Benjamin Heim Shepard and novelist Wayne Hoffman, discuss Shepard’s first novel, Illuminations on Market Street as well as Hoffman’s novels Hard, An Older Man, and Sweet Like Sugar, and his non-fiction anthology, Policing Public Sex.  Both writers consider the lines between fiction and non-fiction, activism, loss, AIDS and the impacts of HIV on sex and culture in their works. Shepard’s novel begins in San Francisco in the early 1990s. Cab is on the deep end of a losing streak. After having been dumped yet again, he moves to Haight-Ashbury fresh out of college. It is the middle of a recession, before the dot-com boom, and AIDS is an immediate and untreatable reality. A story about AIDS and sex, acting up and praying for the dead, this is a story about living and fighting in the face of insurmountable challenges. Hoffman traces the stories Moe’s escapades through the Giuliani era War on Sex through years of trips to Provincetown to find something in himself as he ages and his community shifts.

Copies of Illuminations on Market Street and works by Wayne Hoffman are available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve copies please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Benjamin Shepard is a Brooklyn based activist.  He is also the author/editor of ten including  White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (1997), From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (2002), The Beach Beneath the Streets (with Greg Smithsimon, 2011), Brooklyn Tides (with Mark Noonan, 2018), and Rebel Friendships (2015).  Illuminations on Market Street is his first novel.

Wayne Hoffman is the author of the novels Hard, An Older Man, and the Stonewall Book Award-winning Sweet Like Sugar, and co-editor of the anthology Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism.  Currently executive editor of Tablet Magazine, his cultural reporting has appeared in Washington Post, Slate, the Nation, Village Voice, Out, Poz, and elsewhere.