
TELLING TIME:

Resisting the Apocalypse in American AIDS Novels

1982-1992

by

LISA FRIEDEN

TELLING TIME: Resisting the Apocalypse in American AIDS Novels, 1982-1992.

Copyright (C) 2020 by Lisa Frieden.

Originally titled Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American AIDS Novels, 1982-1992, a doctoral dissertation by Lisa Garmire Frieden published in 1996 by the University of California, Santa Barbara.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews or in credited citations in academic publications.

www.lisafrieden.com.

My love to the HIV+ and AIDS community and my friends who have passed on. Especially Tom. I miss you.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Professor Emeritus and now deceased Elliott Butler-Evans, who gave me the departmental support I needed to complete the project. Endless thanks and gratitude to Adan Griego, without whom I could not have achieved such a comprehensive bibliography. Additional thanks to Professor Emeritus Steven Allaback for supporting my project. My life in graduate school at University of California Santa Barbara would have been immeasurably emptier without Professor Frank McConnell, who was forever my advocate. How I miss you, Frank.

# Table of Contents

Chapter 1: AIDS Novels in Context

Chapter 2: The Apocalyptic AIDS Novel: Facing It: A Novel of AIDS

Chapter 3: Resisting the Apocalyptic AIDS Narrative in David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion

Chapter 4: Borrowing Time in Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home

Chapter 5: Silent Apocalypse: Race, Class, Gender, Heterosexual AIDS

Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of American AIDS Novels: 1982-1992

Selected Bibliography of American AIDS Novels published since 1992

Works Cited

Preface

And from the ends of the earth, across the thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.

-- Camus The Plague

Perhaps it isn't surprising that with the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, I find myself reflecting on another virus that once wreaked epidemic death across the United States. HIV first appeared on the world stage almost forty years ago. Coming of age in that era, I was personally affected by the deaths of friends and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the subject as a way to try and understand how novelists could imagine stories about the epidemic. Now in 2020, as I live as an immunocompromised person in a new world of social isolation and quarantine, I wonder what exactly does "safe living" mean and do masks function like "face condoms"? How do you assess risk when certain behaviors could expose you to something that, in my case and in many others, could kill you?

Though HIV and Covid-19 are hardly synonymous with each other, especially given that people can recover from Covid-19, I find myself continually surprised at the parallels that have arisen in both crises. Public policy has been woefully inadequate. Fear and politicization of the viruses run rampant. Particularly disturbing to me is how disproportionately deadly the viruses are to people of color. Unfortunately, forty years haven't seen enough progress. Still there is no vaccine for HIV, and I am doubtful that one will be developed for Covid-19, considering that no vaccine was developed for the initial SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. The viruses are tricky, resilient, and deadly.

One thing that has changed in the forty years, however, is that writers can now more easily bring their works to the light of day. Having successfully published several other books, I decided in this current time of plague to issue my dissertation as a book and to offer it free to whomever may find it useful in their research and otherwise. I can only hope that in another forty years, more will have changed with respect to American public policy and that we might evolve our empathy beyond Camus' assertion and one day be able to truly share in the suffering we cannot see.

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# Chapter 1: AIDS Novels in Context

The obvious consequence of believing that all those who "harbor" the virus will eventually come down with the illness is that those who test positive for it are regarded as people-with-AIDS, who just don't have it... yet. It is only a matter of time, like any death sentence. -- Susan Sontag

1.1 Introduction

As Paula Treichler has noted, the AIDS epidemic "is simultaneously an epidemic of transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification" (32). This was especially true during the first decade of the epidemic in the 1980's, when the lack of literal knowledge about AIDS generated an explosion of the figural meanings of AIDS. Susan Sontag's provocative words, "It was only a matter of time, like any death sentence," describe one of the most powerful ways AIDS was first signified in the United States. Biomedical discourse, the media, and much politically charged rhetoric of the 1980's emphasized a linear and mortal trajectory of AIDS, the effect of which was to collapse the time between diagnosis and death such that an AIDS diagnosis or even an HIV+ test result was represented as a "death sentence." It was within this highly charged context that the early novels about people living with AIDS (what I will call AIDS novels) were written, and a key issue at stake within them is the problem of how to represent the temporality of AIDS.[1]

In this dissertation, I will examine the narrative strategies by which the significant AIDS novels I consider both address and resist the apocalyptic significations of time that dominated the rhetoric of AIDS in the first decade of the epidemic in the United States.

1.2 Disease and the Novel

AIDS novels can be linked in part to a larger literary tradition about physical disease. Though much has been written about the relationship between mental illness and literary production, little has been written about the relationship between physical disease and literature.[2]

One exception has been the important contribution made by Jeffrey Meyers in Disease and the Novel. In this book, Meyers identifies and describes a particular literary tradition that relates physical disease and artistic production, one that asserts that "The creation of literature is one way of transcending mortality and celebrating human existence, despite the threat of death" (2). He entitles this tradition of linking physical disease with literary production, "Romantic," not to be confused with the British and German Romantics, though he asserts that "The poet-hero whose life and writings most perfectly embody the Romantic idea of the diseased and doomed artist is John Keats...who lived the last year of his life under the constant threat of death" (6). Central to Meyers' conception of a "Romantic tradition" that links literature and disease is the idea of the artist as "an outcast who renounces life in order to create art..." (11). The experience of disease also places the artist in "an existential situation... Man knows he is mortal; disease makes mortality visible and forces the victim to realize what it means to be an isolated being - irreparably condemned to death" (14).

Thus, the key elements of Meyers' Romantic tradition include isolation (the sense of both the distance and the difference of the artist from the healthy), individualism (the sick person's ability to act and think separately from a larger social context), and mortality (the sick person's direct confrontation with the time limits of existence). Also active within this tradition is a particular belief about the relationship between time and art, which asserts that "timeless" art is an important strategy by which to resist the temporal, mortal trajectory of human time. Paradoxically, however, though the sick artist struggles to escape diseased life by privileging an art of timelessness, this desire yet confirms the linear and mortal trajectory of his life.[3]

Though Meyers' articulation of this "Romantic" tradition makes an important contribution to the study of the relationship between disease and the novel, his tradition describes only one possible relationship between them. As he himself notes, Alexander Solzenhitzyn is an important exception to the tradition he describes:

"Unlike Tolstoy, Hemingway and Mann, who observed illness objectively, Solzhenitsyn earned his insight through actual experience. He writes in the tradition of Russian realism, of Tolstoy and Chekov, and resolutely renounces the Romantic attitude toward disease. He does not believe the artist is sick or that disease inspires creative genius, aesthetic insight, spiritual knowledge or human dignity. And he does not think that the artist must stand outside society." (16, my emphasis)

Solzhenitzyn's "actual experience" of cancer and of life in a cancer ward influences his representation of the disease in his novel. For him, disease does not figure simply as a literary tool for imagining the philosopher poet contemplating his doom. Rather than focus on isolation, individualism, and mortality, Solzhenitzyn emphasizes the importance of relationships, interpersonal responsibilities and the process of living. Like him, many of the AIDS novelists this dissertation considers, including Paul Monette, David Feinberg and Robert Ferro among others, renounce this "Romantic" attitude toward disease. And, like Solzenhitzyn, they too write from actual experience, but instead of cancer, they live with HIV, ARC or AIDS.

Though Meyers notes that Solzhenitzyn is an exception to the tradition he traces, it is beyond the scope of his project to consider what alternative relationship between disease and art Solzhenitzyn's novel might express. This dissertation will contribute to enlarging the understanding of the relationships between disease and the novel by considering how AIDS novelists write about their disease. A crucial distinction must be made, however, between different kinds of diseases, because different diseases carry different cultural interpretations.[4]

Unlike cancer, AIDS is contagious, and, during the first decade of the epidemic, it appeared to be spreading exponentially through an entire community rather than sporadically affecting isolated individuals. Quests for explaining the origin of the virus, the rates of spread, the projected lifetime after an HIV+ diagnosis, and the latest mortality figures led to an increased emphasis on linear history and the propagation of apocalyptic rhetoric about AIDS as "plague."[5]

The rhetoric of AIDS became increasingly tied to a language of time. To better understand the significance in the AIDS novels of the narrative strategies for depicting time, we need to understand the tremendous power that the language of apocalypse has had on the American imagination.

1.3 AIDS and Apocalyptic Rhetoric

The vision of Apocalypse has played a crucial role in the literary and cultural imaginations of the Judeo-Christian West. As Frank Kermode has written, "We project ourselves - a small, humble elect, perhaps - past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle" (8). In the United States, the cultural importance of the apocalyptic imagination can be traced from as far back as the founding of the Puritan colonies to the more recent time of the nuclear age. In his Introduction to In a Dark Time, Joseph Dewey provides a thorough description of the attributes that are manifested in apocalyptic thinking:

"A belief in the incessant linearity of history; an unashamed sense of cosmic scale; a sobering belief that history is best understood as a cooperative structure of beginning, middle, and end; the strong possibility of a fast-approaching end; a general dissatisfaction with the moral life of the present culture; a strong awareness of contemporary crisis that draws a definite line between good and evil; an inherently dramatic approach to history that is as riveting as any drama rushing toward a shuddering climax." (12)

Dewey's analysis of the apocalyptic temper of the nuclear age goes no further than 1985. Indeed, the mid to later 1980's saw a distinct bracketing of the nuclear age, with Gorbachav, glastnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and ultimately the dissolution of the USSR. AIDS replaced nuclear war as the global threat and became the latest site for apocalyptic rhetoric in the United States, as Richard Dellamora has observed in Apocalyptic Overtures, "By 1990, an array of apocalyptic narratives had been inscribed in mystified, homophobic representations of AIDS in the mass media" (6).

Though AIDS novels invoke the apocalyptic representations of AIDS, many of them also seek to resist the dangerously mythic power of apocalyptic thinking. Kermode has drawn a useful distinction between myth and fiction. He writes, "myth operates within diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures" (39). With myth, the past, the present, and most importantly, the future are predetermined. Fictions, on the other hand, "are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change" (39). Because fictions emphasize the process of "finding things out," they privilege time in the present. Kermode's distinction between "myth" and "fictions" is a useful one for understanding some of the key issues involved in the novels about AIDS. Like the fictions Kermode describes, many of the AIDS novels we will consider insist on the possibilities available in the present. Biomedical discourse, not to mention that of the media and the Right Wing, has generated an AIDS myth, the "facts," which imposes a linear, temporal trajectory on AIDS and which focuses on the "inevitable" future of an AIDS diagnosis, such that AIDS=death. Many of the AIDS novels resist the mythic power of this temporal representation of AIDS, often by emphasizing the possiblities available in the present time or by envisioning alternative futures to the mortal End imposed by medical diagnosis.

The AIDS novels, however, cannot wholly extricate themselves from the medical "myths." Indeed, Paul Reed's novel, Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, for example, is wholly dependent on the medical "facts" about AIDS for its structure, even though this dependency is not mere submission. Ultimately, all of the AIDS novels address the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding AIDS, though they develop differing strategies for alternatively conceptualizing the time of AIDS. The stakes involved in resisting the apocalyptic rhetoric of AIDS are greatly intensified in those AIDS novels that describe the experiences of gay men, because homosexuality has traditionally been so often equated with apocalypse. As Dellamora notes, "The threat sodomy was traditionally taken to pose to both the secular and the religious orders suggests that the association of sex between men with end times is embedded in the political unconscious of Christian societies" (3).

1.4 AIDS as the "Gay Plague"

Much of the recent work done in the study of sexuality, including aspects of the newly emerging field of queer studies, has noted the cultural tendency to yoke male homosexuality with death. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray has become a classic source for the analysis of male-male desire and, as Jeff Nunokawa writes, "Wilde's novelization of the homosexual male subject casts this most common sentence as the gay signature, concentrating fatality in the figure of a male homosexual identity, as the figure of male homosexual identity" (316). Other theorists have claimed that the desire to link male homosexuality with death is a fearful response to imagining homosexual practices. In his disturbing essay, "Is the Rectum a Grave?," Leo Bersani puts it quite vividly, when he writes of the horror of imagining "The infinitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman" (212). He argues that the intolerableness of imagining male anal intercourse stems from certain prevailing notions about sexual intercourse in patriarchal Western society: "To be penetrated is to abdicate power...It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other" (217, my emphasis).

If we consider the ramifications of Bersani's point, then the very "naturalness" of heterosexuality assigns an "unnatural" designation to homosexuality, and, through a similar oppositional logic, where heterosexual intercourse traditionally is viewed as life-affirming and procreative, homosexual intercourse then is perceived as deathly destructive. In its pursuit to explain "Nature," science has historically reflected these sexual binarisms, and homosexuality was medicalized as an illness until the 1970's.[6]

To a large extent, the gay rights movement in the United States and Western Europe involved combating images of isolated, doomed homosexuals like Dorian Gray and creating communities of highly visible, typically white, urban gays, who celebrated life, freedom, sexuality and success, and who sought to make homosexuality a publicly recognized, acceptable lifestyle.

Part of the tragedy of AIDS in the early 1980's was its ominous emergence in the United States as a "gay plague," which threatened to undo a decade of trying to demedicalize and legitimate male homosexuality. In fact, AIDS was initially known in the medical journals not as "AIDS" but as something that specifically targeted gays, GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder). In 1982, the CDC officially changed the name to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), when it first outlined a surveillance case definition, which was modified again in 1983, and then much later in 1987, to include a larger number of diseases that affected individuals other than homosexuals.[7]

It wasn't until January 1, 1993, however, more than a full decade since tracking of the epidemic began, that the CDC added a clinical condition that specifically affected women with AIDS.[8]

Until this expanded definition was implemented, many people, including many women, were invisible to medicine, the insurance industry and all of the other health-related organizations that operate under the mandate of the CDC.[9]

Additionally, with Clinton's election to the presidency in 1992, and with more media attention paid to heterosexual AIDS, public perceptions about AIDS have begun to change. During the first decade of AIDS in the United States, however, the bulk of public perception, exacerbated by media representations of figures like Rock Hudson and Liberace as well as by the slow moving public policy of the Reagan years, imagined AIDS not only as a modern day apocalyptic plague but as a homosexual one in particular.

To talk about the first decade of AIDS in the United States is to inevitably confront the yoking of homosexuality with disease and apocalyptic rhetoric. Because so little was initially known about it (and even today, because we as yet have no cure, no "magic bullet"),[10]

AIDS constitutes a site over which multiple discourses and rhetoric vie for the power to alleviate fear of the unknown. In her reading of Camus' The Plague, Treichler explains the dynamic in the novel whereby scientific "facts" combine with people's fears to make plague more imaginable and thus more manageable:

"The townspeople of Oran in The Plague experience relief when the plague bacillus is identified: the odd happenings - the dying rats, the mysterious human illnesses - are caused by something that has originated elsewhere, something external, something "objective," something medicine can name, even if not cure. The tension between self and not-self becomes important as we try to understand the particular role of viruses and origin stories in AIDS." (47)

With AIDS, the "general population" was contrasted to the "high risk groups," and because public perception viewed AIDS as the "gay disease," the "not-self" became figured as the homosexual.

The literalization of AIDS into a "gay plague," as a spreading and infectious homosexual epidemic, has had material consequences.[11]

As Lee Edelman points out,

"It is, after all, the citation of the pressing literality of the epidemic with its allegedly "literal" identification of homosexuality and disease, that fuels the homophobic responses to AIDS and demands that we renounce what are blithely dismissed as figural embellishments upon the "real," material necessities of human survival - embellishments such as civil rights and equal protection under the law." (316)

The gay community came under attack for the very thing it had fought so hard to legitimate, namely its sexuality, and yet again, but now with horrific "evidence," this sexuality was yoked to a ghastly death. An example of this resurrected yoking of homosexuality with death can be seen in Randy Shilts' tremendously popular novelization of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Shilts attributes the spread of AIDS to a single, suicidally murderous homosexual, which reinforces homophobic stereotyping of gay men. As Nunokawa notes, "The story of [Gaetan] Dugas singlehandedly infecting an entire community with HIV serves to narrate his status, in Shilts' novelization, as a reflection of that community" (313).[12]

Important for our discussion is the way that homophobic attitudes toward homosexuality have influenced and reinforced assumptions about the mortal trajectory of AIDS. In a cogent articulation of this point, Nunokawa writes:

"If the notion that gay men are subject to extinction encourages the continued homosexualization of AIDS it may also help to account for the continued resistance to the idea that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is not uniformly fatal, the persistent failure to perceive HIV-related infections as things that people live with, as well as die from. AIDS is a gay disease, and it means death, because AIDS has been made the most recent chapter in our culture's history of the gay male, a history which sometimes reads like a book of funerals." (312, my emphasis)

Though HIV infection does not yield immediate death, indeed it is something people "live with," because of its association with homosexuality, AIDS continues to be seen as fatal, that "it means death."

1.5 Cultural Narratives and Plotting AIDS

To link AIDS with male homosexuality, plague and death is to describe a particular cultural narrative about AIDS, one which James Jones has described as, "one of the most potent American cultural narratives about AIDS - and the one with the most dangerous implications for affecting attitudes towards those with AIDS - [which] is that AIDS is a 'plague'" (74). One of the dangerous implications of this cultural narratives is that it imposes what we could call an AIDS plot on the life of a person diagnosed with HIV, ARC or AIDS. To borrow from Peter Brooks, a succinct definition for "plot" is "...the principal ordering force of those meanings we try to wrest from human temporality" (xi). Thus, to describe the plot of a novel is to describe the temporal ordering of its events. The principal ordering force of an AIDS plot is that AIDS means death, or the end of human temporality; in other words, AIDS robs a person of life, of time. Because this AIDS plot plays such an integral part of the cultural narratives about AIDS, any novelist who attempts to write about AIDS must address it. Indeed, many writers have found themselves asking, as Adam Mars-Jones has, "How do you tell a fresh story when the structure [plot] is set?" (1) Though many of the AIDS novels succumb to the AIDS plot, there are also those novels that question its authority. Many of these are by novelists who themselves live with AIDS, to whom challenging the AIDS plot is of mortal concern. Their efforts are courageous, as Treichler notes, "To challenge biomedical authority - whose meanings are part of powerful and deeply entrenched social and historical codes - has required considerable tenacity and courage from people dependent in the AIDS crisis upon science and medicine for protection, care, and the possibility of cure" (40).

1.6 The AIDS Novels of the First Decade

Artistic responses to the experience of the epidemic were initially slow in coming. As others have noted about horrendous historical experiences, such as nuclear war and the Holocaust, writers usually need time to assimilate their experiences, and only later do they have the emotional endurance and strength to express that experience in novels.[13]

Indeed, with AIDS, the earliest artistic expressions about people living with AIDS (PLWAs) took the forms of plays, poetry, and short stories. Many of the plays sought to raise public consciousness and promote activism about the government's slow response to the epidemic. An important early figure was Larry Kramer, a gay activist and one of the founders of both the Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP, who wrote a series of plays, including The Normal Heart, which were intended to express his rage at governmental inaction and to incite his audiences to become engaged in fighting the epidemic. Many of the poems, short stories and memoirs acted as testimonies, remembering figures who had died and speaking of the tremendous tragedies and changes AIDS has wrought on gay life. Susan Sontag's short experimental piece, "The Way We Live Now," appeared in The New Yorker in 1986, and introduced the experience of AIDS to the literary imaginations of a wide, general audience.

Many of these early artistic expressions sought to challenge cultural narratives about AIDS, including the authority of biomedicine, which, when it assigns an AIDS diagnosis, plots time in an apocalyptically mortal way, emphasizing the impending End. Though people have continued living upwards of twelve years after an AIDS diagnosis, the common perception continues that, in Sontag's words, "It is only a matter of time, like any death sentence." These artists also addressed the feelings of apocalyptic doom, which were exacerbated for gay men living with AIDS whose homosexuality had been already metaphorized in apocalyptic terms. Indeed, early on, it seemed as if the Christian Moral Majority had God on its side, bringing the Apocalypse and striking down the accursed.[14]

Because AIDS initially decimated large numbers of gay men within the gay communities of New York and San Francisco, not only did HIV+ gay men have to deal with feelings about their own possible mortality, but often were simultaneously trying to cope with the myriad of losses of loved ones and friends. At work in many of the artistic responses to AIDS is the implicit affirmation of an idea cogently expressed by ACT UP's slogan, SILENCE=DEATH. The act of remembering and putting that remembrance into language and art helps keep memories alive.[15]

Where AIDS novels differ, at times quite significantly, from the other literary expressions about AIDS is in their creation of narrative spaces that involve a prolonged confrontation with the problem of representing the time of AIDS. In response to the question of how novels differ from short stories, for example, the author David Leavitt has explained that short stories are like affairs - passionate, dramatic, but brief, whereas novels are more like marriages and like life - long and intricate, intimate, relationships.[16]

As we will see in our exploration of the novels about AIDS, to describe living with AIDS in the lengthy narrative form of a novel leads inevitably to a confrontation with and negotiation of the AIDS plot that has been generated by biomedical discourses, media representations of AIDS and public perception.

Though Dorothy Bryant's A Day in San Francisco was the first novel to make reference to a mysterious new epidemic affecting gay men, it wasn't until 1984, with the publication of Paul Reed's novel, Facing It: A Novel of AIDS, that the first novel appeared which sought to describe the experience of living with AIDS. By 1987, a good number of novels that dealt with AIDS as a central theme began to appear, though none of the novels about gay people living with AIDS received much mainstream public attention. It was also about this time that AIDS began to be perceived as more of a threat to "the general population."

Indeed, the first popularly received novel about AIDS was Alice Hoffman's At Risk, which appeared in 1988, and which tells the story of a suburban, white, heterosexual family and the suffering they experience as their daughter Amanda dies of AIDS, which she contracted nonsexually, "innocently," through a blood transfusion.[17]

The AIDS novels of the first decade fall into two large, general categories - novels about gay PLWAs, which are mainly written by men, and novels about children PLWAs, which are almost entirely written by women.[18]

During this decade, there were remarkably few novels about women living with AIDS.[19]

The 1990's have seen some modifications in the cultural narratives about AIDS. Since Clinton's election in 1992, public discussion about AIDS-related issues has greatly increased, including, for example, the debates about permitting gays in the military, as well as the circulation around the country of the mainstream, award-winning movie, Philadelphia, which addresses homophobia and the fear of AIDS.

1.7 Plotting the Dissertation

Chapter 1 places the AIDS novels in context. Chapter 1 establishes the apocalyptic narrative paradigm that the majority of the AIDS novels follow. Appearing during the height of the apocalyptic and homophobic rhetoric about AIDS, the earliest AIDS novel, Paul Reed's Facing It, provides a good example of this narrative paradigm, or AIDS plot, which represents AIDS as a linear temporality and which focuses on the future and the assumption that AIDS=death. Chapter 2 assesses how Reed's novel engages the problematic contradictions between biomedical discourse and the protagonist's, Andy's, experience of his illness, and this chapter analyzes how the novel ultimately succumbs to the apocalyptic AIDS plot. In order to both illustrate this paradigm and substantiate my claim of its pervasiveness, this chapter draws extensively from the comprehensive bibliography of the AIDS novels published during the first decade of the epidemic. Chapter 3 addresses one set of narrative strategies used to resist the apocalyptic representation of AIDS time, namely the use of memory. In David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion apocalypse is resisted by casting the temporal trajectory of the narrative toward the past, with a refusal to look forward into the future. Chapter Four assesses the critical achievement of one of the most important of the AIDS novelists, Paul Monette, and his narrative strategy in Afterlife and Halfway Home of insisting on the importance of the temporality of the present. Chapter Five consider srepresentative AIDS novels written by women, including M. E. Kerr's Night Kites and Alice Hoffman's At Risk. In this chapter, I also bring my discussion of the AIDS novels into the second decade of the epidemic, and I address the concern of the lack of novels that describe the experiences of women, particularly women of color, and AIDS.

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# Chapter 2: The Apocalyptic AIDS Novel: Facing It: A Novel of AIDS

He [Andy Stone] realized that now the diagnosis was given, he had something to which to concede his health, his life probably. There was in it - though he remained filled with confusion - a slight blessing; the unknown would soon cease to instill fear. -- Facing It: A Novel of AIDS

2.1 Introduction

This chapter defines what I mean by an "apocalyptic AIDS novel," by conducting a detailed analysis of Paul Reed's novel, Facing It: a Novel of AIDS. This chapter also demonstrates the pervasiveness of this apocalyptic narrative representation of AIDS in the different kinds of AIDS novels by extensively referencing the Annotated Bibliography, which can be found at the end of the Dissertation and which groups novels about AIDS into five general categories.

Reed's novel was the first primary AIDS novel published in the United States.[20]

By "primary AIDS novel," I mean a novel in which AIDS plays a central role in the narrative and which can be distinguished from several other categories of AIDS novels (please see the Annotated Bibliography for a definition of these five general categories). Though Reed's novel has been considered somewhat didactic and awkward in its execution by critics, it is important for several reasons.[21]

First, it marks the historical emergence of a new literary tradition, novels about AIDS, and secondly, the structure of its narrative illustrates a paradigm for representing AIDS to which many subsequent novels about AIDS conform.[22]

2.2.1 The Problems and Possibilities of Paradigm Formation

Before turning to Reed's novel, there are several things that need to be said in general about the problems and possibilities associated with the formation of a paradigm to describe the narratives of novels about AIDS.[23]

To define our terms, we could say that a paradigm is the establishment of a general model (or type) by which to describe a group of things. A narrative paradigm for novels about AIDS, then, is a particular narrative structure that generally describes a large number of AIDS novels. The most obvious problem with such a paradigm is that it may mute, or even worse, erase the particularities of a specific novel to fit general criteria. A related problem is that to blindly apply a paradigm to a group of novels without respect to the dynamic and changing cultural and historical contexts in which the novels were written may prevent the literary scholar from seeing how the paradigm itself may shift and change when adopted by different people and through time.[24]

On the positive side, however, if a scholar has read a great many texts and begins to see particular trends in how the novels treat a subject such as AIDS, the formation of a paradigm may help the scholar better understand and describe the issues at stake in the novels. With respect to novels about AIDS, we can see a repetitive pattern in the narrative structure of a great many of the novels and, for lack of a better phrase, we can call it an "apocalyptic narrative paradigm."

2.2.2 The Apocalyptic Narrative Paradigm of AIDS

In using the term "apocalyptic," I do not allude to the Christian view of the Apocalypse, which mitigates the destructiveness of the Apocalypse by the promise of eternal salvation for the Chosen. Rather, I draw from the work of scholars like Frank Kermode and Richard Dellamora, who argue that the idea of apocalypse plays an important part in how people make sense of their lives, and which is reflected in their literature. Kermode's The Sense of an Ending illustrates how important a role the notion of the End is in the history of the Judeo-Christian world for making sense of life in time, or as he puts it, "life in the middest," and Dellamora's recent book, Apocalyptic Overtures, extends the implications of apocalyptic rhetoric to describe issues of sexuality. Issues of temporality and sexuality conjoin in the spectre of AIDS, which exacerbates the tendency toward apocalyptic rhetoric and representations of AIDS. Indeed, the language of apocalypse permeates the medical, social and cultural representations of AIDS, and not surprisingly, the novels about AIDS. AIDS as apocalypse means the intense focus on the End AIDS threatens: death, inexorable, non-redemptive; the destruction of communities, families, couples, with little or no hope for a cure; an ending with few consolations. The apocalyptic narrative paradigm for novels about AIDS, then, is a narrative that represents AIDS as a one-way ticket to death. Associated with this narrative paradigm is what could be called an "AIDS plot," and, as I will illustrate, various elements of Reed's novel, Facing It, combine to generate a plot dynamic that thrusts the narrative inexorably forward toward an apocalyptic ending.

2.2.3 The Popularity of Apocalyptic Narratives

Certain narrative structures or plots have had long literary histories in Judeo-Christianity. Indeed, as many narrative theorists have remarked, traditional novels tend either to have comic plots, which move toward marital union, or to have tragic plots, which fall toward death.[25]

In the case of AIDS, which has often been seen as a tragic affliction dooming heroic young men in the prime of their lives, there is a powerful appeal to use a tragic plot trajectory, which moves toward their deaths, as a way to describe their lives. Historically, the experience of other diseases has also led to the popularity of this tragic plot structure. During the nineteenth-century, for example, consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) became a popular disease to depict in tragic literature, and, as Jeffrey Meyer points out, John Keats' life history seemed to enact a tragic plot. Keats became the embodiment of a Romantic tradition of disease, which, according to Meyer, privileged the diseased character as a heroic and noble, yet doomed, figure.[26]

The tragic plot becomes apocalyptic when the tragedy is no longer confined to an individual but threatens us all, and the twentieth-century, with its world wars, genocides and nuclear threats, has been an apocalyptic century. Apocalypse and plague come together in Albert Camus' The Plague as a way for Camus to comment on the cosmic condition of humanity following the atrocities of World War II. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that in this historical context, and because there is as yet no cure for it, AIDS has so often been described as an apocalyptic plague (on one extreme, as God's Judgment of the immoral, and on the other, as a modern-day Holocaust).[27]

Unfortunately, as queer scholars have noted, apocalyptic language, when used to describe gay men with AIDS, has oftentimes overlapped with an insidious, homophobic tendency in literature about homosexual men to mark gay characters as plague-ridden and doomed.[28]

Due to these multiply interacting and mutually informing traditions, the apocalyptic narrative paradigm has had a tremendously popular appeal for novelists who write about AIDS, since it is an easy form to utilize, in part because of its well-established history and easy applicability for representing AIDS.

The popularity of the apocalyptic narrative paradigm, however, depends upon the novelist's relationship to AIDS. As Meyers notes of Solzhenitzyn, who had cancer, when a writer is sick with a disease, he or she does not participate in the "Romantic" tradition that idealizes disease.[29]

Indeed, since the stakes involved in representing AIDS are much higher for them, the novels written by people living with AIDS differ quite markedly from those written by people who do not have AIDS.[30]

For many novelists living with AIDS, the apocalyptic narrative of AIDS threatens absolute destruction, and as they fight for their lives, their novels also fight for life, seeking to resist the mortal destructiveness of this narrative and to create alternative, life-affirming narratives.[31]

Thus, another possible explanation for the popularity of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative may be linked to the fortunate fact that the great majority of people living and writing in the United States do not have AIDS and can afford to unproblematically engage the pre-existent cultural narrative of AIDS.

2.3 The Apocalyptic Narrative of AIDS in the 1980's

Critics have noted the historical and medical accuracy of the depiction of AIDS in Facing It.[32]

Though the novel was published in 1984, its dated entries mark an even earlier historical time period in the history of AIDS. The narrative spans roughly seven months, beginning with June 1981 and ending in mid-February 1982. The earliness of these dates is important, because the medical knowledge about AIDS was only just beginning. In fact, the novel begins during the very month the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published its first report of an epidemic of pneumocystis pneumonia afflicting gay men. And, the novel accurately depicts how AIDS was first known as GRID (Gay-Related-Immune-Disorder) and only came to be known as AIDS in 1982. Indeed, it wasn't until 1984 that HIV was confirmed as the virus that causes AIDS.[33]

Fear, mystery and paranoia played a large role in the cultural consciousness of AIDS at this time, especially because so little was known medically about it.[34]

Rhetoric and metaphor rushed in to fill the gap created by this lack of scientific knowledge. As the death count increased exponentially, AIDS began to be perceived as a mortal illness and a horrifyingly lethal plague. There was a sense of time rushing forward apocalyptically, of time running out. In his book, And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts describes the sense of urgency in January 1982, "We are losing time, and time is the enemy in any epidemic. The disease is moving even if the government isn't" (121). In New York City, where the epidemic struck with the earliest severity, Larry Kramer wrote "1, 112 and Counting" as a way to inflame his community and stir it to action, and in 1983, he helped form the Gay Men's Health Crisis, which became a way for the gay community to help care for itself in lieu of the apathy of the "general public." The New York gay community did not have the time during this early period of the epidemic to write novels about AIDS, because it was so swept up in basic survival. As Paul Reed points out in an essay, "Early AIDS Fiction," "New Yorkers, and gay New Yorkers in particular, found themselves amidst the swirling maelstrom of death and dying, without even a moment to pause and reflect..." (93). As he goes on to note, "It was the dubious fortune of the west coast and the rest of the nation to have the time to look up and see the train racing down the tracks before it hit" (93). Though both Reed and Shilts write from San Francisco's gay community, they situate the early years of the American AIDS epidemic in New York, and like Larry Kramer, they both emphasize the mounting numbers of dead and the mortal trajectory of AIDS time. Reed wrote Facing It and Shilts wrote And the Band Played On to educate the public about AIDS and to raise public consciousness about the threat it poses.

2.4 The Critical Reception to Facing It

Published by a small San Francisco press, Gay Sunshine Press, Facing It did not achieve widespread public recognition, though it did receive comment in the gay literary community.[35]

The educational aspects of Facing It have garnered the book both its highest praise and its deepest criticism. Repeatedly commented upon has been the accuracy of the novel's depictions of AIDS, both as a syndrome suffered by individuals as well as an epidemic fought by the medical establishment. The early reviewer Joseph Interrante, for example, notes that "the educational aspects of Facing It are extremely important," and the novel "presents basic medical facts about the opportunistic infections associated with AIDS... [and] traces the politicizations of the medical crisis and the concomitant obstructions to research and treatment of AIDS" (6). In a later essay, entitled "AIDS and the American Novel," Emmanuel Nelson calls the novel a "carefully researched work" (51). Gay critics applaud Reed's depiction of the gay couple, Andy and David, as they face AIDS, as McGovern writes, "In spite of the obstacles of alienation, loneliness, and death from AIDS, Reed affirms the possibility of a loving monogamous relationship between two gay men" (354).

Though there is general agreement about the importance of the educational aspects of Facing It, there is also general agreement that the novel does not integrate these aspects into a smoothly cohesive, larger form. The critics find different explanations for the novel's awkwardness. Interrante points out that Reed's use of a question-and-answer style of dialogue as a way to convey much of the information about AIDS "sometimes makes the dialogue seem overly didactic and somewhat wooden" (7). Nelson attributes the awkward style of the novel to it being Reed's first novel (51), whereas Rochelle Ratner finds fault with the plot (92). Though Facing It will not be remembered for the literary execution of its themes, it will be remembered as "a welcome addition to our struggle to learn to live with AIDS."[36]

2.5 The Narrative Structure of Facing It

Facing It interweaves the life stories of two different white men, a fifty-year-old, straight doctor, Walter Branch, and Andrew Stone, a twenty-eight-year-old, gay activist, both living in New York City. Walter had delivered Andy as a baby in a restaurant during a blizzard while he was still in medical school, and he has continued a friendship with Andy ever since. The novel begins with Andy visiting Walter at his office, complaining of mysterious symptoms of ill health. The primary plot unfolds as an unraveling of the medical mystery presented by Andy's symptoms. What could it be that's making him so tired? Possibly hepatitis, but what is it that is causing the painful staph infections? Eventually, it becomes clear that Andy has AIDS, and the novel charts the various reactions principle characters, including David, several of their friends, and Andy's family, have to facing AIDS. A secondary plot intermingles with the primary one and it traces the ugly political and financial machinations involved in medical research.[37]

This secondary plot culminates in a final, successful confrontation, in which Walter's wealthy and influential wife coerces Art Macguire, the closeted homosexual who is in charge of finances at Mt. Zion hospital, to make funds available for AIDS research.

2.6 The Genre of Facing It

One way we might describe Facing It is as a medical "mystery" novel, in which the characters seek to uncover what is ailing Andy.[38]

As Walter Branch and the other doctors attempt to interpret his symptoms, and Andy and David try to understand the changes wrought on their lives by Andy's sickness, the narrative moves forward to confirm what we, the readers, already suspect. It is this gap between what the reader knows (at least from the title, if not from the cataloging of the ominous and incriminating symptoms) and what the characters do not know, in part the historical gap between the medical knowledge of 1981 and that of 1984 (and beyond), that helps fuel the suspenseful dynamic of the story. We read on, wondering when will they realize what Andy really has, when will they finally "face" it, when will Andy finally die. This dynamic presupposes that we as readers have a particular attitude toward AIDS and its effects on temporality, namely that it eradicates time due to its fatal "nature" (I use this term intentionally). The novel thus forces us to also "face" AIDS. Because we readers "know" there is no cure for AIDS, we watch in horrified confirmation that Andy cannot be "saved."

This concern with the future, of when Andy will die, keeps the narrative moving forward and emphasizing the future, rather than focusing on the present or the past. The present, which includes the unveiling of progressively gruesome, new symptoms and Andy's deteriorating health, is important only as it signifies the oncoming future and what will be the end result of Andy's illness. Memory and the past play only perfunctory roles in the narrative.[39]

The first chapter, for example, only briefly alludes to Dr. Branch's history as a medical researcher and it summarily enumerates how Branch came to deliver Andy into the world. Chapter Two then quickly fills us in on Andy's life story: his homophobic family, especially his father; his coming to gay consciousness in the 70's, with the help of Stonewall and his therapist; his political activism working for gay rights; his meeting David Markman in 1977 and their blossoming relationship. After this summary history, the narrative then halts its recollection of the past to focus again on the ailing present, a time in which, as David notes, "something was wrong, something imprecise, subtle" (31). The narrative then reiterates the specificity of the actual, historically significant time of the present: "And then it had begun. Early in the spring of 1981" (32). The past and present are only important to the narrative in how they lead us to the "real" story, of when "it had begun."

As the overall narrative moves forward, what's ailing Andy, writes its own narrative onto Andy's body and begins to take over the larger narrative. AIDS writes an all-consuming narrative over Andy's life, eating up and destroying the other narrative threads and options Andy's life initially has, to finally become the only narrative left to Andy; at this final point, he dies. This all-consuming destructiveness of the narrative AIDS writes over Andy's life not only destroys Andy but any alternative narrative options available to the novel as well.[40]

This is an important aspect of why I call this an "apocalyptic" paradigm, because it not only terminates the life of the person living with AIDS, but the narrative life of the novel as well. The closure is absolute, inescapable and unredeemable. The end is absolute, apocalyptic destruction.[41]

2.7 The Title: Facing It: a Novel of AIDS

The title initiates the apocalyptic narrative paradigm of the novel.[42]

According to the dictionary, "facing" something can be read several ways: "1. To confront impudently. 2. To stand with face forward. 3. To meet face to face. 4. To oppose firmly; resist. 5. To contemplate the prospect of" (295). In the context of this particular novel and the "it" which is faced, definitions numbered 2 ("to stand with face forward") and 5 ("to contemplate the prospect of") seem most applicable, though periodically the characters in the novel try to accomplish definition number 4 ("to oppose firmly; resist"). The present tense of the word, "facing," is important, because of what is being faced, namely, AIDS. Indeed, this "facing" is presented as a temporal problem, because to stand facing forward, is to look toward the future, the future of AIDS, which threatens to turn the present tense of "facing" into the past tense of the dead and historically ended. The narrative plays out the terms of its title, with its protagonist, Andy Stone, and his lover, David Markman, "facing it" and the impending death that AIDS threatens to Andy's life. In fact, as the narrative moves forward toward the future that is faced, a slippage occurs in the meaning assigned to the vague term, "it." Though "it" initially seems to signify AIDS, as Andy's health deteriorates, "it" also becomes synonymous with death. We can see that even within the novel's title, the apocalyptic rhetoric of AIDS, which asserts AIDS=death, is at work.[43]

2.8 The Importance of The Opening Chapter

The opening chapter of Facing It sets the medical mystery dynamic into motion, which will, as every piece falls into place, confirm Andy's death. The themes of time, appearance and medical logic are introduced in this first chapter and play important roles in putting this dynamic into motion.

