Overview

Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality. Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality. In At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK. The buttoned-up repression of the fifties and sixties makes way for liberation and free love in the seventies, only to be chased by the terror and pain of HIV/AIDS. This is Jarman at his passionate best, written when he was already ill with HIV and in the midst of the moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis. Defiant and furious, he not only celebrates his own sexuality but skewers wider society for its brazen homophobia. Reissued here 25 years after Jarman's death, with an introduction by Straight Jacket author Matthew Todd, At Your Own Risk remains a singular work. It is a powerful reminder of how far we have come and how much further we have left to go. 'It blew my mind quite honestly !', It's A Sin star Olly Alexander via Twitter

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9780099222910

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If there is any such thing as the literary equivalent of an incendiary bomb, then this is it... His semtex-packed sentences are welcome thunderflashes of dissent in the grey drizzle of a dispirited political climate New Statesman At Your Own Risk gives the reader access to something that is hard to articulate, the near asphyxiating pain, anxiety and rage which many gay people have felt living under the physical, legal and cultural attacks of the last few years Observer For all his anger, Jarman never seems brutalised. He retains his humanity and good humour. His is a wonderfully garrulous, mercurial, polymathic daemon Literary Review

If there is any such thing as the literary equivalent of an incendiary bomb, then this is it... His semtex-packed sentences are welcome thunderflashes of dissent in the grey drizzle of a dispirited political climate * New Statesman * At Your Own Risk gives the reader access to something that is hard to articulate, the near asphyxiating pain, anxiety and rage which many gay people have felt living under the physical, legal and cultural attacks of the last few years * Observer * For all his anger, Jarman never seems brutalised. He retains his humanity and good humour. His is a wonderfully garrulous, mercurial, polymathic daemon * Literary Review *

Patchy memoir by gay British filmmaker Jarman, who tested HIV-positive five years ago, has survived a handful of illnesses, and is still going strong. Jarman covers five decades here, at times attuning his voice to each period. The story, what there is, often melts down into gay commentary, and we never get a satisfying history of the author's films (Sebastian, Caravaggio, Edward II, etc.), his filmmaking, or incidents tied to filmmaking - although a few reviews are reprinted and answered, along with gay manifestos, some by Jarman. This is as much a cannon blast as a memoir, and some bitterly juicy quotes can be lifted from the text ( Understand that if you or I decide to have sex, whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and other people have no rights in our lovemaking ), with Jarman wanting to forget his illness and make love blithely with seemingly whomever is pleased to have him. One idea often repeated is that all men are homosexual and that heterosexuality is the deviant form of sex. As Jarman puts it: It eventually dawned on me that heterosexuality is an abnormal psychopathic state composed of unhappy men and women whose arrested emotions, finding no natural outlet, condemned them to each other and lives lacking warmth and human compassion. He describes rigid British laws anent homosexuality and states his belief that there should be no age of consent, that homosexuality begins when it begins and should not be locked up in legalities. Jarman laments dead friends carried off by AIDS, defends his movies, and gives the fist to moral censure. Past fear, he fights on. For readers fresh to the fray, the title tells all. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Derek Jarman (Author) Derek Jarman was born in London in 1942. His career spanned decades and genres, from painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, to poet, writer, campaigner and gardener. His features include Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993). His paintings - for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 - continue to be exhibited worldwide, and his garden in Dungeness remains a site of pilgrimage to fans and newcomers alike. Matthew Todd (Introducer) Matthew Todd is one of the UKs leading gay writers. He was the editor of the UK's bestselling gay magazine, Attitude, between 2008 and 2016 where he won three British Society of Magazine Editors Editor of the Year Awards, a Stonewall Journalist of the Year Award and was given the Freedom of the City of London. Prince William made history by sitting for the cover of Matthew's final issue as editor. Matthew's first book, Straight Jacket was voted Boyz LGBT Book of the Year 2017, and has been called 'an essential read for every gay person on the planet' by Sir Elton John, 'utterly brilliant' by Owen Jones and as 'game changing' and 'life saving' by readers. He has written for national newspapers, including the Guardian, Observer, Telegraph and Sun. He appears regularly on TV and radio and is a regular speaker at conferences and events, including the Terrence Higgins Trust HIV Prevention CHAPS conference. He lives in London. His work appears in This Is Not A Drill (Penguin), Letters to the Earth (Harper Collins) and The Queer Bible (HQ). His second book PRIDE- The Story of the LGBTQ Equality Movement (Welbeck) is out now.

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