Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar, del 1 Kärleken av Jonas Gardell

During the 80's, a homosexual life in Sweden, and most of the world, probably, was almost impossibly difficult. Everywhere people judged them and even the high esteemed newspaper Dagens Nyheter viewed homosexuality as a sickness. The book, being the first of three, is loosely based on real events and real people known by the author. Where ever Gardell appears to talk about the horrible past, he tears up. It was his friends that while receiving neither acceptance nor comfort died like flies of a strange, unknown and incurable disease, which would later be known as AIDS. Gardell states that it is so incredibly important never to forget these people, and how they were stigmatized by the society until their very end. They deserve to be remembered. People always say that the past is the past, but that's just an excuse to avoid responsibility. The world has to remember for it to never happen again.

It's an incredibly sad story, but at the same time there are a few glimpses of real, relieving happiness, when the two men, one of which a former bully victim, and the other a jehovah's witness, finally drop their disguises and are themselves only.

Gardell's writing alternates between being magnificent and very simple, but perhaps that's the perfect way to reach through to people. This isn't meant to be a big work of prose. This is meant to reach and affect people, and that it absolutely did. Reading this book is almost as being there, back in the early 80's, in the middle of all the injustice, alienation and the AIDS epidemic. This is the most important Swedish literature in a long time.