2.8.1 time

Chapter One begins with a date and a location for the scene which is about to unfold: "June 1981, New York City." This historical and geographical specificity initiates the sense that this will be a "realistic" if not a "true" account, and this emphasis on veracity will become important as the narrative unfolds.[44]

The opening lines then read:

"Had it been some other season of the year, Dr. Walter Branch wouldn't have given the hospital morgue a second thought. But now, in the heat of early summer, late on a Friday afternoon, he remembered that there was, somewhere at least, one cool spot to which he could retreat should the heat get much worse." (9)

These opening sentences not only reiterate a concern with time (eg. "early summer, "late on a Friday afternoon"), but also introduce the setting, a hospital, and the initial allusion to death through reference to the morgue. Additionally, this opening conveys a sense that this particular time is a bad one, so bad, in fact, that it makes Branch think of the morgue as relief. It is so unbearably, almost feverishly, hot, that the death-like coolness of the morgue, kept cool to perserve the corpses, becomes attractive. The opening then describes the first event to take place in the story: "there were patients waiting, and more work to be done in the lab, so Dr. Branch opted for just a moment sitting down in his inner office" (9). The first action of the novel is thus the ceasing of action - Dr. Branch resting tiredly for a moment and thinking to himself about the heat, his fatigue and the morgue.

The following paragraphs continue to build the sense of the intolerableness of the heat and the sense of time passing away, of tiring out:

"The heat was sweltering, unendurable really, and this corner of the hospital - built of brick at the end of the last century - was like an oven. The ventilation system, which, to Branch's amusement, some called air-conditioning, failed altogether if the temperature exceeded ninety-five degrees. And it has, Branch thought to himself." (9)

Because this wing of the hospital is so old, it cannot function properly when submitted to high levels of stress on its system; it is overcome and its inhabitants pay the price. At this point in the opening scene, Branch becomes linked thematically to the hospital. The passage of time has affected them both: "He was tired today, and he looked it...He looked his age - fifty years, with his fifty-first birthday approaching in the fall" (9-10).

2.8.2 appearance

This transition in the opening scene to an emphasis on appearance introduces a new theme, which will gain increased importance as the narrative unfolds. The passage continues:

"He wasn't handsome, but neither was he ugly; his face was kindly, the sort of face that would suit the grandfatherly years. He was tall, not fat. His thin hair, once chestnut, was now almost all gray. The chestnut still showed in his bushy eyebrows, only lightly salted with gray. Deep lines were etched in his cheeks, lines that deepened with every smile. He had the thin lips of a native New Englander, as well as a stiff posture.

Today, the heat and fatigue of his work was beginning to show in his face." (10)

This passage is important for several reasons. First, it establishes the narrative's meticulous attention to specific, physical details, such as Branch's hair color and his posture. It also, yet again, expresses a concern with the passage of time, and now there's a mention of the future. Not only is Branch's next birthday, his fifty-first to be exact, approaching, but the description of him also notes that he would look good in his "grandfatherly years." This alludes to a geneological history; to be a grandfather is most likely to be a heterosexual and is to have grandchildren, to have lived through several generations, which, as we will find out, is exactly what Andy, a gay person with AIDS, will never have.

Indeed, the next event to happen is that Dr. Branch encounters Andy. We first see Andy through Branch's eyes, a doctor's eyes, which clinically take in every physical detail of Andy's appearance and there is an overwhelming sense of deterioration:

"Branch was so shocked by Andy's appearance that he hesitated for a moment. "Hi, Andy," he answered, regaining his composure. "It's been quite a while since you've been to see me. What can I do for you?" Branch was formal as he tried to hide his shock.

Andy related his symptoms to Dr. Branch, and the doctor took a long look at him as he spoke. Usually quite robust and muscular, Andy now looked extremely tired, pale, and much thinner. He had never seen Andy so drawn, with such a pallor. He frowned as he listened to the litany of complaints." (11)

This passage portrays the initial ways in which AIDS has begun to write itself onto Andy's body and into his life narrative.

2.8.3 medical mystery

Another aspect of this opening scene that is crucial to establishing the narrative dynamic is the role medical diagnostic logic and procedure play in it. We learn early in the opening paragraphs that Dr. Branch has had to forgo most of his general practice in order to keep up "a frantic pace as an immunological and infectious diseases researcher" (10), though he does allow himself to continue special clinical work that involves "the more specialized medical problems that dumbfounded general practitioners" (10). This foreshadowing continues, when later as Andy apologizes for being a general patient, who he's sure Branch doesn't really have time for, Branch responds, "'I just have to restrict myself mostly to the rare cases'" (12). These references convey the sense that Dr. Branch specializes in exploring medical mysteries, that he looks for the unusual, which leads the reader to suspect that Andy's case may develop into one.

As he and Andy interact, his role as medical detective, a kind of medical Sherlock Holmes, becomes clear. He begins by asking Andy, "'What can I do for you?'" (11) and both observes and listens to Andy's evidence, the litany of clinical symptoms. He processes this data, and, as he physically examines Andy's body, he asks pointed questions to establish a contextualized understanding of Andy's symptoms, asking about Andy's job and his lover, David. Based upon his examination of the physical evidence and Andy's responses to his questions, Dr. Branch provisionally diagnoses Andy as having hepatitis:

"Andy started to put his shirt back on. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Branch said, "but I'd like to do some blood work to check for hepatitis. It often shows up just like this."

Andy looked crestfallen. "Hepatitis? Oh, shit! How the hell did I get hepatitis? I mean, I take care of myself; I don't understand." He was shocked and frustrated. "I don't have time for it, anyway. Don't you have to stay in bed for six weeks or something?" (13, my emphasis)

The question, "What is it?," will drive the narrative forward, as Andy, Dr. Branch and the other characters of the novel seek to answer this question. The narrative will play with the ambiguity of "it," seeking to interpret, to arrive at its meaning, to define, to narrativize this ominous vagueness. Also, of key importance in this scene is Andy's angry exclamation, "I don't have time for it," because time will become the key issue for Andy. Indeed, Andy will ultimately have no time for anything but "it," though at this point, his life consists of many narrative strands and this particular narrative strand is one he does not want to follow. The end of this passage reads as ironically prophetic to us, because, as we suspect from the title, Andy will not be in bed only "for six weeks or something."

If we are initially tempted as is Andy to be lulled into Dr. Branch's diagnosis of hepatitis, we like Andy are just as soon jolted out of our complacency by the next narrative development, the sinister unveiling of another, mysteriously anomolous symptom. As Andy prepares to leave, he remembers something. "'Oh!' Andy exclaimed, unbuttoning his shirt again. 'I almost forgot; I wanted you to look at these sores here.' Andy took his shirt off again and pointed to a number of small red sores in his armpit" (14). Dr. Branch notes these as a staph infection, which is not usually indicative of hepatitis, but he says that he'll do a workup on Andy's blood for hepatitis, prescribe him something for his painful staph infection, and that meanwhile, Andy should rest. As Andy leaves, however, Branch is plagued by doubts:

"Even if it was hepatitis - which he was sure it must be - there was something else that troubled him. He had quite a diagnostic skill, as well as a native intuition, and he was troubled by Andy's sudden decline. It wasn't just the hepatitis, he told himself; no, there was something seriously wrong, something anomalous that made him suspicious." (15)

In his concern, Dr. Branch then calls and converses with a fellow doctor involved in clinical research about Andy's case. The other doctor tells him not to worry.

It is in this last portion of the first chapter that the secondary plot of the novel begins, which involves Dr. Branch's life as a medical researcher, whose research experiences have been frustrated by lack of time and by medical politics. Though the novel does not always succeed in seamlessly interweaving the two plots, this secondary plot enables Reed to address another set of issues with regard to "facing it," the degree to which politics in medical research determine who receives funding and what is studied. The chapter concludes by returning to the primary story-line and forefronts Branch's concern over the medical mystery posed by Andy's symptoms:

He barely perceived that Meg [his secretary] had left. He was absorbed in Andy's file. Something's out of kilter there, he thought; he hoped it was just a case of hepatitis. He made one last notation in Andy's file, then closed it and picked up he next. He began dictating. (21)

2.9.1 Medical Realism and Facing It as "AIDS 101"

Besides "medical mystery," Facing It could also be categorized as a work of "medical realism." There are several ways we could describe this type of novel. On the most superficial level, the tone of the novel is unrelenting in its earnest, reporter-like seriousness, which is tied to its subject-matter, the description of a medical crisis. As a work of "medical realism," Facing It contains none of the humor, romance or fantasy of other kinds of AIDS novels, such as the humor in David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and the romance in Paul Monette's two AIDS novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home. Instead, Facing It focuses on the "facts" about AIDS, medical and otherwise, which, as they are made known, sentence Andy to death.

2.9.2 AIDS and the Body

Another way in which Facing It depicts "medical realism," is in its unrelenting cataloging and reporting of Andy's various and encroaching ailments.[45]

We are told, early on, that Andy had been quite good looking. In fact, when Dr. Branch's secretary, Meg, expresses her disappointment that Andy and David are still together, she notes his attractiveness:

"Is he still with David?" she [Meg] asked.

"Yes," Branch said, "and he says that David's doing fine."

"And that's too bad, too!" Meg said, and then, seeing Dr. Branch frowning again, she said, "I'm only kidding, doctor. Its just that Andy's so handsome." (16)

Later, in the opening of Chapter Two, we watch Andy try to come to terms with the possible diagnosis that he has hepatitis. As he looks in the mirror to study himself, we too, look at him:

"Okay, what do I see? he asked himself, studying his face in a new light. Though he had lost some weight, it had helped define his features more clearly. His jet-black hair offset his steel-gray eyes, which were highlighted by the thick moustache. At twenty-eight, he was one of the most handsome young men in Manhattan, and his looks seemed perpetually to improve, though it was hard to improve on perfection. Or so his lover said. Still, as he stared at his own classically handsome face, there was a remnant of fear. Why was he so tired? Why was he losing weight?" (22)

This is a significant passage for several reasons. First, as in many novels about gay men with AIDS, there is an emphasis on how beautiful the men were who were stricken with AIDS.[46]

In part, this could have been due to the availability of sex for beautiful men, as the narrative later notes about Andy's personal sexual history: "He let his mustache grow, black and thick. He appraised himself in mirrors, naked or dressed; he learned to use his beauty to win sexual favors" (28). Another aspect of the passage is that the narrative does not directly report Andy's appearance; rather, we see Andy by reflection, looking into the mirror with him and seeing Andy in the glass.

Mirrors, mirroring and a beautiful man bring to mind Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and the work of recent theorists of male sexuality like Eve Sedgwick and Jeff Nunokawa. Wilde tells the story of an incredibly handsome young man, whose beauty is worshiped by other men. He becomes obsessed that he might lose his beauty, so he lets a painter preserve his image, a mirror of his beauty, on canvas. As the narrative unfolds, however, the picture becomes horribly disfigured, mirroring the corruption of Dorian Gray's soul, though his face remains angelically pure until the very end, when Dorian dies. As Sedgwick and Nunokawa have noted, there are disturbing implications to this story, with its linking of beauty and homosexuality to corrupting and fatal influences. In his reading of the story, Nunokawa notes the lethal characterization of male homosexual identity as "a spectacle defined by a figure of death" (315). From this homophobic perspective, AIDS is the latest manifestation of the doomed nature of homosexual men, and, like the spectacle of Dorian Gray's painting, AIDS wears itself on the bodies of its victims.

Indeed, as the narrative of Facing It progresses, we see Andy's looks destroyed. Andy himself notes this: "he himself was a bad sight, so thin, so very exhausted. There was nothing he could do; the illness wore itself on his face" (122). As the novel and Andy's AIDS progress, his condition writes itself graphically, horrendously, on his body: "...Andy had worsened, terribly. There had been a new and sudden proliferation of KS lesions all over his body, and the staph infection had broken out again in his groin. Andy showed the red, pustular sores and the KS lesions to David..." (196). The medical realism of the novel spares us nothing about the effect of AIDS on Andy's appearance.[47]

In the end, as Andy lies in the hospital bed, the horror is complete:

"David just stared as he stood by the side of the bed. He could barely recognize Andy now. In just a few short days he had broken out with herpes lesions, in addition to the staph lesions and the Kaposi's sarcoma. The herpes blisters covered a good part of Andy's face and neck, red, running." (210)

2.9.3 AIDS and the Mind

Another aspect of the medical realism of the novel is its thorough reporting of the various emotional and psychological stages that both Andy and David go through as they "face it."[48]

As Part One of the novel ends, Andy's diagnosis has been changed from the provisional diagnosis of hepatitis to the possibility of "gay cancer," because Dr. Branch has found a lesion in Andy's mouth. They await the biopsy results. Part Two then describes in great detail the emotional reactions Andy and David undergo once the diagnosis of KS is confirmed.

Andy's initial emotional reactions are varied, and the narrative reports their shifting intensities in detail:

"And then, as he absent-mindedly stepped into the street and was narrowly missed by a speeding limousine, he felt his sorrow turn to denial. It can't be! To end like this? The equation did him wrong, he felt; it wasn't fair...Oh, but he felt an edge of anger, of betrayal, but still the persistent fact: he would die. The sense of betrayal disturbed him the most. He felt he had been betrayed beyond his control too many times. First, it had been his sexuality, different from others. Though he had learned fast enough to accept that, it had been the crux of the matter for his parents' betrayal of him. And now the cancer." (81)

Besides depicting Andy's feelings, the novel also portrays the psychological adjustments David must go through to live with Andy's illness. Denial, fear, anger, jealousy, are all tracked as they make their way through David's consciousness:

"He looked at Andy, now stirring and opening his eyes, and felt a great wave of jealousy that it was his turn, his dignity that was facing death. David wanted it then, wanted to go with Andy. But then Andy smiled, yawned, and beckoned to David. The moment was past; the fear distilled to bland expectancy. David went to the couch and hugged his lover." (176)

By the end of Part Three and the conclusion of the novel, both Andy and David have reached a stage of acceptance, and it is at this point that they both are emotionally prepared to "face it," which in this case means Andy's death:

"He stood and held Andy close, saying nothing. It was a moment when the whole of Andy's illness became a true reality, when both of them saw together that they had weathered a storm and, moreover, that there was more to come: they accepted Andy's illness. And they gathered their strength for what was left." (197)

Part III of the novel also reports the psychological effects that knowledge of Andy's illness has on his family members, which, after a long family struggle, results in a pact of silence about Andy and his illness: "Beth continued to cry in her mother's arms. Edna Stone comforted her child, her heart filled with regret that such an ugly scene had taken place. She now, too, felt as Chuck did: they had had enough. It was best left alone" (194-5).

2.9.4 AIDS and the Politics of Medical Research

Besides telling a medically realistic story about Andy's personal struggle with AIDS, the novel also comments on some of the larger issues involved with AIDS, including its historical status as a new epidemic and the political machinations involved in AIDS research.[49]

As I have noted earlier, the dated and geographically identified sections of the novel play a significant role in the larger context of the AIDS epidemic, since New York and San Francisco were the earliest places that GRID was identified. In each of the three sections of the novel, there are explicit references to the larger epidemic and its progression. First, in Part One, there is a direct citation from the historically significant first report in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, dated July 3, 1981, which noted a statistically significant number of gay men suffering from pneumocystis pneumonia (43). Then, in Part Two, there is an excerpt from an Associated Press release, dated August 28, 1981, which includes the findings of Dr. Harold Jaffe's research that the number of gay men affected by KS, pneumocystis and/or other strange diseases related to immune compromise had greatly increased since the CDC's July report and that now a woman had also been reported with pneumocystis (116).

Finally, in Part Three, we witness David's interview with the medical researcher, Max Kinder-Mann, who explains how he thinks AIDS operates: "'I think there is a specific infectious agent - a virus, or perhaps a constellation of viruses - which destroys the T helpers. We need to find it'" (185). Kinder-Mann's point of view here reflects the latest medical knowledge of 1984, which, though the novel doesn't name it, was the discovery of HIV. It is also in this interview that the novel addresses some of the complex political and economic implications of AIDS being sexually transmitted. Like Shilts' reporting of the controversies that raged in the gay communities about how to deal with AIDS, Kinder-Mann speaks to David about the complexities of trying to publicize the dangers of gay sex to gay communities: "'Now if I go around stating that everyone must stop having sex, what about the economy? What about all those institutions whose very existence is predicated upon sexual freedom?'" (187).

The politics involved in AIDS research are represented in the secondary plot of Dr. Branch's attempts to gain research money to study AIDS. Dr. Branch's desire to study AIDS is ridiculed by a rabidly homophobic colleague, who sarcastically says to him, "'Fags are big news nowadays, and dead ones are even better news. Think what coverage this will get'" (105). Repeatedly through the novel, Dr. Branch's requests for funds to pursue AIDS research are denied by the closeted administrator, Arthur Maguire, who tells him, "'We're facing major cutbacks in funding of every research topic. And with something this politically loaded - what with the homosexual element and all - well it's all delicate and avoidable'" (76). Maguire only finally agrees to release funds for AIDS research when Branch's wife, Carolyn, threatens to out him, which, as she points out, would ruin him: "He was perspiring. She had backed him into a corner. She was right; her threat was a real one. Certain members of the board and the administration would never tolerate a revelation of his tastes, even now. He was beat; he would have to maintain the lie" (209). Though this secondary plot and the commentary about the history and implications of the larger AIDS epidemic help educate the reader, a kind of "AIDS 101," as critic Interrante has called the novel (7), none of it helps Andy or David "face it." In fact, by the end of his interview with Dr. Kinder-Mann, David rejects the larger political implications of the epidemic to focus on his and Andy's personal battle: "The information on the nature of AIDS was useful to him; no one had yet published that explanation. But the rest, the political jabber, he could do without. Particularly since Andy lay at home, very close, David suddenly felt, to death" (188).

Though funding is made available for more AIDS research and the novel ends with the medical knowledge about AIDS increasing, there is not enough time for Andy to be able to wait until the scientists discover a treatment for AIDS. Ultimately, the historical, political and personal accounts of the AIDS epidemic work together to forefront the apocalyptic narrative of AIDS, which writes itself across the text, closing off, killing, the life-affirming narratives of the novel.

2.10 The Narrative "Life" of a Protagonist

In literary forms like the novel, the life of a protagonist is typically represented as a complex interweaving of many different narrative strands. It is as the drama of the novel unfolds and these narrative strands are set into motion that larger patterns emerge. For example, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the life of Elizabeth Bennett is represented periodically as daughter, sister, desirable young woman, adversary. These different narratives that compose Elizabeth interact and combine in certain ways that help contribute to making the novel a romance; her reformulation of the narratives about herself and Darcy, for example, help lead her to form a union with him. In other kinds of novels, the lives of the protagonists are destroyed. For example, in Richard Wright's Native Son, the many different narrative strands that initially compose Bigger Thomas as protagonist - his life as chauffeur, son, brother, lover - are all stripped from him. One way to distinguish between romance and tragedy then, is that in romance, the connection between narrative strands is emphasized, whereas in tragedy, the disjunctions and ultimately the destruction of narrative strands (the life of the protagonist) is emphasized. In the case of Facing It, Andy's life is initially represented as a series of intertwined narratives - Andy as gay activist, as son and brother, as lover. During the course of the novel, each of these strands that compose Andy's life is killed off by the plot AIDS writes over his life.

2.10.1 Life as Work and Community

In the beginning of the novel, Andy's work as a political activist plays a large role in his life. Almost immediately, however, it is threatened by his illness: "For a year he had been working to get the gay rights ordinance passed by the city council, and they were nearing a critical juncture; if Andy dropped out of the picture for a few weeks, the thing could truly be jeopardized again" (23). As the novel continues and Andy's condition worsens enough that he has to cut back from his work, we find that his project is being undercut:

"...in Andy's absence, Mitch had been able to divert attention away from promotion of the gay rights ordinance by recruiting staff members to work on his pet projects. Andy couldn't be there much anymore, and his illness left him tired when he was there; he kept fighting, but he was losing to Mitch and to his own absence from the issue." (53)

Ultimately, the ordinance isn't passed and Andy's life as an activist dies. David becomes more politically active in his frustration over AIDS, and he decides to turn his writing skills from editting romance novels to writing political journalism:

"He felt the pent-up tension and insanity flow out as he realized a goal; he would write about the medical crisis, would let those people know that something was going on in gay America, something serious, something deadly...He had felt, lately, that he might burst if something didn't change, and now he saw that he could help change it by blowing it up, publicly." (127)

The novel at this point indicates a bit of hope, that David might develop a political life that would offset the death of Andy's. However, when his activism seems about to yield fruit in his interview with Kinder-Mann, he cannot continue thinking as an activist but as a worried lover: "Suddenly he was preoccupied with Andy, with worries about his being in New York alone" (188).

AIDS not only destroys Andy's life as gay activist but robs him of his membership in the gay community as well. Unlike other AIDS novels, including Clayton Graham's Tweeds and Paul Monette's Afterlife, which emphasize the love and support networks formed by gay friendships, in Facing It, Andy and David are left alone in their struggle to face AIDS. The novel does not often describe their gay friends, indeed at one point Andy notes to himself that "He and David had few other friends" (82). When Andy becomes sick, however, the novel does describe how one of their few gay friends behaves: "'Did you notice?' Andy asked, 'that when Rita came to give me a hug, Jim made a straight line for the door, as far away from me as he could get?'" (62). In response to Jim's behavior, they distance themselves from their friends: "...based on the brief experience with Rita and Jim. They would simply not discuss the problem with their friends..." (62).

2.10.2 Life as Person With AIDS

In many novels about AIDS, the forming of friendships with other people living with AIDS (PLWAs) plays an important role in helping the progatonist live with AIDS.[50]

Perhaps because Facing It describes a period of time early in the AIDS epidemic, there are not many PLWAs portrayed in the novel.[51]

In the early portion of Part Two, when Andy is first positively diagnosed with KS, he feels intensely isolated and alone: "He felt a terrible isolation, as though he were frighteningly and absolutely alone. Never in his life had he felt such real horror that his body was diseased and that he would, most likely, die (79). Dr. Branch hopes to help Andy cope with his experience by talking to the one other patient he knows who is dealing with KS: "'But before you go, I want you to meet someone else who's undergoing the same treatments...I just thought it might be helpful to you to meet someone else who'll be going through the same thing you will'" (109). This other patient's name is Patrick, and Andy feels a bit better when he connects with someone who is living a similar experience to his: "Andy shook his hand and smiled. He had expected to feel some apprehension, but he felt a vague relief, something like coming home after a long trip. Andy sat beside Patrick and made small talk..." (109). At this point in the story, there is the sense that possibly, Andy will find a sense of shared community by being able to form a relationship with Patrick, another PLWA.

As Part Two of the novel continues and Andy is confirmed as having AIDS, however, the narrative denies this possibility and reasserts the horror of AIDS. There is a sense that Patrick's decline foreshadows Andy's; at least it darkens Andy's sense of hope for himself:

"He hadn't been able to talk with Patrick as he had hoped, because within a week of commencing chemotherapy, the young man had taken a serious turn for the worse and been hospitalized in isolation. Knowing that Patrick had done so badly did not reassure Andy about his own progress. He remained scared and doubtful." (121)

Andy finally gets a chance to connect with Patrick toward the end of Part Two, but only after he has had a premonition that Patrick is dying. By the time Andy finds him in his hospital room, Patrick has gone mad:

"He could tell now that this shell of a man was just a whisper of the one he had met only weeks before, and the senseless babble was disheartening; Andy didn't like to consider that he, too, might end in madness...For a long time Andy just sat there and stared at Patrick, sick with the image of a bright young man dying in such misery and wildness. It had a profound effect on Andy at that moment, and Andy felt that he had, somehow, not tried hard enough; he had conceded to the cancer too soon.

And as he sat there, holding Patrick's thin, weak hand in his own, Andy decided that he would either beat this thing or go with dignity." (130)

At this moment, when Andy finally connects with Patrick and witnesses his extreme suffering, Andy is inspired to try and fight his illness. But, since the novel has not provided any sense that Andy might "beat this thing" (especially, since to this day, there is yet no cure for AIDS and the mortality figures continue to rise with time), it is the second half of his decision, "to go with dignity," that will prevail. However, this statement yet again foregrounds the death AIDS represents, and we, like Andy, read Patrick's decline as presaging Andy's.

Patrick disappears from the narrative after this. Half way through Part Three, we find out in passing that Patrick has died. The narrative does not let us witness his death; his death is silenced. Instead, we only hear after the fact about the maliciously homophobic and isolated circumstances in which he has died:

"One of the nurses on the evening shift had told him [Dr. Branch] a bizarre and cruel story. Apparently Dr. Irving Krantz had, the day before, made some joking wager about "how long that crazy fag in room 217 would last; any bets?"

The story made Branch sick. He didn't doubt that Krantz was capable of such insensitivity. But "that crazy fag," Branch knew, was Patrick Ross. And Patrick Ross had just died." (189)

The chance that Andy might find solace in a community of people living with AIDS does not happen in this novel. There are only two people with AIDS portrayed; with Patrick, we see someone who intensely suffers and who dies horribly alone. Andy's sense of isolation is alleviated by the love of his partner, David, and his concerned doctor, Dr. Branch. When Andy dies, there is someone there who cares and who can witness his bravery in confronting his death. In the case of both Patrick and Andy, however, the novel emphasizes the mortal trajectory of AIDS for a person living with it.

2.10.3 Family Life

Family is another narrative strand that often contributes to the life of characters. In the case of Andy and David, though David's biological family has accepted his homosexuality, Andy's family has not. This rejection by his family continues to affect Andy, and though the novel promotes the sense of a possible reconciliation, in the end, it forcefully shoots it down, killing it.

In the flashback in Chapter Two, we learn that Andy had involuntarily been outed by his mother, Edna, who discovered gay porno magazines in the mattress of his bed when he was fifteen. She showed them to his father, Chuck, who immediately burned them and sent him to a psychiatrist to try and "cure" him. However, "Twelve psychiatric sessions later Andy heard about the Stonewall riots in New York, and his therapy took a slant his parents had not intended" (24). Indeed, his therapist taught him to be proud of his identity, and historically, this was the exciting time of the seventies and sexual liberation. Life at home was difficult for Andy, because neither his parents nor two of his three sisters approved of him. Only Beth, the youngest, loved and accepted him entirely. When he turned eighteen, he left home for Manhattan with a great sense of relief and hopes of sexual freedom.[52]

He coped with the anger and pain of his family's rejection by becoming actively involved in gay politics.

As the novel progresses and Andy's health deteriorates, however, we find him considering whether or not to contact his family about his illness, and we witness him still aching from his family's rejection:

"It was something he couldn't stand; the flu, strep throat, whatever - it always brought out the anxiety, the stuff that he kept bottled up and shut down most of the time. And here was some of it now, the pain of his family's rejection. When the fuck would it just go away? When the fuck could he block it out for good?" (40)

When Andy finally does tell Beth that he has KS, her reactions seem inconsistent with the earlier descriptions of her love for him. First, when he tells her of his diagnosis, the narrative describes her cold reaction: "At first she had been shocked, then, barely concealing her revulsion at the particulars, had grown unexpectedly cold and distant" (100). Then, the narrative describes her telling their parents the news of Andy's condition, in a passage that conveys the intense homophobia of Chuck but which does not explain Beth's motivations for breaking confidence with Andy:

"Elizabeth shook her head. "It's some kind of blood cancer or skin thing; I'm not sure. But it's not like a tumor or something they can cut out."

Andy's father exploded. "No more! I won't hear another word. I'll tell you what should have been cut out a long time ago!" He was trembling, on the verge of apoplexy..."No, no more! That's the end of it," he commanded, picking up the remote control and flicking on the television. He pressed a button and the volume came up loud. Further conversation would have been impossible." (101)

This passage indicates the tremendous power Chuck has to silence any family discussion about Andy, and it is this silencing power that is Chuck's most powerful homophobic strategy.

We don't see the family again until Part Three, which delves deeply into the family dynamics and their reaction to news about Andy's deteriorating health. Indeed, Part Three opens with Chapter Twenty-Two, December 1981, Philadelphia, and his mother thinking about her son while reading a national magazine with a story in it about AIDS. As Part Three continues and Andy's health begins to rapidly deteriorate, the narrative hints that Andy's mom will try and make contact with her son. Chapter Twenty-Six ends hopefully, with Edna planning to defy her husband: "She would buy a ticket for New York during the week and simply go. And he wouldn't stop her, not on this one" (180). Unfortunately, in Chapter Twenty-Eight, we discover that Chuck has found the train ticket, "torn it to shreds before her eyes" (189), and, to make matters worse, Edna has told Beth about this. The chapter then describes another of the fierce family confrontations about Andy. Both Edna and Beth struggle to persuade Chuck away from his horrible coldness toward Andy, but he will not be swayed:

"He was frozen in her [Beth's] argument. He was filled with inertia. A lifetime of American manhood had produced a man who, in the face of direct pleading from his daughter, could do nothing but stand mute. She stood before him, looking up at her father, expecting - hoping - for an answer. But he stood there, silent." (194)

When David finally calls the family to let them know that Andy is dying, he unfortunately reaches Edna and Chuck, instead of Beth. As Edna cries hysterically for her son, Chuck urges her to stop crying: "'Let's just stop all this now and consider that Andy's already dead, as I did long ago. And we won't tell Beth. Okay? Will you do that?...Will you promise?'" (204). For a moment, she appears to resist him, "She looked up at him with a hatred in her eyes that he would never forget" (204), but then she submits:

She knew, as she nodded her head and agreed to his demand, that she had no choice. He had made that clear two weeks ago; it was either the family life or Andy. And so it was over. She started to cry once again, because she realized as she nodded her head and capitulated, that she would never see Andy again. (204)

We hear no more about Andy's family. Indeed, their agreement to silence - their refusal to face Andy's homosexuality and his death and their conspiracy of silence in lying to their daughter - all act paradoxically to force us to face their behavior, their fear, and we, as we read, must face Andy's death. Any hopes we might have had that Andy's mother or his sister could have been with him in his last moments are squashed by the silence his father imposes on the family. It is in this absolute silence, their refusal to "face it," that Andy's family is as dead to him as much as he is dead to them. Family in Facing It ultimately serves no life-affirming role.[53]

Indeed, in the end, they treat Andy as though he were dead, and then he dies.

2.10.4 Love Life

In adulthood, one of the primary life-affirming narratives is the relationship to one's significant other. By "life-affirming narratives," I mean those stories that we tell of our interactions with others and the world that give us a feeling of agency, of connectedness, of being alive. In traditional heterosexual relationships, the relationship to one's significant other manifests itself in the marital union, "'till death do us part," but because marriage is not yet legally or culturally sanctioned for same sex couples, these couples have to establish their own private bonds. In Facing It, David is Andy's significant other, and we watch as AIDS takes over Andy's life and diminishes their relationship.[54]

In the historical flashback of Chapter Two, we discover that they first met in 1977 at a gay pride parade, and after a year of being lovers, Andy moved in with David: "It hadn't been a difficult decision for either of them. Andy was ready for a lover, and David was ready to settle down" (29). Their relationship deepens, but with the normal difficulties of two people bonding:

By the end of 1980, David couldn't imagine a more perfect gay couple, except, of course, for the small details:

"The small details loomed larger as time passed. Andy, in his drive to push an ordinance for gay rights through the City Council, became insufferable and obsessed. And David, in his indecision, became languorous, disinclined to the sort of pace Andy was, by then, addicted to. Though they remained deeply involved, there came to be a tension between them, both angry and hilarious." (31)

Perhaps if the business of their lives had continued as usual, they might have broken up.

But business does not continue as usual. Andy comes down with his mysterious ailment, which begins to impact the life of their relationship. Much of this impact is registered through David's eyes, as he tries to adjust to Andy's changing condition and to the lack of answers the medical community has about AIDS: "...Andy's health had worsened considerably as far as he could see and the lack of answers was beginning to wear on his nerves and patience" (50). David finds the new world into which Andy enters and into which he is thrust alienating: "But now - now that Andy was becoming more involved in this hospital culture, this medical nightmare - it all began to affect David as well. The place seemed somehow cold, technological; David didn't like it" (51). Through the middle of the novel, as Andy concentrates on his own, personal relationship to his illness, David despairs about their relationship: "After all, David concluded miserably, relationships - and love - need nurturing. But what they had instead was a gradual debilitation, a constant erosion of all they had worked for" (54).

As Andy comes to terms with AIDS and as his health fails, David begins to draw closer to him:

"David was filled with a sudden strength, a vitality borrowed from Andy's dignity. What had seemed so pathetic only a moment before - Andy's ghastly gray pallor, his thinning hair, the hideous lesions on his skin - what had seemed so pathetic now seemed the inverted symbol of Andy's strength." (197)

Following these thoughts, David has a moment of realization, which confirms the value of their relationship:

"...it was, for David, one of those rare and triumphant moments of crystal clarity, when the tragedies, as well as victories, of the world somehow fit, a moment when David saw that what had already been accomplished had been good, had been real. He stood and held Andy close, saying nothing." (197)

David stands by Andy to the very end, whispering the last words, "`I love you'" (217), to Andy as he dies. So, even though their relationship languishes through the middle of the novel, by the end, they feel the value of their relationship has been reaffirmed. This reaffirmation is undercut by the narrative, however, because Andy dies at this point. Their relationship cannot continue and the reaffirmation is of something which is now over.[55]

2.10.5 Sex Life

The reticence of the novel to fully celebrate the life of a gay relationship is reflected in its troubling portrayal of gay sexuality.[56]

As Andy's health deteriorates, so too does the sexual life of his relationship with David. The first sexual interaction described in the novel resonates with ominous foreshadowing. At the end of Chapter Two, Andy and David come together, but "Somewhere outside, an accident occurred at just their moment of orgasm; they could hear the squeal of rubber, the rattled thud of steel against steel, the chimes of breaking glass falling to the street" (33). As they begin the struggle to understand what Andy's illness is and whether or not it is infectious, their sex life begins to suffer. In a moment of depression, while waiting at the hospital for Andy as more tests are being run, David notes that "Their sex life had been good until the hepatitis scare, but now, through Andy's fatigue and the uncertainties of what the affliction was, that seemed to be finished" (53).

The next time they do have sex, it is fraught with unspoken, uncommunicated tension:

"[David] laid his hand across Andy's as they sat on the edge of the bed. And then, for the first time in weeks, he felt Andy's fingers close around his in a way that suggested only one thing. "We'll have to be careful," he whispered to David. David sat stiff; he was horny, lord knew, but considering everything, he couldn't, just couldn't do it. He didn't know how to get out of it without making Andy feel more isolated than ever. And so he went through with it, for Andy's sake, not his own. But as he yielded to the feelings, Andy's hand began to stroke the fear and misgiving from him. It was a rare moment, and for some reason, David knew it might very well be their last expression like that. Andy had withdrawn so completely until that moment, and it was likely to happen again. But then Andy's hands forced David to abandon thinking, and he lay back, once again giving himself to his lover, so much like the past, but really so different. Everything had changed." (62)

There are several things to note about this passage. First, we perceive this situation solely from David's point of view. Second, David does not communicate his feelings to Andy, which also indicates a dysfunctionality of the intimacy in their relationship. We also see that David yields to Andy "for Andy's sake, not his own." There is a sense of finality to their sex life, as David thinks, "it might very well be their last expression like that." And, though the sex is good, "so much like the past," it yet is unalterably different, "Everything had changed." This passage traces the lifespan of their sex life, noting an earlier time of vibrant, lively sex, to how it is now different, and implies that it will soon die. This passage occurs at the end of Part One.

When we get to Part Two, the narrative kills off the life of their sexual relationship and juxtaposes it with a heterosexual one.[57]

In Chapter Eleven, we see Dr. Branch and his wife, Carolyn, having sex:

"They kissed and rolled on the bed, the warm night air blowing gently across them from the open window. For a moment, Branch thought of Andy and David, of what sorrow lay in their life together. But then he felt the insistent pressure created by Carolyn's fingers, and then she was offering herself fully, pulling him in beneath her as she lay atop him and brought him in tight. He put everything out of his mind at that moment; it was the release he so desperately needed." (91)

In contrast to this passage, which describes the successful "release" a heterosexual couple achieves through sex, the next passage of the novel begins with Andy and David lying in bed, not talking:

"Earlier, Andy had wanted to make love again, but this time, David had refused him, trying to mask his fear with excuses of disquiet and worry. Andy had not argued about it; he seemed somehow to understand; he had, in fact, anticipated that moment when David would cease to find Andy attractive in his illness. Somehow, it made them seem closer." (91)

Unlike the earlier sexual encounter between them, which was told from David's point of view, this moment in the narrative when their sex life dies, is told from Andy's point of view. It also directly follows Andy's diagnosis of not only KS but also of GRID (AIDS had not yet been named as such), which both he and David have taken as a death sentence. In the subsequent passage, Andy muses about his feelings for David in light of his terminal illlness:

"[Andy] felt very close to David, for suddenly he seemed very precious, very much to be appreciated. Andy lay uneasily as he saw that David had fallen asleep; he was glad it was over. He realized that now the diagnosis was given, he had something to which to concede his health, his life probably." (92)

His feelings for David are overshadowed then by his feelings about death: "He disengaged his arms from David and sat up. Knowing that it would be a long time before he could sleep, he let himself out of the bedroom and made his way along the dark hall to the front room" (92).

Indeed, as the narrative progresses, we witness another juxtaposition of the death of their sex life with the fervent heterosexual life of the Branchs. In Chapter Fifteen, we see David holding a feverishly sick Andy and thinking, "...his mind felt the real pain, as though it might explode. No, he couldn't stand it; he felt it would - if it all got worse - push him too far after all" (115). To be pushed too far would mean David would leave Andy, unable to take anymore of it. The section in the novel that immediately follows this one then reminds us of heterosexual sex: "Walt Branch, having left the hospital early to escape the heat and spent the afternoon and evening making love to a surprisingly fervid Carolyn, reclined beside her with a stiff drink" (115). Through this juxtaposition and comparison of healthy heterosexual sex with ailing, gay sex, the narrative implicitly confirms the homophobic view of gay sex as unhealthy, if not deadly.

Toward the end of Part Two, the narrative explicitly addresses the implications of linking gay sex with AIDS. Once again, we are reminded that the sex life in Andy and David's relationship has died, though now there is an added explanation for its death:

"...as Andy grew weaker and more involved in his illness, his sexual inclination was dimmed. This had been hard on David especially, for he remained vibrant and sexual, while Andy, at his own admission, had lost all interest in the activity which he held responsible for his disease." (121)

The issue of Andy's blaming homosexuality for his illness is pursued further during conversations in which Andy repeats "mainstream" homophobic feelings about AIDS and homosexuality:

"But I can't help but wonder if it's something we did. I mean, what if I weren't gay? There are all those happy heterosexual family units all across America; they've never even heard of this thing. It's like a punishment, that's how I feel sometimes. Like God has waved his hand and said that we must pay." (125)

Andy then describes to David how people where he works and at the hospital have begun treating him like a leper. This discussion fuels David's anger, and he determines to write about the epidemic.

