All the Young Men

All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South is a memoir by Ruth Coker Burks published in 2020 by Grove Press. Burks co-wrote the book with Kevin Carr O’Leary, who has assisted as a ghostwriter on several memoirs by public figures. The book was published in both print and audiobook versions. The audiobook was narrated by Burks and sold exclusively by Audible.

In the book, Burks recounts her life story, with a focus on her experiences from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s as a volunteer caregiver to people living with HIV/AIDS across Arkansas. During this period, Arkansas, like many other Southern states, failed to provide adequate care to HIV-positive individuals. Contributing factors included limited information, insufficient infrastructure, and the pervasive homophobic stigma surrounding the disease. Against this backdrop, Burks narrates how she took it upon herself to help those living with HIV/AIDS acquire medical treatment, keep them clean as they lay dying, and bury their remains in empty plots she believed to be owned by her family in Files Cemetery in Garland County when their relatives refused to claim their bodies. She estimates that she interred over forty people (although some believe the number is much lower).

The first part of the book details Burks’s first encounters with people living with HIV/AIDS. Burks opens the book by discussing her chance meeting with Jimmy, a young man she found quarantined alone in a hospital in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Neglected by nurses and abandoned by his family, Jimmy dies just hours after Burks discovers and cares for him. Burks describes how she could find only one funeral home in the state willing to cremate his remains, which she later buried near her father’s grave in Files Cemetery. According to Burks, after Jimmy’s death, she began to be contacted to care for those living with HIV/AIDS or bury those who had succumbed to the disease.

The second part of the book chronicles Burks’s work as a public advocate. She appears on local television, lobbies state leaders, and briefly moves to Washington DC in an unsuccessful attempt to find work with a non-profit organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS research, treatment, and prevention. When she returns to her hometown of Hot Springs (Garland County), Burks embeds herself in gay communities there, disseminating information about HIV/AIDS at the bar Our House and even discreetly passing out safe sex kits in “cruising areas” (public but out-of-the-way locations where men meet for sex). However, as her activist reputation grows, Burks begins to feel ostracized by locals. One evening, while mourning two of her closest friends recently lost to HIV/AIDS-related causes, she finds a cross burning in her yard.

In the book’s epilogue, Burks discusses how, by 1995, the advent of protease inhibitors to treat HIV/AIDS began extending life expectancies, rendering her caregiving services effectively obsolete. She briefly moves to Florida and back to Arkansas. The book ends in November 2019, with Burks returning to Hot Springs to visit Files Cemetery and meet with Paul, the former lover of her now deceased best friend, Billy.

The book received critical praise leading up to and immediately following its release, but it later became a source of controversy. An article in the Arkansas Times questioned the whereabouts of $75,000 raised from a GoFundMe campaign in 2015 to erect a monument in the cemetery where Burks buried remains of people who died due to HIV/AIDS-related causes. Burks admitted to spending some of the money on medical bills but insisted she still planned to construct the memorial. A later investigation cast more doubt on Burks’s intentions and the validity of details in her memoir. In interviews with over a dozen people, a Today Show reporter found that there were no plans for a monument and that Burks’s family never legally owned the cemetery plots she used as burial ground. Current and former residents of Hot Springs, including some Burks wrote about in the book, accused her of exaggerating aspects of her caregiving efforts.

For additional information:
Bailey, Austin. “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument.” Arkansas Times, July 8, 2021. https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/07/08/ruth-coker-burks-and-the-missing-monument (accessed February 20, 2025).

Burks, Ruth Coker, with Kevin Carr O’Leary. All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South. New York: Grove Press, 2020.

Hatfield, Joe Edward. “Caring for Public Memories of the Queer South with the Arkansas ‘Cemetery Angel.’” Southern Communication Journal (2024): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2024.2436065 (accessed February 20, 2025).

Kacala, Alexander. “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” TODAY, October 28, 2021. https://www.today.com/health/doubts-surround-viral-story-aids-angel-who-says-she-helped-t236351 (accessed February 20, 2025).

Joe Edward Hatfield
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville