Love from the Pink Palace: Memories of Love, Loss and Cabaret through the AIDS Crisis, for fans of IT'S A SIN

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Her tireless campaigning for Aids awareness and research is the heart of her friend Davies’s It’s A Sin (she has a cameo as the mother of the character inspired by her). In this livestreamed event, Nalder and Davies will be in conversation about both the memoir and the TV show, shining a light on the boys who were stigmatised and shamed, and remembering those who were lost too soon. When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends – of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own – she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs could get. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the ‘gay flu’, and Jill and her friends – spirited Juan Pablo, Jae with his beautiful voice, upbeat Dursley, and many others – found that their formerly carefree existence now under threat.

Love From The Pink Palace - Memories of Love, Loss and Love From The Pink Palace - Memories of Love, Loss and

When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends - of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own - she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs she could get. Jill met the crisis head on . . . She held the hands of so many men. She lost them, and remembered them, and somehow kept going’ Russell T Davies, creator of Channel 4’s IT’S A SIN

When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends – of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own – she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs she could get. This book resonated with me because I was around Jill's age and just starting University at the start of the AIDS crisis and this is such a valuable addition to the history books of that period.

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It is Henry who disappears first, as a mysterious new illness arrives, hitting a now-familiar wall of fear, denial and misinformation. The disappearances keep coming. Friends from the scene “go home” to their families and never return, lost to what relatives might decide to call cancer. In March 2020, the former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe wrote a column for the Daily Express suggesting that Aids was one of a number of frightening epidemics that had not “proved as devastating as feared”. Though this series finished filming before the current pandemic, it stands as a riposte to such an abhorrent idea. The sheer waste of lives is devastating. As Welsh philosopher Raymond Williams said: ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ Jill is radical. Truly, beautifully radical. This is Jill Nalder’s first book and it’s a pretty astonishing debut which grips and holds you tight by the hand, urging you not to go, not to put out the light, not to leave a word unread. There’s something about Jill’s straightforward South Welsh narrating of her life which echos the flint and steel in the soul of this Neath girl. Jill is a busy person, quite how they managed to do so much is a miracle. She is also modest, and although allowing the wonderful excitement of her life to shine here, often through the lens of others’ lives, she also shares the gratitude of being able to experience such talented people.A heartbreaking, life-affirming memoir of love, loss and cabaret through the AIDS crisis, from IT’S A SIN’s Jill Nalder I had to take a long walk along the seafront after finishing the book, it’s quite the ripping yarn, ripping at the heart, emotionally raw. As we saw in It’s A Sin and can truly appreciate through her memoir, Jill has the ability to inspire through action. This book will make you cry and as Jill took the time to educate the reader about the wonderful people who were Colin, Derek, Juan and Dursley - and the many, many others who lost their lives, I knew if I allowed it, I would just become a bawling mess. This book is an absolute eye opener about a time that people are still affected and traumatised by, and while we know now that a HIV diagnosis isn't the death sentence it once was, we still have a long way to go before we overcome the stigma and fear that still rings around such a diagnosis. Despite the darkness and despair of parts of the book, Nalder skillfully combines snippets of humour, loads of love and joy and a deep humanity that , despite my tears, kept me reading on. To those lost to the killer we call AIDS, the world of PrEP, treatment and people on medication who ‘can’t pass it on’ is alien. I cannot help but ask if we are doing enough to honour their legacy and sacrifice?

Love from the Pink Palace: Memories of Love, Loss and Cabaret

By sharing the lives of her ‘boys’ with us and letting us laugh, while we feel the trembling possibilities they all felt were theirs for the taking, Jill does what she promised them. They’ll not be forgotten.Love from the Pink Palace is just that, a huge throb of love, from a woman who continues to give and share (although she doesn’t mention it here, her charities have raised more than a million pounds for HIV research and support). Her love teaches us that unconditional love will get us through the darkest of times and give us an opportunity to build on the ashes of the glories of those who went before.

Review: Love From the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder | Terrence

Jill writes with ease, this makes it surprising this is her first book. Each chapter is filled with light and dark. They appear so close to each other that you go from crying to full-on belly laughing. Trust me, it gets fellow tube travellers very confused and leads to many an odd look. As it happens, I was also a Jill in the eighties - but not half as good a Jill as real Jill' DAWN FRENCH There’s a delicious honouring foreword from fellow Wales born – Russell T Davies – who shares his love for Jill and the reasons he based It’s A Sin on her life. The book is full of joy, of wonderful anecdotes and insights into lives long gone, letting them flash into our memories with a golden whirl of camp gay radiance. I actually liked how Jill made some references to the Covid-19 pandemic in her book, as really it's one of the closest things we have now in modern memory to compare to the terrifying era that was the AIDS epidemic including the fear and vilifying of a particular group of people. From healthcare to people in the street, it was too long a time before suffering gay men were treated with the respect that they and any human being deserves as their bodies were slowly ravaged by an illness that takes no prisoners. Jill also makes sure to point out in her book as well how AIDs diagnoses also affected many women and how testing procedure failed women and children who may have contracted the disease whether it be through sexual relations, blood transfusions, or in utero.So what was it like to be gay and live in 1980s and 1990s London? This book will tell you everything you need to know, and more. Like a book I read previously and reviewed here, by a different author, I came to this book via BBC radio. With this book, the radio programme records the author joining her old friend, and the writer of the foreword of this book, Russell T Davies https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dn... It is a tonic to listen to. How was it possible to enjoy It’s a Sin, knowing what was to come? Russell T Davies’s great skill was in making it seem like it would be rude not to. It might have been reasonable to expect a certain solemnity from this five-part drama about the arrival of Aids in Britain and the devastation it wrought, but what was less predictable, perhaps, was the furious, beautiful joy of it. It was gut-wrenching and it was terrible, but god, it was funny and it was full of life.