Their sex life does not resurrect itself; it is dead. Instead, we see them drawing together differently. As they struggle to tell Andy's homophobic family members about his diagnosis, they draw together in a different kind of intimacy:

"And so together they put their heads under the covers, neither of them able to cheer the other. But it became a slow, quiet form of strengthening for them. Together they buried their heads and slept; together they held hands and said nothing; together they began the difficult task of facing it." (100)

By the end of the book, we find Andy still questioning his sexuality. In the last moments before he dies, he speaks with David. "'My question has boiled down to one thing,' Andy went on. 'Whether or not - if I had the chance - I would choose not to be gay'...David didn't try to stop him. He understood that for many, especially those afflicted by the disease, this question posed itself as seemingly central" (216). Andy then continues:

"But I know this: the answer to my question is that no, I wouldn't have chosen not to be gay. It has been the most compelling force...You know, David, we were there! We were at the forefront of something new, something hopeful. How many people can say that?...I wouldn't change it," he said finally." (216-7)

As in the earlier passages we've looked at, this one also contains a strange ambiguity. It pedantically asserts one thing, but the language it uses and the subsequent course of events seem to counter its assertions. Andy says he does not regret his chosen lifestyle, that it has been the most important aspect of his life, but he is now about to die.[58]

There is another, more largely historical issue expressed here, which is the sense that the gay liberation movement had been a thing of value and importance ("we were on the forefront of something new, something hopeful"), but the operative words are "had been." The sexual freedom and liberation of that time is now over, because AIDS has destroyed it.[59]

What we have seen in this novel is that the sexual life of a gay couple is killed by AIDS, and, perhaps more ominously, the implication that AIDS has killed the life of the gay movement. The novel offers no hope for the future of the gay movement, and, in all likelihood, David is infected by the AIDS virus, as well, so that if we are to imagine the rest of David's life, it will most likely mirror Andy's. This apocalyptic narrative would thus repeat itself in David's story, another tale of total, absolute destruction and finality. The novel reasserts the larger cultural narrative that AIDS means death for all it touches.

2.11 Facing Death

Through the course of the novel, the feelings Andy and David have about death move toward acquiescence, toward accepting AIDS as meaning death.[60]

Initially, when Dr. Branch tells Andy that he might have hepatitis, Andy is shocked and dismayed, but he expects that with rest he will recover. When the tests come back negative for hepatitis, he is at first relieved, but then he asks, "'If I don't have hepatitis, then what's wrong?'" (42). Immediately following this passage, in which Dr. Branch explains that he doesn't know exactly what is wrong with Andy and that he'll have to run more tests, the novel includes an excerpt from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about an outbreak of KS in homosexual men, which emphasizes death. Though Andy has yet to find out what is ailing him, the narrative informs the reader in cold medical terms exactly what Andy has and that of the 26 patients diagnosed with KS, "eight have died" (43).

When Dr. Branch suggests to Andy and David that Andy may have KS, a kind of cancer, immediately, they are overcome with horror: "Andy's shoulders fell and there was a sharp intake of breath from David. The word 'cancer' had shot through them like a burning knife" (56). Both Andy and David equate cancer with death, and "...as Dr. Branch had explained the curious outbreak of cancer and immunodepression, Andy had experienced an alarming sense of doom" (59-60). The fear has a numbing effect on Andy: "...he had to face it - terror at the prospect of his own possible death. Strange, he told himself; he might have expected to break down and sob about it, but he felt almost numb" (64). At the end of Part One, we see Andy sit down to read a book by May Sarton, entitled A Reckoning, which he knows is about death and which he hopes might be useful. But then he wonders if he should continue reading: "He was torn between two modes: denial and preparation. He had to keep reading, had to see what it might be like. But at the same time, he wanted to forget it, to brush it aside" (66).

In Part Two, we witness Andy's changing attitude toward death. First, when he receives his positive diagnosis of KS, we see him both angry and frightened, feeling betrayed by his body and yet terrified of what may come to pass:

"He was afraid to die. Even though he had known the biopsy would prove positive, he had not yet received the death sentence - as he now thought of it - until the words were out of Dr. Branch's mouth. Now he knew; now it was certain. So, "I am to have my own death," Andy said aloud as he walked along, quoting a line from May Sarton. Now the moment was here, and the prospect of having his own death, no matter how well or poorly he might face it, terrified and infuriated him." (80)

He struggles with how will he "face it," the prospect of his death, equating cancer with mortality.

Toward the end of Part Two, Andy goes to see Patrick, the one other person with AIDS depicted in the novel, who is suffering from AIDS-induced dementia. As he witnesses Patrick's condition, he remembers May Sarton's words, "I am to have my own death," and his attitude toward his own mortality alters. Both Dr. Branch and David note this change:

"There was - both Branch and David could detect - some subtle change in Andy's attitude. He seemed less desperate, less hopeless; there was a hint of something stiffer in his posture, and his face no longer hid an expression of fear.

It was his dignity they witnessed, the resolute and abrupt decision on his part that morning that he would face the cancer and his death with dignity, with strength...He would not end it in madness and confusion." (131)

In the end, Andy's attitude toward his death is one of complete and total acceptance: "Tears brimmed in their eyes, but Andy would not cry. He was done with that, he was done with suffering. He wasn't sure, but he knew that he was infused with a great harmony, a consonance. He had made his armistice with the world" (217).

The final passage of the novel plays in such a way with the ambiguity of the word "it," that life and death, AIDS and the narrative of the novel, become synonymous: "'I wouldn't change it,'" Andy says of the life he has lived. And then he thinks, "'It's all so simple, so plain,'" about his lover, as he looks up at David, who whispers the words, "'I love you.'" But Andy cannot respond: "He was ready to open his mouth and whisper the same, but something small and magnificent deep inside him had loosened itself, was growing larger, expanding, releasing itself. Andy could hear David crying, but it didn't matter. It was done" (217). In this passage, the "something small and magnificent deep inside him" that grows "larger, expanding, releasing itself" could be the virus, or it could be his life, or it could be his spirit as it moves beyond him. David's crying, signifying their relationship, no longer matters, because "it was done." Here, the "it" could stand for the entirety of Andy's life and his relationships, except that as the last line of the novel, it also signifies the closure of the novel as well. In this last passage, Andy's life becomes synonymous with the narrative of the novel, and both become synonymous with AIDS and with death. It is at this moment, the last moment, that AIDS has finally succeeded in imposing its meaning on Andy and the novel: AIDS means death and the novel dies with Andy. It is in this total and complete dying, not only of Andy but of the narrative itself, that the novel is apocalyptic: there is no redemption, there is no living beyond, there is nothing to be learned beyond death and beyond the "fact" that AIDS means death.[61]

2.12 In Retrospect

When we stand back from the particulars of the novel and look at it as a completed whole, we begin to see several important things. First, the novel conveys the importance of writing as a way to "face" AIDS. In David's desire to put into writing and communicate his findings about AIDS, the novel contains within itself a parallel of what it as a whole wants to accomplish. David begins writing as a way to get the gay community around him to "face it," to face AIDS and the growing epidemic. Additionally, Andy ponders the phrase, "I am to have my own death," from May Sarton's book, A Reckoning, a book which helps people think about death, and which mirrors one of the purposes of Facing It, namely, getting the reader(s) to face AIDS and all of its implications for someone living and dying of it. In this respect, then, the novel serves an educative function.[62]

There is also another level at which the novel as a whole operates. From the opening chapter, with its insistent emphasis on aging and the impermanence of both people and their constructions, through the end of the novel, with Andy's acquiescence to death, the narrative of the novel represents human time as a linear trajectory. We might call this a "journalistic" portrayal of life in time, in the sense that the novel reports events sequentially as they happen, or we could see it as the construction of a medical history, charting the important events in the history of Andy's illness. In either case, however, the narrative represents the life of a person with AIDS as a linear movement, of time running out and moving to its end, which is represented as death. AIDS means the end of time, the end of text, and the meaninglessness of death; these are the messages the novel communicates. Afterall, the only other death we encounter besides Andy's is Patrick's, which yields only a brief comment in passing. The narrative does not depict the death of either Patrick or of Andy as having consequences. The narrative takes us all the way to the moment that Andy is gone and the narrative has finished, "It is done," but we do not see what happens beyond. How has Andy's death affected David and how he lives his life? How does Dr. Branch and his wife react to the news? Because the narrative does not illustrate the effects of his death, which would convey what his death means to the people who love him, Andy's death in some sense is meaningless; it merely signifies the end of the narrative.

Another way of looking at the novel, however, takes the points of view of the reader and the author into consideration. Though the narrative depicts a world of characters living life in time, the novel also stands outside of time. In this respect, the novel is a kind of artifact that the author has constructed, so that subsequent readers can discover and uncover its value. The novel then takes on added significance. Besides serving an educative function for the reader, the novel also refers to a historical time and its inhabitants that are no longer extant. Though Facing It is a fictional representation of a historical moment, (Reed didn't personally know anyone dying of AIDS),[63] the novel yet works to testify and bear witness to the historical experience of the early AIDS epidemic and its impact on members of the gay community. In this sense, the novel contributes to the project of constructing a history of the epidemic in its early years, a project not unlike others, such as work on the history of slavery, of the Holocaust and of Vietnam, which seek to make sense of horrible events within human history. All of these projects acknowledge the power of the equation SILENCE=DEATH and work to break the silence through a variety of means. In the case of Facing It, we see an early contribution to the gay community's efforts to document and make sense of the AIDS epidemic.

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# Chapter 3: Resisting the Apocalyptic AIDS Narrative in David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion

3.1 Introduction

This chapter explores how David Feinberg uses memory and humor in his two AIDS novels, Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, to resist the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. Following a brief history of Feinberg's life, the chapter moves into a discussion of the problematics of memory and AIDS. Recounting stories from the past or remembering is one of the most popular structuring devices used in novels about AIDS and my analysis moves beyond Feinberg's novels to also include a more general discussion of other AIDS novels that use memory. In the second portion of the chapter, I examine how humor can constitute another narrative strategy for disrupting the apocalyptic AIDS narrative and its emphasis on linear, forward-moving temporality. Feinberg's two AIDS constitute some of the best examples of AIDS novels that use humor for talking about AIDS.

3.2 Biographical Context

David B. Feinberg was born in 1956, in Lynn, Massachusetts and grew up a member of a Jewish family in Syracuse, New York. He graduated with a math degree from MIT in 1977 and then moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote his first, yet unpublished novel and where he came out. He then moved to New York City, where he spent the rest of his life, working as a computer programmer for the MLA (Modern Language Association) and writing in his spare time. As AIDS began to affect his world, he became an active member of ACT UP (Carducci 90). B.J. Rosenthal, the first-person narrator of his two AIDS novels, reflects autobiographical aspects of Feinberg's identity and personality as a young gay Jewish man living in New York City, who has a witty, ironic, guilt-ridden, "Jewish" sense of humor. Eighty-Sixed was Feinberg's first published novel and was published in 1988. It was the first book to win both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Fiction and the American Gay/Lesbian Book Award for Fiction (Carducci 90). Spontaneous Combustion was published in 1991. In his final book, Feinberg moved away from fiction to compile a collection of autobiographical essays, speeches and previously published essays. Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone was published the week he died in November 1994 of AIDS-related complications.

3.3 The Problematics of Memory

Memory and one's relationship to the past form a central problematic in much AIDS literature, including many of the novels about AIDS. As critics like John Clum point out, "a major theme of gay AIDS literature is what to do with a lost past, which was both affluent and carefree" (201). As Clum notes, for many gay authors the past seems divided between the "then" of before AIDS and the "now" of living in the time of AIDS. One aspect of remembering, then, becomes a way to commemorate the history of gay liberation and the time before AIDS, when the sexual revolution had liberated many homosexual men, enabling them to come out and to claim membership in gay communities across the United States, particularly in San Francisco and New York. But to consider this past is also to face the problematics of one's own sexual history, a history that was in part connected with the spreading AIDS epidemic. Though Clum aptly remarks that "a crucial issue for gay writers is how to recollect the pleasure principle that allowed urban gay communities to become a breeding ground for the AIDS virus" (201), his essay reflects silences that permeate much of AIDS criticism, which I will explore in Chapter 5 of the dissertation. He speaks of gay AIDS literature and the larger gay community as unified wholes, whose lost past "was both affluent and carefree." The underlying assumption is that these groups are composed of white, primarily middle-class gay men. Indeed, most of the gay AIDS literature has been written by or about this population, but not entirely. Indeed, novels like Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days From Now, E. Lynn Harris' Invisible Life, Elias Munoz's The Greatest Performance and Michael Nava's Henry Rios detective novels illustrate the diversity of gay populations and experiences as well as the problems some minority men who have sex with men have with aligning themselves with "the gay community." Their stake in constructing narratives of memory are not synonymous with those described by Clum of white gay authors, and their novels lack much of the elegaic and sentimental tones of novels about white gay men who live with AIDS.

For many of the AIDS novels, however, memory does serve an elegiac or memorializing function, which commemorates those who have died of AIDS-related diseases. Timothy Murphy cogently describes this function as testimony: "Testimony is witness in front of an indifferent world about the worth and merit of persons. And thus one writes, for the world unconvinced, that someone was here and that, death notwithstanding, a presence remains" (317). This process of commemoration in the face of larger societal indifference and/or hostility has a political aspect. Testimony functions to break silence, a process that is reminiscent of the activist organization ACT UP whose central purpose is to combat the dangers represented by its slogan, that SILENCE=DEATH. Testimony also serves more personal needs and memory can serve a healing function. For AIDS novelists both gay and straight as well as for many others who write about AIDS, remembering in their writing the loved ones who have died can help their mourning process.

3.4 Risky Sexual History

"... I recognized the baths as the most direct path to sexual gratification. No deceptive advertising or flashy packaging here. Nothing to unwrap, unzip, unsnap, or unbutton: no complicated configuration of slip-lock belts and long johns to unravel, no adult equivalent of a child-proof medicine cap to struggle with. And everyone was there for one reason only: sex." (Feinberg, Eighty-Sixed 19)

One danger of looking backward in the age of AIDS is the risk that the past threatens. Is the past a source of pollution, guilt, shame, and conviction? "Guilty, guilty, guilty" for sexual crimes that are now being punished by divine retribution, as conservatives like Patrick Buchanan have indicated? In "Placing Blame for Devastating Disease," Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman describe this process of ascribing morality to disease: "Disease is a means to reinforce sexual mores. It serves as a public sign of the violation of socially defined boundaries. The sick man becomes a sinner; pestilence is the punishment unleashed by divine retribution; disease is the means to cleanse the sin" (46). Focusing a narrative on the past risks engaging aspects of these homophobic cultural narratives, which see venereal disease as a fitting crime for having violated biblical sanctions against non-procreative sex.

Part I of Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, entitled "1980: Ancient History," recounts the life of the first-person narrator B.J. Rosenthal in the era before AIDS. Told in the past tense, B.J. describes how his life during this time revolved around sex, from popper-enhanced sexual encounters at New York City's famous St. Marks Baths, to summer days at the gay section of Jones Beach, to anonymous encounters in Central Park, to failed attempts at developing longer term relationships, first with a priest named Dennis and later with a recovering alcoholic and drug addict named Richard.

Though Feinberg's memory project remembers the days of B.J.'s sexual freedom before AIDS, the narrative is tinged with foreshadowing. Immediately following B.J.'s sexual encounter at St. Marks, he comes down with venereal disease: "...the primordial ooze emanating from my member was not in fact precum but the drip of a social disease" (23-24). Subsequent sexual encounters are also followed with descriptions of B.J.'s trips to the public health clinic, but each subsequent disease seems worse than the last. Following the gonorrhea, he then comes down with intestinal parasites: "I had had the runs now since that night at the Stud. Oh, feckless youth!" (56). In this episode, like the episode at the baths, the narrative implicitly sets up a connection between anonymous sexual encounters and disease. The diagnostic procedure for confirming intestinal parasites is more humiliating and difficult, however, and B.J. recounts the embarrassing episode in which his first attempts at pooping in a cup are not acceptable to the nurse, so he has to repeat the procedure. The recounted event is softened by his use of humor: "I didn't know which was worse, to be insulted for your feces or complimented on them" (59).

As the narrative of "1980: Ancient History" moves forward in time, B.J.'s different sexually transmitted diseases become more difficult to treat. In a foreshadowing of the complexities of AIDS medications, B.J. complains about how complicated his medication schedule has become in treating the latest round of infections: "'It got so complicated I had to make up charts and set alarm clocks to remind myself which pill to take when'" (61). The big difference in history, however, between "Ancient History" and the years of AIDS is that B.J. can take his medication and get better; the worst he really has to suffer at this point in time is not being able to have sex for a while: "Dejected, I went to my next class. It looked as if I was going to be out of commission for another extended period of time" (61). When he eventually contracts herpes, he can no longer be totally cured by medication, but he can avoid having sex when the herpes flares up. As the narrative moves forward and B.J.'s infections become more frequent and more complex, the narrative seems to presage the ominous beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in New York City's gay community.

Indeed, one of B.J.'s tricks in Part I becomes a casualty of AIDS in Part II, which links B.J. sexually with AIDS. In Part I, Bob Broome seems to serve an ominous symbolic function for. B.J. B.J. is not attracted to Bob but has sex with him because he has just been rejected by two other men he is attracted to. B.J. reflects, "I should know not to go home with the first man that came along just because I felt lonely or horny. Whenever I did this and substituted whoever was handy for the person I was attracted to, disaster struck" (51). B.J. does not specify at this point what he means by "disaster," but it is just prior to this sexual encounter that B.J. and his friends have discussed being "Eighty-Sixed" from different places. In "Part I: 1980: Ancient History," "Eighty-Sixed" has quite a different meaning from the one it will develop in the age of "Part II: 1986: Learning How to Cry." Memory fails B.J. when he tries to describe the sex he had with Bob, because he blacked out: "What happened next I don't recall. I'm not exactly sure what transpired. A few cocktails later, enough to addle my memory, I found myself in bed with Bob. The next thing I knew it was the following morning" (51). Bob is a troubling, recurring figure in B.J.'s "ancient history." When B.J. again encounters Bob, he cannot remember Bob's name. Repeatedly B.J. asks himself, "Now, what was his name?" (84).

In Part II of Eighty-Sixed, B.J.'s life during the age of AIDS is continually shadowed by Bob's presence. B.J.'s description of Bob's life with AIDS in Part II reenacts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, as first we see Bob hospitalized for PCP, then grow sicker, and ultimately die of AIDS. Through the course of Bob's experience of AIDS, B.J. reluctantly develops a friendship with him, visiting him in the hospital. Part II, unlike Part I, only once explicitly describes a sexual encounter B.J. has with a trick and Bob's presence once again inserts itself. Coming toward the end of Part II, B.J. describes what it is like for him to have sex in the age of AIDS: "There is no such thing as sex without angst anymore. The specter of death cannot be ignored, forgotten. Every action is accompanied with caution; every invention with doubt" (318). B.J.'s encounter is plagued by fear - of infecting or being infected. As his trick begins to hump his stomach, the phone rings. The answering machine clicks on and Bob's presence once again inserts itself, becoming "the specter of death" that "cannot be ignored":

"Dave Johnson speaks tersely to the machine. His voice is hoarse. "B.J., it's Dave. I got a call from St. Clare's a few minutes ago. Bob Broome just died. His lungs filled with fluid, and he drowned. I didn't want you to go there and visit him straight from Rochester and find out he was dead." He hangs up. I go limp." (319)

Bob ultimately symbolizes the mortal effects of B.J.'s sexual history, a haunting which squelches B.J.'s sexuality of the present time.

In the latter portion of Part I of Eighty-Sixed, we finally see B.J. develop a longer-term relationship with Richard, but even their relationship is tinged with foreshadowing. When Richard wants to instigate S and M with B.J., B.J. yells out, "'Do not molest what's left of my innocence. Listen, I've got it all charted out. At twenty-eight I become a tired old jaded queen and get into light S and M. At twenty-nine I graduate to heavy stuff: fist-fucking, slings, the works. By thirty I'm dead'" (113-4). Part II begins with B.J. telling us five years have passed and he is now 29. Though he has not died by the time he is thirty, at the end of the book, most of his friends are dead or dying, including those he had been sexually active with in Part I. B.J.'s relationship with Richard finally fails in the course of Part I and B.J. continues to long for an intimate relationship with someone. Part I of Eighty-Sixed ends full circle with him at the baths again, but now, anonymous sex leaves him empty: "Disgusted with myself, frustrated, I left, vowing not to return. What was the point? The St. Mark's Baths was ultimately depressing: always a matter of waiting for such fleeting satisfaction that afterwards my mood would only worsen" (148).

The ambivalence to sexual history represented in Eighty-Sixed can also be seen in many of the other AIDS novels that construct narratives of memory which predate the AIDS epidemic. The only exception to this is Castro Street Memories by N.A. Diaman, which details the history of an unnamed, first-person narrator and which does not blame the past as a source of infection. The novel ends with the narrator continuing to celebrate his sexual history, though he is being evicted from his apartment on Castro Street along with the other tenants because the landlord wants to perform costly renovations: "So much had happened to me here. So many people had passed through my life. Only a few brief weeks remained before I would have to say good-bye but I would certainly never forget this wonderful period and place in my life" (206). Though Christopher Davis' Valley of the Shadow also extensively celebrates the sexual history of its first-person narrator, Andrew, its celebration is problematized at the end of the novel when Andrew renounces sex and destroys the symbols of his sexual history, including all of his sexual paraphernalia and pornography:

"I guess I really only had sex about a dozen times after I got out of the hospital before I stopped, for good...as I began to live more easily with the knowledge that I was dying I began to feel guilty about what I was doing, and one night I made a careful, deliberate decision not to do it again." (199-200)

In the final pages of the novel, however, the narrator returns to more distant memories of celebration: "My life now has become memories: memories of my youth, memories of Teddy..." (206) The novel's narrative ends in mid-sentence, refusing the closure of a period: "I remember what it felt like to be well. To be strong, when my body was lean and hard. I remember " (208). Death is excluded from Andrew's narrative and is only alluded to by an impersonal newspaper obituary, which is attached on a separate page at the end of the novel.

Other novels that recreate sexual histories before AIDS tend to be darker. Oscar Moore's A Matter of Life and Sex and Elias Munoz's The Greatest Performance tell histories of sex tied to homophobia and violence. In their novels, AIDS reads like the latest punishment men who have sex with men must suffer. More recent novels, like Dale Peck's Martin and John, Felice Picano's Like People in History and Paul Reidinger's Good Boys, tend to continue this trend. For example, in Good Boys, the gay protagonist Chris feels sex in the age of AIDS threatens doom:

"It is the same San Francisco, the same Castro, and not the same...Then sex was fortissimo, full speed ahead, all you can eat. Now it is hip to be square, or at least cautious.

Underneath the veneer of continuity lie layers of doom, gloom, grief, hysteria. In how many of the people on this street, Chris wonders, is the time bomb already ticking? In how many is it not? It is possible they will all die." (228)

Sharon Mayes' Immune is one of the only novels to narrate the experiences of a heterosexual woman who acquires HIV sexually. Like the gay AIDS novels, sexual history in Immune is dangerous. The narrative constructs a memory project by beginning with the knowledge that Suzanne has committed suicide and then by recounting the events of her life that led up to her suicide through a rereading of her diary by her boyfriend, Chris. Her diary describes a lengthy sexual history which parallels her research on HIV. The diary ultimately reveals that her test for the HIV antibodies yielded a positive result, which led her to commit suicide. The narrative thus reenacts a punitive chain of events linked to her sexual history - the past as sexual excess, the subsequent punishment of HIV infection and then death.

In the AIDS novels by gay authors, the AIDS epidemic places gay authors in a particularly awkward position with respect to memory and history. Does the recollection of one's prior sexual history become a source of explanation for what has happened? Does the past come to solely represent the source of infection, thus implying shame and/or guilt for one's past sexual behaviors? Does this lead to a condemnation of gay communities and their sexualities? Many of the AIDS novels wrestle with these questions. In Joel Redon's Bloodstream, for example, the protagonist, Peter, retreats from New York City and the gay sexuality it represents to live again in Portland, Oregon, with his parents in their wealthy, heterosexual, suburban community. As he struggles to maintain his failing health through the course of the novel, he condemns his sexual history as an "unhealthy lifestyle," and in his friendship with Yale, another PLWA, he renounces sexuality altogether.

There is also a tendency in many of the AIDS novels to focus on the plight of individuals affected by AIDS rather than that of communities, which, as Simon Watney has argued, promulgates certain stereotypes of gay men who have AIDS as "helpless victims." Watney writes,

"On the one hand we are told that literally hundreds of thousands of gay men are directly affected, whilst at the same time we are only permitted to "meet" them singly, or at most in pairs. Thus the entire structure of urban (and rural) gay culture is conveniently erased as if it had never existed." (335-6)

Feinberg, like Paul Monette in Afterlife, is one of the few AIDS novelists to comment extensively on the larger gay communities in which his narrator resides.

There is a danger in Feinberg's representation of these communities, however. As John Weir writes, "If David was popular among heterosexual readers, I suspect it was in part because his writing satisfied certain preconceptions about homosexual men. Of course, gay men like to believe cliches about themselves, too" (11). Feinberg's representation of gay sexuality possibly does feed into stereotypes about urban gay culture. Throughout Eighty-Sixed, sexuality forms the center of B.J.'s life. He is his sexuality. He wants a monogamous relationship, something condoned by dominant societal sexual norms, and yet, he is constantly being led around by his sexual desires, promiscuously engaging in more-or-less anonymous sexual encounters which leave him infected with a plethora of "social diseases." According to homophobic logic and the logic of sexual activity=disease depicted in the "Ancient History" section of Eighty-Sixed, is it any surprise then that in "1986: Learning How to Cry," we find B.J. terrified that he may be infected with HIV?: "I sit at the desk with my calculator and figure the odds. My hands are trembling; my palms are sweaty; my fingers stick to the keys...By the time you read these words I may in all likelihood be dead" (151-2). Indeed, by August 1987, depicted in Spontaneous Combustion, B.J. tests positive for HIV. The trajectory of time represented in Feinberg's two AIDS novels, from a past time of uninhibited sexuality to a present time of fear in Eighty-Sixed and then to a subsequent present time of infection in Spontaneous Combustion reenacts the dominant cultural narrative, which represents gay sexual history as a source of mortal infection.

3.5 Mourning Processes

A central function of many of the AIDS novels that construct narratives focused on the past is to mourn the past. For novels with primarily gay points of view, this involves multiple processes of mourning, including mourning such losses as one's own sexual past, lost loved ones, gay communities drastically decimated and altered by the epidemic. As we have seen in the discussion of Eighty-Sixed, B.J.'s memories of life before the AIDS epidemic revolve around the sexuality that no longer can exist as it once did. In the latter part of Eighty-Sixed, we witness B.J.'s plight in the present tense, as he experiences first-hand the devastating descent of the epidemic, his friends and lovers becoming sick and dying. HIV seems to be closing in on him and he is afraid. Following a visit to his friend and ex-lover, Bob Broome, who has been hospitalized for PCP, B.J. finds himself drawn to a sex bar:

"I wonder what draws me so urgently to the Spike tonight. The criminal's compulsion to return to the scene of the crime? The microbe's urge to return to the site of the infection?

After seeing Bob Broome, I don't want to be left by myself tonight. I'm afraid to be alone." (199)

Though he suspects he may be infected with HIV in Eighty-Sixed, B.J. does not actually take the HIV antibody test until Spontaneous Combustion. The latter portion of Eighty-Sixed involves his coming to terms with his emotions and the plight of the altered New York gay community. The sessions with his therapist help him cope with his emotions and the mourning process he must go through. Ultimately, he "learns how to cry," and the novel ends, "It begins as a gentle rain. Just a drop, for each illness, each death. And with each passing day it gets worse. Now a downpour. Now a torrent. And there is no likelihood of its ever ending" (326).

In Spontaneous Combustion, Feinberg's narrative works more explicitly to mourn those who have died of AIDS, periodically remembering those who B.J. had known and loved who have now died of AIDS-related illnesses. For example, Chapter 9, "Snap Out of It!: Untidy Endings" ends:

"Lonnie was dead.

Seymour was dead.

Howard was dead.

Bob was dead

Charles was dead.

William was dead.

Gordon was dead.

And I was last seen laden with pills on a Trailways bus headed toward Canada, my Canada, clutching a copy of Bob Damron's guide in one hand and a liberalized safer-sex guidelines in my other." (174)

Unlike Feinberg's novel, many of the AIDS novels that construct narratives of memory focus on mourning the loss of a particular loved one who has died of AIDS. Clayton Graham's Tweeds and Carole Maso's The Art Lover, as well as more recent novels like Rebecca Brown's The Gifts of the Body, Nisa Donnelly's The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay, Paula Martinac's Home Movies and Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest tell stories that remember the life and loss of particular loved ones. These novels exemplify Murphy's point that testimony, not death, becomes the last word. Unlike AIDS novels for young adults and the novels that describe other people who have died of AIDS, these novels unanimously describe the deaths of gay men. The novels told from a non-gay point of view are often told by women, many of whom have been caregivers for people living with AIDS (Rebecca Brown, for example, is a nurse). These novels tend to focus on individuals in private settings, telling stories of one-on-one relationships set within the domestic spaces of families. The tone of many of these novels is elegiac.

Besides describing how AIDS has personally affected B.J., both Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion also acknowledge the devastation the AIDS epidemic has ravaged upon the gay community of New York City. In Eighty-Sixed, for example, B.J. reflects on how AIDS has altered the sexual life of the gay community: "In the age of anxiety gay men go to the gym five nights a week just to keep out of trouble. On weekends it's home with the VCR, watching porno, 'Masturbates Theatre'...Any way to sublimate desire; anything to avoid sex" (201). The AIDS novels told from gay points of view about the past tell more complex stories of mourning than the other AIDS novels of memory. The toll is much higher and it is harder to live on, surrounded by so many reminders of those who have died in the gay community. En route to another ACT UP meeting in Spontaneous Combustion, B.J. fears the loss he has experienced will overwhelm him:

"Soon the memories of the dead would overwhelm me. It would be impossible to go anywhere without thinking of the dead. New York was the city of the dead...Was I caught in the web of my past, spending all of my waking hours remembering my dead father, my dead tricks, my dead friends?" (163)

Besides Feinberg's AIDS novels, many of the other gay AIDS novels also deal with mourning multiple losses. For example, Geoffrey Main's Gentle Warriors, Joseph Puccia's The Holy Spirit Dance Club, and Joel Redon's Bloodstream mourn the loss of different gay communities destroyed by the AIDS epidemic.

Part of the mourning process for Feinberg, as with other AIDS novelists who confront the politics of AIDS, is coming to terms with one's rage about the epidemic and how American society has been dealing with AIDS. Besides Feinberg's two novels, other AIDS novels like Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home, Jed Byran's A Cry in the Desert and Elias Munoz's The Greatest Performance also express a great deal of rage about the bigotry and homophobia toward gay people living with AIDS expressed by society and the government. In Spontaneous Combustion, B.J.'s rage about the AIDS epidemic threatens to consume him:

"I was worried that if I kept up this high level of anxiety, one day I would spontaneously combust: I would walk down the street and suddenly burst into flames, becoming the literal embodiment of the proverbial flaming faggot...At other times I was so angry at the whole damn mess that I thought that under the pressure I might evaporate into steam." (160)

When B.J. finally gains enough courage to reveal his HIV+ antibody status to his mother at the end of Spontaneous Combustion, Ryan White preempts his admission, by appearing on national television to tell the nation that he has AIDS. Unlike B.J., however, Ryan is an "innocent," young child, and the rhetoric Ryan uses to describe himself enrages B.J.:

"What I want to know is, why did Ryan White have to pick the weekend I finally got around to telling my mother I was taking AZT to bag it? Was he maybe trying to help me as an object lesson? Ryan White was America's most favorite innocent victim, which left me guilty, guilty, guilty. Verdict first, trial afterward, just like in Alice in Wonderland." (189)

His mother's reaction to his news is negative: "She sighed heavily, a sigh that took her sixty-two years to perfect. With harsh sadness, my long-suffering mother said, 'It's a wonderful life.' I realized that this was where I had learned irony. It's a wonderful life-style, was what I think she meant" (196-7). B.J. then leaves and returns to New York City.

His initial emotional response to his mother's reaction is subdued by guilt, but then the rage takes over: "It turned out that I was so furious, I was so incredibly angry, it took me an entire week to admit it. I was so concerned that I had done the wrong thing, that I had hurt my mother unintentionally, that I couldn't even recognize my own fury at her" (200). A mourning process that is contained by sadness is apparently the most acceptable to critics of Feinberg. The outstandingly positive critiques of Eighty-Sixed give way to negative if not outright hostile reviews when critics encounter the anger expressed in Spontaneous Combustion. For example, in his review of Spontaneous Combustion for Christopher Street, Bob Satuloff complains that "Instead of expanding his knowledge, [Feinberg] throws a temper tantrum on paper, the literary equivalent of holding his breath and banging his fists on the floor..." (4).

3.6 Resisting the Apocalyptic AIDS Narrative

Several well-known gay writers including Edmund White and Andrew Holleran have avoided writing directly about the AIDS epidemic in their novels. In order to write about gay life free from AIDS, they construct narratives that take place in a historical time period that safely predates the epidemic. For those writers who tell stories set in the more recent history of AIDS, the past does not always easily stay the past. Especially for HIV+ writers, the past, which in part symbolizes the time of infection, threatens the present with the progression of one's HIV disease. In Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, the narrative of Part I: "1980: Ancient History" successfully remains history, because AIDS has not yet irrevocably changed B.J.'s life. In Part II: "1986: Learning How to Cry," however, B.J.'s narrative breaks into the present tense, the present time of AIDS. Part II begins with a prologue-like paragraph that utilizes scientific discourse - present-tense, acronym-infested and impersonal - to describe the historical onset of the epidemic: "Studies in San Francisco show that in January 1986, up to 80 percent of the gay men have been exposed to human T-cell lymphotropic virus type-III (HTLV-III), known by its French discoverers as lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV)" (151). This factual first paragraph ends with chilling words, which form a literal "bottom-line" to the paragraph and to the meaning of AIDS, emphasizing the apocalyptic "truth" of an AIDS diagnosis: "Most doctors and clinicians believe AIDS to be universally fatal. At present there is no cure for AIDS" (151). The next paragraph begins, "I sit at the desk with my calculator and figure the odds" (151). Death looms large for B.J. in Part II. Where "Eighty-Sixed" had meant getting kicked out of parties, dance clubs and YMCA saunas in Part I, in Part II, "Eighty-Sixed" means death:

"Don't write him off; don't give up on him," I tell Joey, cringing at his words. "Isn't there always hope?"

"Hope for what? Don't fool yourself, B.J. He's got 'Eighty-Sixed' written all over his face. He's not going to make it through the winter." Joey is certain. "It's painful, but you have to face reality. The man is walking towards his grave." (267)

The narrative of Spontaneous Combustion temporally reenacts aspects of the narrative of Eighty-Sixed. Spontanous Combustion begins in the past tense, describing B.J.'s life since the end of Eighty-Sixed but now B.J. is fairly certain that he has been exposed to HIV. His narrative is no longer as carefully controlled and constrained as it was in Eighty-Sixed. For example, Chapter Two ends with a section, "The Little Disturbances of Man," that breaks out of the past into the present tense: "For the past several years it seems that I have turned into a mass of symptoms and inchoate disease" (16). When B.J. describes what causes his herpes to flare, the final, page-long paragraph of Chapter Two becomes a single run-on sentence that is tinged with hysteria, or perhaps more of a mind-numbing verbosity - anything to keep him from thinking that his ex-lover Richard has ARC, which would imply his own infection with HIV.

The stakes are raised for B.J. in Spontaneous Combustion as AIDS closes in on him. Rather than the narrative breaking between an historical past before the AIDS epidemic and the present historical period of AIDS as it did in Eighty-Sixed, in Spontaneous Combustion the narrative breaks temporally around B.J.'s own HIV status. The narrative fails to maintain its focus on telling a story of the past, when B.J. is directly confronted by his HIV status and when death comes too intimately close. For example, toward the middle of Spontaneous Combustion, B.J. finally takes The Test. Following a positive test result, his narrative suddenly breaks into the present tense, moving from a recounting of past events to a description of his life now, in the present time: "So this is what I do: I go on with my life" (80). This life, however, is one ruled by fear and concern that time is running out: "And now I never sleep through the night...Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I sit, watching helplessly as my T-cell count drops every three months, the sands of time running out" (81).

The narrative of Spontaneous Combustion is conflicted with respect to the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, which represents AIDS as a forced march forward to impending death. On the one hand, B.J. regards AIDS as a death sentence and he is ashamed of his HIV status. When, for example, he has a nosebleed in a restaurant, he is ashamed of himself: "All I could think of was infection and disease. All I could think of was the virus that was coursing through my blood. I blotted it out with the napkin and sat there ashamed, frightened, in despair" (81). On the other hand, Spontaneous Combustion resists the smooth linearity of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. B.J.'s narrative is broken into many chapters, each with sub-headings, and the narrative resists moving the story forward in a linear, predictable fashion. Indeed, the choppiness of the narrative has been one of the primary complaints by critics of the novel. In The New York Times Book Review, for example, Scott Bradfield writes, "Although the stories describe B.J.'s anxiety over a period of five years, they do not develop any momentum; instead, they are a series of jazzy riffs on the subjects of diagnosis, treatment, disavowal and safe sex (mainly you talk about it a lot)" (11).

My argument that Feinberg attempts to disrupt the apocalyptic AIDS narrative in Spontaneous Combustion is further supported by the last two sections of the novel, which break out of the past tense and the perspective that HIV means doom. The last chapter, "The Rules of Attraction, June 1990," resists a linear narrative altogether, by consisting of a listing of ten rules of attraction. Additionally, through the course of this listing, B.J.'s tone is uncharacteristically tinged with hope (quite a shift from the tone of the rest of the novel) and his list reveals the hopeful possibility that he has found a new lover, Mitchell, who cares for him. The final section of the novel, entitled "Appendix: After the Cure 1996," further denies that AIDS has the last word. Like the last chapter, it too is told in the present tense and humorously recounts life after a cure for AIDS has been found. The novel ends, "But the nightmare is now over. The disease has been vanquished. And now, if you will excuse me, I have an engagement with an as-yet unidentified prospective boyfriend at some unseemly cocktail lounge near the docks. Wish me luck" (226). At the end of Spontaneous Combustion, sex is no longer a source of fear and B.J. joyously returns to a life of celebratory gay sexuality.

3.7 Is Humor an Acceptable Way to Deal With AIDS?

In an article for The Advocate, entitled "Is Humor an Acceptable Way to Deal with AIDS," Feinberg begins by quoting Edmund White: "'If art is to confront AIDS more honestly than the media has done, it must begin in tact, avoid humor, and end in anger'" (96). White goes on to say in his essay, which Feinberg quotes at length, that humor is inappropriate for dealing with AIDS because it does not do justice to the calamity of AIDS:

"Humor puts the public (indifferent when not uneasy) on cosy terms with what is an unspeakable scandal: death. Humor domesticates terror, lays to rest misgivings that should be intensified. Humor suggests that AIDS is just another calamity to befall Mother Camp; whereas, in truth AIDS is not one more item in a sequence but a rupture in meaning itself. Humor, like melodrama, is an assertion of bourgeois values; it falsely suggests that AIDS is all in the family." (Feinberg 96)

Feinberg then responds to White's claims that humor is an unacceptable way to deal with AIDS and ultimately rejects them. In a consideration of AIDS literature, including Monette's Afterlife and John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, Feinberg notes that "Indeed, it is hard to find any work that does not deal with humor at least peripherally, save the Death Be Not Proud school of humorless literal-minded writing" (96). Feinberg then discusses how humor can be used to talk about AIDS. He provides five arguments in favor of using AIDS humor. First, humor is central to everyday life. Second, black humor, like Joseph Heller's Catch-22, achieves great emotional impact by juxtaposing humor and tragedy. Additionally, "In an absurd world," Feinberg asserts, "humor may be the only appropriate response" (96). He also mentions that "Humor is a survival tactic, a defense mechanism, a way of lessening the horror" (96). Finally, he notes that gallows humor allows emotional release through an appalled, oxymoronic desire to laugh and cry: "I'm interested in the joke that makes you wince as you laugh or suppress a smile: the joke that simultaneously appeals and appalls" (96). His two AIDS novels reflect aspects of his philosophy of AIDS humor.

