Amy Hoffman’s memoir, An Army of Ex-Lovers, chronicles Boston’s--and the nation's--gay community in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her post at the Gay Community News (GCN) gave Hoffman unique insight into the burgeoning lesbian and gay political movement on the East Coast. The newsroom of the seat-of-the-pants weekly, and dinner parties hosted by its large cast of contributors, forged many leaders and artists, including Richard Burns and Urvashi Vaid.
In one telltale passage, Hoffman ridicules the penchant of activists to consume themselves in dialogue: "I claimed that everyone had a finite number of meetings she could attend in her life, and I was close to using mine up." Blending a keen eye and a knowing wit, the memoir is a rare and intimate picture of an era just before AIDS and the activism it unleashed, before widespread consumer technology or public tolerance.
The twin gifts of compassion and concision Hoffman has long displayed as writer and editor help convey the story of her own fight for personal and professional integrity and her coworkers' struggle to avoid hate violence, family ostracism, invisibility, or career pigeonholes. This is no lavender-scented bit of nostalgia. It is among the most original histories of LGBT America. An amazing collection of photos adds humor, depth, and texture to the taut narrative.
Amy is the author of Hospital Time, a revealing memoir of counseling and caring for a friend dying of AIDS. In addition to GCN, she previously edited the Unitarian Universalist World magazine, also based in Boston, in whose environs she still resides. Hoffman has served as the development director for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. She is the editor in chief of Women’s Review of Books.
