East Village, summer of 1984. Renata is a young dyke-about-town who happens to have the ability to see ghosts, which has been happening more and more frequently as her friends have started dying of what has recently been named AIDS.
So, when her best friend Mark dies, she assumes she’ll see him again. There’s no way Mark wouldn’t give her a chance to say goodbye, would he? But to her disappointment – and increasingly, her concern – Mark doesn’t appear.
Renata has other problems, too. A mysterious, police-like force has begun ridding their East Village neighborhood of anything abnormal or inexplicable. At first, she’s sure they’re scam artists, but it becomes clear they’re actually trapping ghosts as part of a city-wide gentrification plot to make downtown safe for Reaganites.
Told with humour and pathos, Waiting on a Friend is a genre-bending retelling of Queer history that manages to be both heartbreaking and healing.