AIDS humor does not always succeed, however. Feinberg points out that humor is a tricky narrative strategy to employ and that it sometimes fails: "Humor is extremely subjective. If it misfires, it trivializes tragedy, offending the reader, as I'm sure I've offended many" (96). Indeed, Feinberg's AIDS humor has bothered a number of his critics, including Daniel Mendelsohn, who complains that Eighty-Sixed "was ultimately dulled by too many Borscht Belt gags" (78) and that Spontaneous Combustion's humor falls short: "If only Spontaneous Combustion had gotten hot enough to burn away its dross, leaving comic gold" (78). Feinberg insists that if a reader is offended by an author's use of humor, the reader should consider the intent of the author: "If you dislike a work, consider the intent of the author. This is not how you judge a work on literary merits but how you forgive it" (96). If we consider Feinberg as author, then we understand that he wrote both his novels on the side while holding down a full-time job and that by the time he wrote Spontaneous Combustion, his health was beginning to suffer. Perhaps we can forgive him that.

3.8 Humor as Survival Strategy

Reviewers of both of Feinberg's AIDS novels support Feinberg's claim about the subjectivity of humor and their reviews tend to fall into two camps. Catherine Texier of The New York Times Book Review finds the humor of Eighty-Sixed successful: "The deadpan dialogues, the constant sexual innuendos, the sick jokes, the horrific puns, the hysterical shriek of the 'queen' in heat - it is all there, and it is wickedly funny" (9). She, like the other critics who respond positively to Feinberg's humor, see it as a survival strategy. As she notes, "Sarcasm is both a weapon and the shield that keeps B.J. from falling apart..." (9). Those critics who object to his use of humor in Eighty-Sixed tend to complain that it distances the reader from "truly" feeling the "tragedy." For example, Sybil Steinberg writes in Publisher's Weekly that "Feinberg relates events without enabling the reader to feel or understand the tragedy he gradually unfolds" (73).

Though many of the critics comment on Feinberg's campy style, none of them note how he actively aligns himself with what he sees as a Jewish sense of humor. They tend to describe him, as Bob Satuloff does, as "a snippy, self-involved, decidedly hostile, fussily neurotic, gay New Yorker..." (6). In an interview following the publication of Eighty-Sixed, Feinberg describes himself as a gay Jewish writer: "I always thought of myself as 'the gay Philip Roth.' That was my goal. He's my favorite writer, almost. I also like Woody Allen a lot. Those are my two Jewish heroes. For a long while I was fighting against 'the Jew that lives inside me,' but I gave in" (Weinberg 47). Like Neil Klugman in Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and like the many different characters Allen has played in his movies, a key component for B.J.'s emotional survival is his use of wry wit and humor to deflect threat. Self-abasement is one strategy B.J. uses to ironically and humorously deflect threat. An example of this can be seen in a conversation he has with his friend Dennis in Eighty-Sixed:

"Me in therapy? What a joke. I think I'm too advanced for therapy. You know, Dennis, people have this overwhelming compulsion to try and fix me. Strangers on the street straighten my collar, and point out the fact that my socks don't match. Little old ladies tell me to work on my posture. Even lesbians tell me that I need a haircut. Am I such a mess? What is it about me?" (160)

Both of his novels actively depict B.J. as a gay Jewish man whose biting ironic humor is tied to his neurotic and guilt-ridden Jewish heritage.

3.9 Jokes: Circling Time

To hear or read a joke, absorb it and understand its humor requires a halting of linear, forward-moving time. In order for the joke to register, the auditor/reader has to stop, process what has been heard, reflect on it, and hopefully "get" it. Feinberg's humor does not work so much as punch-line jokes but as shaggy dog, drawn-out, funny tales with concluding one-liners for humorous effect. A good example of this can be seen in Eighty-Sixed when B.J. is trying to escape a trick:

"The hour was late, and I had to go. The air in Mr. Mackenzie's apartment had become so rarefied that I found it difficult to breathe. Moreover, my artificial plants needed watering, the stuffed dog on the mantel needed walking, the linoleum needed Hoovering. There were a thousand and one immaterial reasons to vacate the premises, not the least of which being Mr. Mackenzie himself." (65)

B.J.'s description is humorous and yet also laced with a degree of contempt for the object of his sarcastic humor. The chapters of Eighty-Sixed are also interspersed with humorous interludes, from "Why I Always Wanted to Be a Clone" to "How to Stay Celibate in the Age of Anxiety," which includes a series of grotesquely humorous digressions:

"Acquire unattractive personal-grooming habits. Floss your teeth in public: at the opera, in major metropolitan museums. Better yet, use wooden toothpicks. Chew tobacco and spit... [etc., etc.] Blow your nose by holding one nostril shut and forcing the mucus to shoot out the other. This is particularly effective at cocktail parties. When questioned on this, remark upon the disgusting habit many Americans have of wrapping up their mucus in cloth and carrying it around in their vest pockets." (238)

In Spontaneous Combustion, Feinberg no longer uses humorous sections to divide the chapters of his novel. Instead, the narrative is broken into many small sections, each with their own heading. In her review of Spontaneous Combustion, Sybil Steinberg notes of the novel, "Feinberg reins in the one-liners as the tone grows less determinedly fey, and there is real poignancy in one character's final days" (48). Indeed, Spontaneous Combustion does not maintain the highly humorous tone of Eighty-Sixed.

3.10 The Disruptive Force of Laughter

M.M. Bakhtin in his chapter on chronotopes in the Dialogic Imagination discusses how laughter is subversive of the established order. He writes,

"...laughter was never "infected," even slightly, by the "red tape" of moribund officialdom. Therefore, laughter could not be deformed or falsified as could every other form of seriousness, in particular the pathetic. Laughter remained outside official falsifications, which were coated with a layer of pathetic seriousness. Therefore all high and serious genres, all high forms of language and style, all mere set phrases and all linguistic norms were drenched in conventionality, hypocricy and falsification. Laughter alone remained uninfected by lies." (236)

Though Bakhtin speaks of an "ancient laughter" that predates the bureaucratization and totalitarianism of the modern state, he wants to show through his praise of Rabelais that there is something the present can learn from this ancient past. After all, doesn't what he say still hold true in the modern world - that laughter continues to have subversive value, disrupting dominant, "serious" and "institutionalized" discourses? I would argue that in the case of novels about AIDS, the laughter generated by AIDS humor contradicts the dominant discourses of AIDS, which represent AIDS as unmitigated tragedy and assured doom (what I have been calling the apocalyptic AIDS narrative). In this respect, then, I would urge that AIDS laughter "remains outside official falsifications." I am not saying that there is no truth to the evidence that suggests that HIV disease is a fatal disease. I am saying that it is an official falsehood that there is only one way to represent AIDS. As my dissertation argues, there are many different ways to represent living with HIV disease.

Feinberg has observed the bifurcation between tragic AIDS novels and novels that use humor as a way to redescribe life with AIDS. In a review of Peter McGehee's Boys Like Us, he writes,

"There seem to be two schools of fiction writing about AIDS. One might be called the "Death Be Not Proud" school of noble suffering: innocent victims cossetted in flowing white robes sit uncomplaining in the dark, clutching comforting stuffed animals. Then there is the Diseased Pariah News school of caustic black humor: queens in black leather jackets kvetching about hospital-room decor and disorderly orderlies. DPR, an underground magazine in San Francisco, takes a mordant view of the epidemic." (7)

Perhaps it is no surprise that critics respond more favorably to the "Death Be Not Proud" school of AIDS literature, considering the prevailing dominance of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative for representing AIDS in the novel. Serious, "truthful" accounts in this respect seem more appropriate than the use of AIDS humor for talking about living with HIV disease. For example, Bob Satuloff finds the literature of Paul Reed (author of Facing It, a classic example of the apocalyptic AIDS novel as I discussed in Chapter 2 of the dissertation) more appealing than Spontaneous Combustion. He compares Reed in his latest work, The Q Journal: A Treatment Diary, to Feinberg in Spontaneous Combustion: "...the San Francisco author has no ax to grind but that of his own well-being...Being that, unlike Feinberg, Reed's will to live seems more powerful than his ego, a reader can identify with his work" (7). Besides Feinberg's two AIDS novels, Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home, Peter McGehee's Boys Like Us and John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, as well as more recent novels like Harry Kondolean's Diary of a Lost Boy, use humor as a way to disrupt simplistic conventions of representing life with AIDS as unmitigated tragedy. Unlike these novels, however, Feinberg's last AIDS novel, Spontaneous Combustion, does not temper its angry humor. Indeed, anger tends to predominate.

3.11 "Rage, Rage, Rage": When Laughter Is Not Enough

In the end, Feinberg's humor fails to keep AIDS at bay. His last book, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone, is dominated by feelings of fear and anger. David Kirp notes this in his review for The New York Times Book Review: "...the humor is starting to give out in 'Queer and Loathing.'...Mostly, though, the one-liners are simply angry" (29). In an obituary for his friend, the novelist John Weir writes "His last book, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone, which was published the week he died, is the least wise-cracking, and the hardest to read of all his work because it is the most unmitigated by irony" (11).

Indeed, I would argue that even in Spontaneous Combustion Feinberg's ironic humor is already beginning to lag. As we have seen in his essay on humor and AIDS, Feinberg notes that there should be a careful juxtaposition and interplay between tragedy and humor for AIDS humor to work effectively. And yet in this essay, Feinberg makes no mention of anger, which comes to dominate so much of his later writing. In Eighty-Sixed, he achieves the difficult and delicate balance between humor and tragedy, but in Spontaneous Combustion, it is almost as though HIV is pressing too close to his own daily lived experience for him to be able to obtain the needed restraint for successful AIDS humor. In his obituary, John Weir notes something similar when he says of Feinberg, "He used irony to distance himself from pain, but irony failed in the end, and all that was left was his devastating fear and rage" (11). Indeed, few other AIDS novelists express so much rage in their work. Though he does not use ironic humor to achieve his purpose as Feinberg does, Monette is the only other prominent AIDS novelist to express extensive anger about AIDS in his novels. Unlike Feinberg, however, Monette's rage is ultimately lessened by his greater emphasis and belief in the importance of love, as I will discuss in the next chapter.

3.12 Conclusions

Memory and humor are two ways that David Feinberg disrupts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative in his two AIDS novels, Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion. As we have seen, by foregrounding memory in Eighty-Sixed, Feinberg disrupts the apocalyptic narrative's emphasis on apocalyptic future time. This narrative strategy of foregrounding memory is the one most often used in those AIDS novels that attempt to resist the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. This strategy is not always a successful one, however, because it risks aligning itself with aspects of the dominant AIDS discourses, particularly the homophobic ones that represent the past as a source of infection and homosexuality as diseased. Feinberg also uses ironic humor in both Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion and his narratives resist a progressive, forward momentum. AIDS humor has been most often used by novelists like Feinberg who themselves live with HIV disease, and as we will see in the next chapter, Paul Monette is another of these novelists.

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# Chapter 4: Borrowing Time in Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home

Generally I don't waste a minute, especially here in Trancas, figuring how short my time is. I've been at this thing for a year and a half, three if you count all the fevers and rashes. I operate on the casual assumption that I've still got a couple of years, give or take a galloping lymphoma. Day to day I'm not a dying man, honestly.-- Halfway Home

4.1 Introduction

This chapter considers the importance of Paul Monette as an AIDS novelist and argues that his two AIDS novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home, constitute some of the most powerful strategies yet developed for resisting the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. In order to contextualize my reading of his two novels, the chapter begins with a brief biographical overview of his life and an assessment of the critical reception to his work. The chapter then situates his project as an AIDS novelist in the larger context of other writers writing about AIDS. This is followed by a reading first of Afterlife and then of Halfway Home, in which I analyze the significant ways these two novels counter the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, by drawing specific comparisons and contrasts to Facing It, the paradigmatic apocalyptic AIDS narrative.

4.2 Biographical Context

In his second autobiography, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, which won a National Book Award, Paul Monette succinctly describes the silence of his early life as a closeted homosexual: "Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at all. I'd long since accepted the fact that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would. That's how the closet feels, once you've made your nest in it and learned to call it home..." (1). During these early years, he attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and Yale, and then spent several years teaching at a variety of prep schools in the New England area and writing poetry. It wasn't until he came out in his later twenties, when he became involved with Roger Horowitz in 1974, and then when they moved to Los Angeles, that he turned to writing novels that depicted gay characters and themes. The early novels, as David Roman writes, "begin where most coming-out stories end; his protagonists have already come to terms with their sexuality long before the novel's projected time frame" (273-4), and Roman notes that "refreshingly for gay fiction, a secure gay male identity is the norm in his novels" (274).

When AIDS struck Roger in the early 1980's, ultimately leading to his death in 1986, Monette began to focus on AIDS in his writing. His first autobiography, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, described the years that he and Roger battled with AIDS and his volume of poetry, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, expressed the chaotic wildness of his emotional reaction to losing his lover to AIDS. These works were written as part of a coping process for Monette. As Monette himself writes in the Preface to Love Alone: "Writing [these poems] quite literally kept me alive, for the only time I wasn't wailing and trembling was when I was hammering at these poems" (xii). Not just personal, Monette's AIDS writing also contains both a political and social message, which he expresses in the Preface, "...I would rather have this volume filed under AIDS than under Poetry, because if these words speak to anyone they are for those who are mad with loss, to let them know they are not alone" (xi).

Monette's autobiographical writing about AIDS and about his relationship to Roger are reminiscent of the kind of AIDS writing that Timothy Murphy has called "testimony." As Murphy describes it, "Testimony for the dead is not driven by a desire to overcome death, but to prevent it from eroding the meaningfulness of life. Testimony, not death, is the last word" (316). Monette testifies in Love Alone and Borrowed Time not only to Roger's passing, but more importantly, to the value of the life he and Roger shared together, to their love. He gained a great deal of publicity for these two works, and Borrowed Time was nominated for a National Book Award. Monette's changing stature as author and his growing prominence as a writer of AIDS has been colorfully described by John Clum:

"Tragedy brings pain and insight: Monette, the writer of novelizations and unsold Whoopi Goldberg scripts, becomes an anguished, eloquent Jeremiah, angry at the insensitivity of many doctors, in whose cold hands people with AIDS become dependent patients, angry at the disease itself, but possessed, articulate, and gifted with the ability to forge a harrowing beauty out of pain, grief, and fury. Monette becomes the Bard of AIDS." (210)

3.3 Critical Reception to Afterlife and Halfway Home

Unlike the reception to these autobiographical works, however, when Monette turns to writing novels about AIDS, there is no longer a universal agreement about the value of his work. As Roman has noted, there has been a mixed response to Monette's two AIDS novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home (279). Mainstream (nongay) reviewers praise his novels for their "universal" themes, but this universalized praise tends to discount and ultimately negate the specificities of the gay male experience Monette's novels describe.[64]

Reviewers for gay publications, on the other hand, are frustrated by his novels' lack of "realism," which many feel is the only appropriate way for portraying so serious a thing as AIDS.[65]

There also seems to be a regional bias in the reception to his two novels, with New York reviewers slighting Monette as "Hollywood slick." David Feinberg overtly expresses the New York attitude, when he writes in his review of Afterlife: "I admit I have a bias against an author who lists novelizations of Nosferatu, Predator and other screenplays beneath novels, poems and nonfiction. Maybe Afterlife was too Hollywood slick for me" (66).

The primary source of disagreement in the critical reception has been Monette's manipulation of various popular forms, including romance, melodrama and irony. Depending on the critic, Monette's integration of popular forms either appears masterful or overblown. Roman praises "Monette's gift for manipulating such popular forms" (279), whereas John Weir criticizes Afterlife for "plot complications which sometimes resolve themselves with movie-of-the-week facility" (3). David Kaufman denigrates Halfway Home for containing a "slick pop-fiction style and enough melodramatic twists to betray aspirations for movie-of-the-week sale" (24). Though critics disagree about the "literary" quality of Monette's AIDS novels, there is a general agreement about their necessity as testimony to the AIDS epidemic. Weir aptly expresses this in his closing comments about Afterlife, in which he says that Monette's two AIDS novels are "written in what Norman Mailer called 'bestseller style,' a book that holds your interest not because of the beauty of the language, but because of the urgency, and the immediacy, of the story" (3).

Though I agree with the general criticisms that there are aspects of Monette's AIDS novels that lack finesse - such as his occasionally simplistic rendering of secondary characters and abrupt plot twists, as well as his periodic use of hyperbolic language - I also feel that none of the critics have really considered his work in light of the growing body of literature, novels about AIDS. If we read Monette's novels and understand both their context and their contribution to this new field of literature, we find in their narrative configurations a provocative disruption of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative that predominates in so many of the novels about AIDS. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, his two AIDS novels offer some of the most unique and important resistances to date of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative.

3.4 The Novelist's Dilemma in Novelizing AIDS

Fictionalizing the experience of AIDS in the form of a novel has been a source of debate, especially among gay writers confronting the topic. On the one hand, to fictionalize an experience that decimated a generation of gay men and that continues to exact a heavy toll seems to trivialize their history. In his AIDS autobiography, Ground Zero, Andrew Holleran explains why he has not written a novel about AIDS: "Novels weren't needed...The truth was quite enough; there was no need to make it up. To attempt to imagine such scenes seemed an impertinence of the worst kind" (13). Indeed, he feels that, as a literary form, the novel cannot fully capture the experience of AIDS:

"The novel is occasionally the way we bring some sort of order to the disorder of life. But this disorder seemed way beyond the writer's powers. Literature could not heal or explain this catastrophe; the one thing about the plague that became clearer as it progressed was its senseless, accidental, capricious quality." (16)

Other authors who have actually considered writing novels about AIDS have been daunted by the rigid plot structure AIDS seems to impose. Adam Mars-Jones has described the difficulties he encountered when trying to write a novel about AIDS:

"In any novel about Aids there are likely to be rites of passage, hard to avoid but hard to reshape, retroviral equivalents of the Stations of the Cross: first knowledge of the epidemic, first friend sick, first death, first symptom...How do you tell a fresh story when the structure is set?" (1)

The attitudes of Holleran and Mars-Jones mark the two extremes of the debate about fictionalizing AIDS, which is reflected in Joseph Cady's helpful distinction between "immersive" and "counter-immersive" AIDS writing. On the one side is Holleran's attitude, that to fictionalize AIDS is to risk "impertinence of the worst kind," and thus he does not write fiction about AIDS. This resistance to writing about AIDS reflects Cady's concept of "counterimmersive AIDS writing."[66]

On the other side is Mars-Jones' attitude, that to fictionalize AIDS is to find oneself locked into an apocalyptic, doomed narrative structure. Cady prefers this "immersive AIDS writing," because it forces the reader to confront the deadly threat of AIDS. Central to all immersive AIDS writing, Cady writes, "are prolonged moments when the reader is thrust into a direct imaginative confrontation with the special horrors of AIDS and is required to deal with them with no relief or buffer provided by the writer" (244).[67]

Remarkably, Paul Monette's two AIDS novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home, are neither "impertinence" nor apocalyptic, neither counterimmersive nor simply immersive. Perhaps this explains their mixed reception. Though they cannot heal or explain the epidemic, Monette's AIDS novels do tell a fresh story about AIDS. Unlike many of the AIDS novels discussed in Chapter Two, whose narratives rush apocalyptically toward the tragedy of death from AIDS, Monette's two novels are unique in that they are firmly rooted in describing life; his novels refuse tragedy in favor of romance. In his insistent focus on the life and thus the agency of his characters, Monette participates in the activist art that Douglas Crimp calls for, when he writes, "We don't need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS" (7). Monette himself comments on the public duty a writer has, in an interview with Maria Maggenti: "'...a writer is not an excuse to close the door and have private fantasies and private realities: It's a resposibility to live with public realities'"(57).

His two AIDS novels act as cultural artifacts that describe, engage and question cultural practices regarding AIDS, and as such, they provide interpretive sites in which the reader can interrogate the meaning(s) of AIDS. Monette recognizes Paula Treichler's point, that AIDS is a social construction and, as such, its meaning is intimately linked to language. As she puts it,

"The name AIDS in part constructs the disease and helps make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look 'through' language to determine what AIDS 'really' is. Rather we must explore the site where such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language." (31)

Where Treichler stops with locating the meaning of AIDS in language, I would push further to look at how the language of AIDS combines to form a dominant cultural narrative that engages a particular "logic" (to borrow from Linda Singer), which works to insist on the apocalyptic threat AIDS poses.[68]

Indeed, it is at this point of narrative structuring that Monette's novels function the most radically to restructure and to retell the dominant cultural narrative of AIDS.

Even the titles to his two AIDS novels express this different way of interpreting and representing AIDS. Neither accedes to the apocalyptic threat of AIDS: though tempered by death, "afterlife" indicates the life that comes after, and "halfway home" implies a process, a journey, toward a resting place, toward "home." Monette makes it quite clear in his novels that he feels the only hope for a person living with HIV or AIDS is to live life in the present, which means having made peace with one's past and recognizing one's future for what it is (namely, limited - but not dead, yet). For Monette, it is only by living life in the present that a person can find love, which he feels is the only real reason to keep fighting AIDS and to continue to live. As he said in one of the last speeches he gave, a little over three months before his death from an AIDS-related illness, "...all that will matter in the end of your life is how much you've loved and how much you've given back" ("Choosing" 136).[69]

3.5.1 The Narrative Structure of Afterlife

In Afterlife, Monette explicitly addresses the issue of how to live with HIV. The novel traces the life stories of three diverse, HIV+ men over a period of several months, about a year following the deaths from AIDS of their lovers. In fact, white, middle class, travel agent Steven Shaw, body-building Adonis Sonny Cevathas and Mexican gardiner Dell Espinoza were originally thrust together when their lovers first were all hospitalized in adjacent rooms and then all died in the same week at Cedar-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. The novel opens with what appears to be the last of their Saturday night "widowers' gatherings," which they have been observing for the last year since their lovers' deaths. Following the opening chapter, the narrative then interweaves the three plot strands of Steven's developing relationship with Mark Inman, of Sonny's sexual escapades and his forays into New Age mysticism, and of Dell's politically channeled rage and his ultimate acts of assassination and suicide. Steven's house becomes the site at which the plot interweaving takes place, beginning in Chapter One with the widows' gathering and then culminating in Chapter Ten, with the Thanksgiving Dinner. Monette spends approximately equal portions of the novel developing these three different plot strands (though with a bit more attention to the character most like himself - Steven Shaw).[70]

3.5.2 Running For Your Life: Sonny Cevathas

Afterlife develops a rich and textured portrayal of the lives of people in urban Los Angeles. Rather than focus on characters who become increasingly isolated by their conditions (like Andy in Facing It) or on small groups of friends, either in elite, well-to-do urban settings or in rural settings, removed from the bustle of city existence, Monette describes the lives of his three main characters as they actively interface with the larger communities in which they exist.[71]

In the figure of Sonny, Monette provides a glimpse of one kind of gay experience, that of the West Hollywood fast-life: "Sonny Cevathas was one of the gods of Prime Time. His own waitering schedule was clustered on the weekend, so that all he needed to pick up during the week was a couple of lunches...The Body Works was Sonny's living room, his office and his yard" (61). Christopher Davis characterizes Sonny as "pure, selfish sensuality, always on the move" (21), and yet, Sonny is also a man in denial of his HIV status. Though his lover Ellsworth died of AIDS, he refuses to get tested for HIV: "He knew he had made the right choice not to be tested for the virus. The real test was the vast aliveness he felt at the end of Prime Time, gathering his workout clothes and stuffing them in his gym bag, feeling a throb in his groin from the smell of his own sweat" (64). Sonny resists mourning Ellsworth's death as a strategy for his own emotional survival.

Rather than mourn the tragic and horrible randomness with which AIDS has killed Ellsworth, Sonny turns to New Age mysticism as a way to separate the failings of the physical body from the spiritual. This strategy enables him to remember Ellsworth's goodness and yet blame him for his physical failings:

"This, he had come to see, was where Ellsworth had failed him, by keeping Sonny's body at the objectified level of pure desire. If only Ellsworth could have broken through metaphysically, he never would have gotten sick at all. In his own way Sonny had truly loved Ellsworth and tried not to judge him. He understood that different men had different karmas to enact. But the last of the grief he felt was indistinguishable from a sort of moral posture, that a man made a journey of his own devising." (64)

Sonny wants to believe that, unlike Ellsworth, he himself can live by the philosophy of mind over matter. His faith in this philosophy, however, is soon challenged.

AIDS impinges on Sonny's life, though through the course of the novel, we watch him continue to try and deny the threat AIDS poses. When his roommate Dirk has obviously come down with AIDS-related symptoms, including hairy oral leukoplakia and flu-like symptoms, Sonny runs away: "Sonny practically lurched from the room, hurrying out of the apartment as if he was late..." (100). Under no circumstances does Sonny want to be reminded of how AIDS has affected his life: "There was such a wall up between him and Ellsworth's illness that he didn't let the memories flood back in, refused to see again the white patches that foamed over Ellsworth's tongue, or hear the amulet phrase they had repeated over and over: 'Just the flu'" (100). Sonny refuses to let the memories flood back in - he will not face the past. He rushes his things from the AIDS-haunted apartment, loading up the Mercedes, the only thing besides an armload of cashmere sweaters that he has left of Ellsworth, and heads over to stay at Steven's.

During this time, he is on the look-out for a sugar-daddy, or at least someone to provide a place for him to live, which he momentarily finds in the figure of Sean Pfeiffer, an extremely wealthy, nouveau riche man, who has made his fortune in cable franchise. As Sonny thinks of him, "A total top and a total asshole" (185). Sean is initially seduced by Sonny's beauty, and they engage in long, crystal-stimulated episodes of sex, during which Sean appraises Sonny: "While Sonny soaped him down, he stroked the Greek with a meaty hand, lingering on the buttocks in a proprietary way...For if he'd learned nothing else from having an ocean of money, he knew that the rich could own the beautiful" (186). But Sean wants nothing of damaged goods, and soon after he has noticed the small, slightly raised, red spot on Sonny's biceps, he dumps Sonny, handing him $2,000 and telling him to get the spot checked out. Sonny denies that the spot is Kaposi's Sarcoma (KS), and he refuses to accept the implications of the present moment, a time in which AIDS has begun to leave its mark on his body.

Instead, Sonny turns to a channeler named Salou, whose New Age philosophy empowers him to continue his denial of the past and the present, in favor of a magical future. Salou not only tells him that he is not gay, but that he can also escape the "gay disease." Salou says, "'That will pass,' declared Salou. 'Once you leave the path. Your soul is too old to die young'" (234). Sonny desperately wants to believe Salou's words - that, through an alteration of his mind and a purification of his body, he can escape the tragedy of his past and the threat of his present bodily condition, and that the future holds the possibility of complete renewal. When he goes home that night, he throws away his material possessions, all those things that have until now marked his gay identity: "Tossed in a Hefty bag his porno tapes, his poppers, butt plug, leather straps. Even his jock-strap. All the evidence he could gather of his carnal ride across the world of the body. He regretted none of it, missed none of it, as he dumped it all in the trash can at the curb" (234). Sonny wants to reject his gay identity, as though doing so would alleviate his past suffering, vanquish the red spot on his biceps, and produce a new, clean life: "If he wasn't gay anymore, perhaps he could reinvent being a boy from the bottom up" (253). As Sonny gets into his Mercedes 380, preparing to disappear from the novel, Steven urges him to take the mangy, transient dog who has adopted Steven's house and Sonny, in particular, as his own. Reluctantly, Sonny grants Steven's request: "The last thing Sonny had ever permitted, the very last thing - except for Ellsworth - was someone in love with him, but that was the old life when he was still gay. What the hell, he thought, and reached over and flung open the passenger's door" (274). Though Sonny acquiesces to take the dog, his last thoughts of the novel still express the desire to deny his gay identity.

In the figure of Sonny, Monette portrays one kind of response to AIDS. This response is one of denial. It denies the impact of AIDS on the past and rejects the implications of AIDS on the present, in favor of focusing forward on a magical future in which AIDS won't exist. Sonny's denial of his gay identity is reminiscent of AIDS discourse that signifies AIDS as a "gay disease." If we read Sonny as engaging this homophobic logic, then he wants to believe that if he isn't gay, then he can't have AIDS. This denial of AIDS and implicit shame of one's homosexual identity is reminiscent of Cady's comments about authors who produce "counterimmersive writing" about AIDS, that this denial of AIDS "seems to be rooted in a lingering depression about homosexuality and in stereotyped understandings of it" (258). Though Monette does not condemn Sonny's behavior, his novel does convey the sense that Sonny's coping strategy of denial prevents him from doing more with his life than simply running from AIDS and from himself, his past and his present, toward some fantasy future. There are costs involved in Sonny's approach to dealing with his HIV status and with his life. As the novel illustrates, Sonny can never stay in any one place long, and therefore, he is unable to develop any real commitments, all of which take time. Sooner or later, the past and the present come together in his bodily condition, which threatens the strength of his denial, so he must continue running forward toward the future with the hope that AIDS won't catch him. He drives right out of the narrative of the text, so in one sense, Monette portrays him as evading AIDS. Monette does not close Sonny's life story but leaves it on the open highway.

3.5.3 Grief Can Kill: Dell Espinoza

In contrast to Sonny, who focuses on hopes for the future, Dell Espinoza is trapped in his past. Unable to successfully mourn the loss of his lover, Marcus, he cannot make a life for himself in the present or make plans for the future. The only thing that ties him to living are his feelings of filial responsibility to his sister, Linda. Dell and his sister form part of Monette's multicultural depiction of Los Angeles. Dell is a Mexican gardener, who originally met Marcus, the professor of Mayan anthropology, on the freeway: "Bumper-to-bumper traffic, southbound on the 405 - Marcus in lane 2, Dell in lane 3, flirting like truckers all the way to Laguna. How else did professors and gardeners meet?" (57). Dell, like the other widowers of Afterlife, lost Marcus to AIDS about a year prior to the novel's action, and in the year since, Dell has tried several strategies to cope with his grief.

Through Dell, Monette attests to one kind of sex born of the AIDS epidemic, telephone sex. Monette describes its appeal and the intricacies of 976 etiquette in the age of AIDS:

"Dell never said a word about himself, or anyway not the truth, especially that Marcus had died of AIDS. In a jerkoff scene it was very bad form to bring up one's lover, let alone the holocaust. Dell was content to be a kind of scoutmaster to his 976 crew. When he called around he changed like a chameleon - sometimes Italian, sometimes twenty-five, top with bottom urges, rapist, virgin - anything not to be one particular man, especially himself." (51).

Over the phone lines, fantasy becomes reality and the horror of the holocaust can be momentarily forgotten. And yet, the very anonymity of the encounters has a deadening effect on Dell: "His hundred men with their vital stats were too familiar, too predictable, as hard to quicken as a sleepy wife. Of course he could go back into the pile, pay his twenty cents a minute to the LOAD line and start a new page. But he already had one of every kind" (52). Telephone sex fails to satisfy Dell; his fantasy partners cannot replace Marcus, and he turns his rage at AIDS to acts of telephone terrorism.

His first act of telephone terrorism consists of calling a television station and claiming that he's dropped a gallon of AIDS-infected blood into one of the water-sources for Los Angeles, a water reservoir outside of Los Angeles proper. This act of terrorism elicits some public response, and Dell becomes a way for Monette to comment on aspects of the homophobia surrounding AIDS. Dell's primary target of rage is Mother Evangeline, a middle-aged, white, American woman, who preaches hatred of homosexuals to a multi-ethnic group of immigrants. On Halloween, he stalks her ministry in a ghoul outfit, witnessing the horrible hypocrisy of her message:

"His red eyes scanned the room and picked out the whitest woman, a honey blonde in her mid-forties, sleek in a beige wool suit. She was clearly more expensive than all the immigrant mothers...She began to speak, and at the first sound of her lush and lulling voice, the room fell into a reverent silence..."Ours is the kingdom, don't ever forget it. And thank God for AIDS. Sometimes He is a God of wrath before He is a God of love. And we are His army. Remember that next Tuesday. Yes on 81!" (137)

Her rhetoric mirrors the classic right wing point of view, which sees AIDS as a fitting curse for homosexual sin and which seeks to bring Church and State together through a mobilization of congregations to vote. Dell vandalizes her church office but then he must go into hiding. Steven's house provides a sanctuary for him.

With Dell, Monette portrays a man not only unable to recover from his personal grief, but also a man consumed by rage at the larger social context of AIDS, including cultural discourses on God:

"Between God and Marcus he could only believe in one at a time, and Marcus always won. God was back in Morelia, the queer priest in his gold cloak seething for the altar boys, Beatriz and her useless novenas. God didn't have enough rage...Not even revenge was enough of a reason to believe, for he couldn't pin the enemy down to any one man. Chaos was what mattered. Watching the world unstring itself, with just a snip of the thread here and there. Not that he wished to hurt anyone, except maybe God himself." (52-53)

Dell's rage is reminiscent of the rage that has fueled some members of gay communities decimated by AIDS, including Larry Kramer, Michael Callen and David Wojnarowicz. Like these historical figures, Dell will not submit, will not be an "AIDS victim": "Every single night before he went to sleep, he had to be finished with the world, in case he woke up too sick to go on. All he knew was this: before he went he would do what he had to, whatever it was, to let them know his people wouldn't go quietly anymore" (53). Dell's rage drives him to wish for more chaos, since revenge needs a target he can't clearly identify. AIDS is too complex, too multidimensional, too enormous for him to fully comprehend. Thomas Yingling has described the sublimity of the AIDS epidemic: "Inscribed since its appearance as profoundly unimaginable, as beyond the bounds of sense, the AIDS epidemic is almost literally unthinkable in its mathematical defeat of cognitive desire" (291-2).

Through the course of the novel, Dell manages to constrain his rage because of his love for his sister, Linda, though she is aware that he is suffering. Following Dell's vandalism of Mother Evangeline's office, Linda confides in Steven who has agreed to hide Dell:

"Only after Steven had agreed to give her brother sanctuary did Linda begin to pour out all her terror. How she had seen him withdraw deeper and deeper for months now, willfully almost - the opposite of putting the passion of his grief behind him, letting it fade to a dull ache the way it had with her. Dell Espinoza's passion only seemed to grow more violent and more secret. In the month that followed the anniversary, she thought he was going to kill himself, and could even feel that the one thing holding him back was Linda herself - the last protective urge he felt as head of the family." (165)

When Dell thinks that Linda has found a partner in Heather, one of the workers at Steven's travel agency, he feels released of this family bond. Heather has taken Linda under her wing and will teach her the ropes of being a secretary for Shaw Travel, so Linda will no longer have to be a cleaning woman. Dell begins to disconnect from reality. Chaos begins to run him: "Did he know what he wanted? Not quite yet. He was still making this up as he went along...He astonished himself every step of the way. It was all he had anymore to prove he was still alive, the surge of unlikeliness, the opposite of reason" (246).

When he rides the bus to Mother Evangeline's, the gun resting hidden in his lap, his rage no longer drives him forward, "Anger wasn't a part of it all anymore. Anger might have veered him from the path. This was passionless, indifferent, not quite real" (269). When he shoots Mother Evangeline, he acts without reason: "He shot directly into her face, no hate anymore, no reason...Dell seemed perplexed, not having figured the next part out. It was really almost an afterthought that he put the gun in his mouth" (272). By the end, reason, feeling, family, none of the things that contribute to a person's feeling connected to life, apply to Dell. The rage that had consumed and driven him through the year following Marcus' death dissipates into a chaotic state of nonfeeling and disconnected reality, such that no life-affirming narrative is left available to him. Quite literally, the murder/suicide excise him from the life of the novel. He's dead, no longer a part of the narrative. His sister and his other friends will live on, however, so in one respect, through the power of memory, Dell will not die.

Dell is an ambiguous and troubling figure. Is he "something of a lunatic," as Christopher Davis describes him? Or is he merely "the stereotypical gardener and the 'hot-blooded' activist,'" that David Feinberg claims? Or rather, does he symbolize what Roman notes as "the revolutionary impulse [that] many gay men, including men of color, feel is a necessary and legitimate reponse to AIDS"? Perhaps he is a bit of each. On the one hand, his attempts to affect the larger social complacency about AIDS seem more admirable than, for example, Sonny's desire to run away from AIDS and from what we will see to be Steven's somewhat bourgeois complacency. And yet, his attempts at terrorism do not affect the needed changes to alter the course of AIDS. Indeed, they almost seem to backfire, as Steven observes, when he sees the television coverage of Dell's murder/suicide:

"The coverage was already starting to accrue the nimbus of martyrdom...Steven could see just where it was going. Within hours the telegenic priests and rabbis would be coming out of the walls to denounce and decry. Mainstream guys, not just the Jesus fringe and the Aryan nuts. With one fell stroke, it seemed, Dell Espinoza had set things back a generation, all the making nice and the coalition-building." (276)

Though Steven finds fault with Dell's political tactics, his point of view here does not simply reflect Monette's, even though Steven is the character in the novel most similar to Monette. Monette's primary concern is not with the destructive consequences of Dell's political tactics but with the destructiveness of his emotional outlook. In the figure of Dell, Monette indicates that anger and the inability to let the past go through making peace with it does not offer life-affirming options for a person living with HIV.

3.5.4 Steven Shaw: Love-life/ Loving Life

In contrast to Sonny and Dell, Steven Shaw represents a man who has made some peace with his HIV status and the loss of his lover, Victor. Steven's grief "had dwindled at last to a quiet throb, like a broken bone that ached in the rain" (165). It is through Steven that Monette portrays what it means to live with HIV. For example, on Steven's first date with his future lover, Mark Inman, we can see how different Steven's attitude compares to Mark's hopeless feelings about AIDS. Mark wonders why he shouldn't just kill himself sooner as opposed to later; afterall, since AIDS means death, why wait for the horrors of AIDS to destroy his body? We then hear Steven's life-affirming response: "'Well,' Steven replied carefully. 'Sometimes people stick around for other reasons. So they can stay with people they love'" (67).

In the opening of the novel, Steven still grieves for Victor. The smell of the hotel soaps that Victor had collected from their world travels fills him with sad memories and he impulsively throws them away, yet catches himself, suddenly afraid "that he would throw away everything that murmured Victor's name and be left with nothing" (2). His grief also keeps him away from his work at the travel agency: "...he stayed out of the office. Shaw Travel mocked him now with all its promise of freedom, the paradise beaches and Gold Card souvenirs. For Steven travel was over. He'd become a walking bad advertisement, like a misspelled sandwich board" (9). Though the novel begins by describing Steven as a grieving "widow," the opening scene at the widows' gathering also shows him meeting a man who he has not seen in several years, and they discover a personal connection to each other - Mark had also been Victor's lover, but some 10 years previously. As the evening proceeds, they find some quiet time together, looking at several of Steven's photo albums that contain pictures of Victor. At this moment, Mark reveals to Steven that several days previously, he'd lost a lover to AIDS. In this moment of intimacy, they grow closer, but Mark is threatened by his emotions: "'I can't cry,' Mark announced with a certain psychic precision, as if they were playing chess by mail. At that he withdrew his hand from Steven's touch, restoring the equal distance, man to man. Nobody seemed to have anything safe or comfortable to say" (17). Their relationship will proceed in a similar fashion, not safe, not comfortable. Mark is having a great deal of trouble accepting his HIV status, and Steven has forgotten how to love, which he realizes after their initial interaction: "Steven realized he hadn't looked in anybody's eyes in over a year, not since the light began to go for Victor. Not even in his own eyes, not even in the mirror" (18). The first chapter ends with Steven alone again in his empty house: "His party had vanished like a parlor trick. There was no more mud [pies] in the freezer. He couldn't even imagine what he needed" (20).

