Thom Gunn: The Man with Night Sweats

2024 marks the twentieth anniversary of Thom Gunn’s death. The Man with Night Sweats, to many readers Gunn’s finest and most moving collection, addresses the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and includes some of the most devastating elegies in English poetry. But The Man with Night Sweats is also, very specifically and lovingly, a vivid portrait of city life in San Francisco, the gay community of that time, and the friends and lovers who made up Gunn’s family, and who were taken by the disease.