Various Artists' Red Hot + Blue

Red Hot + Blue is a meditation on music’s capacity to find us, transform us, and help us make sense of our historical moment.

In a narrative that blends memoir and history, Red Hot + Blue explores the author’s coming out at the height of the AIDS crisis alongside the history of the music industry’s response to the epidemic. The book’s centerpiece is a major 1990 effort by musical artists to break through the silence and stigma about the disease. The resulting tribute album drew inspiration from the life and work of the legendary composer Cole Porter, who himself wrestled with the joy and sorrow that accompanies love in a judgmental society. Leading musicians, including Debbie Harry, Annie Lennox, Sinead O’Connor, Iggy Pop, and U2, interpreted some of Porter’s most iconic songs — “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day”— offering not just a joyful tribute to a composer and a community, but a shared vision of survival.

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 man’s coming of age in the era of both.