As the novel progresses, Steven begins to learn what he needs, that is, to live again through a developing relationship with Mark. This part of the plot reads somewhat like a romance, but an awkward one. Monette does not euphemistically describe Steven's romantic rebirth, but explicitly chronicles Steven's sexual rebirth as well. Steven evolves sexually, from virtual abstinence on his first date with Mark, "As to equipment, Steven had scarcely glanced at his own in months" (68), to a renewed interest in masturbation:

"Now he jerked himself off at night, sometimes snapping a cockring on, sometimes a full trussing with the rawhide...now it was every night. He'd even stocked in a few stroke books. But the fantasies were very careful - never Mark, certainly never Victor. In fact, he found himself roaming way back, to Boston fifteen years ago or his randy first summer in Europe, dicks of the ancient world. The deep past was the one safe place where a man could still go." (152)

Monette draws attention here to the larger historical experience of AIDS for Steven's generation of gay men. As John Clum has noted, these men "came of age in the Stonewall generation" and can remember the "real glory days" of the 70's before AIDS, "the time before the war" (664). Monette's depiction of Steven's memories of sexual desire affirms gay history, as Clum writes, "Memory of desire - is a central characteristic of gay literature in the age of AIDS as gay men fight the inroads of the virus and the oppressive constructions that could rob them of the freedom and pride gained in the now-compromized past" ("And Once" 218-19). Unlike apocalyptic AIDS narratives, especially unlike Facing It with its portrayal of the disintegration of Andy and David's sexual relationship, Afterlife depicts Steven, an HIV+ man, rediscovering and enjoying his sexuality. Though for sexual fantasy he must go back in memory to "the time before the war," Steven still enjoys his sexuality at the present time.

Rather than focus on the death that HIV threatens, Steven wants to concentrate on the life his love-relationship with Mark has created. When Ray Lee dies of AIDS and they attend his funeral, Steven is impatient to leave: "Steven wasn't thinking of Ray or even Victor. He held himself back, abstracted, almost bored, yet hungry to be out of here and back in the soup of life. He glared at Mr. Corason with loathing, as if that manicured queen were Death's doorman himself" (259). Here Steven expresses Monette's strategy for coping with AIDS. Steven doesn't want to dwell on the past, represented by Victor, and he doesn't want to think of Ray, whose death from AIDS predicts his own. Instead, he is hungry to be "back in the soup of life," of living life in the present time with his new lover, Mark.

Mark's feelings about his HIV status undergo transformation both through his involvement with Steven and through a pivotal trip he makes to visit his father. When Mark goes to visit his father in Florida, he experiences several surprising revelations. His mom had died some ten years earlier, and a couple of years ago, his father, Rob, had had a heart attack. As a precaution, Rob quit working and joined a retirement community, where he met and fell in love with a woman named Roz. During his visit, Mark finally comes out to Rob, reveals his HIV status, and mentions his newly developing relationship with Steven. To Mark's amazement, Rob is completely unfazed by any of this, however, he admonishes Mark to not squander his developing relationship with Steven: "'The lucky ones are like Roz and me, we get another chance. We know it's not for long. Two years, three years - just like you say. But it's all there is, so you'll take even a little. Everything else is shit'" (178). At this moment, Mark's father articulates Monette's philosophy of life, which Mark is now beginning to understand.

By the end of the novel, Mark has quit his job as a Hollywood executive, and Steven and he are planning to travel using Steven's travel perks. The last moments of the novel describe Steven and Mark alone together in bed, falling. In this last passage of the novel, Steven's point of view clearly aligns with Monette's:

"Even going under he could taste the simple wish that overrided all the rest: to stay in the middle of this with Mark as long as he could. Perfectly selfish, except it was deeper than that - the last dance, the last pocket of air. Nothing else was happening right now in Steven's house, a luxury beyond calculation. The sleepers had all they needed. Only to lie like this between the bombs, dreaming away and not alone, because time was very short." (278, my emphasis)

Unlike the "it" that drove the narrative of Facing It, an "it" that reverberated with the threat of death, of closure, of AIDS, here Monette plays with the term "this": to "stay in the middle of this," to "lie like this." "This" indicates life, indicates the space in which actions take place, the space/time of life in the present, "to stay" and "to lie" in a time here right now. This time is not an apocalyptic one; it lies in a space "between the bombs," between the time of apocalypse. The urgency of these actions is driven by the lack of time, "time was very short," but Steven will stay in life because of Mark, "as long as he could." Christopher Davis has complained that in Afterlife Monette conflates an HIV diagnosis with death, and other critics have read this as a dark book of sadness about AIDS. I would argue that in this passage, Monette's position is not easily tragic and certainly not straightforwardly apocalyptic. The bombs have fallen and will drop again. Monette is not a Sonny who believes AIDS will magically disappear. Apocalypse will someday come. But the emphasis he insists upon is that Steven's wish "to stay in the middle of this with Mark," is "deeper than" the End, "the last dance, the last pocket of air." Death and the last moments will come - but right now, this is more important: "to lie like this, "dreaming away and not alone," because, as Monette admonishes us in his last words of the novel, time is very short.

3.6 Family Life and Community in Afterlife

In another contrast to Facing It, Afterlife does not depict a solitary AIDS patient as he spirals downward toward his death, surrounded only by helpless doctors, a lover and a narrowing circle of friends. Instead, Afterlife describes a richly textured web of interrelated relationships. The Thanksgiving dinner scene, a central moment in the narrative when the three plot strands come together again, conveys Monette's vision of one possible alternative to traditional, biological, nuclear families:

"Mark sat next to Angela on the sofa and was exquisitely charming, making it clear that his bitterness toward her husband didn't extend to her. That said, the two of them launched into an orgy of slurs against the person of Lou Ciotta [her husband]. Across the way Heather negotiated an intricate discussion between Linda and Ray about household customs in Mexico and Korea, like a Berlitz class gone slightly haywire.

Sitting on the floor and eating off the coffee table, Andy told Sonny and Dell the tale of his coming out, blow by blow. He didn't seem to care that both his listeners were utterly preoccupied and lost in thought. Sonny cast blushing glances at Angela, smitten like a teenager. All the red and soreness of his flesh had vanished. He was pure spirit. Beside him Dell still seemed to be watching the blank screen of the Sony, as if he could see in the dusk there the shape of his next reprisal." (222)

Brought together by the calamity of AIDS, this family is a motley assortment of genders, cultures and races. As Davis writes about this assortment of characters, "It's a [sic] quite a mix, but it works" (21). Afterlife also describes a seropositive rap/support group that Steven and Mark attend on Thursday nights. Like the extended family, this group reflects the diversity of people afflicted by AIDS in Los Angeles. Monette notes their diversity: "In fact they were all bizarrely different from each other, random as a planeload of refugees..." (72). Most of the group's members are gay men, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-fifties. There are also several women in the group, including Marina, who contracted HIV from a hemophiliac boyfriend, and Charlene, a black woman, who contracted HIV from an IV-drug-using male partner. About Charlene, Monette writes:

"Charlene was the thirdest world among them by a long shot, however disenfranchised the militant gay ones felt. They never knew what to say to her, an ex-hooker with two kids no father would claim, four generations of women accordioned into an apartment off Pico. Yet Charlene never truly complained, so accustomed was she to bad shit, and seemed content with the sheer diversion of Thursday's men." (152)

Though she is accustomed to "bad shit," Charlene still finds value in her life and she reiterates Monette's philosophy for living with AIDS, when she reminds the gay men in the rap/support group that time is passing: "'Seem like you boys wanna fall in love awful bad,' she drawled. 'You better get movin', huh? I got me my chirren, where's your man? Time goin'. Stop talkin' about it [love]'" (152).

Monette's depiction of secondary characters in Afterlife is a matter of some controversy. David Feinberg finds Monette's use of dialect to depict Charlene's speech ("chirren," for example) "jarring." Feinberg's criticism extends to most of Monette's secondary characters, and he writes of Afterlife that its "secondary characters are less well drawn" because of what he sees as Monette's tendency to stick characters into convenient, stereotyped slots (66). Other critics, however, find this to be an admirable economy of form. Christopher Davis, for example, praises Monette's ability to efficiently convey personalities and information, "just [by] capturing with a word or two, or a short phrase, what takes lesser writers great effort, if they are able to do it at all" (21). David Roman has voiced the concern that Monette's depiction of minorities lacks a certain sensitivity to the plight of people of color with AIDS (279). Indeed, there are only two characters who die in the novel, Dell and Ray Lee, one from suicide and one from AIDS. Monette's portrayal of Ray Lee, a Korean PLWA, has drawn criticism from Roman, who notes that "...the novel fails to address why Ray Lee, the only person who dies of AIDS, also happens to be a gay man of color" (279). Roman goes on to say that "while much could be said of the discriminatory lack of access to health care many people of color with AIDS must confront, Ray's death is never fully accounted for in Afterlife" (279). While I find these criticisms of the novel to be a bit narrowly politicized, I do think Monette's portrayal of Ray Lee is problematic with respect to race.

Part of the difficulties with how Ray Lee is represented is that the reader is not invited into his consciousness; we do not ever see from Ray's point of view. He thus seems more of an object at which other people look. Additionally, more often than not, Monette refers to him not as Ray Lee but as "the Korean," which calls attention to his racial difference. Ray's portrayal is also problematic because most of the time the reader sees Ray through Steven's eyes, and Steven's preference for straight-acting men colors his attitude towards Ray, especially since Ray is the epitome of a queen. Unfortunately, Ray's effeminacy links together with his Asian-American identity, such that the representation of him in the novel comes dangerously close to a racial stereotyping of the Asian-American male as effeminized and as exotically non-Western. In one revealing scene toward the end of the novel, just before Ray's death from AIDS, we can see how complex and problematic the connection is between Steven's and Monette's point of view. In this passage, Steven sees Ray lying naked in bed and beginning to suffer from AIDS dementia:

"He didn't seem to be in any pain. It was all rage. Startling because the Korean's demeanor had always been so placid. His rib cage was a pair of praying hands, every bone distinct. Steven couldn't help but see his dick, long and uncut, the foreskin tapering generously like an anteater's snout. Steven blushed at the violation of Ray's privacy, then flinched with self-flagellation to find himself wondering if uncut was the general rule for Asians. Surely not. They were so fastidious. Shut up, he screamed in his head." (238)

This passage indicates that Steven is aware of his own racial stereotypes of Asians and is ashamed of them. Perhaps part of the difficulty with the text in relation to Ray is that to call attention to one's race is not necessarily racist, unless one invokes stereotypes that belittle the person being described. In Afterlife, Monette simplistically portrays Ray, drawing from certain stereotypes about Asian men, but Ray is not ultimately denigrated. Indeed, Ray's presence in the novel is key, since he embodies the AIDS that the three widowers' and their HIV+ friends will inevitably have to face. One could just as easily argue, however, that for a character to function merely as a plot device and as a source of spectacle is also to deny the agency or fully human aspects of that character. I must conclude that Monette's depiction of Ray is troubling.

Like Ray, Margaret is another problematically portrayed character in Afterlife. Her position in the novel is unique as the only straight, white woman, and she acts repeatedly as a maternal figure. She helps Steven run his travel agency, and she continually nurtures him and assists the other gay men when they need help. When Steven mourns the loss of Victor, "she moved swiftly to cradle him in her arms, he who was so lost and far from home, unanchored and alone, who would never again want a ticket anywhere" (12). She sacrifices her own love-life to care for Ray, when her boyfriend, Richard, dumps her for associating with people with AIDS. As she tells Steven, "'You don't understand, he thought he was going to get AIDS from the turkey. Richard and I are deader than Ray'" (254). When Ray gets sick from AIDS, she becomes his caretaker because he has no family or close friends. Where does her selfless energy come from? Like Ray Lee, Margaret's motivations remain unvoiced, her character unplumbed, and her portrayal borders on a stereotype of woman as mother.

In the context of this discussion of social difference, then, one might be tempted to argue that Monette's strategy for living with AIDS privileges white, affluent, gay men. After all, only Mark and Steven obtain the peace of mind about their HIV status that comes from their love relationship and their power to learn to live life in the present. I find this argument simplistic, however, for several reasons. First, unlike many AIDS novels, which focus insularly on particular groups of gay, white men, like Facing It and Second Son, and which consequently privilege the experiences of these groups by leaving unvoiced the experiences of other people living with AIDS, Afterlife does convey the sense of how wide the spectrum is of people affected by AIDS. Second, is it any surprise that those who have the most means, both socially and economically, feel the most empowered to effect changes in their attitudes and lives? From this perspective, Monette's novel implicates the system of privilege with which the society of Los Angeles operates. And yet, not only can rich, white, gay men employ Monette's strategy for living with AIDS. As we have seen, Charlene, "the thirdest world among them," also understands the importance of living life in the present, because as she says, "'Time goin.'"

3.7 From HIV to AIDS: Afterlife to Halfway Home

As the AIDS epidemic has continued, people have begun to live longer, both with HIV and with AIDS. Where many of the first people diagnosed with AIDS died quite quickly, in 1995, the average span of life for a person from the time of HIV contraction to the time of an AIDS diagnosis is eight years, and this span continues to increase. Additionally, people now diagnosed with full-blown AIDS also live longer than before. Increased knowledge about how HIV affects the immune system has helped people know better how to change their behavior so as to optimize the strength of their immune systems. Additionally, a variety of different drug therapies have been developed to help slow the progression of HIV. A consequence of all of this has been a change in the terminology of AIDS. What used to be broken into different distinct phases (eg., asymptomatic HIV, ARC, full-blown AIDS) now falls under the inclusive phrase, HIV disease. Many recent novels reflect the occurrence of people living longer with HIV disease, including John Berger's To the Wedding, Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days From Now, Nisa Donnelly's The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay, and Dale Peck's Martin and John, to name just a few. Monette's novel Afterlife belongs to this group of novels and focuses on characters in the earlier stages of HIV disease.

Monette's second AIDS novel, Halfway Home, shifts from a focus on characters with HIV to center on the experiences of a character with full-blown AIDS. A similar shift takes place between David Feinberg's two AIDS novels, Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion. Both writers were living with HIV disease when they wrote these novels and we might speculate that their personal experiences of living with progressing HIV disease may have influenced the shift in focus of their later novels. The novels by other people who write about AIDS but who themselves do not live with HIV disease, such as Michael Bishop's Unicorn Mountain, Alice Hoffman's At Risk and Paul Reed's Facing It, do not question the cultural narrative that represents AIDS as a death sentence. Unlike these other novels, which tend to represent AIDS apocalyptically, in the case of Halfway Home, AIDS signals neither defeat nor death for Monette.

Halfway Home develops a greater sense of urgency than Afterlife, because unlike most of the characters of Afterlife who are merely HIV+, Tom in Halfway Home has full-blown AIDS and feels sick. He no longer lives in the bustle of the urban life in which the HIV+ characters of Afterlife thrive, but has removed himself to the seclusion and restful quiet of a beach bungalow in Malibu. Halfway Home also develops a greater sense of immediacy than Afterlife because it is told in the first-person from Tom's point of view. Finally, the narrative is in the present tense, which helps add to the sense of urgency of Tom's experience of living day to day with AIDS. The following passage evocatively conveys Tom's daily confrontation with his deteriorating health and communicates Monette's philosophy of life:

"Once a day, toward sunset, I walk down the blasted wooden stairs jerry-built into the fold of the cliff, eighty steps to the beach below. At the bottom I sit at the lip of the shallow cave that opens behind the steps, the winter tide churning before me, the foam almost reaching my toes...That's what I'm greedy for more of...[time] which I don't have now. I know it as clear as anything when I turn and climb the eighty steps up. I take it very slow, gripping the rotting banister as I puff my way. This is my daily encounter with what I've lost in stamina. The neuropathy in my left leg throbs with every step. I wheeze and gulp for air. But I also love the challenge, climbing the mountain because it's there, proving every day that the nightmare hasn't won yet.

The cliff cascades with ice plant, a blanket of gaudy crimson that nearly blinds in the setting sun. The gray terns wheel above me, cheering me on. I feel like I'm claiming a desert island, the first man ever to scale this height. As I reach the top, where a row of century cactus guards the bluff with a hundred swords, I can look back and see a quarter mile down [Malibu's] Trancas Beach, empty and all mine, the rotting sandstone cliffs clean as the end of the world." (23)

Rather than despair, Tom embraces his world with love: the terns, the century cactus, the sandstone cliffs of the beaches of Malibu, and he embraces the challenge of climbing the stairs - the mountain - that in a way symbolize the increasing challenge his life poses for him. He is greedy for more time and he will fight every day to prove "that the nightmare hasn't won yet." But he is not in denial; the nightmare may "yet" win, but it has not won yet. Halfway Home is unlike much other AIDS writing, as Janice Simpson writes of the novel, "...[Monette's] narrative is not driven by the experiences of those who are defeated by the disease but by those who defiantly make a life for themselves in spite of it" (72). Unlike Afterlife, whose narrative portrays several different attitudes toward HIV and AIDS and the struggle to come to terms with one's HIV status, in Halfway Home, Monette focuses on one character, Tom, who has more or less come to terms with his physical condition. If Afterlife is a novel about learning how to live with HIV, then Halfway Home reads like a novel about someone actually living with AIDS.

3.8 The Narrative Structure of Halfway Home

Halfway Home intensifies many of the themes developed in Afterlife, especially since the main character is dealing with full-blown AIDS rather than just being seropositive. Halfway Home interweaves two main stories. First, it tells the story of the reconciliation of Tom Shaheen with his older brother, Brian, after a lifetime of misunderstandings due to Brian's homophobia and Tom's poor self-esteem. It also tells a second story, which is really a love story, of the developing relationship between Tom and a man named Gray Baldwin. The two story strands come together at the Baldwin Malibu beach bungalow, where Tom has retreated to nurse his failing health.

3.9 The Temporality of Living with AIDS

Temporality is a central theme in Halfway Home. Every day Tom is confronted by his condition, which signals the passing of time and the deterioration of his body. Because AIDS heightens his awareness of time passing, however, time actually seems to slow down for him. Each moment gathers significance as the time of being alive:

"Some mornings you wake up whole. You open your eyes, and the ceiling is swirling with light reflected off the ocean. The bright air pours through the balcony doors like tonic. It's not that you forget for a moment that you're sick. But if you're not in pain, the sheer ballast of being alive simply astonishes...I straddle the stucco balustrade like a pony and drink it all in. The smell of sea pine and eucalyptus wafts around me. I don't want anything but this." (26)

For Tom, "this" represents all that constitutes his experience of being whole and alive in the present moment. Like Steven in Afterlife, who wants no more than to "like like this between the bombs," Tom wants to fully experience the life available to him in this time between bouts of AIDS-related illnesses. Not only does Tom's experience of AIDS affect his own perception of time, but his condition also influences the people around him to recognize the passing time of their lives: "I've found that since my illness I can cut right to the chase with my friends, demanding that they jettison the bullshit from their lives. I am like the toller of the bell: my very presence seizes them with how little time is left" (57).

Monette does not convey the sense that because time is so finite and so fleeting, a person should simply "seize the day" and be happy at each moment. His philosophy for living in time is a more provisional one. Like Mark's father, Rob, in Afterlife, another elderly person articulates Monette's philosophy of life in Halfway Home. When she congratulates Tom for his developing relationship with Gray, ninety-year-old Foo, Gray's great-aunt, stresses both the importance of one's love-life and, just as importantly, the understanding that one's life in time cannot always be happy:

"Let me tell you something, Tom. Lasting's the least of it. Lasting is all I've done for fifteen years." She puffed out her lips with contempt, making a sound like pish. She looked out at the water, whose shifting sapphire had been her's longer than anybody's. "Not that I don't have nice days, mind you," she added judiciously. And I realized it was just what I'd said to Daniel, the same provisional wisdom. Happy was for birthdays...Then she looked at me again, exquisitely calm in her lounging posture, ancient but not old. "So, if you can walk on air and be boys for a while...well, that's the secret, isn't it?" (207)

Where AIDS has heightened Tom's sense of time, old age has influenced Foo's. Like Tom, Foo recognizes that the time of her life is passing, but for her, time has stretched out over many years, as she says, "'Lasting is all I've done for fifteen years.'" In both cases, however, they share the "same provisional wisdom" \- that one's life has moments of happiness and that the secret is to be happy, to "walk on air," in those moments that last only "for a while."

3.10 Tom Shaheen's Life as Performance Artist

Before Tom retired to the restful quiet of the Malibu beach bungalow, he lived in West Los Angeles and led the life of a performance artist. Twice during the course of Halfway Home, he returns to the stage of AGORA, a radical performance theatre, as Miss Jesus. Tom describes AGORA as "... our fiesty open space in Venice that we reclaimed from a ball-point pen factory, famous throughout the netherworld of Performance, with its own FBI file to boot" (5). As Miss Jesus, Tom exaggerates the effeminate aspects of his personality in order to inflame his audience. As H. Stephen Kaye describes Tom, "The character is an in-your-face Los Angeles performance artist - probably inspired by celebrated Jesse Helms target and NEA reject Tim Miller - whose claim to fame is a portrayal of Jesus as a sadomasochistic drag queen" (313). The first performance of Miss Jesus takes place at the beginning of the novel, and Tom describes his effeminate, on-stage behavior: "As a sort of warm-up I strike a set of poses, limp-wristed and mincing, flouncing my golden hair, shivering with sissiness. All right, it's self-indulgent, but it gets across the persona with swift economy: this boy is a queen" (45). Unlike Afterlife with its masculine protagonist, Steven, and with its problematic portrayal of Ray as an effeminate, Asian-American, gay man, Halfway Home depicts Tom's effeminacy as a source of power, and he is often as much a queen off-stage as he is on. Monette portrays Tom as a queen whose effeminacy heightens his emotional sensitivity and depth.

The second time Tom performs Miss Jesus is in the closing portion of the novel, and this will most likely be his last performance of Miss Jesus, since his AIDS is progressing. This time, his performance reveals how much he has changed through the course of the novel:

"It's myself I can't shock anymore. The naughty boy has lost the thrill of flashing his dick in church. Though I feel no special overwhelm of regret, I'm glad it didn't happen any sooner, or else there might never have been a Miss Jesus at all. Besides, I didn't require a whole life of being happy. I like it this way, dancing behind the end credits." (259)

Like Andy in Facing It, whose political activism stemmed in part from the homophobia of his upbringing, Tom's life as an artist had been fueled by the emotional damage of his childhood. Now, however, Tom is no longer tormented by his childhood with its incestuous and abusive relationship with his older brother, Brian, and with its Catholic hypocrisy. Where Reed portrays Andy's AIDS-related illnesses infecting Andy's life and preventing him from his career as an activist, Monette depicts Tom voluntarily relinquishing his career as a performance artist in order to focus on other aspects of his life, and Halfway Home ends with Tom happy and in love. For Halfway Home, AIDS signals neither the end of the novel nor the end of Tom's life.

3.11 Tom's Love-Life, Living Life

Though Halfway Home differs from Afterlife in its depiction of a protagonist with full-blown AIDS, there are many similarities between the love plots of the two novels. The novels open with Steven and Tom feeling a lack in their lives, though Halfway Home's first-person, present tense form conveys more urgency. Like Afterlife, Halfway Home continues to communicate Monette's philosophy of life - that the only reason it is worth living is because of love. I concur with Sharon Warner when she says, "...love is a subject Monette knows more about than any other contemporary writer I can think of" (497). Monette doesn't depict gay relationships any differently from straight ones. Indeed, as Kaufman writes, "Probably more than any other writer, Monette has demonstrated just how conventional or mainstream gay relationships can be - even in the midst of the AIDS epidemic" (22). Tom's growing relationship with Gray illustrates Kaufman's point.

Tom first met Gray through his involvement with performance art. About Gray, Tom says, "He's spent most of his life giving away his share [of his inheritance], a sort of patron saint of the avant-garde" (8). The novel opens with their friendship beginning to shift from the uneasy intimacy of a gay friendship to the growing depth of a romantic involvement:

Through the winter Gray and I have grown tighter, like roommates except we live in different Baldwin houses. Yet there's always been a line we never cross, the no-man's-land where you walk on eggs. I usually chalk it up to my illness, or to Gray's unfailing reserve and discretion. Tonight there's no line. (41)

Though Gray is not overly demonstrative of his feelings, the novel communicates his quiet and understated affection for Tom as well as the positive, life-enhancing effect this has on Tom:

"Who knows what deep Presbyterian springs prohibit him from being stroked? "I'm just glad you're around," he says, ignoring the encomium. "Gives the place some life."

"Wait, I think you got it backwards. I'm a dying man." But I say so with perfect jauntiness, and we both laugh. I don't feel dying at all right now." (39)

When Tom finally begins to connect with Gray, like Steven and Mark in Afterlife, he feels a rebirth of what he thought were doomed feelings: "When we opened our mouths at last to drink each other in, it was astonishment rather than passion shivering in me. I never expected another chance. I'd shut this part of me down for good, like a summer house, the day they told me my antibody status" (146).

Though Tom develops a loving relationship with Gray, love does not stop his AIDS. During one of the climax chapters of the novel, Tom has a seizure and must spend the night in the hospital after having had a spinal tap. As Tom is wheeled into the hospital room, getting ready for the spinal tap, he realizes the trap that love has set for him:

"I used to swear I'd end it all before they'd ever check me in, my small final protest against the stealing of the real Tom...But I hadn't done it, had I? I'd walked in here on my own power, freely giving up my name and self. And all because I'd been ambushed by love, and would do anything now to squeak through." (186)

The next day, when he returns home with Gray, sex becomes a way for him to reaffirm life: "I needed the bond to be physical, to gorge on him, if that pinprick above my coccyx was ever going to stop feeling like the first kiss of dying. I growled and sucked, holding his ballsack tight in my fist" (202).

Monette's two AIDS novels do not merely allude to the love among men living with HIV disease but graphically depict what that love entails, namely, sex. In Afterlife, Dell feasts on 976 numbers, Sonny snorts crystal and picks up guys, and Steven falls in love and rediscovers his sexuality; in Halfway Home, Monette shows Tom having sex with Gray. His two AIDS novels are quite unique in their celebration and representation of the sexuality of people living with HIV and with AIDS. Unlike Facing It and so many of the AIDS novels that are conflicted about gay sexuality because of its association with death, Halfway Home presents gay sex as life-confirming. As Tom thinks while deep-throating Gray, "One thing I knew with every swallow: nobody sucked like this in the grave" (203). Monette challenges us not only to imagine Tom, who has full-blown AIDS, making love with Gray but he also challenges us to imagine that love as a celebration of life, love and sexuality.

3.12 Family Life in Halfway Home

Besides the love story, the second interwoven plot of the novel consists of Tom's reconciliation with his estranged brother, Brian, and Tom's chance to develop a relationship with his nephew, Daniel. When Brian, his wife, Susan, and their son, Daniel, suddenly show up at the Malibu beach bungalow, the juxtaposition of this traditional family unit (of genetic ties) with the alternative family structure at the beach house (bonded by love, respect and friendship) becomes a way for Monette to compare and contrast straight families with alternative ones. As Kaufman writes, "...we're offered a sharp contrast [in Halfway Home] between the all-American nuclear family and the more extended kind that, for many, has replaced it" (24). Like Afterlife's depiction of the "family" composed of Steven and his circle of friends, Halfway Home portrays a similarly non-traditional family structure, with Tom sharing his life at the beach bungalow with Gray, Gray's great-aunt Foo, and Tom's lesbian friend, Mona. The alternative families that Monette portrays in his two AIDS novels, like those in other recent novels such as Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, are what Kaufman has aptly described as "part of a literary movement that testifies that nothing less than a new definition of the American family is in order, one that is more dynamic and capacious, more cognizant of the extended possibilities that have already permeated society" (21).

The alternative family in Halfway Home results in part from homophobia and AIDS. Tom's biological family rejected him twenty years earlier because of his homosexuality, and more recently, AIDS has killed most of his close friends. About Mona and Gray, Tom says, "The two of them have come to be my most immediate family, somewhat by elimination, my friends all having died, but I couldn't have chosen better" (10). Unlike the easy complacency that often springs from genetic ties, the creation and maintenance of their family requires effort and action. Tom acts as a kind of matchmaker to help Mona and Gray to become friends and members of a family chosen rather than given. Tom consciously considers how their attributes will contribute to the family he is constructing: "They'll be good for each other, so opposite in every way" (10). Besides his developing intimacy with Gray, Tom feels a deep closeness and comfortable intimacy with Mona, his partner in AGORA. Early in the novel, he describes their easy intimacy: "We sit there slumped against each other, watching the fire, not needing to talk. I love the smoky elusiveness of Mona's perfume, a scent she swears is the very same Dietrich wears, a beauty tip passed in whispers through the shadowy dyke underground" (6-7). When Tom discovers that Gray's great-aunt Foo is still alive and that she is a warm and interesting person, he gladly welcomes her into his family. Foo feels more like a grandparent to Tom than did his biological grandparent: "The only grandparent I ever had was my dad's dad, by then a shell in a wheelchair, spewing hate and ethnic slurs at everything that moved. Foo was like getting a second chance - finally, one's own kind" (71).

The arrival of Brian and his traditional family at the Malibu beach home offers Tom the opportunity to learn how different the two families are. In contrast to his carefully evolving relationship with Gray, Brian and Susan seem to squander and sabotage their marriage with abusive behavior:

"The relationship we were struggling to begin didn't seem half so crazy now, compared to the competition. And I saw clearer than ever how the abuse had come down like a wayward gene from my father to Brian. It wasn't just an adolescent's meanness, mauling his baby brother. He had this well of violence in him, and so did his wife, and they danced a constant tango of taunt and explosion. Coldly I wondered which of them hit the kid." (122)

If the love plot is a process of expansion and growth, this plot is a process of uncovering. The layers of past secrets and repressed memories and feelings are progressively stripped away to leave Tom seeing for the first time with crystal clarity the intimate bonds that connect him with his brother and his brother's family. Through the course of the novel, Tom confronts the homophobic bigotry of Susan, Brian's violence toward Susan and their son, Daniel, and his own repressed memories of his father's violence toward himself and of Brian's incestuous behavior with him. Ultimately, after Susan has abandoned the beach bungalow, taking Daniel with her, Brian is left needy, his family gone except for Tom. Tom recognizes the significance of this instant, as his older brother turns to him:

"I hadn't forgotten his own Jekyll-and-Hyde. All of that still waited to be wrestled and cursed and exorcised. But here was my brother turning to me. In the quick of our fumbling clasp, something wrong that went to the core of the planet - a fissure that leaked molten rock and brimstone - knitted at last and healed." (160-1)

Though the novel ends with Brian separated from his wife and child, his relationship to Tom, which had been suspended in an icy silence for twenty years, has finally been warmed and returned to life.

Unlike the romance plot, this plot of Halfway Home has been accused by some reviewers as being "too Hollywood" - too staged. The course of this plot line does sound contrived: the initial appearance of Brian at the beach home, hinting of his questionable business partnership with his old high school buddy, Jerry Curran; the subsequent fire-bombing of his home and the discovery of three charred bodies; the sudden appearance of Brian and his family at the beach home with the explanation that the three people dead were actually their live-in house-help, a Vietnamese family; much later, Brian's decision to work with the FBI to expose Jerry in exchange for clemency; Jerry's sudden gun-wielding appearance at the beach home; Tom's coming to his brother's rescue; Jerry's panicking because of Tom's AIDS, and Jerry ending up fatally shot. An enumeration of these events makes the novel sound like a newsstand thriller, however, it does not convey a complete sense of the novel. Though Monette uses these events to provide a frame for the family plot, within the course of the narrative, Monette pursues much more than a simple, plot-driven story.

Besides telling a story of Tom's reconciliation with his long-lost brother, the family plot in Halfway Home enables Monette to work with a theme missing from Afterlife, namely the most important aspect of traditional, biological family structures. It is through having children that people have traditionally sought to help offset the mortal trajectory of their life in time. In Halfway Home, Tom comes to realize how significant a figure Daniel, his seven-year-old nephew, is to him. Not only is Daniel important to Tom in terms of inherited traits, since Tom sees so many similarities in their personalities, but also in terms of Daniel's position in a different generation of their family history. Toward the end of the novel, Tom embraces this idea when he thinks of Daniel:

"Now all I wanted was a little time, one last walk with him on the beach at sunset, so as to sink the memory of me deeper. Fifty years from now, when Gray was gone and Brian - all of us - Daniel would be the only thing left of me. Believing nothing else, I found myself longing for that small immortality." (191)

Though Tom's alternative family will continue to remember him after he dies, they do not span generations of time into the future as represented by this child.

3.13 The Humor of Halfway Home

Besides Monette's use of plot, another important aspect of Halfway Home as well as of his other AIDS writing is his use of humor. At the beginning of the novel, Tom refers to his AIDS in a casual, tongue-in-cheek manner: "I've been at this thing for a year and a half, three if you count all the fevers and rashes. I operate on the casual assumption that I've still got a couple of years, give or take a galloping lymphoma. Day to day I'm not a dying man, honestly" (4). Tom's manner of speaking about AIDS does not work if the reader does not pick up on it as a form of black humor. As David Feinberg has noted in his provocative essay, "AIDS and Humor," "Failed humor trivializes tragedy and offends the reader..." (88). The way in which Monette interweaves the topic of AIDS with a kind of black humor (or perhaps a kind of gallow's humor) has been one of the criticisms his novel has received, especially when conjoined with his use of romance plots - the implication being that because he strays from realism, he has not treated AIDS seriously enough (Roman 279). Especially in Halfway Home, however, it is this sense of dark humor that helps make Tom's experience of AIDS more bearable.

In the important point in the novel when Tom must be hospitalized because of his AIDS, he and Gray encounter another PLWA, his old acquaintance, Ed Bernardo. Tom's initial reaction to seeing Ed so sick with AIDS is one of horror: "he looked just like everyone else before the end" (185). Unlike Reed's portrayal of Andy focusing on the horror of Patrick's AIDS in Facing It, and very much unlike his portrayal of the three widowers glumly observing the spectre of Ray Lee's AIDS during the Thanksgiving dinner in Afterlife, Monette here does not portray his characters with AIDS dwelling on their AIDS as presaging apocalyptic doom. Indeed, they begin to laugh at their circumstances:

"But Ed somehow segued from coughing to laughing, practically holding his sides with mirth, or trying to keep his tubes in. "Tom," he gasped, "I heard you were dead!"

Oh it was priceless, how black the humor could get. I gave out a chortle in response, and then the three of us were whinnying merrily at the absurdity of keeping track of who was still alive. When in doubt - no Christmas cards two years running - assume the worst. And as for the gray areas, the half-dead, look at Ed Bernardo, for Chrissakes. Was I really so sick I could laugh at that? The fifty pounds he'd shed, the straggle of thirteen hairs on his head, where he used to sport a ponytail. His mottled face, at once gray as a dead fish and weirdly ruddy, as if he'd stood downwind of a hydrogen bomb. Yet we laughed like kids in a graveyard." (185).

By laughing in the face of apocalypse, Tom and Ed cope with their AIDS. As Feinberg says, "In an absurd world, humor may be the only appropriate response" (87). Humor becomes a way to make AIDS feel more manageable, as Feinberg notes, "Once you joke about something, you appropriate it, you attain a certain amount of control over it" (87). In Halfway Home, humor provides an important coping strategy for Tom so that he can live with his AIDS.

The climax of the family plot culminates in a stand-off, rife with humorous melodrama, between the armed and dangerous, Jerry Curran, and the bare-chested, Kaposi Sarcoma-covered Tom. Indeed, I find this scene both reflects and merits David Roman's praise of the novel, that "the elements of fantasy and melodrama are ironic and add to the reader's overall experience of the novel" (279). Tom walks into the living room of the beach house to find his brother, Brian, cornered by Tom's childhood bully and the rampant homophobe, Jerry. At first, Jerry does not notice Tom's body, and as he turns the gun on Tom, he proceeds to hurl homophobic taunts at him. Then, he suddenly perceives Tom's body:

"The gun still pointed, ready to blow my brains out, but now his nervous eyes were everywhere. The lesion on my shoulder, the one by my left nipple, the double one on my thigh... "Don't worry, I won't sneeze on you," I declare, but not even trying to conceal the exhiliration of having shocked him. "Though if you're planning to use that" - I nodded toward the gun, a foot away and trembling slightly - I can't swear I won't bleed. I don't suppose you brought a rubber suit." (229)

When Jerry is then distracted by the appearance of Gray entering the living room, Tom jumps at the chance and bites Jerry's hand. Monette then sardonically notes Jerry's reaction: "His shout was a horror of being infected, rather than rage, so he panicked and flailed when he should have gone for the kill" (231). At this instant, Jerry is then fatally shot. In this scene, the melodrama of a Hollywood-style showdown between the bad guys and the good guys comes together with AIDSphobia and with the black humor of a person living with AIDS to resolve this plot line.

3.13 Resisting the End

By the end of the novel, Tom has reconciled with his brother, gained a nephew and has begun his relationship with Gray. Even though it is clear that his AIDS is progressing and that his time is finite, indeed, that he may only have a summer left, Tom continues to resist the apocalypse AIDS threatens. The narrative itself reflects his philosophy of life. The novel does not end in closure or even at a stable resting place, but in the "middest" (to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase), ending on the brink of summer. The last passage of the novel wonderfully conveys Monette's attitude toward love, life and time. As Gray drives the old pick-up truck back out to Malibu with Tom's head resting on his lap, Gray says to Tom, "'You ready for a little summer?' he asks. I laugh, rocking in his lap as he hangs a sharp left and makes for the beach. 'Oh yes indeed,' I tell him. Home is the place you get to, not the place you came from. 'Haven't I told you? Summer's my middle name'" (262). This concluding passage explicitly articulates one of the main themes of the novel, namely that "home is the place you get to, not the place you came from." And implicitly, this last passage enacts Monette's philosophy of life, that what matters in life isn't one's end but the process of one's living. Steadfastly refusing closure or even a resting place, the novel ends in the "middest" - on the cusp of summer, in the middle of a conversation, and in a car that is driving home.

3.14 In Retrospect

Having now considered both Afterlife and Halfway Home, we might be tempted to ask which is the better novel. There is some disagreement among the critics about how to evaluate the two novels and much of the disagreement seems to be a matter of personal taste. Jesse Monteagudo has said, "Afterlife is the greatest novel ever written about AIDS" (6), and yet other critics have preferred Halfway Home. For example, David Kaufman writes:

"A tendency in Afterlife to veer in too many directions at once is surmounted in Halfway Home. As realized in the final pages, Tom's touching reconciliation with Brian is like a magnet that draws all other elements of the narrative into a culminating perspective on families, from the ones that chose us to the ones we choose." (24)

The basis for many of the complaints against Halfway Home is the issue of how to evaluate Monette's use of plot. H. Stephen Kaye writes, "The plot continues as an odd mixture of Hollywood police drama and gay male fantasies fulfilled...overblown [and] sometimes implausible" (313). Marv Shaw finds the plot's lack of realism problematic: "... the departures from probability weaken the book" (30). Janice Simpson complains that Monette "indulges in a fondness for melodrama that results in a climactic shoot-out and several teary reconciliations" (72). Kaufman, on the other hand, is more sympathetic to Monette's use of plot: "While there is still too much reliance on plot...such a drawback is compensated for not only by hip expression but also by an economy of theme" (24). In his review of Monette's critics, David Roman says that the critics just do not understand Monette: "Most critics, regardless of their venue or sexual orientation, generally fail to comment on Monette's gift for manipulating such popular forms as romance, melodrama, and irony" (279). I would have to agree with Roman's assessment. Monette capably interweaves these different popular forms to write novels about AIDS that manage ultimately to achieve a difficult balance, neither becoming too sentimental nor too tragic. Halfway Home proves a more successful novel to me when compared with Afterlife, several of whose characters I have found problematic. The risk with Halfway Home, however, is that its depiction of the AIDS epidemic is not as inclusive as Afterlife's, since its cast of characters and range of locations is much smaller, which by omission may privilege the experiences of white, gay men with AIDS.

