band Played On, Someone Was Here is an important work.
In the prologue to Someone Was Here, Whitmore describes a photograph of a monk in a charnel house in a monastery on Mt. Athos. The monk is holding a large box of bones. Whitmore writes, “Someone . . . has to tend to the boxes. Someone has to arrange and rearrange the display. Someone has to take the box down off the shelf to show you. This is that man.” Whitmore is also that man. He will show us boxes of bones. He will bear witness and prove that someone was here. This grisly prologue is powerful.
Whitmore doesn’t just write about gay white men with AIDS. He gives us harrowing, intimate accounts of all kinds of people who are crushed by the “juggernaut,” his term for the AIDS epidemic. Who can forget AIDS patient Jim Sharp and his volatile relationship with Edward Dunn, his GMHC counselor? Or the loving, determined Nellie Rocha and her wayward son Mike? Or Nurse Carmen Baez? Or Sr. Fran Whelan? Or little Frederico?
In the epilogue to Someone Was Here, Whitmore reveals that when he was researching and writing the book, he was also confronting his own AIDS diagnosis: “I’m afraid to finish the book. I’m afraid of what will happen next.” Although Whitmore knew that he was, as were many of his subjects, under a death sentence, he managed to keep himself out of the book. He acknowledges the courageous people who inspired him to keep going, for instance, Jim Sharp with his “life-affirming anger.” Someone Was Here was published in hardcover in April 1988 and in paperback in April 1989. George Whitmore died on April 19, 1989.
Someone Was Here should be included on every list of significant books about AIDS.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews