"This stage of his work is from a place of desperation and an itching demand to speak out about living with HIV/AIDS, and trying to survive a hopeless situation. Wojnarowicz’s words are resurrected cries of help from recent memory that are more relevant than ever."

"The level of craft at work in each of the poems in “Don’t Call Us Dead” is exceptional. These are poems about black men and their imperiled, impassioned bodies, what it means to live with HIV, and so much more. There is pain here but there is so much joy, so much fierce resistance to anything that dares to temper the stories being told here."

"It's pretty fucking brutal but also very truthful about the amorality of adolescence and how some kids can be. And it was also dealing honestly with HIV amongst heterosexuals, which was a first. It launched Harmony Korine and started a whole new genre but made a real stink at the time. A tough film with no feel good factor in sight. It's completely unsentimental."

"That’s just a jam. Always, whenever I DJ, this goes on. Devendra Banhart played this for me and turned me onto it. It’s sort of disco… but not quite in the prime of disco; his era was the late 70s and early 80s. Sylvester’s not around anymore, sadly he died of complications from HIV/AIDS in 1988. He left a lot of great records – most famously You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) – but there’s only a few of his songs I really love. This is his best in my opinion. It’s really funky, super dance-y, nice n’ long, and it just grooves."

"Fred Hersch is a hugely respected jazz pianist who was diagnosed HIV-positive in the 80s. He didn't talk about it publicly until the 90s. Then in 2008, he got very ill, and fell into a coma, which he stayed in for two months. When he came round he'd lost all his muscle memory, which is obviously devastating when you're a jazz pianist. So he had to learn to play again. This record was only made three years later, unbelievably.

I find this album very emotional. It's partly the music, which is very beautiful, but it's partly about what he went through. Having had a heavy hospital experience myself, I know how that can affect you. I managed to get a contact for Fred after he made this, and I wrote to him to tell him how much it had moved me. We wrote to each other for a while after that, which was really special."