Visual aids for imagining the tandem trike/tricycle/"the contraption" can be found here: (🔗Online Bicycle Museum 1990s replica tandem tricycle

And she's very right, those handles have awful placement. I'm getting a sore back just thinking about it...

"So, who did the most damage to the community, HIV, or her? I say that from the bottom of my heart. That's, that's not anger, that's, I look at it that way. I, I really really look at it that way now." - Tim Looper

"The story of Ruth Coker Burks & all the young men in the shadows of the cemetery angel."

Ophie Dokie grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She first looked into Ruth Coker Burks because she wanted to make a video sharing stories of people working as allies during the AIDS crisis, but found many major inconsistencies while researching Ruth's story. To make her video, RUTHLESS, she worked with Tim Looper, a minister in Hot Springs who was friends with Ruth for decades prior to the articles coming out in 2021, & Mike Melancon, the director & founder of the Hot Springs AIDS Resource Centre. The video currently has only 5441 views, three of which are mine. I highly recommend watching it¹ &/or reading the Today article instead of reading this book. I'm very glad I found Ophie's channel & she was able to finally post Ruthless before I got around to reading my copy.

Ophie Dokie, YouTube: 22 June 2024 🔗RUTHLESS: The REAL Story Behind the 'Cemetery Angel' of Arkansas [All The Young Men] [Scam Exposed] 🔗Today article: 28 October 2021 Doubts surround viral 'AIDS angel' who says she helped hundreds of dying men 🔗Arkansas Times article: 08 July 2021 Ruth Coker Burks and the missing monument

Excerpts from RUTHLESS² reviewing ATYM as a book, rather than the fraudulent claims & literal fraud:

OD: "I may have already given up the twist here of my personal enjoyment of Ruth Coker Burks' & Kevin Carr O'Leary's Memoir, All the Young Men, when I said earlier that I would be ripping it to shreds later in this video. But if that wasn't already a clear enough review, um, this is one of the worst Memoirs, if not one of the worst books, I have ever read. In my life. It's bad. I don't even just dislike Ruth, which I do, you will walk away from this video understanding exactly how much I dislike Ruth Coker Burks, but this book is bad. This is a book that is entirely unaware of which parts its readers are most interested in. Which is to say, you would think most people picking up a book called All the Young Men, a story of chosen family and AIDS in the American South, are looking to read, primarily, about the young men & that chosen family & not about how hard Ruth Coker Burks' life is. Because the second thing is what the book is actually about. And part of it, where her life seems to be less hard than it usually is, the parts she's asking for your sympathy, is where she was plugged into the gay community in Hot Springs at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A lot of the book is about her being a financially struggling young mother, to a point where it really does feel like just pages and pages and pages of "hand out money please". And that's all at the expense of actually taking any time to humanise or flesh out, you know, all the young men who the book was named for. All of these people who Ruth has kind of propped up her legacy & her fame based on. Those men who are turned into, at best, one-dimensional character props for Ruth &, at worst, completely offensive caricatures of themselves or men like them. That I now can't even really fully fact check the existence of, for reasons we'll be getting into. So yeah, I hate this book. I hate this book all the way down to its title. [...] I told [Tim Looper] that I thought even the title itself was beginning to strike me as a bit dehumanising. That these men, these fully-fledged, individual people, were being distilled down into a set of props for Ruth Coker Burks to carry around in her bag & trot out as it serves her. Not real men, not fully formed people or individuals with lives and people who loved them and missed them, but Ruth's men. She says "my guys, my guys" constantly, & it is in a way that, to me, feels a lot more possessive than it does endeared. And uh, not to brag, but when I told Tim that this was my reading of this memoir, he told me, essentially, that I'm right." [...] TL: "But yeah, [Daymon Jones] was highly offended when she talked about how bad & racist & horrible it was here during that time, because that just was not true. It was not true as we've talked about over and over." OD: "[...] he was right, it's not. Hot Springs, Arkansas is this tiny little Resort City in the Bible Belt of the Southern United States of America. It's deeply proud of its history, [...] Hot Springs is beautiful, & it deserves to be thought of as somewhere beautiful, & not the way that Ruth is attempting to frame it. While homophobia did and does exist, especially in Southern and rural areas, she has done a lot of damage to the reputation of this Town by publishing things like, you know, unsubstantiated claims that she was getting sprayed with Lysol until she left pharmacies because people knew that she worked with AIDS victims. Or other things that other people who worked with AIDS victims on public levels, like Ruth did, have never mentioned anything similar happening. Like her stories of the KKK burning crosses in her yard multiple times. Would you not think that that also would have happened to the doctor that has been there the whole time? Or the social worker who founded the AIDS clinic? Or you know the HIV patients themselves? Why would it only happen to Ruth, & why didn't she call the police when it did? Nobody who was in Hot Springs or who has lived in Hot Springs since believed her claims about the KKK. Because while there is Confederate and Southern baggage, & there are racists and awful people, Hot Springs specifically, is this tiny little, somewhat liberal, Resort town. This was a town that had multiple gay bars in it at one point in the 80s. And she talks about those gay bars, but she also just, threatens to stick this town with a reputation as if it is slightly, slightly better than a severely racist & unsafe sundown town. Which is just not at all the same level of risk. Hot Springs is not like that, but she paints it like it is. She paints it as if it is filled with nothing but backwards, hateful Hicks. And she does that while she's telling you that she loves it, but also telling you that she has never, & will never, move back to it. So even if she does love it & even if she, like me, just has reasons why she doesn't currently live in Hot Springs. Despite the fact that she feels fondly for the city, she doesn't love it enough not to completely sell out its reputation for her own gain. She certainly doesn't love it as much as Tim Looper does, or anybody else who is still living there, & actively putting in the work to maintain the gay community there."

¹And her other videos, they & she are awesome. ²Buffer words abridged for ease of reading.

edited for typos