The demographics of the AIDS epidemic have been steadily changing as white, gay men with AIDS have died and as AIDS has moved into minority populations, especially those of Black Americans and the urban poor. Strangely enough, novels that describe the experiences of gay men with AIDS have now been accepted by mainstream publishing houses. As Kaufman sardonically notes, "It is a matter of supreme irony that gay men should be coming to life in such numbers on the page, assimilated into mainstream publishing, just as we are dying in such numbers on the street" (25). Paul Monette is no exception. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story earned wide mainstream praise and received a national book award. This book completes Monette's life story, which he had first begun in Borrowed Time, and it recalls his childhood and early adult years before meeting Roger Horowiz. The last volume Monette published before his death was a collection of autobiographical essays, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise, which describes aspects of his most recent experiences of living with AIDS.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Monette moved away from fiction in his final years, as AIDS began increasingly to take its toll on his body. His last works seem a fitting completion to his life as a writer. In the last interview he gave before his death, Monette explains the importance of Becoming a Man to his mission as a gay writer: "If my life has been useful enough to help people understand that they're not alone, then I know those people will go off and help others. That's how we will change the world" (59). About his AIDS writing, Monette said, "It would give me great satisfaction to die knowing that mine was a kind of first voice telling the story of what AIDS did to us..." (62). When AIDS finally prevented him from serving his duty as a writer, he gave up. In the preface to his interview with Monettee, Bohdan Zachary noted how closely writing and life were aligned for Monette: "Unwilling to go on if he could no longer write, Monette stopped his medication and prepared to die" (60). Though February 10, 1995, marked the silencing of one of the most vibrant voices to have spoken out about AIDS, the writing Monette has left behind continues to speak and to live.

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# Chapter 5: Silent Apocalypse: Race, Class, Gender, Heterosexual AIDS

No. She could never tell C'Anne this. Most of the people she knew didn't talk about AIDS at all. Like if they didn't say the word, the disease wouldn't become real. If they talked about it, they spoke as if it were something none of them could ever get.

How could she tell them she had it? -- Touch

5.1 Introduction

This chapter addresses the many silences invoked by the stereotype of AIDS as a "gay disease" and begins by providing important statistics regarding the epidemiology of the AIDS epidemic in the United States during the 1980's and 1990's. The chapter then proceeds by examining several of the key social, cultural and economic issues involved in discussing AIDS in populations other than urban, middle-class white gay men that have contributed to the lack of novels that represent their experiences. As we have entered the second decade of the epidemic, the silences are beginning to be broken and the chapter explores several of the new voices that have sought to break silence. Their novels indicate how these authors stand in a different relation to the dominant apocalyptic AIDS narrative than the other authors we have thus far considered in the dissertation. The chapter also addresses young adult AIDS novels. I conclude the chapter and the dissertation with a consideration of both the possibilities and the limitations of the AIDS novels as forms of cultural critique.

5.2 Startling Statistics

Though AIDS was primarily thought to be a disease of middle to upper-middle class, urban white gay men during the first decade of the epidemic in the United States, the epidemic affected other sectors of the population as well. Indeed, the transmission of HIV is not due to one's race, sexual preference or to where one lives but is related to particular actions and behaviors.[72]

Unfortunately, the assumption that AIDS was a "gay white man's disease" tended to predominate during the 80's, as noted by a senior policy analyst of the National Minority AIDS Council, "...there has always been a higher incidence of HIV infection in communities of color than early statistics indicated, because people used to assume that AIDS was a gay white man's disease only and did not look for it elsewhere" (Greeley 11). Though there was a great deal of publicity in the 80's about white gay men with AIDS and white, middle-class "innocent AIDS victims" like Ryan White and Elizabeth Glaser, there was virtual silence about the many other people affected by AIDS: injecting drug users, heterosexual women, men of color having sex with other men.

This silence has not reflected the demographics of the epidemic in the United States, especially as we have entered the second decade of the epidemic. Indeed, the statistical increases in these "silent" populations have been staggering. For example, by 1991, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) noted, "...the HIV/AIDS death rate for all black females was approximately ten times the rate for white females" ("AIDS" 648). When the CDC expanded its HIV/AIDS classification in 1993 to include tuberculosis and invasive cervical cancer, the number of AIDS cases rose dramatically: "...the number of AIDS cases reported among racial/ethnic minorities in 1993 increased 135% over that in 1992, while the number among whites increased 114%" ("AIDS" 646). The CDC'S HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report of December 1994 notes, "Among reported cases, 1994 was the first year when blacks and Hispanics together accounted for the majority (53%) of all cases reported among men" (Greeley 11). Additionally, by 1995, "Blacks, 12% of the population, account for one-third of all AIDS cases. Three out of five new AIDS victims now are black, up from one in five in 1986" (Rosin 21). Racial misclassifications may also contribute to inaccurate reporting of AIDS cases in populations of color, as noted by the MMWR: "AIDS surveillance may underestimate the number of AIDS cases reported among certain minority populations because of misclassifications of race/ethnicity on medical records, which are the source for AIDS case reports" ("AIDS" 646).

Though these numbers indicate that the epidemic spread massively during the 80's within populations of color and that it is still spreading today, there continue to be important silences about AIDS. Indeed, there are silences within silences. For example, when Magic Johnson disclosed his HIV+ status in November 1991, he broke silence about people of color living with HIV disease, and yet, as David Roman has remarked, "Johnson, single-handedly with his announcement, returned AIDS to the international spotlight, so much so that even George Bush was forced to admit that he needed to improve his AIDS record...And yet the media frenzy surrounding Johson's disclosure barely touched upon AIDS and gay and bisexual men of color" (Roman 204). Today in 1996, silences continue. As more and more people are being infected with HIV each year, indeed as AIDS becomes even more of an apocalyptic threat, ironically, AIDS is now considered, like poverty and crime, to be a "chronic" problem. Perhaps not so ironically, these problems disproportionately impact specific sectors of the population, particularly people of color.

5.3 The Silences of "Gay" Identity

The gay rights movement of the 1970's led to the development of coherent, organized and thriving gay communities in many urban centers, particularly in San Francisco and New York City. As with the feminist movement of the 70's, an integral part of the gay rights movement involved interrogating and revising existing cultural definitions of identity. "Homosexuality," which had traditionally been conceptualized as a pathological sexual disorder, was dismissed in favor of the term "gay," the meaning of which was revised by participants in the movement and it came to include more than just a new and positive sense of a homosexual male's sexual identity. "Gay" also began to refer to the many different aspects of the growing communities of men who congregated in particular locations and participated in cultural institutions of various urban centers. Businesses, social organizations and cultural institutions arose to serve the needs of "gay communities," and when members of these gay communities began to die of AIDS, members mobilized, forming, for example, the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City. Another, more troubling parallel between the gay rights movement and the feminist movement, however, was that, like the term "feminist," "gay" came to signify a middle-class, white identity. Silences developed with respect to the issues and experiences of people who did not fit these particular identities.

Many post-colonial, feminist and race theorists have illustrated how sexuality, race and socio-economic status are closely linked. For black communities existing within a white-oriented nation, these linkages have led to particular effects. Within poorer populations, low socio-economic status has led to a greater emphasis on sexuality. "The capitalist nature of American society," writes Benjamin Bowser, "has reduced Black male and female relations into commodities where men and women treat themselves as sexual objects" (121-2). White racist stereotypes about black sexuality have led middle-class blacks to de-emphasize sex. Phillip Harper remarks that "Indeed, some middle-class blacks have colluded in this defusing of black sexuality, attempting to explode whites' stereotypes of blacks as oversexed by stifling discussion of black sexuality in general" (124). Some black leaders like Louis Farrakhan have openly condemned homosexuality (Stewart 16). Many black writers have viewed homosexuality as a white man's disease. According to Charles Nero, black writers like Alvin Poussaint, Imamu Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver have all viewed homosexuality as a white man's disease (231). Nero argues that even Toni Morrison "has written into her novels these ideas of homosexuality as alien to African cultures, as forced upon black men by racist European civilizations and as inability to acquire and sustain manhood" (232). Christianity is a major force behind black homophobia, writes Laura Randolph: "The greater religious conservatism in the Black community encourages a level of homophobia that leads Black gay and bisexual men to be more secretive about their sexual orientation and to define themselves as heterosexual in spite of same sex sexual activities" (123). Other writers like Hanna Rosin point out that black communities will tolerate homosexuals as long as they remain closeted: "The black community has always accepted homosexuality...It's only when that person defines himself as gay, you know, adopts a gay white culture, like doing the rainbow flag thing, that the community reacts negatively" (Rosin 22). Indeed, Magic Johnson, the first black celebrity to reveal his HIV+ status, was quick to differentiate himself from homosexuals. David Roman has observed that the reception to Johnson's remarks indicated pervasive fear of black male homosexuality: "Johnson's own assurance on the Arsenio Hall Show that same week [as his disclosure] that he was 'far from being a homosexual' was met with cheers of heterosexist, if not homophobic complicity" (204).

One consequence of this unwillingness to legitimate homosexuality has been the existence of black men who practice bisexual behavior in order to fit in with their communities. Randolph has commented that "...mainstream Black America must shoulder at least partial responsibility for the code of secrecy many Black bisexual men say they are compelled to live by" (123). There has been little research on the specific sexual practices of people of color. Lynda Doll et al explain that "Because the sexual behavior of minorities who engage in bisexual activities has rarely been studied, the frequency of these behaviors among black Americans [as well as other nonwhites] is largely derived from surveillance reports of nonwhite AIDS cases" (33). In the public eye, these bisexual men may appear heterosexual and hold up the tradition of family and yet they may also engage in sexual encounters with other men. Unlike white gay men who have developed large, open support networks and communities for themselves, these bisexual black men may feel torn in allegiances. Are they gay, which means they must renounce their black identity? Or are they black, which means they must hide any sexual feelings for other men? Neither the gay community nor existing black communities can speak to their experiences and needs. "Because the gay community in the United States is viewed by some blacks as being dominated by white men," write Doll et al, "in some communities there may also be an inherent tension between the development of ties to both the black and gay communities, respectively" (34). Indeed, as Stewart has remarked, white gay culture is largely segregated: "In most American cities the gay community is largely white and segregated, with most black gays participating in its institutions only occasionally if at all. This is particularly true of working-class blacks and those who live in predominantly black neighborhoods" (15). Both the anonymous sexual encounters which often become the norm for black men who have sex with other men as well as their fears of disclosing their bisexual behavior to their female partners puts both parties at increased risk for HIV transmission (Doll 31).[73]

Another serious consequence for closeted black men is that they may not identify themselves as at risk for HIV infection. Like so many of the "general population" who think of AIDS as only a "gay disease," they may think they too are not at risk for AIDS and may thus not practice safer sex. Additionally, AIDS education has not been directed toward these populations. For black men living with AIDS, the resources available to white gay men may not be as easily obtained. If closeted, these men may prefer to die in silence rather than risk the shame the exposure of their AIDS might cause their families. "When HIV strikes and is associated with homosexuality," writes Alexandra Greeley, "people deny its presence. This is true in some African American communities...where families often hide and treat infected relatives as long as possible so outsiders cannot suspect the presence of homosexuality" (13). Another aspect that may interfere with black men seeking treatment for AIDS is their suspicion of the conventional medical establishment, a suspicion which has grown since the Tuskegee experiment. As Rosin notes, "Long considered this country's worst large-scale violation of medical ethics, Tuskegee has become the parable by which many blacks understand their relationhip to public health services" (24). The serious consequences of these issues have been both the continued spread of HIV through the black population and the shorter life expectancy of blacks living with AIDS. To date, only E. Lynn Harris' AIDS novels, Invisible Life and Just As I Am, describe the experiences of closeted black bisexual men.

Like black men, Hispanic men in the United States who desire other men may feel torn between allegiances to gay communities and to their ethnic and cultural communities.[74]

Also like black men, little research has been done with respect to their sexual behavior. Findings do indicate, however, that because the Catholic Church plays such a large role in many Hispanic communities, sexual behavior is strongly influenced by its mandates (Greeley 12). Church doctrine forbids the use of condoms in heterosexual sex and expressly forbids homosexuality as an abomination of god. "Safer sex" thus is not an option for an observant Catholic and homosexuality is silenced and enshrouded in deeper secrecy. Another factor influencing male sexuality in Mexican men is the cultural notion of "machismo," which Doll et al describe as "the culturally defined hypermasculine model of manliness" (36). Doll et al note about Mexican men that "The masculine self-image of a man is typically not threatened by his homosexual behavior as long as he engages in the appropriate sexual role [insertive anal intercourse] and also has sex with women" (36). Other roadblocks which have hampered AIDS education and medical care in Hispanic populations include what Greeley notes as "the community's language isolation and culture" (13), which have hampered efforts by non-Hispanics to provide AIDS education as well as outreach and other AIDS services to these populations. All of these factors contribute to the increased possibility of HIV transmission, which is supported by epidemiological data: "More than 65% of AIDS cases among men born in Central and South America, Cuba and Mexico were associated with homosexual intercourse" (Diaz et al. 504). Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days From Now is yet the only AIDS novel to depict an Hispanic man living with AIDS.

Another culture in the United States that involves male-male sex which "gay identity" does not describe is that of male prison inmates. During this era of "tough-on-crime," prison populations have grown enormously. Black men are disproportionately represented in this culture. Indeed, "...one-quarter of all black men in their 20s, and 15% of adult males, rotate through prison" (Rosin 23). With the growth of prison populations and especially with recidivist members, a thriving prison culture has developed. One aspect of this culture is male-male sex. Little data exists on sexual behavior in prisons but various studies indicate both coerced and consensual sexual encounters occur, as well as tatooing and injection drug use, all of which contribute to the spread of HIV in prisons (Hammett et al. 141). According to Hammett et al, "11,565 (5%) of the adult cases reported to the CDC were prison inmates" (136). Because many men behave heterosexually before and after their periods of incarceration, their sexual behavior does not simply fit under either a "heterosexual" or a "homosexual" label. Possible exposure to HIV while in prison also increases the risk that they may then transmit HIV to their female sexual partners once they are released from prison. There has been some effort to distribute condoms in a few prisons, but as with many governmental policies regarding behavior considered "immoral" by this society, there is the assumption that the provision of condoms (like needles) will promote the "immoral behavior." Instead, emphasis has shifted from "crisis" issues to "long-haul" issues, such as the provision of housing, programming, and medical care for prisoners with HIV disease (Hammett et al 141). Life in contemporary American prisons is an experience that is not described in any of the AIDS novels published to date.

5.4 Silent Subjects: Poverty, Drugs and AIDS

If the epidemiological trends are any indication, class as well as race is a factor for increased risk of exposure to HIV. Class divisions within the U.S. population have distinct consequences for members of different classes.[75]

For the "lowest" classes in this country, HIV is a growing threat but is also only one of the many experienced hardships. With a hierarchy of needs common to all human beings, these populations fight daily for the bare minimums of existence: a safe place to live, food, something that makes life worth living. For the homeless, even these bare minimums may be unattainable. The well-being experienced from sex and/or drugs and the satisfaction of having children may very well be the few pleasures these people experience. Greeley notes several additional issues that affect these populations, including "...a lack of medical insurance, which results in a lack of access to health care; a higher incidence of diseases or maladies in general; fear of medical care, particularly among illegal aliens; limited or no means of transportation to a health clinic; and for some, particularly in rural areas, too few doctors" (12). For members of these populations living with HIV disease, "'...people may be sick, but without access to healthcare, they won't do anything about it until they are very ill. Taking care of kids, housing and work...these basic needs are more important than worrying about HIV'" (Greeley 12).

Though injection drug use (IDU) and poverty are not necessarily correlated (Bowser 119), there does appear to be a correlation between IDU AIDS cases and particular impoverished regions of the United States. Shooting galleries, sex for drugs and/or sex for money to acquire drugs are all aspects of the drug culture which contribute to the increased risk of its members and their sexual partners for infection with HIV. Friedman et al note that there are regional differences in AIDS cases due to IDU: "There are considerable differences in geographic distribution of HIV among injection drug users, with seroprevalence rates as high as 50-60% in some northeastern cities, 15-17% in San Francisco, and below 5% of most other areas of the country" (68). Other regions, however, are experiencing the fastest increases in new AIDS cases. Okey Nwanyanwu et al. report that as of June 30, 1991, "...58,879 (32.2%) of AIDS cases were associated with illicit drug use.The highest percentage increases were in the South, U.S. Territories and the North Central" (399). There are no AIDS novels that describe IDU culture. Indeed, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, published over thirty years ago, remains one of the only American novels to describe aspects of this culture.

5.5 AIDS and Women

AIDS has had a very different history in the United States for women as compared with gay men. As discussed in Chapter One, it was not until 1993 that the CDC revised its definition of AIDS to include one of the most common AIDS-related opportunistic diseases to kill women, namely invasive cervical cancer. There are many reasons for this lag in response to studying women with AIDS. As with all other non-white male people, women have historically ranked lower on the totem-pole of medical research. Women of child-bearing age have suffered the added burden that the potentiality of their bearing offspring is often used as an excuse for denying them the benefits that come from medical research. Tema Luft, a woman living with AIDS, has described her experience of being denied an experimental AIDS drug: "I have told them that I'll get my tubes tied and that I'll sign any paper they want, but they are just too afraid I'll sue them one day" (67). Life expectancies for women diagnosed with AIDS are shorter than men's: "At present the combination of unequal or delayed access to care and the male bias in existing knowledge means that women in both rich and poor countries have a shorter life expectancy than men after a diagnosis of AIDS" (Doyal 13). An important contributing factor for delayed diagnoses in women is the dangerous assumptions generated by the concept of being "at risk" for AIDS, which has had deleterious consequences for women. As MMWR reports, "In particular, women are more likely than men to be reported initially without risk for HIV because both women and their health care providers may not recognize or report the risk behaviors of the woman and her partners" ("Update" 88).

Though AIDS in other countries like Uganda, for example, affects more women than men (Barnett and Piers 32-33), AIDS in the United States has primarily been viewed as a gay male disease. Perhaps a reason for this has been that anal sex, a high risk factor for HIV transmission, has been considered solely as a gay male phenomenon. Indeed, for a time, women were considered less at risk for HIV infection than gay men, because of their "rugged" vaginas as opposed to the "fragile" anuses of gay men (Treichler 37). This conflation of AIDS with gay anal sex has led to further silences with respect to women's sexuality and their risk for HIV. Indeed, as Katie King has noted:

" ...educational efforts by, for example, the World Health Organization, have often seriously misrepresented the sexual practices and behaviors currently understood to transmit HIV. Because of a debilitating fascination with the ongoing construction of a heterosexuality innocent of, yet mutually defined by, homosexuality, local sexual practices have been ignored or appropriated." ( 87)

Within this heterosexual logic of HIV transmission, lesbian sex is completely invisible. Indeed, lesbians have not been considered at risk for AIDS, though there have been several documented cases of sexual transmission among women ("Update" 83).

Another issue that greatly impacts heterosexual women's sexual behavior (both in the United States as well as in other countries) is its relationship to male sexual behavior. Some women may not have the option to negotiate the terms of these sexual interactions with male partners. Indeed, marital rape is still not legally recognized in several American states. Another issue is that of practicing safer sex. For some women, the decision to not use condoms is tied to issues of "love" and "trust," whereas "safer sex" becomes a sign of mistrust and/or infidelity. "Young girls in particular," Lesley Doyal has noted, "often fear that they will be accused of mistrust, of 'not loving him enough', or of being too sexually assertive" (68-9). Most of the heterosexual "safer sex" campaigns have targeted white, middle-class women, particularly young women, to take responsibility for their sexual encounters, though they are less at risk for HIV infection than women from other sectors of the population and though they are not the ones who wear the condoms. Catherine Waldby et al have noted the bias of this education campaign: "...the implicit privileging of heterosexual men within AIDS policy...attempts both to protect male bodies and to maintain masculine sexual 'freedom' in the age of AIDS through placing greater restrictions upon women's sexual behavior" (38). A crucial factor affecting the ability of women to practice safer sex is the issue of self-esteem, which Muriel Whetstone notes as particularly important for black women: "Education, empowerment and self-esteem - These are the tools Black women need to become better equipped to protect themselves" (121). Waldby et al point out that even more needs to be done in order for women to be able to protect themselves: "As well as education and community support, alternatives to the condom are urgently needed if women are to have the means to protect themselves" (15).

During the media hype of the mid-80's, which portrayed AIDS as something that primarily affected gay men, Haitians and drug users, the most publicity regarding women with AIDS was directed toward a few white women. These few women contracted HIV through "innocent" blood transfusions, and these women fit the public's image of the good, middle-class, white mothers who care for their kids. For example, Elizabeth Glaser (wife of the actor who played Hutch on the television show, "Starsky and Hutch") became an advocate of people living with AIDS and her autobiography, In the Absence of Angels: a Hollywood Family's Courageous Story, was well-received by the "general public." The experiences of other white women living with HIV disease - poorer, prostitutes, injecting drug users, women who acquired HIV sexually - have received little attention. As Tema Luft has remarked about her invisibility as a woman with AIDS, "Who would think that a nine-to-five woman worker like me could have AIDS? It's those 'other people' who get it" (70). Mirroring this silence is the lack of novels that describe the experiences of women living with AIDS.

The women in the United States hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic have been poor women of color, particularly black women (CDC 975). The two major factors that have contributed to this trend have been the use of injecting drugs and sexual relationships with male partners who use injecting drugs. Another, less prevalent, but significant contributing factor for some of these women has been their having sexual relationships with men who also have sex with other men. Studies have indicated that the female partners of these men "...are frequently unaware of their partners' sexual contacts with men" (Doll et al 31). In his novel, Invisible Life, E. Lynn Harris repeatedly addresses the complex issues surrounding black males who practice bisexual behavior and the ignorance of their female sexual partners as to their double sexual identities.

Lack of services for poor black women living with AIDS poses real problems for their healthcare. Additionally, care for them is difficult to maintain. As Dr. Joe Timpone, director of Washington, D.C., General Hospital's AIDS Unit, remarks, "It's hard enough...to persuade people with no money for bus fare or for a babysitter, who miss an average of half their appointments, to stick to a regimen of bimonthly visits and fifteen pills a day" (Rosin 25). Consequently, their life expectancies following an AIDS diagnosis are much shorter than for white women and for men in general (Doyal 13). The desire to have a baby as a way to help deal with the spectre of one's own mortality is another issue for many women. Approximately 7,000 infants are born to HIV-infected women each year ("Update" 768), and there has been controversy over the ethics of mandatory testing of pregnant women for HIV. Several studies have indicated that Zidoduvine therapy (AZT) has been shown to prevent HIV infection in babies born to HIV+ women (Rosin 25). However, chronic suspicion and paranoia of the conventional medical establishment have kept some black women from seeking the treatment. Their suspicion may not be altogether unjustified. For example, Charlotte Watson Sherman's recent novel, Touch, describes the racist corruption in a white hospital, including the coercion of a pregnant HIV+ black woman to have an abortion by a white male doctor, who then, without her knowledge or consent, sterilizes her.

As with black women, injecting drug use and/or sexual relationships with injecting drug users are primary sources of HIV infection for Hispanic women born in the United States and Puerto Rico (Diaz et al. 504). Additionally for many Hispanic women, the Catholic church plays an influential role in their sexual lives with respect to HIV transmission. Because the Church actively condemns the use of condoms, an Hispanic woman has little recourse for demanding safer sex practices from her male sexual partners. Additionally, as Ledia Martinez, Hispanic HIV/AIDS Coordinator for the Red Cross, has noted, "Hispanic women often lack empowerment in sexual relationships..." (Greeley 12). Church doctrine and machismo promulgate power imbalances in the sexual relations between Hispanic men and women, and like black women, Hispanic women may also be at greater risk for HIV infection due to a male partner's undisclosed bisexual behavior. Language and cultural barriers may also prevent Hispanic women from obtaining necessary AIDS services, from safer sex information to medical services. As with black women, Hispanic women have not been targeted by AIDS organizations. For Hispanic women living with AIDS, there may be a series of other issues that impact their quality of life, including problems with language barriers that reduce access to information about AIDS and related AIDS services; shame and/or fear of stigma for having HIV disease, which may lead to hiding a positive diagnosis; a lack of precedent and language from which to speak openly and honestly about sex with a male sexual partner. As with all women living with AIDS, Hispanic women may be caregivers to their families in addition to themselves. As Antonia Coello Novello, the first female and first Hispanic Surgeon General of the United States provocatively asks, "All that matters is that women - even when they are sick - are asked to take care of their families. I believe the time has come to ask: who will take care of them?" (xiv). Perhaps it then comes as no surprise that with so many issues plaguing these women's lives, they have not written novels to describe their experiences of living with HIV disease and that no one else has chosen to do so, either.

5.6 The Literary Marketplace

The literary marketplace reflects many of these economic, social and cultural issues that lead to prevailing silences about some people's experiences living with HIV disease. First and foremost, the publishing business is a business. It is an industry that exists in a capitalist society and like any good industry in such a society hopes to turn a healthy profit. In order to do so, publishing companies hope to market and sell products that appeal to the widest number of consumers and to consumers who have enough expendable income to buy their products. Books about "the American people" are the most likely to be published, since editors assume that the "general public" wants to buy books that speak to them. This "general public" is assumed to be heterosexual, white, middle-class and educated enough to read. Perhaps not surprisingly, the publishing business continues to be dominated by white men. Black gay writer, Steven Corbin, acidly describes the exclusionary practices of this industry: "The publishing world is decidedly an exclusive, white male, predominantly heterosexual, elite fraternity that stretches itself to any length to protect its narrow confines, even in its exclusion of women who, statistics convincingly show, comprise the majority of readers and book buyers" ("White Men" 14).

With the growth and development of gay communities since the 70's, presses that cater to gay and lesbian readerships have grown in number. Indeed, as Victoria Brownworth has noted, "Gay and lesbian literature is the publishing trend of the '90's" (80). Larger publishing houses like St. Martin's have had sympathetic editors like Michael Denneny who have assisted various "alternative" (i.e., non-mainstream) texts to make it to publication and there are a significant number of smaller presses, like Naiad, Alyson and Knights Press to name just a few, that specialize in publishing gay and lesbian literature. Like the straight publishing companies, these presses are still businesses and as such need to turn profits in order to survive. Unfortunately, many of the editors for gay presses have also thought that this means catering to a white, middle-class, urban market who only wants to read about people like themselves. As with the straight presses, "The booming trade in gay books," writes Brownworth, "is still the domain of a select few gay white men" (80). There is more to the issue, however. As Michele Karlsberg, a book publicist who has handled such well-known black gay authors as Assoto Saint and Melvin Dixon, says, "'There is an underlying racist and classist idea that blacks don't read and buy books'" (Brownworth 80).

These assumptions by the gay publishing industry have led to a prevailing silence about the experiences and issues of non-white and/or non-middle class gays and lesbians. "Read any good black gay fiction lately?" asks Steven Corbin. He points out that "Unless one is literature-savvy, one could easily subscribe to the misconception that African-American gay male fiction - and its writers - had died along with James Baldwin in 1987" ("The Dearth" 39). Though several black female novelists, both straight and lesbian, like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, have had a good deal of success publishing their work, indeed Toni Morrison has won the highest honors for Beloved, according to Corbin, black male novelists and especially black gay novelists have had difficulty finding places to publish their work. He has extensively criticized what he perceives to be the racist assumptions and practices of both straight and gay presses.

We can presuppose myriad perennial assumptions and baseless theories to justify these classic patterns. Black [male and/or gay] literature isn't commercially viable; black literature is second-rate; black literature has no audience; only blacks are interested in black art; blacks don't read; and, finally, that one black voice is representative and encompassing of all black people, which succinctly explains why we have been doomed to celebrate one solitary literary icon at a time, posturing as the 'flavor of the month.'" ("White Men" 4)[76]

Though Corbin dismisses as racist the assumption by editors that black authors lack the financial and time resources to write extended works of fiction like novels, time and money are issues for some writers of color, as Nancy Bereano, publisher of a small lesbian press insists, "'But when we're talking about big [publishing] houses, they want novels, and many writers of color don't have the time or the money to write novels'" (Brownworth 82). Corbin also argues that since most editors themselves are white men, they do not identify with black gay experience and/or they may find that experience threatening to their own notions of identity - racial, sexual, otherwise. Indeed, as Barbara Smith, publisher of the Kitchen Table Press, notes about gay and lesbian writing of color, "'There is also an inherent critique in what we write of the society, and many editors take that critique personally'" (Brownworth 82). The lack of black editors of any sort also influences the selection of novels chosen for publication (Brownworth 83).

Other literary and artistic forums besides the novel have proven to be more successful ventures for articulating black gay experience. Since the mid-80's, several anthologies have appeared that address the silence of black gay male experience. The earliest of these was Joseph Beam's In The Life, which appeared in 1986, and the more recent Brother to Brother has done quite well.[77]

The videowork of Marlon Riggs as well as the film documentary Paris is Burning have also received a good deal of critical attention. An important concern for critics has been to read these cultural productions in such a way as to resist homogenizing black gay experiences into the experience of black gay men, which would silence the diversity and variety of these many different identities and experiences. As Hemphill says in his introduction to Brother to Brother, "It would be impossible to say there is one type of black gay male for all seasons. We haven't yet, nor do we need to, become clones" (xxx). Unfortunately, the tendency by mainstream society to canonize particular authors is a reality of history. As Corbin notes, "...the one voice who [has] been our sole, black, openly gay author for four decades - James Baldwin" ("White Men" 14). Black gay novelists have had to find strategies to circumvent these assorted difficulties in order to publish their work. Corbin went overseas and found a British press willing to publish his second novel, Fragments That Remain, which was eventually published two years later by the American press, Alyson. As he sees it, gay American publishers were too racist and afraid to publish such a charged novel which deals with interracial gay relationships and the problem of racism in American gay culture. Overseas, Corbin found that "...the English, not unlike most Europeans, take delight in, even relish, stories that deal with racism - American racism..." ("White Men" 15). E. Lynn Harris originally self-published his first novel, Invisible Life, with Consortium Press in 1991. His skills at marketing paid off when the major publishing house, Vintage Books, republished Invisible Life as well as its sequel, Just As I Am, in 1994. Harris' financial successes have continued with his latest novel, And This Too Shall Pass, which occupied a spot on The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list for several weeks.

5.7 Risky Business: Literary AIDS

Why would a reader want to read about disease and suffering? In particular, why would a reader who has little fear of and/or is at little risk for HIV infection want to read a novel about AIDS, especially a novel about a person of color with AIDS? For an editor of a large, extremely profitable New York publishing company, these questions would immediately steer her/him away from risky novels toward "safe" AIDS novels. Indeed, Alice Hoffman's At Risk (ironic title in this context) was the first AIDS novel to be published by a major publishing firm in 1988 by Putnam's Sons, and it received a great deal of attention. Her novel is a "safe" one, discussing the plight of a suburban family's experience of AIDS, when the daughter Amanda "innocently" contracts HIV from a blood transfusion. Another factor that affects the risks publishing houses are willing to take to publish non-mainstream work is the issue of downsizing. Reflecting nationwide industrial trends, the publishing industry has seen a great reduction in the number of small publishing companies and the booming success and domination of the market by large publishing houses that can consolidate their capital. Additionally, many large chain bookstores place book orders not directly with publishing companies but with book distributors, who buy mass quantities of books they feel will be a sure sell. This process homogenizes the selection of reading materials available at large chain stores, which carry only a limited, generic supply of books that will garner the largest profit. Readers and individual bookbuyers are directly impacted, since chain stores squeeze independent bookstores out of business with their cheaper prices, their greater numbers and their ability to afford more convenient locations and better advertising. Though some of the large chains now include a "Gay Studies" section in their stores, the selections are often minimal, tending to highlight best-selling white gay male work.

All of these issues that I have been discussing have impacted which AIDS novels are published. Gay novelists of color who have written about AIDS face a difficult battle to find a place for their work. As Corbin has said:

"Even though the face of AIDS has changed," says novelist Steven Corbin, who is HIV-positive, "you can't find publishers willing to take on books related to AIDS and black queers...there is no market for an AIDS novel that is multicultural. Our men are dying too. Our writers are also doing work like Paul Monette and other white writers with AIDS. We need to be able to see the multicultural context of AIDS. We too are fighting this killer." (Brownworth 83).

To date, Corbin's A Hundred Days From Now is the only AIDS novel published to describe the experiences of a black gay man living with HIV disease. Besides Corbin's explanation about market politics, there may also be several other reasons for this prevailing silence. Judith Pastore has suggested that literary genres may not be the best ways to talk about AIDS (Pastore 10). Another contributing factor to this silence may be the lack a support network for these writers. Paul Monette and David Feinberg, for example, benefited from their membership in the urban, white gay middle-class, which both welcomed and celebrated their work.

The lack of AIDS novels about of men of color living with AIDS has been mirrored by the lack of novels about women living with AIDS. For women living with AIDS, the issue of longevity poses an even greater issue than for gay men of color. With little time left, poor health, few financial resources, possibly children to care for, perhaps it is no surprise that there is not a single novel yet that focuses on the experiences of women of color living with AIDS. Charlotte Watson Sherman's quite recent novel, Touch, published by HarperCollins in 1995, is the first novel to describe a black woman's coming to terms with her HIV+ status. At present, there are only two novels that focus on white women who acquire HIV disease, Sharon Mayes' Immune and Alfred Ignegno's Shared Legacy. Both novels were published by small presses (New Rivers and Birch Brook Impressions), went through single printings, and now are impossible to find for sale in bookstores. Mayes has written about the difficulties she experienced in having her novel published and the negative reception it received. She writes, "The publication of this novel, for which both I and my publisher had grandiose fantasies of success, was met with disagreeable silence. Reviewers called it 'disturbing,' 'depressing,' 'a scathing attack on modern society,' and 'of questionable taste'" (85). Mayes thinks that "The critics, at least, were not interested in reading about the downfall of an attractive, successful professional, probably much like them. People who spread or had AIDS could not be viewed as like them. In the minds of mainstream Americans, AIDS must remain a disease of homosexuals and IV drug-users" (85). As Katie Hogan has observed, "...female characters in AIDS literature are often confined to the work of mourning while male characters brazenly express anger and sexual desire even as their bodies give way to physical deterioration." Hogan provocatively asks, "Why is AIDS still conceptualized as a male disease?...What does the absence of women as people with AIDS teach us about women's predicament in our culture?" (84). The same could also be asked about the literary representations of men of color living with AIDS.

5.8 Background Sound: AIDS Novels and Men of Color

During the first decade of the epidemic, most of the AIDS novels focused on describing the experiences of white gay men living and dying of AIDS. Novels about and/or by men of color living with AIDS were a small background sound. Well-known novelists like black writers Melvin Dixon and Larry Duplechan did not write about the experiences of men of color and AIDS, though Duplechan's Tangled Up in Blue does describe a white gay character's experience of ARC.[78]

As Emmanuel Nelson remarked in 1990 about the famous gay Chicano novelist, John Rechy, "While many of the novels he wrote prior to the AIDS era insistently and explicitly dealt with gay life, his two post-AIDS novels - Bodies and Souls and Marilyn's Daughter \- deal with homosexuality only marginally. Neither one even alludes to AIDS" (49). The same could be said of his most recent novel, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. Though Michael Nava refers to AIDS in his mystery series featuring Henry Rios, it is not the Chicano protagonist but Henry's younger, Jewish lover, Josh, who Nava depicts in his mystery series as living through the stages of HIV disease.

Men of color with AIDS appear in several AIDS novels by well-known white male authors because of their relationships with white male characters. In one of the earliest AIDS novels, Howard Fast's The Dinner Party (1987), Jonesy, a black man with AIDS, exists in the background of the novel, which centers on the description of his white lover, Leonard, the son of a senator coming home to the suburbs of a northeastern city to disclose his AIDS status to his family. Though Leonard has brought Jonesy with him to the dinner party, the bigotry and racism of guests at the party are so insulting to Jonesy that he leaves the party (as well as the narrative of the novel). In the more recent AIDS novel, Afterlife, Paul Monette depicts a Chicano gay male's experience with AIDS in the character, Dell Espinoza, as I discussed in Chapter Four of the dissertation. Like Jonesy, Dell's existence in the story is determined by his relationship to a white man. The novel does not focus on Dell's own HIV disease but instead focuses on his inability to emotionally recover from the AIDS death of his lover, Marcus. Most recently, Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest is haunted by the ghost of a gay black man named Wyatt, who has died of AIDS-related complications. The novel foregrounds how the aging white protagonist, Hutch, copes with the slow, agonizing death of his son, Wade, who has returned home to Virginia from New York City and his gay life there. Forever in the background of the novel and Hutch's consciousness, however, is the figure of Wyatt, challenging Hutch's claims to Wade's love.

It was not until 1991, a full decade into the epidemic, that a number of secondary AIDS novels began to appear by men of color. An American Indian doctor, Aragam Subbarao's The Riddle of AIDS, was published by the small Carlton Press and is a very short (91 pages), poorly written and edited, scientific thriller. The novel focuses on the search by an American white man, Robert, for the person whose blood infected his son, Peter, with HIV, when Peter received a massive blood transfusion following an auto accident. Robert's search leads to the discovery of a surprising explanation for the origins of the AIDS epidemic. (The Russians did it!). The novel ends unrealistically with a surprise happy ending and the discovery that Peter actually does not, and never did, have HIV disease. Indeed, the first AIDS test had been a false positive. Also appearing in 1991, The Greatest Performance, by Cuban American poet and author, Elias Munoz, was published by Arte Publico, a press that specializes in publishing work by Hispanic authors. This novel recounts the homophobia that threatens the lives of the two first-person narrators and best friends, Rosita, a lesbian, and Mario, a gay man, and traces their youth in the intolerant Cuban society to their immigration to the United States. AIDS provides a closure mechanism for the novel. Mario tests positive for HIV and both Mario and Rosita perceive this to be a death sentence. The final chapter resists the tragedy of this conclusion by denying the entire narrative that has proceeded this point in time, including that Mario and Rosita had ever even known each other in Cuba. Rosita insists: "We never heard of Castro. (Not even Castro Street). Nobody hides, waving a dagger in the air, behind the mask of God. A plague hasn't broken out" (150). The novel ends with an act of self-reflexivity, a looping in time that promises to break out of the apocalyptic trajectory AIDS has imposed on the narrative. Rosita speaks, "Yes, I will create this place where you can be who you've always wanted to be Marito. Where You and I have become the same person. This moment of greatness. I will create it. When the performance ends. And life begins" (151).

Black novelist, E. Lynn Harris' first novel, Invisible Life, was self-published in 1991 with Consortium Press. The novel focuses primarily on the first-person narrator, Raymond Jr.'s coming to terms with his sexual identity, which is complicated by other aspects of his identity, being a Christian, well-educated, middle-class, black closeted bisexual man. The novel traces the course of his love life, from his relationships with Sela and Kelvin at a southern college, to his life as a successful attorney in New York City and his two subsequent love relationships with Quinn and then Nicole. Like Munoz' novel, AIDS enters Harris' novel only at the end and brings the plot-strands of the novel to a close. When Nicole's best friend, Candance is suddenly hospitalized near death with PCP, Raymond is forced to finally reveal his bisexuality to Nicole, who promptly breaks up with him. Candance's death from AIDS-related complications fills Raymond with guilt for his bisexual behavior: "I was overcome with a tremendous amount of guilt regarding Candance's death. I was part of a secret society that was endangering black women like Candance to protect our secret desires. Would this have happened if society had allowed Kelvin and I to live a life free from ridicule? (253-4). The novel ends with Raymond seeking emotional refuge from his love life by returning south to stay with his parents in Alabama, still unhappy with his sexuality: "I don't know if I thought being back in Alabama would cure my gayness. The opportunities didn't exist as they did in New York" (261). He vows celibacy, hoping he can control his sexuality by suppressing it: "Redirecting my thoughts was something I could control. I had made my sexuality the primary focus of my life for too long; from now on, I would allow it to be only a small part of my identity" (262).

