Vamps Virgins and Victims: How Can Women Fight AIDS?

Robin Gorna Cassell, £16.99, pp 400 ISBN 0 304 32809 X

As head of health promotion at the Terrence Higgins Trust, Robin Gorna has lived with the AIDS epidemic through a decade of hard work and activism. Her analysis of the impact of AIDS on women is refreshing, direct, and passionate. Arguing that the spread of AIDS among women can be understood only in the context of the power inequalities between the sexes, she also dismisses the concept of AIDS as a heterosexual epidemic and, with it, the notion that everyone is equally at risk. AIDS, she asserts, is still a “queer disease,” and those infected with HIV are socially …