Today on the site I’m thrilled to welcome John S. Garrison, whose contribution to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, which is dedicated to deep dives into various classic albums, covers Red Hot + Blue, the first major benefit album to fight AIDS. Here’s a little more on the book:

Red Hot + Blue is a meditation on music’s capacity to find us, transform us, and help us make sense of our historical moment. Blending memoir and cultural history, Garrison recalls his coming out at the height of the AIDS crisis alongside the music industry’s first major response to the epidemic. In 1990, a groundbreaking effort by musical artists sought to combat the silence and stigma about the disease. The resulting tribute album to legendary composer Cole Porter was evocatively titled Red Hot + Blue, capturing both the joy and melancholy that accompany love during turbulent times. It re-imagined those iconic songs – including “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day” – not just to celebrate the composer but also to offer a shared vision for survival. In this book, Garrison reflects on his own life story through the lens of Porter’s life and music to illuminate the emotional landscape we all navigate in the search for love.

Red Hot + Blue returns us to the early 1990s to reveal how the love songs of the past can be revived to speak to new audiences in times of need. The book is the portrait of an album, a pandemic, and a young gay man’s coming of age in the era of both.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

And here’s John S. Garrison to talk about the role of music in queer history, and specifically in his own coming out:

Continue reading Our Music is Our History: a Guest Post by Red Hot + Blue author John S. Garrison →