Just As I Am, Harris' sequel to Invisible Life, was published in 1994 by the big company, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, that also reissued Invisible Life in paperback that same year. The story told in Just As I Am takes place three years following the events of Invisible Life. This time, the narrative is split into two alternating first-person narrations, Raymond's and his ex-girlfriend, Nicole's. The novel continues to trace Raymond's evolving acceptance of his sexuality as well as describing Nicole's love life and her search for a suitable man to marry, which is complicated in the course of the novel by her Christian faith, her experiences of racism, her own homophobia and her sexual experiences with closeted bisexual black men. The novel is divided into three sections, with the middle one focusing on the two narrators' relationships to the only black openly gay character portrayed in the novel, Kyle, who is dying of AIDS. At the end of Invisible Life, Kyle had entered a rehab program for his addictions to crack cocaine and alcohol, and now in the middle of Just As I Am, he discloses to Raymond and Nicole that he had tested HIV+ back then, but that he had not wanted to tell anyone. He explains to Raymond, "'I blocked it out. Long story short, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life dying'" (188).

Part Two of the novel enacts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative structure in describing Kyle's deteriorating life and how his friends come to his aid. This is Raymond's first encounter with AIDS and the spectacle of Kyle's AIDS-ridden body frightens him: "He didn't have on a shirt and his frail body was covered with large, purplish black spots. It was the first time I was face to face with AIDS and it looked horrible" (209). Harris uses Part Two of the novel to comment on the impact of AIDS on the black community:

"I guess maybe the heterosexual community had finally realized that this was not only a white gay man's disease. But I still felt the African-American community had a long way to go in the areas of education and support of minority AIDS patients. Kyle often mentioned that there were very few support groups run by African-Americans...

All the support Kyle received outside of family and friends came from the white gay community." (205)

Part Two of the novel not only ends with Kyle's death but also with the novel's consideration of AIDS as a thematic issue. Part Three briefly describes Raymond and Nicole's mourning process, but then moves on to focus on Raymond's entrance into therapy, his finally coming to terms with his being gay and his meeting of a new male love interest, as well as Nicole's engagement to the perfect white man, Jarred, and her announcement to her therapist that she now feels ready to end therapy.

Harris' project in his two novels seems to be, finally, the rejection of black male bisexual behavior. In his review of Just As I Am, Canaan Parker praises the novel for its efforts to deal with male bisexuality: "The subject of bisexuality gives Just As I Am some needed weight - it is a relatively unexplored issue in contemporary gay fiction - and presumably works as well to broaden the cross-over market potential of the novel..." (20). Surprisingly, however, Parker mentions nothing about the racial and religious issues addressed in the novel. Addressing how the novel treats these issues would help explain why the novel ultimately rejects black bisexual behavior as an acceptable lifestyle. Indeed, by the end of the novel, Raymond finally admits that he is not bisexual, but "gay," and the only truly unpleasant character portrayed in the novel is Basil, a black, closeted, bisexual football player, who is represented with little redeeming features. Perhaps another reason for Harris' rejection of male bisexuality reflects his efforts to find a larger market for his work. Parker aptly remarks about Just As I Am that it is "a very commercial novel, both in style and content" (20). Both of Raymond's parents as well as his best friend seem too good to be true. Indeed, in Invisible Life, when Raymond finally discloses his homosexuality to his father, his father gulps and then easily accepts Raymond. At the end of the novel, when Raymond has returned home following Candance's death, his mother quietly assures him that she loves him unconditionally. When Raymond finally reveals his bisexuality in Just As I Am to Jared, the gorgeous white man he has been quietly worshiping, who also happens to be straight, Jared expresses no other emotions but instant acceptance. In Part Two, Raymond introduces Jared to Kyle, and though Kyle has physically deteriorated and looks like the classic "AIDS victim," deathly thin and covered with KS lesions, Jared does not hesitate but instantly begins caregiving to Kyle.

Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days From Now, published in 1993 by Alyson, is the only primary AIDS novel that centers on the experiences of gay men of color and their experiences of AIDS. The novel traces the course of a love relationship between the protagonist, Dexter, a struggling Hollywood screenwriter, who is black, openly gay and HIV+, and his lover, Sergio, an extremely wealthy, white-looking Mexican American, who is a closeted, HIV+ gay man. The novel presents the story as a flashback, framed by this present time of Dexter's loss, aloneness and life with asymptomatic HIV disease. Within this frame, the narrative traces an apocalyptic AIDS narrative, from the time that Dexter and Sergio first meet, through the wonder and joys of their romance, to Sergio's discovery of KS, which switches his HIV+ status to AIDS, to his eventual hospitalization, and then to his death. This all takes place over a period of one year. In the course of their relationship, Dexter is forced to confront issues of class, race, homophobia and culture, all of which complicate the power balance of the relationship and which eventually lead Dexter to leave Sergio three months before Sergio dies of AIDS-related complications. Throughout the novel, Dexter focuses on his lover's AIDS. Only once does Dexter dwell on his own HIV status, late at night, as he listens to a clock ticking, trying to fall asleep:

"Tick... tick... tick...

This is what he heard inside himself. The ticking of a bomb that could possibly explode inside him, succeeded by an aftermath of symptoms and opportunistic infections. Though he had not thought much about it recently - which was just as well, since he welcomed distraction - it dawned on Dexter that, in a number of years he could be in Sergio's predicament, living, breathing, and battling Sergio's illness." (186)

Though the novel does not end in death like so many other AIDS novels, neither does it end with sentimental, cliched messages of hope for Dexter. Seven months have passed. Dexter is alone. His lover is dead. He is broke. His request for money from Sergio's family has been rejected, though at Sergio's funeral they had previously offered to help. Dexter's dog, Bigger, has left a pile of dog shit on the floor. Dexter is trying to get on with life: "Seven months. That's how long it had been. Seven months since Sergio's death. And Dexter was still reliving the nightmare, trying to climb out of the abyss it had plunged him into, attempting to piece together the fragments of his former life and get on with the business of living, the bitter aftertaste of the nightmare lingering in his mouth still" (219).

There are a few American AIDS novels that describe AIDS in other places than the United States. Science fiction and medical thriller AIDS novels like Ray Buck's The Master Cure and Aragam Subbarao's The Riddle of AIDS have portrayed Africa as a site for nefarious AIDS experiments. Several more recent AIDS novels published in the United States have described the plight of people living with AIDS in other countries. Published in 1994, Patricia Powell's A Small Gathering of Bones describes gay life in Jamaica during the late 70's and how a character named Ian is suffering from what at the time was an unidentified, mysterious set of ailments. Terese Svoboda's Cannibal, which was also published in 1994 and which won a literary award, describes the American white female narrator's experiences of traveling in Africa and mentions the decimation of AIDS in a particular African village. Finally, Tibbie Kposowa's Silence that is not Golden, published in 1995, is set in a west African country and describes how AIDS has impacted the elite, heterosexual communities of that country. All of these novels are framed in such a way that though they may often contain apocalyptic AIDS narrative strands, these strands do not infect and destroy the larger narrative frameworks.

5.9 Silence: AIDS Novels and Female PWA's

Though women have composed a portion of the AIDS epidemic from the beginning, and though more and more women, particularly women of color, are living with HIV disease as the epidemic continues, there are extremely few novels that focus on the experiences of these women. Before 1992, there were only two novels that briefly referred to the experiences of women of color and AIDS. In his description of a multiculturally composed AIDS support group in Afterlife, Paul Monette briefly describes several women with AIDS, including Charlene, a poor black woman who contracted AIDS from a drug-using boyfriend. Her children provide her with a reason to continue fighting for life. Toward the end of E. Lynn Harris' Invisible Life, Candance, a young black woman is abruptly diagnosed with full-blown AIDS and then dies. In many of the novels about gay men living with AIDS, when there are female characters portrayed, their depictions are often problematically simple and reiterate cultural stereotypes about women as madonnas or whores, or as Katie Hogan describes them, "as either the site of disease and pathology, or as a symbol of affect and virtue" (84). Most of the AIDS novels portray women as versions of the cultural stereotype of the "Ministering Angel," in which "women are cast as caretakers and nurterers of men and children, as if their genuine activity in life is their self-sacrificing service to others" (Hogan 85). Hogan notes that "Rarely, if ever, do we encounter richly developed, autonomous female characters who are themselves at risk for HIV infection - unless the female character can be depicted as an 'innocent' (read asexual) victim" (85). Their caretaking, however, is not enough to save their loved ones, because the narratives of these novels depict AIDS as a death sentence, tracking the apocalyptic AIDS narrative to end in death.

The earliest published American AIDS novel to describe a woman contracting HIV challenges Hogan's assertion that there are only "innocent" female characters in AIDS literature. Sharon Mayes' Immune was published in 1987 by the small, New Rivers press. The novel consists of four parts with the first three attempting to uncover why Suzanne, a virologist who had been studying the AIDS virus, has apparently committed suicide by drowning in the ocean. We follow these parts through the point of view of her lover, Chris, and his reading of her diary, which he has found at the beach where her body is missing. The final section of the novel moves back in time to the events immediately prior to Suzanne's suicide and are told from her point of view. This section confirms that she had just tested HIV+, which explains her motivations for committing suicide, and it ends with the description of her drowning in the ocean. From the very opening scene of the novel, Suzanne is not represented as "innocent." Indeed, if anything, she seems more like the stereotype of woman as pathological and "guilty" for her desires. As he searches the beach, Chris remembers her: "Once when they were making love on this beach and he was about to explode into her, she stopped moving with him. She taunted him playfully, 'I've got you now; I'll never set you free'" (6). Her words invoke images of the desire-ridden, all-devouring, pathological monster-female. Her words also ring prophetically true, when all of the other primary characters converge at the beach at the end of Part Three and realize that she was diseased (had HIV) and could have infected all of them, since they were all sexually connected with her. Suzanne is definitely not a "Ministering Angel," with her addiction to consume prescription drugs, alcohol and sex. Indeed, immediately before she commits suicide, we discover that Suzanne cannot be a mother: "The botched abortion that left her sterile...Simone de Beauvoir had written she had only one regret about her life and that was never having had a child. Well, she'd always agreed with Simone" (253). Without a child, there is no reason for Suzanne to remain living. Mayes' portrayal of Suzanne fits the "guilty" stereotype of desiring, acting women. Rather than let AIDS kill her, Suzanne kills herself, but the effect of this is the same, apocalyptically terminating the life of the novel as well as that of the protagonist. As discussed earlier, both gay and straight critics have criticized the novel. Straight audiences have dislike the "filth" Mayes describes. Gay audiences have disliked the depiction of Suzanne's character, both for its sexuality as well as its failure of nerve to face an HIV+ diagnosis.

In direct contrast to the negative reception of Mayes' novel was the large popular appeal of another early AIDS novel, Alice Hoffman's At Risk. Published by the major house, Putnam's Sons, it has been one of the best selling AIDS novels and has received a great deal of critical attention. The novel invokes the classic apocalyptic AIDs narrative, describing the course of four months in the lives of a suburban family, the Farrells, during which the eleven-year-old daughter, Amanda, is diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in August, gets sicker and then dies in November. She had apparently contracted HIV when she had had a blood transfusion five years previously and the novel describes how the family deals with the tragedy. Does the novel through its depiction of "mainstream" Americans confronted by AIDS help increase public concern and empathy for people with AIDS? Or, does the novel merely reinact the prevailing cultural silences with respect to the experiences of those people most affected by AIDS? In their reception to the novel, critics are divided along these lines. On the one hand, Judith Pastore counters the criticisms of the novel made by gay critics by arguing that the novel has educational value: "...the criticism that Hoffman is playing it safe by writing about a white, middle-class child - an 'innocent victim' who is bound to elicit more sympathy than gays or drug addicts - to some extent misses the value of the novel as a tool for educating the general public" (46). She goes on to say that though the novel does little "to combat the mounting homophobia in our society...Both Amanda and Brian as PWAs can elicit general sympathy without unduly disturbing conventional attitudes" (47). Joseph Dewey, on the other hand, disagrees and scathingly attacks the novel, saying,

Instead of confronting AIDS, Hoffman manipulates its impact as a hot buzzword. Forsaking the tensions caused by AIDS on the margins of society to register the impact within the settled middle, Hoffman sanitizes the epidemic, making it reader-friendly. Not surprisingly, her book received enormous critical attention and significant sales, including movie rights. (27)

In her more recent feminist analysis of At Risk, Katie Hogan nuances these opposing criticisms of the novel and focuses on how the novel represents Amanda's mother, Polly, as a "Ministering Angel," caretaking for her sick child. She disagrees with Pastore's assertions that the novel portrays how everyone is "at risk" for AIDS, writing, "On the contrary, HIV and AIDS continues to highlight the inequalities among various communities, genders, races, classes and sexualities; HIV infection and AIDS illuminates injustices that are deeply disturbing and culturally reinforced" (87). Her central argument supports that of this chapter, namely, that issues of gender, race, class, culture contribute to prevailing silences in AIDS literature about the experiences of particular populations and AIDS. As she says in her criticisms of how Amanda's mother, Polly, is represented, "At Risk is not interested in presenting complex women characters who experience genuine and clear sexual arousal, making women's sexuality almost invisible" (89). She also disagrees with how gay critics have read the novel, commenting on David Leavitt's review that "Curiously, however, while Leavitt exposes the politics of Amanda's character in terms of gay male sexuality, he seems unaffected by the invisibility of women's sexuality and complex experiences with HIV or AIDS, or the ways in which gender and sexuality get constructed" (88).

Like At Risk, Perri Klass' Other People's Children, also depicts a "Ministering Angel," this time in the figure of the first-person female narrator, Amelia, who is a well-to-do pediatrician. Not only is she caregiver to her own middle-class, white family, which includes herself, her husband and her preschool-age son, and which she does not consider to be at risk for AIDS, but she is also caregiver to many children at the hospital where she works, including a poor, black boy, Darren, who is about the same age as her own son and who is sick and ultimately dies of AIDS. The novel does not smoothly slide over these contrasts in whom Amelia cares for. Indeed, Amelia reflects at some length about them. In her reading of the novel, Hogan praises its portrayal of Amelia as a complex female character, but Hogan feels the novel does not go far enough: "...Klass' novel sadly portrays Amelia Stern's witnessing and critical thinking in the most privatized, isolated manner" (92). Hogan adds that "Amelia's retreat [from thinking about these issues] suggests that when an unusually thoughtful, talented, skilled, creative and educated woman begins to piece together the systems of sexism, racism and classism, she is reigned back in with the threat of loss" (92). As with At Risk, this novel traces an apocalyptic AIDS narrative with respect to a child living with AIDS, portraying the deterioration and death of Darren from AIDS-related complications. These two novels hearken back to nineteenth-century sentimental conventions of portraying the tragedy and pathos of dying children (ala Little Nell and Little Eva).

To date there is only one AIDS novel that focuses on the experiences of a woman living through the entire course of her HIV disease, from testing HIV+ to development of full-blown AIDS.[79]

Alfred Ingegno's Shared Legacy appeared in 1992 and was published by the small press, Birch Brook Impressions. The novel is dedicated to the memory of Olmitella Ingegno, though it is unspecified of what relation this woman was to the author. The novel tells a straightforward story of a white, middle-class woman's love life, which is complicated by HIV. The novel opens with Sharyn Goldberg, an attractive insurance agent who works in New York City, finding out that a series of routine blood tests reveal that she is HIV+. When she feels empowered enough to reveal her HIV status to her boyfriend, Gerard, he reveals that he had previously had sex with a woman whose bisexual boyfriend had died of AIDS. He admitted that he'd tested negative until about six months ago, when he tested positive but he'd been afraid to tell her. She throws him out. Part One ends with her hearing from a friend that Gerard has died of PCP. Part Two begins after several celibate years have passed and with Sharyn meeting a new boyfriend, Rod. In order to insist they practice safer sex without revealing her HIV status, she lies to him, telling him that she has a lethal allergy to semen. Unfortunately, Rod is a jerk. When she confronts him in bed with another woman, he attacks and rapes her without using a condom. She then reveals that he may have been exposed to HIV. Part Three involves the trial in which Rod presses charges against Sharyn for having infected him. Part Three ends with the case being thrown out. In Part Four, Sharyn encounters trouble with her company because of her HIV status, though the difficulties are finally resolved. Part Five describes Sharyn's diagnosis of full-blown AIDS when she is hospitalized for PCP. While in the hospital, Rod comes to plead forgiveness and reveals that he is now HIV+. She quits her job to reduce the stress on her life. Though the novel begins tracing the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, it does not end with her death. Instead, the novel ends on a positive note, with Sharyn at her birthday party surrounded by her friends, one of whom is a doctor involved in looking for an AIDS cure. The novel focuses on the private lives of its characters and, besides describing Sharyn's job difficulties, does not tackle many of the cultural, political and economic issues influencing the AIDS epidemic.

Unlike Shared Legacy, Charlotte Watson Sherman's novel Touch addresses some of these other issues. Touch was recently published in 1995 by the large publishing house, Harper/Collins. Touch is also the first novel to focus on the experiences of a woman of color learning she is HIV+ and the novel traces in complex psychological detail her coming to terms with her HIV status. Rayna is a 35-year-old, middle-class, black woman, who quit lawschool and an unsupportive husband to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. The novel opens with an art reception that she and her friend, Novel, are putting on to celebrate the opening of a new AIDS hospice in Seattle.

From the very beginning of the novel, Rayna is uncomfortable with thinking about AIDS. She notices the members at the reception who look like they have full-blown AIDS: "Rayna began to appreciate the reality of the chilly specter of AIDS circling the room, reaching into each corner, its evil dust swirling in every nook and crevice, brushing its icy fingertips across the heated temples of too many, searching for more, too many more to clutch to its empty bosom" (5). In her review of the novel, Jill Petty has aptly praised Sherman's skill as a writer: "Sherman has a gift for rendering the peculiar inner dialogues that personal crises can force" (79). The first chapter foreshadows Rayna's own involvement with HIV disease and her fear of AIDS. Her feelings about AIDS peak at the end of the chapter, when she is confronted by her friend Ricky's AIDS and her own feelings:

"She had been afraid of Ricky. Afraid to touch him, afraid to be near him, breathing the air he breathed.

A snake's tail of shame coiled itself inside her belly. She could feel its poison sinking deep inside her bones, oozing into the core of her soul." (18, my emphasis)

The rest of the novel plays upon the word, "touch," which is also the title of the novel. AIDS touches Rayna's life, first at the art reception. Then, there is a demonstration by angry women of color with HIV and AIDS outside the hospital where Rayna works as a crisis-line counselor. Called the Prejudice Posse, they protest how the hospital has dealt with one of its patients, Latosha Briggs, a poor black pregnant HIV+ woman, who has been coerced by one of the hospital's doctors, Dr. Van Horne, to have an abortion and who has been sterilized by Dr. Van Horne without her knowledge or consent. The angry demonstraters confront Rayna on her way to work, accusing her of collusion with the racism and AIDSphobia of the hospital. One of the women corners Rayna and explains why people with HIV crave life affirmation. Again, the theme of touch is emphasized:

"We got this thing in our blood and they wanna deny us life, and the right to keep making life. For some of us, that's all the power we want. The length of our lives has already been cut to the quick... They're afraid to work with us, to sit by us, to breathe the same air we breathe. They're even afraid to touch us. Afraid to touch us in a time when we need human touch most of all." (56)

When Rayna subsequently learns of her own HIV+ status, she spends the rest of Part One of the novel wrestling with the doom she feels because HIV has touched her and with how to conceal her HIV+ status from her friends and family members. Part Two of the novel then describes how she reaches out to her family and friends and learns to let them touch her. She also refuses to simply be a victim to AIDS. She reaches out to touch others, becoming an activist by helping to expose Dr. Van Horne's horrific practices and by volunteering at a home for AIDS orphans, Dancing Unicorn House. Through the course of the novel, Rayna also develops a loving, sexual relationship with a black HIV- man, Theodore, whose own brother has died of AIDS. Together, they develop the pleasures of touching each other sexually in the age of safer sex, which she describes in one of her diary entries:

"Theodore touches me. I told Novel. Told her we are still able to be intimate. How I've grown to love surgical gloves and have found a certain kind of sexiness in latex. A little lube inside a rubber can go a long way. Told her Glyde dental dams do feel like silk stockings.

All it takes is an imagination. And Theodore has plenty of that." (201)

Rayna's family, friends and lover unite together in their support of her. Sharon Wilkins in her review of Touch has found this universal sympathy unrealistic: "...much of the story is unrealistic: all of Rayna's friends (including her lover) are supportive, caring, and nonjudgmental. In the real world, it often isn't that easy" (39). I would argue that Sherman's intent in this novel is to represent Rayna's own interior, psychological development and to illustrate how the issues of support, caring and acceptance are qualities that Rayna, herself, must learn, not the people around her. The novel does end with an AIDS death. Not with Rayna's, but with that of a 10-yr-old black girl named Anika, who Rayna has been planning to adopt from Dancing Unicorn House. The final scene takes place at Anika's burial, with Rayna surrounded by her friends. Rayna's last diary entry articulates her completed coming-to-terms with her HIV status and with her enhanced understanding of the importance of community: "... I do know this: no matter what, when I come to that jumping-off place where the two branches of this life meet and separate, and I step off into air, those who love me will be there, holding my hand, urging me forward and loving me, as I step from the light of this world into the darkness of the next" (214). As with many of the other AIDS novels, Touch ends somewhat sentimentally with the protagonist learning an important lesson from her experience with AIDS.

5.10 Young Adult Novels: AIDS and Adolescents

The young adult AIDS novels tend to fall into three categories: those novels that deliver a moral message about prejudice and that try to defuse AIDSphobia; those novels that depict a young adult coping with the loss of a family member to AIDS, which sometimes also involves confronting the person's homosexuality; and those novels that describe a protagonist who is a young adult dealing with living with HIV disease. Most of the novels have a didactic purpose, aiming to teach their young readers about AIDS in its different aspects, though the novels approach this task in very diverse ways. Several of the novels are aimed at a Christian audience and most of the novels describe white suburban, middle-class adolescents and their experiences of AIDS, which typically revolve around a gay relative with AIDS or another youth who acquired AIDS from a blood transfusion. Most of the authors of these books have been women. More recently, several young adult AIDS novels have appeared that have discussed the experiences of people of color and AIDS, including Gayle Roper's Christian The Mystery of the Poison Pen and Barbara Ann Porta's excellently orchestrated novel, Something Terrible Happened. Most of the young adult AIDS novels attempt to soften the message that AIDS is fatal and most of them do not utilize the apocalyptic AIDS narrative.

The earliest AIDS novels all sought to combat the AIDSphobia of the time and delivered strong moral messages that a person with AIDS was not someone deserving of discrimination. Besides being the earliest young adult AIDS novel to appear in 1986, M. E. Kerr's Night Kites is also one of the better AIDS novels. It tackles more than AIDS prejudice, describing Erick's life one summer in which he not only combats the AIDSphobia of both his family and the summer resort community but also comes to terms with his brother's revealed homosexuality. Other examples of early novels whose primary purpose is to educate their readers against AIDS discrimination include Miriam Cohen's Laura Leonora's First Amendment, Patricia Hermes' Be Still My Heart, Martha Humphreys' Until Whatever. Since 1992, there have been fewer novels published that focus specifically on the issue of AIDS discrimination. Perhaps this is because AIDS now occupies a less mysterious and frightening place in the general public's cultural consciousness. Examples of these more recent novels that still deal with this issue include Judy Baer's The Discovery, Clayton Bess' The May Day Rampage, and Gayle Roper's The Mystery of the Poison Pen. Interestingly, the novels by Baer and Roper focus on AIDS discrimination by Christian communities and aim to teach their Christian audiences to be more tolerant of people with AIDS. Roper's text is particularly interesting in its additional attention to the issue of racism by white Christians toward black Christians.

Besides combating AIDSphobia, another focus of some of the novels is the portrayal of how a young person can successfully cope with loving and sometimes losing a loved one to AIDS. These novels are more likely to invoke the apocalyptic AIDS narrative for representing someone living with AIDS. Early examples include Penny Durant's When Heroes Die and Alida Young's I Never Got to Say Good-bye. Many novels published since 1992 also deal with this issue, including Lee Bantle's Diving for the Moon, Paula Fox's complex psychological study, The Eagle's Kite, Teresa Nelson's Earthshine, and Barbara Ann Porta's Something Terrible Happened. The later novels tend to be more multi-dimensional than the earlier ones, not only tackling issues of AIDS education and mourning but some also describe adolescents living with HIV disease.

Few of the young adult AIDS novels depict protagonists actually living with AIDS. Gloria Micklowitz's early novel, Good-bye Tomorrow, published in 1987, not only describes a teenager living with AIDS but also, unlike many of the novels which shy away from explicitly describing teenage sexuality, describes Alex and Shannon's first sexual experiences. Unfortunately, Alex has been infected with HIV from a blood transfusion he had received several years previously and he is diagnosed with full-blown AIDS after he and Shannon have had unsafe sex. Shannon tests negative for HIV at the end of the novel. Critics have rightly complained that the novel conveys inaccurate information about AIDS. Only one novel, Fran Arrick's What You Don't Know Can Kill You, describes a protagonist who has become infected with HIV through sexual intercourse. Neither of these novels invokes the apocalyptic AIDS narrative structure.

5.11 Generic Boundaries and Unfinished Conclusions

The dissertation began with a discussion of the apocalyptic narratives of the early AIDS novels which, by rendering AIDS a death sentence, compressed time. These early novels reflected the cultural perceptions of the epidemic at that time, which perceived AIDS as a swiftly striking plague, robbing beautiful young gay men of their lives. There was an urgent sense of time running out, as the years passed, more people died and no cure was found. For gay men living with HIV disease, the cultural narrative that represented AIDS as a death sentence posed a site for cultural critique. The AIDS novels of David Feinberg and Paul Monette resist the apocalyptic cultural AIDS narrative and invoke narrative strategies that demonstrate that people living with HIV disease do not have to be passive victims but can live with their condition. For many people, HIV disease has now become just that, a condition. With new developments in medical treatment, life with AIDS has been prolonged. The time of AIDS has lengthened. Recent AIDS novels reflect this sense of increased time. Though for many, AIDS still means death, the narratives of these novels do not move in a singular apocalyptic trajectory to death. Instead, their narratives are more multidimensional or more fragmented, portraying the many other people impacted by the deaths of loved ones from AIDS-related complications, and most recently, characters living indefinitely with asymptomatic HIV disease.

Since the election of 1994, the United States has undergone a conservative backlash, from gutting both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to repealing affirmative action laws on university campuses across the nation. The political rhetoric of this backlash villainizes the poor, targeting "welfare mothers," often depicting them as uneducated black women with too many children. At the same time, however, with Tom Hanks' Academy Award for his role in Philadelphia and with the positive reception both to Greg Louganis' admission of being HIV+ and to his recently published autobiography, the nation seems to have grown slightly more knowledgeable and tolerant of white gay men with respect to AIDS. However, even with Magic Johnson's admission of his HIV+ status and with Arthur Ashe's death from AIDS-related complications, there has been a prevailing silence with regards to the epidemic as it has spread through populations of people of color. Regardless of whether or not this silence is due to inherent lack of concern for the plight of people of color by the public arena or due to the perception that AIDS is now only one of many chronic problems plaguing the nation and therefore less deserving of the spotlight, AIDS is rarely depicted in its effects on people of color.

Even though more and more AIDS novels appear every year, for the most part, they have reflected this silence. Does this silence challenge the central tenet of this dissertation, that AIDS novels can be a form of cultural critique? Throughout the dissertation, I have argued, no. It does seem, however, that AIDS novels do not perform radical cultural critique. As I have discussed in this chapter, the politics and economics of producing, publishing and marketing novels have had a direct impact on which AIDS novels have made it to the bookshelves of bookstores and libraries across the nation. Obviously, some novels (for many other reasons besides subversively portraying AIDS) will never make it into the public light. Additionally, though novels are written and read by people from every sector of the population, they still predominantly occupy a place as a middle-class cultural form, cheaper and more widely available than theatre tickets but requiring at least a semi-literate audience. As such, they have tended to reflect mainstream aspects of middle-class sensibility and experience (either straight or gay), and there are silences about aspects of sexism, racism, poverty, drug addiction, prostitution and alternative sexualities. For the many injecting drug users, their sexual partners, the prison inmates, the prostitutes, who died of AIDS-related diseases in the first decade of the epidemic in the United States, there are no AIDS novels that describe their life experiences and this silence will probably remain.

AIDS novels have thus remained a limited form of cultural critique, primarily targeting the apocalyptic totalitarianism of medical science and homophobia as well as testifying to the impact of the epidemic on personal lives. As time moves on, however, new AIDS novels have appeared that tackle a broader range of AIDS issues. As we have seen, E. Lynn Harris' Invisible Life and Just as I Am, Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days From Now, Charlotte Watson Sherman's Touch and Barbara Ann Porta's Something Terrible Happened have all appeared in the last five years and have begun to map a new area for AIDS novels, describing the experiences of people of color and AIDS. With the passage of time, not only has the genre of AIDS novels grown, but it has developed and deepened its coverage of AIDS-related issues. Gay and lesbian authors, straight authors, novelists of color, even well-known, extensively published authors like John Berger and Reynolds Price have all sought to represent their understanding of AIDS in the form of a novel. The swift, deadly striking of the early AIDS epidemic, which lent a rushed urgency to the early AIDS novels has lessened. Many recent AIDS novels reflect this sense of more time, being more carefully crafted, presenting more complex narrative structures (see, for example, Dale Peck's Martin and John and Berger's To the Wedding), as well as telling more complicated stories about AIDS. Until a cure for AIDS has been found, however, it would seem that the apocalyptic AIDS narrative will continue to exert an influence on the narratives of American AIDS novels.

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# Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of American AIDS Novels, 1982-1992

PRIMARY AIDS NOVELS

The experience of living with AIDS lies at the center of the narratives of these contemporary American novels.

Bishop, Michael. Unicorn Mountain. New York: Arbor House, 1988.

This novel interweaves Native American and unicorn mythologies to trace parallels between a virus that plagues a herd of mysterious unicorns in the Rockies and AIDS, which assails and ultimately kills Bo, one of the novel's main characters. Though ending with Bo's death, the novel moves beyond death by incorporating Ute mythology about spiritual afterlife and depicts Bo's journey to "Over There."

Black, Jeff. Gardy and Erin. Stamford, CT: Knights Press, 1989.

Gardy and Erin tells the story of a successful businessman, Gardy, and his experiences during the course of a year. The narrative is framed by two AIDS-related suicides: early on, Gardy's lover commits suicide following an HIV+ diagnosis, and toward the end of the book, Gardy witnesses his friend Stan commit suicide and die with dignity rather than suffer any longer from AIDS. Gardy ultimately copes with these losses by assuming fatherhood over a neglected little girl, Erin. AIDS and death are linked by suicide in this novel.

Bourjaily, Vance. Old Soldier: a novel. NY: Donald I. Fine, 1990.

This novel describes a fishing trip that the old soldier, 60-year old and just divorced Joe makes with his younger brother and musician, Tommy, whose AIDS prevents his lungs from working well enough to play bagpipes. The novel culminates in a shootout, when AIDSphobic nearby campers burn their camper and fire weapons on Tommy. Tommy drowns himself in the river rather than subject Joe and "little Joe" (Tommy's son) to a slow death. The novel ends with Joe telling his grandson that Tommy died a "clean death."

Bram, Christopher. In Memory of Angel Clare. New York: Fine, 1988.

This novel traces how a group of friends copes with the loss of their mutual friend, Clarence, who has died of AIDS. Interspersed within this narrative is the recollection of Clarence's life with his lover, Michael, and Clarence's developing illness and then death from AIDS. This secondary narrative tracks the apocalyptic trajectory of AIDS but is somewhat alleviated by the primary narrative's depiction of the surviving characters' emotional growth beyond mourning.

Davis, Christopher. Valley of the Shadow. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

This poetically written story is told in a form of stream-of-consciousness, first-person narration, that remembers and celebrates a life of love and health. Though the novel ends with the first-person narrator sick with AIDS, by concentrating on the past and memories of life and health, it resists looking forward toward death.

Duplechan, Larry. Tangled Up in Blue. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Though none of the characters in this novel has AIDS, the narrative revolves around the fear of AIDS as deadly, with two of the main characters, the married couple, Maggie and Dan, afraid they have contracted HIV, and with the third main character, Crockett, learning to cope with having ARC. The plot involves the untangling of the intimate knots tied between the three characters, when Maggie discovers that several years previously Dan had been Crockett's lover.

Feinberg, David. Eighty-Sixed. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1989.

Eighty-Sixed is divided into two parts. The first part, "1980: Ancient History," traces first-person narrator BJ's initiation into gay sexuality, and in the second section, "1986: Learning How to Cry," AIDS looms larger and larger as people everywhere in BJ's life seem to be dying of the disease and BJ finally must face it. The novel ends with his "learning how to cry."

---. Spontaneous Combustion. New York: Viking, 1991.

The first-person narrator of Eighty-Sixed continues to tell his life story in Spontaneous Combustion, in a series of linked episodes from 1985-1990. AIDS continues to impinge on BJ's life, as friends now get sick with AIDS. In a section, "Despair," BJ finally takes the Test, and subsequent episodes describe various issues related to living with HIV, from sex, to experimental drug therapy, to AIDS activism, to telling his family his HIV status. The novel ends with a humorous appendix, "After the Cure, 1996." In his two AIDS novels, humor is both a weapon and a shield that Feinberg uses to deal with the enormity of AIDS.

Ferro, Robert. Second Son. New York: Crown, 1988.

This novel tells the story of Mark, who is sick with AIDS. Second Son opens with the death of Mark's mother and describes the strained family relations, relations complicated by his being "second son" and so unlike the rest of the conventional, successful family. As the novel unfolds, we see Mark develop a close and loving relationship with another PLWA, Bill, and by the end of the novel, Mark's family reaffirms its love for him and resolves to stand by him as he tries experimental treatments for AIDS.

Graham, Clayton. Tweeds. Stamford CT: Knights, 1987.

At the heart of this bildungsroman is the story of the relationship between Scot and the first-person narrator, Cory, and the misunderstanding that they are both straight. In a culminating scene, they reveal their love for each other, only for Corey to find out that Scot has AIDS. The novel then traces their evolving relationship, from Corey's learning not to be homophobic, to their wedding, and ultimately to Scot's death. The novel ends with Corey talking to a new friend, Mark, about Scot, and through this talking and remembering, Scot's death is somewhat mitigated.

Hoffman, Alice. At Risk. NY: Putnam's Sons, 1988.

At Risk tells what has become a classic story of a suburban family who must deal with AIDS when daughter Amanda develops AIDS from a prior blood transfusion. Her family must confront the emotional trauma of her impending death as well as the social difficulties of the local community's ignorance and AIDSphobia. The novel ends with her leaving for the hospital and focuses on her younger brother's living on.

Huston, Bo. Remember Me. New York: Amethyst, 1991.

In Remember Me, the 30 year-old, HIV+, unnamed first-person narrator, describes in present tense the events of his life in a small town over the course of year, framed by the his submission of a pornographic novel for publication and his learning that the novel will not be published because XXX Press has filed for bankruptcy. Not only is the narrator's life "on hold" because he's waiting to hear about his manuscript, but his life as a gay man also feels on hold, his HIV+ status isolating him from the other gay men he encounters. Through the course of the novel, his HIV disease progresses. He is eventually hospitalized with full-blown AIDS and then discharged, the doctor telling him, "'it looks like maybe you won't die for a while yet'" (133-4).

Ingegno, Alfred. Shared Legacy. New York: Birch Brook Impressions, 1992.

One of the only novels to describe the experiences of a woman with AIDS, Shared Legacy begins with Sharyn discovering that her unfaithful fiance has infected her with HIV. The novel then follows her life over the next couple of years, during which her ex-fiance dies and her new boyfriend, Rob, both cheats on her and ultimately rapes her. The novel culminates in a trial, at which she is accused of infecting Rod with HIV+, but the case is finally thrown out. The novel concludes with her birthday, and though sick with AIDS, she is surrounded by friends.

Klass, Perri. Other Women's Children. New York: Random House, 1990.

This novel depicts the experience of a pediatrician, Amelia, who is also a wife and mother. Scenes oscillate between the hospital and her home life, between her own healthy, growing son and Darren, the black child under her care at the hospital, who is sick with AIDS. The novel describes the agony both pediatrician and parents suffer, helplessly witness to the unrelenting suffering of terminally ill children. Though Darren dies toward the end of the novel, Amelia retains her hope, and the novel ends on her son's fifth birthday and with the eternal hope of a pediatrician, "Imagine them all getting better" (284).

McGehee, Peter. Boys Like Us. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.

As a "slice of life," Boys Like Us describes the lives of a group of friends one summer in Toronto. The novel opens with the first-person narrator, Zero, going to care for his best friend, Randy, who is sick with AIDS. The novel then traces the events of that summer, from Zero's love interests and Randy's unstable health to the end of the summer, when Zero takes Randy to the airport and Randy departs Toronto to make a movie.

Monette, Paul. Afterlife. New York: Crown, 1990.

Afterlife describes the responses of three HIV+ men, Sonny, Dell and Steven, to living in the "afterlife" - the life after their lovers' deaths from AIDS. While Sonny resists coming to terms with his HIV status by continually focusing on hopes for the future, Dell cannot recover from his grief over the past. Unlike the other protagonists, Steven makes peace with the past and the future, and the novel ends with him in a growing relationship with his new lover, Mark.

---. Halfway Home. New York: Crown, 1991.

This novel interweaves two plots, a love story and a family reconciliation. Though the first-person narrator, Tom, is living with AIDS and the daily degeneration of his body, the novel resists depicting him as an "AIDS victim." Instead, Halfway Home shows him successfully falling in love and reconciling with a once homophobic brother and his family.

Moore, Oscar. A Matter of Life and Sex. New York: Dutton, 1992.

Interweaving "fact" and "fiction," Moore as narrator recounts the life of Hugo (a man who has just died of AIDS) who originally told Moore his life story as they shared the same hospital room in the AIDS ward. In its depiction of Hugo's life, progressing from Hugo's youth, to his sexual development, to his HIV diagnosis, and finally to his death the narrative enacts the apocalyptic paradigm.

Redon, Joel. Bloodstream. Stamford, CT: Knights Press, 1988.

Bloodstream recounts the return home of Peter, a 26 year-old from a wealthy family, as he marshals his forces to fight AIDS. Though the novel ends with Peter emphasizing the importance of living with AIDS, much of the novel deals with his condemnation of his past sexual behavior. The intimate relationship he develops with another PLWA named Yale does not contain sex and it ends with Yale's death.

Reed, Paul. Facing It: a Novel of AIDS. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1984.

As the first novel to be published in the United States whose central theme is AIDS, Facing It provides a classic example of an apocalyptic AIDS plot: it traces Andy's life, as he is diagnosed, gets sick and ultimately dies from an AIDS-related illness.

