'Harvey was shot, along with Mayor GeorgeMoscone, in 1978, and San Francisco and much of the Castro feels as if not muchhas changed since he worked the streets to build a gay political machine. Wherehis camera shop stood there is now a manicure salon, next to the storefront ofthe Human Rights Campaign Fund, so that if one skews one's view it becomespossible to read their adjoining signs as: "Hand Jobs are a Human Right", asindeed they are.'

Dennis Altman first travelled from Australia tothe United States when Lyndon Johnson was President, beginning a long obsessionwith the US. In the early 1970s he was involved in New York Gay Liberation; his1971 study Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, is widelyregarded as a classic work in its field. In the 1980s Altman lived in SanFrancisco during the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Later he sat on the AustralianNational Council on AIDS and international organisations including, aspresident, the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific.

The election of Donald Trump took place whileAltman was back in California on one of his frequent visits. In this diarisedmemoir, moving between Australia, the United States, Europe and parts of Asia,Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood and many otherspeople a story of a half century of activism, intellectualism, friendship andconflict.

'Dennis Altman'speripatetic book Unrequited Love moves from Australia to the United States,across Europe and parts of Asia. Filled with intellectual luminaries such asJames Baldwin, Dorothy Porter, Susan Sontag, and Christos Tsiolkas, Altman'slife and career has been intense and wide-ranging. The US counter culture ofthe mid-1960s, amid the early days of Gay Liberation, was the melting pot forhis early writing, culminating in his 1971 study Homosexual: Oppression andLiberation. From here his work shifted and expanded with thechanging terrain of sexual politics, including the AIDs epidemic, which hewitnessed firsthand during his time in New York. Unrequited Love amemoir in diaries is the work of a hugely influential Australian writer andcommentator.' - Sebastian Sharp, Australian Book Review

'From Lyndon Johnson to Trump, Altman's diary takes us from the early days of AIDS to gay liberation against a backdrop of Australia's strange love for America.' - Gillian Triggs

'An ingenious combining of memoir and analysis, personal reflection and social science.'  - Frank Bongiorno