At Your Own Risk
  • Published: 6 July 1993
  • ISBN: 9780099222910
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.99

At Your Own Risk

A Saint's Testament

Formats & editions
EBook
14 Dec 2017
Paperback
6 Jul 1993
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Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality.


Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality.

In At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK. The buttoned-up repression of the fifties and sixties makes way for liberation and free love in the seventies, only to be chased by the terror and pain of HIV/AIDS. This is Jarman at his passionate best, written when he was already ill with HIV and in the midst of the moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis. Defiant and furious, he not only celebrates his own sexuality but skewers wider society for its brazen homophobia.

Reissued here 25 years after Jarman's death, with an introduction by Straight Jacket author Matthew Todd, At Your Own Risk remains a singular work. It is a powerful reminder of how far we have come and how much further we have left to go.

'It blew my mind quite honestly !', It's A Sin star Olly Alexander via Twitter
  • Published: 6 July 1993
  • ISBN: 9780099222910
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman was born in London in 1942. His career spanned decades and genres, from painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, to poet, writer, campaigner and gardener. His features include Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993). His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – continue to be exhibited worldwide, and his garden in Dungeness remains a site of pilgrimage to fans and newcomers alike.

Also by Derek Jarman

Dancing Ledge
Pharmacopoeia
Smiling in Slow Motion
Kicking The Pricks
Up in the Air
Chroma
Modern Nature
See all

Praise for At Your Own Risk

If there is any such thing as the literary equivalent of an incendiary bomb, then this is it... His semtex-packed sentences are welcome thunderflashes of dissent in the grey drizzle of a dispirited political climate

New Statesman

At Your Own Risk gives the reader access to something that is hard to articulate, the near asphyxiating pain, anxiety and rage which many gay people have felt living under the physical, legal and cultural attacks of the last few years

Observer

For all his anger, Jarman never seems brutalised. He retains his humanity and good humour. His is a wonderfully garrulous, mercurial, polymathic daemon

Literary Review