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. For many gay men of my generation in London, whether you lived or died depended on when you arrived in the city. I pitched up in 1988, but didn’t venture into the bars and clubs of the scene until a couple of years later. It probably saved my life. 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. 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. ROYAL MAIL STRIKES DURING NOVEMBER & DECEMBER 2022 WILL DELAY DELIVERIES. THE LATEST UPDATE ON THE STRIKE DATES CAN BE VIEWED HERE .

Love from the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder | Waterstones

This sat on my tbr pile for far too long. Partly because I just wasn’t ready to go there emotionally again. Sure enough I was sobbing from the foreword. It’s Jill, real Jill with all her courage, strength, dignity, honesty, tenacity and love taking us from the pink palace and way beyond in her words with her boys. If you loved it’s a sin, this is perfect to follow up with.But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the 'gay flu', and Jill and her friends now found their formerly carefree existence under threat. 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. Russell T Davies is a good friend of Jill and it’s clear from this book how much of her life he actually used as raw material for It’s A Sin and there’s a lot of memories obviously too naughty for the TV but included with relish in this memoir.

Love from the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder | Hachette UK Love from the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder | Hachette UK

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. The work and time that went into raising the money and awareness around hiv and aids while wrapped in the middle of nursing and losing your friends and continuing to work in a highly demanding run of cabaret and theatre tours is awe inspiring and will never be forgotten. Heartbreaking and heartwarming. Just a really excellent book that was full of life while also talking about the loss of life in a very personal way. Absolutely five stars. This book is desperately sad at points, but so vitally important. The shrouding of queer history by the British government, particulary of the AIDS crisis during the reign of Section 28 means that many of the younger LGBTQIA+ generation are left with very little knowledge of what happened from 1986-2003. The work Jill did was amazing. If you’re a west end/musicals fan (especially of early to mid nineties shows) there’s lots to geek out on.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. 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. The staff that work there are either 18 year olds who are ignorant about anywhere else in the world and think they have found the best place on Earth or 35 years old, who still think they are 18 years old and spend half the time chasing any girls they can get. We stayed at The Pink Palace for 4 days, there were four girls and we stayed in the "Just For Girls" room. The room itself was clean but outdated, overall we had no problems with the conditions of the hotel however the activities were a different story.

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

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. 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 DAVIESThe development has sold five apartments so far, including to a buyer who asked to combine a pair of apartments to take up half of the building’s eighth floor. Many of the buyers are already living in apartments, either along nearby St Kilda Rd or on Spring St in Melbourne’s CBD, or are returning to Australia from living abroad. The book is part career CV where names of different shows and different songs in them are dropped as if we should know them all. But what starts a a CV becomes the main part of the book when the show 'Les Miserable' becomes almost a character in itself, the yin to the yang of the A.I.D.S crisis. The author is pulled into deeper and deeper as different friends live by trail and error with different medications and and illnesses that young men are not expected to catch becoming part of a new caseload in hospitals for doctors to treat. As the author notes, a new caseload for doctors requires the renewing of their bedside manner, and adaptation in other ways too. There is also humour in the tragedy as different selves are revealed in the deaths of certain gay men than they revealed in their lives.

Love from the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder | Waterstones Love from the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder | Waterstones

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.Melbourne is growing and becoming a world-class city, we are adopting new world-class living trends that have been in global metropolises for a long time,” Mr Kennon said. The book could have been subtitled 'living with A.I.D.s as explored through three close friends', as the lives of three close friends of Jill Nalder are shared in the book, along with a few more distant friendships, mark the progress that doctors and hospitals make in managing the medication and emotional support of young men with A.I.D.s. for as long as the doctors can keep the young men alive.