At Your Own Risk - Softcover

Jarman, Derek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099222914 ISBN 13: 9780099222910

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 1994

Synopsis

Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality.

In At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK. The buttoned-up repression of the fifties and sixties makes way for liberation and free love in the seventies, only to be chased by the terror and pain of HIV/AIDS. This is Jarman at his passionate best, written when he was already ill with HIV and in the midst of the moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis. Defiant and furious, he not only celebrates his own sexuality but skewers wider society for its brazen homophobia.

Reissued here 25 years after Jarman's death, with an introduction by Straight Jacket author Matthew Todd, At Your Own Risk remains a singular work. It is a powerful reminder of how far we have come and how much further we have left to go.

'It blew my mind quite honestly !', It's A Sin star Olly Alexander via Twitter

About this title

About the Author

Terry eagleton is Britain's most influential radical literary critic. He has been a fellow of four Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and is presently Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford

From Library Journal

British filmmaker, author, AIDS activist, and all-around cultural upstart, Jarman has written a moving, visually evocative memoir of his life and times. One of the first filmmakers to project an unabashed gay sensibility onto screen, Jarman creates here a montage of autobiography, interviews, and social history that shifts back and forth through time, resulting in an intriguing portrait of his personal and artistic growth from the 1940s to the present. Jarman is able to distill the essence of an era with just a few well-chosen anecdotes. He is outraged at what he sees as the complicit passivity of the British government's response to the AIDS epidemic; throughout, he drops the uncaring words of government officials like deadly bombs. Some readers may find his honesty brazen and offensive, but Jarman is truly a spokesman for his tribe, a teacher and a sage who, while staring death in the face, keeps his eyes open to report back with a deep understanding of what is important to the gay community. Highly recommended.
- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099222914
• ISBN 13: 9780099222910
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176