During the plague years of AIDS, from 1981 to 1996, cities like New York lost an astonishing number of young people, with over 80,000 deaths in that city alone. In this gripping memoir, Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. She links this phenomenon to the gentrification of 1970s New York City--wherein a "blighted" urban neighborhood was renovated, and the people who once called it home were priced out and replaced by suburban whites. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation's imagination and the consequences of that loss.