Joaquin Terrones WGS Intellectual Forum on Wednesday February 7th, 2018 at noon in E51-275.

Joaquin will read from his novel Orison.

Orison chronicles a friendship between two gay men of color during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic in New York City.  In 1985, when the city’s death toll has climbed into the thousands, David arrives in Manhattan and meets Jay, who has already lost all his close friends and former lovers.  The novel follows them over the next decade as they go out to nightclubs such as the Paradise Garage; cruise Central Park; test positive together; attend ACT UP protests; help raise David’s teenage nephew; and travel to Brazil, Mexico and Montreal.  Charting lives in which long-term plans or relationships seem impossible yet necessary and vital, it offers a meditation on survival, on the demands of living and outliving.