Arts & Entertainment
Essential AIDS Fiction
Essential AIDS Fiction
by Ernie McLeod
Fiction requires perspective. Perhaps this is why so many novels return to childhood and adolescence, and why the coming–out story formed the prototypical gay novel.
When AIDS hit in the early ‘80s, gay artists were suddenly confronted by that which could not be understood. For how can a plague be comprehended from its midst? It would be like attempting to grasp a hurricane’s path of destruction from the eye of the storm, the devastation of war from the battlefield. Gay writers—many on the front lines of the battlefield—were faced with a dilemma: the only thing more impossible than responding to the AIDS crisis was not responding to it.
In many ways, journalism and nonfiction are better suited to describing events that seem horrific beyond imagination, particularly when (despite reports to the contrary) there is no end in sight to the horror. Much of the most powerful AIDS writing has been non–fiction—whether investigative reporting like Randy Shilts’ 1987 And the Band Played On, or intimate memoirs such as Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time and Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast. Nonfiction does not necessarily demand distance or resolution. It can say “Look, I am a witness. This is how it is.”
The expectations for fiction, on the other hand, are that it will transport you to a heightened world where life truths are revealed precisely because they needn’t conform to the limitations of reality. Fiction that merely tries to duplicate reality seems, oddly enough, unconvincing. Sadly, many early AIDS stories and novels, while important testaments to the astonishing will to create amid even the most dire circumstances, won’t stand the test of time because, ultimately, disease and death are predictable. Fiction must surprise, or even the most heart–rending subject matter becomes clichŽ.
Here are five fictions from the battlefield that surprised me, works that should remain essential reading long after the war is over:
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The Body and Its Dangers (St. Martin’s Press, 1990) was Allen Barnett’s first and only published book. As it did with far too many artists, AIDS ended his career just as it was beginning. Fortunately, he left behind the six beautiful stories in this collection, most of which chronicle the effect of AIDS on relationships among lovers, former lovers, and longtime friends. Barnett poignantly reveals the enormity of the disease by illuminating small, sometimes trivial moments in lives under siege. The collection’s centerpiece, “The ‘Times’ As It Knows Us,” mines familiar, even stereotypical territory—a group of gay men dishing in the Pines—yet remains one of the most moving, nuanced pieces of literature I’ve ever read.
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The fragmented structure of Dale Peck’s first novel, Martin and John (HarperPerennial, 1993), is at first confusing. Characters named Martin and John mutate from one chapter to the next. Sometimes Martin is dying, sometimes he’s well; at one point Martin is John’s stepfather, at another he’s John’s wealthy older lover, at yet another he’s a teen–aged boy. What unifies the work are its recurring themes—a parent’s death, sexual abuse, the relationship between violence and sexuality, AIDS—and Peck’s consistently fresh, fearless voice. At the book’s conclusion, a grief–numbed narrator/author eloquently describes our struggle to articulate the unimaginably real: “Sometimes you have to start over. The stories you make up for yourself don’t seem to have any relevance to the life you lead; the horrors you imagined pale beside the ones you experience, and in your mind there’s a battle as it tries to find something to grab on to, whether it’s a memory of something that happened or a memory of something you imagined, a story you told yourself.”
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Wearing activism on your sleeve can be deadly to fiction writing. Too easily, the propaganda line is crossed and the characters become cardboard mouthpieces for the previously converted. If Sarah Schulman weren’t such an unflinching writer, she might walk the line less successfully than she does in her 1995 novel Rat Bohemia (Plume). Reading her work, you’ve little doubt she’s been in the activist trenches for the past two decades. But her characters come alive, and she’s one of the few writers to put gay men and lesbians together on the page, warts and all. It takes brutal compassion to write this honestly: “One thing I know for sure is that AIDS is not a transforming experience…. We expect that once people stare down their mortality in the mirror they will understand something profound about death and life that the rest of us have to wait until old age to discover. But that’s not what happens. Actually, people just become themselves.”
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Irish writer Colm T—ib’n’s most recent AIDS–themed novel, The Blackwater Lightship, is currently receiving a lot of mainstream attention. His previous novel, The Story of the Night (Henry Holt, 1996), was set against a backdrop of political tensions in Argentina, and was his first to feature gay protagonists. T—ib’n’s characters, unlike those in Rat Bohemia, reside far from the epicenter of queer life and of the epidemic; for them, the personal is not political, at least not by choice. I found The Story of the Night deeply romantic (and erotic) in part because T—ib’n’s characters are so completely isolated from American notions of identity. His style is unadorned to the point of seeming simple–minded. It wasn’t until I reached the end of the novel that I realized how powerfully affecting—and tragic—his storytelling can be.
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I’ve long admired Edmund White; his views on gay culture are never less than witty and wise. While his trailblazing importance as one of the first out gay writers is indisputable, I’ve sometimes found his prose style a bit rococo for my tastes. In recent years, his work has increasingly blurred the line between fiction and autobiography. White’s uncharacteristically spare new novel, The Married Man (Knopf, 2000), though told in the third person, very closely parallels his relationship with French illustrator Hubert Sorin. I’d heard him recount the story of his lover’s death in Morocco, but that hardly prepared me for the harrowing suspense of the novel’s finale. No one writes about AIDS with brighter clarity and less sentimentality than White. Throw into the mix pithy social commentary, keen analyses of sexuality and aging, and masterfully sensuous visual details and you realize how lucky we are that White is still with us, still writing.
There are no happy endings—yet—in the literature of the AIDS epidemic. What these five novels share, however, beyond a willingness to tackle head–on a subject matter many would rather deny, is a quality that makes them life–affirming even as they elegize. There are others I’ve missed, more to come, prayers for a happy ending, promises not to forget.