Ryman, Geoff. Was: a Novel. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Was incorporates aspects of fantasy and reality to interweave three story strands: Jonathan's struggle against AIDS and his increasing dementia, of Dorothy's story in The Wizard of Oz, and of Oz author L. Frank Baum's childhood. The narrative moves toward a convergence of the three narrative strands to a place in Kansas. Jonathan disappears, Dorothy walks away after the tornado, and L. Frank Baum promises to remember his childhood.

Weir, John. The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

In this novel, the story of Eddie's irreversible decline and death from AIDS is framed by chapters narrated in the first-person by Saul, who relates his impressions of Eddie and his feelings about his own relationship to his lover, Merritt, who has had a brief affair with Eddie. Besides Eddie, none of the other main characters has AIDS and none of them die.

SECONDARY AIDS NOVELS

AIDS occurs either in a subsidiary plot or as a simple plot device (typically as a convenient "closure" mechanism) in these contemporary American novels.

Borgman, C.F. River Road. NY: Plume, 1988.

River Road spans more than fifty years, telling the story of Eugene's sexual life, from his childhood in the fifties, through his career in the 80's as an artist, to the early decades of the twenty-first century, in which he has moved to Brazil with his Brazilian lover, Octavio. AIDS enters the novel in the 80's, as friends of his begin to die. By projecting the novel into a future in which AIDS is no longer a problem, Borgman can portray the sexual fulfillment Eugene and Octavio are now able to obtain in their relationship.

Bryant, Dorothy. A Day in San Francisco. Berkeley: Ata Books, 1982.

This novel tells the story of feminist, Clara, returning to San Francisco after a fifteen year absence to visit her estranged gay son, Frank, who is sick with hepatitis. Clara is concerned with the promiscuity and openness of the gay community of San Francisco and during lunch with an old gay friend, hears about a mysterious "gay cancer." The final confrontation between Clara and Frank ends with her denouncing his promiscuity and his demanding that she leave.

Calhoun, Jackie. Lifestyles. New York: Naiad, 1990.

Primarily a love story, Lifestyles describes Kate's burgeoning romance with Pat, a neighbor at their vacation cabin where Kate has retreated to sort things out, having separated from her husband. In the latter portion of the novel, Kate's brother Gordie, who is dying of AIDS, comes to stay with her. They begin receiving threatening letters and are harrassed by an anonymous terrorist about Gordie because he has AIDS. When Gordie dies, the terrorist leaves, and ultimately, Kate and Pat are alone again and in love, planning to move in together.

Champagne, John. The Blue Lady's Hands. Secaucus, NJ: Stuart, 1988.

AIDS is only one more experience of pain that the first-person narrator of The Blue Lady's Hands suffers in his life as a gay man. The novel describes his quest for love and his repeated experiences of failed relationships with other gay men who cheat on him, use him or abuse him. "The Blue Lady's Hands" are those of the Virgin Mary, which persistently pierce his heart and cause him tearing pain as she asks, "how much room?"

Chappell, Helen (Larry McMurtry). Acts of Love. New York: Pocket Books, 1989.

This novel describes the 20 year college reunion of three girlfriends and how their lives have changed since their college days in the late 60's. AIDS provides a convenient ending to the novel, when Emma reveals she has AIDS and is planning to kill herself. One of the male graduates of their college, Remy, a billionnaire, convinces her not to, and he whisks her off to show her the world in her remaining time.

Cunningham, Michael. A Home at the End of the World. New York: Bantam, 1990.

This is a well-written bildungsroman of three characters who form an alternative family structure to traditional families. AIDS enters the picture toward the end of the novel when Jonathan's lover, Erich, comes to live at their house before he dies of AIDS.

Curzon, Daniel. The World Can Break Your Heart. Stamford, CT: Knights, 1984.

Like a bildungsroman, this is a coming-out story that describes the childhood, adolescence and sexual coming of age of Benjamin, who spends the majority of his life trying to come to terms with his homosexuality. In the final portion of the novel, he walks out on his family, renounces the Catholic Church, moves to Hollywood in the hopes of becoming an actor and discovers the pleasures and availability of gay sex. He is eventually diagnosed with KS, and the novel ends with him taking in a former trick, Jim, who has been left homeless because of his AIDS. A letter, addressed to an imaginary sister and written some time later, concludes the book and reveals that Jim has died and that Benjamin waits, not very hopefully, for a cure for AIDS.

Diamon, N.A. Castro Street Memories. San Francisco: Persona, 1988.

Castro Street Memories describes the wonderful memories the first-person narrator has of his gay coming-of-age during the 70's and early 80's and his moving from New York to San Francisco. AIDS is only briefly mentioned toward the end of the novel, when the narrator describes some of the homophobic outfall of AIDSphobia and his own changes in sexual behavior in the age of AIDS.

Dunne, Dominick. People Like Us. New York: Crown, 1988.

This novel primarily describes New York City's high society and its jetsetting, scandalous, wealthy members. AIDS enters the novel periodically, with references to members of this society who have died or are dying of AIDS, though none of the main characters is significantly affected.

Fast, Howard. The Dinner Party. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

The Dinner Party traces the course of one day in the life of the aging senator, Richard Cromwell, which culminates in a dinner party, during which his son, Leonard, breaks the news to his family of his HIV infection. Leonard explains to his father that he has reconciled himself to his condition by drawing from eastern philosophies that emphasize the importance of the here and now: "Here was holy ground. Here was eternity" (250).

Hall, Brian. The Dreamers. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

Set in Vienna, "the City of Dreams," this novel is primarily a love story that describes how the first-person narrator, a young American graduate student named Eric meets and falls in love with an Austrian woman named Jutta. The novel traces the tormented twists and turns of their relationship, complicated both by Eric's HIV+ status and by both of their emotional problems. The novel ends with Jutta dead and Eric marrying her roommate in order to obtain Austrian citizenship so he can adopt her five-year-old son, Timo.

Harris, E. Lynn. Invisible Life: a Novel. 1991. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

This novel tells the story of first-person narrator, Raymond Jr., as he struggles to come to terms with his sexual identity as a black, bisexual, Christian man. AIDS enters Raymond's life through the figure of Candance, the best friend of his girlfriend, Nicole. Candance was infected by Kelvin, Raymond's first lover from years ago, and she dies of AIDS. While Candance is hospitalized and dying, Raymond reveals his bisexuality to Nicole, who then breaks up with him. Through the course of the novel, Raymond reflects on how the clandestine bisexuality of black men threatens their unsuspecting female sexual partners.

Hayes, Mary-Rose. Amethyst. New York: Dutton, 1989.

This novel describes the love and intrigue in the lives of four wealthy white women, who met at an English boarding school. One of them, Victoria, can tell the future using a magical amethyst ring. AIDS comes in at the end of the novel, when Victoria's gay brother, Tancredi, dies of AIDS and bequeaths his vast financial empire to her.

Indiana, Gary. Horse Crazy. New York: Grove, 1989.

Though the first-person narrator's previous lover died of AIDS and he confronts his own HIV status at the beginning of the novel, the narrator's story primarily involves his obsession and complicated, ultimately failed relationship with the much younger, gorgeous and enigmatic character, Gregory, who apparently is hooked on heroin.

Joseph, Bertram. One-Way Passage. Jerusalem: Good Times, 1988.

Though published in Israel, this novel describes the life of an American doctor, Roger Stanwyck, and his various travails, from his inability to cure AIDS to his problematic love-life with women. AIDS reenters the picture briefly toward the end of the novel, when his new wife overcomes her AIDSphobia to adopt an HIV+ boy.

Maso, Carole. The Art Lover. San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

This novel develops a complex interplay between a fictional and an autobiographical narrative, both of which struggle to cope with a multitude of personal losses, from a mother's suicide, to a father's stroke, to a close friend's death from AIDS, which ends the novel.

Maupin, Armistead. Babycakes. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. [Vol. 4 of The Tales

of the City series].

As one of the Tales of the City series, Babycakes recounts the intertwined lives of a cast of characters whose primary geographical locus is 28 Barbary Lane, a house in San Francisco. This particular novel contains two primary story lines: the first includes Mary Ann's machinations to have a child, though her husband has no sperm count; the second involves Michael, who is mourning the loss of his lover, Jon, to AIDS. He travels to Death Valley and to England in an effort to pull himself out of his depression. The novel ends with Mary Ann obtaining a baby and with Michael returning to Barbaray Lane.

---. Significant Others. New York: Perennial Library, 1987.

Another of Maupin's Tales of the City, this novel gives yet another "slice of life" account of the characters who live at 28 Barbaray Lane. AIDS enters the novel when Brian, one of the protagonists, finds out that an old lover Geordie has AIDS, which she got from an IV-drug-using boyfriend, and Brian waits for his test results, worried he may have spread it to other women. At the end of the novel, his gay HIV+ friend, Michael, attends a wake for someone who has died of AIDS, but the wake serves simply as an opportunity for him to find out that a new love interest returns his feelings.

Moore, Patrick. This Every Night. New York: Amethyst, 1990.

This Every Night describes one week in the life of an anonymous first-person narrator, in which he moves from silent nocturnal pursuits of anonymous sex to political activism, when he gets swept up one night in an ACT UP demonstration and rediscovers his own voice. AIDS figures on the periphery, when he remembers all those who have died, and he considers ACT UP's slogan that silence=death.

Morales, Alejandro. The Rag Doll Plagues. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1992.

The Rag Doll Plagues is divided into three historically discrete sections, past, present, future, tied together by the theme of plagues and a consistent first-person narrator, named Don Gregorio in the first section and Gregory in the last two. The second section describes contemporary history and Gregory's intense love relationship with a hemophiliac woman named Sandra, who ultimately gets sick and dies of AIDS.

Munoz, Elias. The Greatest Performance. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1991.

A poetic novel of exile, The Greatest Performance recounts the life stories of two friends, lesbian Rosita and gay Mario, from their childhood in Cuba, to their separate journeys to the United States, to Mario's testing HIV+, to the final section of the novel, in which they sit together in a bar in California, recalling their lives. The novels resists both a linear recounting of events as well as "truthful," fixed, recollections of the past. Indeed, the end of the novel calls into question the "truth" of any of what has gone before and that "a plague hasn't broken out..." (150).

Musto, Michael. Manhattan on the Rocks. NY: Holt, 1989.

AIDS plays a secondary role in this novel, which primarily recounts the socializing of the first-person narrator, Vinnie, in New York City's fast life. In the final chapters, Vinnie become``s involved in an AIDS activist group that stages a demonstration at the funeral of an influential social figure who has died of AIDS.

Nava, Michael. Howtown: a Novel of Suspense. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

This is one of Nava's murder mysteries, featuring Henry Rios, the first-person narrator, who is a 38 yr-old Chicano gay lawyer. In this novel, Henry is called upon to investigate the murder of a man suspected of producing child pornography. AIDS figures in this novel only secondarily in the figure of Josh, Henry's 25 yr-old Jewish lover, who is HIV+.

---. The Hidden Law. New York: Harper/Collins, 1992.

In this Henry Rios mystery, Henry is called upon to investigate the death of a state senator. Framed within the murder mystery is the story of Henry's personal life and his failing relationship with Josh, who is HIV+. Josh has become quite involved in AIDS politics and ultimately dumps Henry for his lack of participation in the fight against AIDS. After the murder mystery has been solved, Josh contacts Henry for help in writing his will, because he now has CMV and is dying. The novel ends with Henry entering a new relationship with a part-time lover named Lonnie.

Puccia, Joseph. The Holy Spirit Dance Club. Austin, TX: Liberty, 1988.

This novel is primarily a recollection of the first-person narrator's relationship to a wild dance club and its orgiastic drug frenzies during the 80's. In the final section of the novel, the club is threatened by dropping enrollment, due to AIDS, the war against drugs, and by an invasion of straights. The novel ends with Harold's decision not to go anymore being challenged by a Japanese lesbian, who urges him to help preserve the club by sharing it with straights.

Purdy, James. Garments the Living Wear. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1989.

This novel is reminiscent of an 18th century comedy of manners and describes the lives of a group of thespians in New York City and their rich patrons. AIDS enters the novel in the figure of a religious fanatic named Jonas, who apparently has AIDS. He falls to his death, when he mysteriously, spontaneously combusts in a public address to his followers.

Rabushka, Jerrold. The Omega Boys: a Gay Novel of Realistic Dimension: A Tale of

Love, Violence, and a Rather Bad AIDS Play. Clayton, MO: New Universe Productions, 1990.

This short novel (55 pages) begins with the first-person narrator, a Jewish gay man named Terry, picking up a man named Reed down by the river in St. Louis. The novel describes the growth, difficulties and ultimately the failure of their relationship, which is told in conjunction with the story of Terry's friend, John, putting together and producing a play about men with AIDS. The novel ends with a successful performance of the play and Terry resisting Reed's attempts to reel him back into the relationship. Terry's psyche is haunted by AIDS, when he remembers his friends and his last lover who have died of AIDS.

Rees, David. The Wrong Apple. Stamford, CT: Knights, 1988.

The Wrong Apple describes the entanglements of three people's love lives, which become increasingly complicated when the first-person narrator, David, finds out he's HIV+ and his bisexual male lover, Kim, dumps him for Katya. The novel ends with them all reuniting at a dinner party, in which David and Kim make peace with Kim's bisexuality, and David is embarking on a more emotionally mature and yet sexually satisfying relationship with his new lover, Simon.

Rule, Jane. Memory Board. New York: Naiad, 1987.

Memory Board describes the reunion of the elderly twins David and Diana after 40 years of estrangement due to David's wife's homophobia. With her death, David reestablishes his friendship with his sister and her lover, Constance, though each now suffers from old age: arthritis, deafness and memory loss. AIDS is only one manifestation of mortality in this novel, when David's nephew is diagnosed with AIDS.

Schulman, Sarah. People in Trouble. New York: Dutton, 1990.

This novel describes the lives of Kate, her husband Peter, and her lesbian lover and AIDS activist, Molly, over the course of a year. Molly's participation in an activist organization, Justice (akin to ACT UP) forms a subsidiary plot that gains prominence toward the end of the novel. Though Molly's gay friends are dying of AIDS, the emphasis in this novel is on other people involved in the AIDS epidemic, especially those who fight for social and political justice for PLWAs.

Stephens, Jack. Triangulation. New York: Crown, 1989.

Besides the opening chapter, in which the protagonist teaches a class on epidemiology and AIDS, the novel describes events in his middle-aged, academic life; AIDS never reenters the narrative.

Uyemoto, Holly. Rebel Without a Clue. New York: Crown, 1989.

The first-person narrator, Christian, describes the events of the summer following his highschool graduation and his life in the Hollywood fast crowd of drugs, sex and parties. Toward the end of the novel, his best friend, Thomas, a successful model, reveals to Christian that he has AIDS, and the novel ends with Christian's reflections about Thomas and AIDS.

Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987.

This is a novel about the high life in New York City. Chapter 15, entitled "The Masque of the Red Death," plays on the reference to Poe's short story and links it to AIDS, when Wolfe describes a guest at the party (apparently afflicted with AIDS) addressing the partygoers with Poe's dark, prophetic vision.

SCIENCE FICTION AND INTRIGUE AIDS NOVELS

Either by telling futuristic stories or by focusing on the intrigue involved in the medical research on AIDS, these works of science fiction and/or intrigue all represent aspects of the paranoia surrounding the AIDS epidemic.

Bryan, Jed. A Cry in the Desert. Austin: Banned Books, 1987.

This is a futuristic vision of what happens to the gay community of Las Vegas, when extensive AIDSphobia triggers the quarantining and imprisoning of gay men. By the end of the novel, the protagonist, Carl, is able to rescue and be reunited with his lover, Larry, though the evil, homophobic mastermind, Botts, is still on the loose.

Buck, Charles H. The Master Cure. New York: Jove, 1989.

This is a futuristic account in which an AIDS vaccine has already been invented but a new virus is being developed by a mysterious U.S. organization and being experimented with on Africans. The two main characters, heterosexuals Gloria and Joseph, battle these mysterious forces, obtain and convey the necessary data to stop the new epidemic and the evil masterminds are killed.

Busby, F. M. The Breeds of Man. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1988.

Book one of this science fiction novel begins in the near future, with AIDS spreading rapidly and threatening the world population in Book One. Cogdill, the protagonist of Book One works for a company that seeks to produce an AIDS vaccine. The last two books of the novel move forward in time beyond the AIDS epidemic to describe a new plague, has arisen from botched attempts to develop an AIDS vaccine. Book Three is told from the point of view of Troy, a member of the new species of human that is beginning to phase out the older species. Called Mark Twos, members of his species periodically undergo physical sexual transformation, shifting between both sexes. Fixed gender categories become obsolete and the world promises to become a better place.

Fisher, James N. And Into Death's Spiral: a Novel. Santa Barbara, CA: Collective

Creations by Fisher, 1990.

And Into Death's Spiral (AIDS), a self-published novel by a doctor in private practice, tells a futuristic story of how Metamorphea Virus (a virulent mutant strain of AIDS) has become the "Plague of the Twentieth Century," killing over 50% of the world's population. The novel centers on the life of Joe, a doctor who struggles to help patients who fall victim to MV and die. By the end of the novel, though Joe has survived and a cure has been found, he has lost his wife and a child to the Plague. The novel ends at January 1, 2000, the beginning of a new millenium in which the world's population has vowed after the devastation of the Plague to live in peace and good will.

Johnson, Toby (Edwin). Plague: A Novel about Healing. Boston: Alyson, 1987.

Plague traces the conspiracy of an organization to spread AIDS, though this organization has the means by which to cure AIDS. The novel ends with the protagonist and several other characters undergoing spontaneous remission of AIDS due to a change in their philosophical attitudes.

Mains, Geoffrey. Gentle Warriors. Stamford, CT: Knights Press, 1989.

Gentle Warriors laments a time gone by and details a presidential assassination plot by a group of "gentle warriors," gay leathermen decimated by AIDS and enraged by the lack of governmental response to the epidemic. The assassination attempt ultimately fails when the assigned sharp-shooter collapses and dies of AIDS.

Subbarao, Aragam. The Riddle of AIDS. New York: Carlton Press, 1991.

This short novel speculates that AIDS was a mutant virus created by the Russians, who were using Haitians as guinea pigs to experiment with viral warfare. This global and political storyline is framed by a more personal story - the quest a middle-class, white American father named Robert embarks upon to discover how his son, Peter, has acquired HIV through a blood transfusion. Ironically, at the end of the novel, it turns out Peter's first test for HIV had been a false positive and that the more accurate Western Blot test now reveals that he does not actually have HIV.

Warmbold, Jean. June Mail. Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent, 1986.

First-person narrator, Sarah, is a reporter investigating the disappearance of Dr. Winslow, a genetic engineer she once dated. The novel exposes the possibility of an enormous coverup, that AIDS was originally a virus developed as part of a biochemical war game. Winslow disappears, her evidence to the prove her story is stolen, and the novel itself finally serves as her testimony to the "truth" of the events she relates.

MURDER AND THRILLER AIDS NOVELS

These murder and thriller novels use AIDS as a tool to fuel their plots.

Coben, Harlan. Miracle Cure. New York: SPI Books, 1991.

In this thriller, the heterosexual duo of Sara, the gorgeous newsanchor, and Michael, a private eye, is on the of Dr. Harvey, a Dr. Mengele-like character, who uses homosexuals as disposable guinea pigs for his research into an AIDS cure. In the end, Dr. Harvey is in jail and reads a newspaper excerpt that describes the birth of Sara and Michael's son.

Cook, Robin. Godplayer. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1983.

This novel reads like a murder mystery, with strange cases of SSD (Sudden Surgical Death) being investigated at Boston Memorial Hospital. Cassi, the diabetic protagonist, has recently married the hospital's top surgeon, named Thomas, and they both work there. One of the key patients to die of SSD is a man named Jeoffrey, who has been diagnosed with AIDS. There is a controversy about treating Jeoffrey's heart condition, because several doctors think energy should be spent "saving" cardiac patients who do not have terminal illnesses. It is Jeoffrey's blood that when analyzed contains a suspicious precipitate, which reveals foul play. In a final showdown in which her husband tries to kill her, Cassi confronts Thomas' addiction to prescription drugs and his desire to play God.

Dawson, David. Double Blind. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

In Double Blind, the psychiatrist, Dr. Snow, investigates a medicaly mystery, which involves gay men experiencing some kind of strange dementia. Through the course of the novel, he solves the mystery, discovering that the dementia is a side effect of an AIDS drug, sees the evil men killed and gets the woman.

Hansen, Joseph. Early Graves: a Dave Brandstetter Mystery. New York: The Mysterious

Press, 1987.

This is one of Hansen's murder mysteries featuring the middle-aged, gay detective, Dave Brandstetter, who in this novel investigates a series of murders of men who test positive for HIV. During his investigation, Dave encounters various homophobic people on the police force and struggles to work through his relationship with his much younger, black ex-lover, Cecil. The serial killer, who is shot while being apprehended, had AIDS and had been killing the men who had possibly infected him. Further investigation reveals that the one man not murdered by the serial killer had led an evil life, not only infecting his current wife with HIV, but had also previously abandoned another wife and a son. It turns out he was killed by this enraged son, who finally tracked him down. The novel ends with Dave and his ex-lover reuniting.

Mayes, Sharon. Immune. New York: New Rivers, 1987.

Immune opens with the mystery of why a woman named Suzanne committed suicide. Through the course of the novel, it turns out that all of the primary characters, through their sexual entanglements, have been exposed to AIDS and that Suzanne killed herself when she learned of her HIV status, due to her fears of dying from AIDS.

McBain, Ed. The House that Jack Built. New York: Henry Hold and Co., 1988.

AIDS figures only tangentially in this murder mystery, in that the murdered man, Jonathan, tests positive for HIV. As Matthew closes in on his investigation, it turns out that Jonathan had led a nefarious life, living off his brother, abandoning his child, and he was finally murdered by the child's mother, when he tried to extort money from her.

Nava, Michael. Goldenboy. Boston: Alyson, 1988.

The first of Nava's Henry Rios murder mysteries, this novel begins with Henry being asked by his friend, Larry, to take a case of his, because Larry is dying of AIDS. The case involves defending a young man named Jim who has been accused of killing a man who had treated him homophobically. The story grows more complicated, when Henry meets Josh, who had worked at the restaurant where the murder happened. With Henry's help, Josh comes out to his family and together they deal with Josh's HIV+ status and what that means for their sexual relationship. In the end, it turns out that Jim was an innocent stooge for the machinations a villain, who is ultimately killed.

Turnbull, Peter. Two Way Cut. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

One of a mystery series, Two Way Cut describes the investigations of the Glasgow police officer, Phil Hamilton, into the mystery surrounding a beheaded corpse. AIDS figures marginally in the story, when Phil's investigations lead him through an AIDS care ward.

Wydra, Frank. The Cure. New York: Dell Publishing, 1992.

In this medical thriller, disease specialist, Luke Chinsky, takes over the project of his murdered boss, which involves finding a cure for AIDS. In the course of events, he encounters a deadly killer, who stalks him and Brenda Byrne, a gorgeous reporter, who helps him. In the end, it is left unclear whether the data Luke acquires will cure AIDS.

YOUNG ADULT AIDS NOVELS

Most of these novels are written by women for a young adult audience and serve to teach moral lessons about AIDS.

Arrick, Fran. What You Don't Know Can Kill You. New York: Dell, 1992.

This novel opens with a family giving blood to help an injured friend, which leads to the discovery that daughter Ellen is HIV+. The novel then details the emotional responses of the family and community, as well as teaches the dangers of unsafe sex, since Ellen wrongly assumed that her boyfriend was also a virgin when they had sex. The novel ends with Ellen assuring her sister that everything will be okay.

Cohen, Miriam. Laura Leonora's First Amendment. New York: Lodestar, 1990.

Nerdy, brainy and Jewish, Laura struggles to survive the difficulties of life in junior highschool, caught between the moral codes of her family and her own desires to fit in with her schoolmates. This conflict culminates in the end of the novel, when a boy with AIDS begins attending school and AIDSphobia infects both her homelife and her school life. Laura learns something about herself, when she stands up not only to her schoolmates but to her own family and sits beside the boy in the cafeteria at lunch.

Durant, Penny. When Heroes Die. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1992.

This novel describes first how Gary, the seventh grade protagonist, learns that his favorite uncle, Rob, has AIDS and then how Gary gradually comes to terms with Rob's impending death. During the course of the novel, Gary is learning how to approach the girl he finds attractive and Rob offers advice. Before Rob dies, he reveals to Gary that he the reason he had never married the girl he had loved was because he is gay. Following Rob's death, Gary begins dating.

Hermes, Patricia. Be Still My Heart. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989.

This novel is primarily a love story, describing how the protagonist, a highschool sophomore named Allison, is in love with David, one of her classmates. AIDS enters the novel when school gossip insinuates that the husband of one of the teachers, Ms. Adams, has AIDS. Allison, David and several of the other students resist the paranoia and AIDSphobia of the other students and the parents. They make everyone read the Surgeon General's Report and Allison comes up with the idea that Mr. Adams should come and talk to people at school so they can get to know him. He comes and everyone likes him. The novel ends with David and Allison dating.

Humphreys, Martha. Until Whatever. New York: Scholastic, 1991.

In this novel, Karen learns to stand up to the ostracism of other highschool kids and to the class bias and AIDSphobia of her mother in order to remain friends with Connie, who is from a poor background and who has AIDS. They will remain friends "until whatever."

Hunt, Angela E. A Dream to Cherish. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1992.

In this novel, the first-person narrator, Cassie, has returned to her old highschool to find that she no longer fits in with her old friends, many of whom are boy crazy. She meets a new student, a beautiful senior, Arien, from California and they become friends. Arien tells people that she has AIDS, though the novel does not detail how she acquired it sexually. Cassie has to confront her fears and the prejudices of her school and community. The previous year, her boyfriend had converted her to Christianity and now Arien is receptive to his talk about the Bible. Though Arien dies from AIDS at the end of the novel, because of her Christian belief system, Cassie believes Arien is not dead but saved.

Kerr, M.E. Night Kites. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

In Night Kites, the first-person narrator, 17-year old Erick, learns a lot one summer, when his older brother, Pete, both comes out to their family and reveals that he has AIDS. Erick must then deal not only with his father's homophobia but also with the AIDSphobia of his own girlfriend, Niki. By the end of the novel, Erick breaks up with Nicki and grows closer to Pete.

Levy, Marilyn. Rumors and Whispers. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

This novel is unlike many of the other young adult AIDS novels that treat teenage sexuality either generally or euphemistically. Highschool senior, Sarah, has just moved from Ohio to California with her family and she has to attend a new school. The novel describes her developing sexual relationship with another senior and their negotiation of safer sex. The novel also describes her older brother's coming out to the family, her father's kicking him out, and his lover, Terry. AIDS becomes an issue when it is discovered that her art teacher, Craig Hill has AIDS. There is a school meeting about Craig and the novel specifically describes the ways in which HIV is transmitted. The novel ends with Sarah's admission into a school of design located near the college her boyfriend will be attending in the fall.

Micklowitz, Gloria. Good-bye Tomorrow. New York: Delacorte Press, 1987.

Good-bye Tomorrow opens with Shannon beginning her first day of junior year at highschool and meeting a guy named Alex, who is new to the school. They become involved and have sex together for the first time. As the novel unfolds, Alex becomes sick with AIDS-like symptoms, and a year ago, he had been injured in a car accident and had had two blood transfusions. He stays out of school during this time and breaks up with Shannon, not wanting to burden her with his sickness. Her HIV test comes back negative, but she'll have to be retested. Someone leaks the story to the newspaper that a student with AIDS will be returning to school, and the novel ends with Shannon and several other friends greeting Alex at the parking lot and escorting him to school.

Young, Alida. I Never Got to Say Good-Bye. Worthington, OH: Willowisp, 1988.

Highschool sophomore, Traci has to deal with her dad's kid brother, Mark, developing AIDS. He'd been infected with HIV from a blood transfusion he'd had four years previously, when he'd been in a car accident in South America that had killed his parents. Mark drops out of college and comes home to live with his brother and family in Los Angeles. Mark's symptoms grow increasingly severe and Traci has to deal with the AIDSphobia and prejudice of the people in town and at school. Unlike other young adult AIDS novels, this novel describes her family attending an AIDS support group and depicts other people besides her brother living with AIDS.

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# Selected Bibliography of American AIDS Novels Published Since 1992

* Highly recommended reading

PRIMARY AIDS NOVELS

Berger, John. To the Wedding. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.

Brown, Rebecca. The Gifts of the Body. New York: Harper/Collins, 1994.

Carpenter, William. A Keeper of Sheep. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions,

1994.

Coe, Christopher. Such Times. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1993.

Corbin, Steven. A Hundred Days From Now. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1994.*

Davis, Christopher. Philadelphia: a novel. [Based on screenplay by Ron Nyswaner].

New York: Bantam Books, 1994.

Guibert, Herve. The Compassion Protocol. Tr. James Kirkup. New York: G.

Braziller, 1994.

---. To the Friend Who Did not Save My Life. New York: Atheneum, 1991.

Kondoleon, Harry. Diary of a Lost Boy: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1994.

Kposowa, Tibbie S. Silence that is not Golden. Cincinnati, OH: Tabay Publications,

1995.

McMullan, Margaret. When Warhol Was Still Alive: a novel. Freedom, CA: Crossing

Press, 1994.

Neale, John. The Laughter of Heroes. New York: Serpent's Tail, 1993.

Peck, Dale. Martin and John. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993.*

Powell, Patricia. A Small Gathering of Bones. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.*

Price, Reynolds. The Promise of Rest. New York: Schribner, 1995.*

Sherman, Charlotte Watson. Touch. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.*

Wilson, Doug. Labour of Love, 1993. [based on characters created by Peter

McGehee]. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.

SECONDARY AIDS NOVELS

Collard, Cyril. Savage Nights. 1st American edition. Woodstock, NY: Overlook

Press, 1994.

Donnelly, Nisa. The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay. New York: St. Martin's Press,

1994.*

Harris, E. Lynn. Just As I Am: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1994.*

Johnson, Fenton. Scissors, Paper, Rock. New York: Pocket Books, 1993.*

Martinac, Paula. Home Movies. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1993.

McMurtry, Larry. The Late Child. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Picano, Felice. Like People in History. New York: Viking, 1995.

Reidinger, Paul. Good Boys. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Russell, Paul E. Sea of Tranquility. New York: Dutton, 1994.*

Svoboda, Terese. Cannibal. New York: New York University Press, 1994.*

SCIENCE FICTION/MEDICAL INTRIGUE AIDS NOVELS

Balizet, Carole. Plague. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Chosen Books, 1994.

Holloway, Michael. Empath. San Diego, CA: Paradigm Publications, 1993.

Labelle, Maurice. Noah's Ark II: Mankind's Last Chance. Miami, FL: Magic City

Publications, 1994.

Stamp, Duane. Dream Logic. Salt Lake City, UT: Northwest Publishing, 1993.

MURDER/THRILLER AIDS NOVELS

Kopp, Nancy. Acts and Omissions. New York: Signet, 1994.

YOUNG ADULT AIDS NOVELS

Baer, Judy. The Discovery. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1993.

Bantle, Lee. F. Diving for the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1995.

Bess, Clayton. The Mayday Rampage: a novel. Sacramento, CA: Lookout Press,

1993.

Fox, Paula. The Eagle Kite: A Novel. New York: Orchard Books, 1995.*

Nelson, Theresa. Earthshine: a novel. New York: Orchard Books, 1994.

Porta, Barbara. Something Terrible Happened: a novel. New York: Orchard Books,

1994.*

Roper, Gayle G. The Puzzle of the Poison Pen. Elgin, IL: Chariot Books, 1994.

Young, Alida. Losing David. New York: Dell Publishing, 1993.*

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# Works Cited

CHAPTER 1

Bersani, Leo. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Eds. Leo Bersani and Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. 197-222.

Brandt, Allan. No Magic Bullet: a Social History of Venereal Disease in the United

States since 1880. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Brooks, Peter. Reading For the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York:

Knopf, 1984.

Dellamora, Richard. Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Dewey, Joseph. In a Dark Time: the Apocalyptic Temper in the Nuclear Age. West

Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1990.

Edelman, Lee. "The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Thory and AIDS." South

Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (1989): 301-317.

Gilman, Sander. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to

AIDS. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988.

Jones, James W. "The Plague and Its Texts: AIDS and Recent American Fiction."

Journal of American Culture 16.1 (1993): 73-80.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Recent Studies in Fiction. New York:

Oxford UP, 1966.

Koponen, Wilfrid. Embracing Gay Identity: Gay Novels as Guides. Westport, CT:

Bergin and Garvey, 1993.

Mars-Jones, Adam. Introduction. Monopolies of Loss. By Mars-Jones. New York:

Knopf, 1992. 1-8.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Disease and the Novel, 1880-1960. London: MacMillan, 1985.

Murphy, Timothy. "Testimony." Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and

Analysis. Eds. Timothy Murphy and Suzanne Poirier. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 306-320.

Nunokawa, Jeff. "'All the Sad Young Men': AIDS and the Work of Mourning."

Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 311-323.

Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic.

New York: St. Martin's, 1987.

Singer, Linda. Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic.

New York: Routledge, 1993.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. 1979, 1989. New

York: Doubleday, 1990.

Treichler. "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: an Epidemic of

Signification." AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Eds. Leo Bersani and Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. 31-70.

Yingling, Thomas. "AIDS in America: Postmodern Governance, Identity, and

Experience." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 291-310.

CHAPTER 2

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York:

Knopf, 1984.

Dellamora, Richard. Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an

Ending. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutger UP, 1994.

Edelman, Lee. "The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS."

South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (1989): 301-317.

Frye, Nothrop. The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP,

1957.

Hemphill, Essex. Introduction. Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay

Men. Ed. Hemphill. Boston: Alyson, 1991. xv-xxxi.

Interrante, Joseph. "Learning to Live with AIDS." Rev. of Facing It: a Novel of

AIDS, by Paul Reed. Gay Community News 12.32 (1985): 6-7.

Jones, James W. "The Plague and Its Texts: AIDS and Recent American Fiction."

Journal of American Culture 16.1 (1993): 73-80.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New

York: Oxford UP, 1966.

Kramer, Larry. "1,112 and Counting." Reports from the Holocaust. By Kramer.

New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 33-51.

Mayes, Sharon. "It Can Happen Here: An Essay on the Denial of AIDS."

Confronting AIDS Through Literature: The Responsibilities of Representation. Ed. Judith L. Pastore. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 84-90.

McGovern, Terrence J. "Paul Reed." Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-

Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. 352-358.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Disease and the Novel, 1880-1960. London: MacMillan, 1985.

Monette, Paul. Preface. Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog. New York: St. Martin's,

1988. xi-xiii.

Murphy, Timothy. "Testimony." Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and

Analysis. Eds. Timothy Murphy and Suzanne Poirier. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 306-320.

Nelson, Emmanuel. "AIDS and the American Novel." Journal of American Culture

13.1 (1990): 47-53.

Nunokawa, Jeff. "'All the Sad Young Men': AIDS and the Work of Mourning."

Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 311-323.

Pastore, Judith L. "Suburban AIDS: Alice Hoffman's At Risk." AIDS: The Literary

Response. Ed. Emmanuel Nelson. New York: Twayne, 1991. 39-49.

Price, Deb. "The Broadening Literature of AIDS." The Detroit News, Gannett News

Service. 15 July 1991.

Ratner, Rochelle. Rev. of Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, by Paul Reed. Library Journal

1.10 (1985): 92-93.

Reed, Paul. "Early AIDS Fiction." Confronting AIDS Through Literature: The

Responsibilities of Representation. Ed. Judith L. Pastore. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 91-94.

---. Facing It: a Novel of AIDS. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press,1984.

Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.

New York: St. Martin's, 1987.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. 1979, 1989. New

York: Doubleday, 1990.

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, MA: G and C Merriam Co.,

1961.

Yingling, Thomas. "AIDS in America: Postmodern Governance, Identity, and

Experience." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 291-310.

CHAPTER 3

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael

Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bradfield, Scott. "Young, Single and HIV-Positive." Rev. of

Spontaneous Combustion, by David Feinberg. The New York Times Book Review 17 Nov. 1991: 11.

Brown, Rebecca. The Gifts of the Body. New York: Harper/Collins, 1994.

Carducci, Jane S. "David Feinberg." Contemporary Gay American

Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. 90-95.

Clum, John. "'And Once I Had It All': AIDS Narratives and Memories

of an American Dream." Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis. Eds. Timothy Murphy and Suzanne Poirier. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 200-224.

Corbin, Steven. A Hundred Days From Now. Boston: Alyson, 1994.

Davis, Christopher. Valley of the Shadow. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

Diamon, N.A. Castro Street Memories. San Francisco: Persona, 1988.

Donnelly, Nisa. The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay. New York: St. Martin's,

1994.

Feinberg, David B. Eighty-Sixed. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1989

---. "Is Any Sex Safe?" Review of Peter McGehee's Boys Like Us. The New

York Times Book Review 10 Feb. 1991: 7.

---. "Is Humor an Acceptable Way to Deal with AIDS?" The Advocate 609

(1992): 96.

---. Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone. New

York: Viking, 1994.

---. Spontaneous Combustion. New York: Viking, 1991.

Graham, Clayton. Tweeds. Stamford, CT: Knights Press, 1987.

Harris, E. Lynn. Invisible Life: a novel. 1991. New York: Anchor Books,

1994.

Kirp, David. "Taking the Measure of Death: Between the Jokes, David

Feinberg Confronted the Reality of AIDS." Review of Queer and Loathing. The New York Times Book Review 27 Nov. 1994: 29.

Mains, Geoffrey. Gentle Warriors. Stamford, CT: Knights Press, 1989.

Martinac, Paula. Home Movies. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1993.

Maso, Carole. The Art Lover. San Francisco, CA: North Point, 1990.

Mayes, Sharon. Immune. New York: New Rivers, 1987.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. "Laugh Lines: Spontaneous Combustion by David

B. Feinberg." Village Voice 26.48 (1991): 78.

Monette, Paul. Halfway Home. 1991. New York: Avon, 1992.

---. Afterlife. 1990. New York: Avon, 1991.

Moore, Oscar. A Matter of Life and Sex. New York: Dutton, 1992.

Munoz, Elias. The Greatest Performance. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press,

1991.

Murphy, Timothy. "Testimony." Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language,

Analysis. Eds. Timothy Murphy and Suzanne Poirier. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 306-320.

Nelkin, Dorothy, and Sander L. Gilman. "Placing Blame for Devastating

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Lethal Epidemic Disease. Ed. Arien Mack. New York: New York UP, 1991.

Peck, Dale. Martin and John. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993.

Picano, Felice. Like People in History. New York: Viking, 1995.

Price, Reynolds. The Promise of Rest. New York: Schribner, 1995.

Puccia, Joseph. The Holy Spirit Dance Club. Austin, TX: Liberty Press,

1988.

Reidinger, Paul. Good Boys. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Redon, Joel. Bloodstream. Stamford, CT: Knights Press, 1988.

Satuloff, Bob. "Enervating Rythm: David B. Feinberg's Literary Lounge

Act." Rev. of Spontaneous Combustion. Christopher Street 14.12 (1991): 4-7.

Steinberg, Sybil. Rev. of Eighty-Sixed. Publisher's Weekly 238.45 (1991):

48.

---. Rev. of Spontaneous Combustion. Publisher's Weekly 234.19 (1988): 73.

Texier, Catherine. "When Sex Was All That Mattered." Review of Eighty-

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Watney, Simon. "The Possibilities of Permutation: Pleasure, Proliferation,

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Weinberg, Joel. "Epidemic of Laughter: First-Time Novelist David

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Weir, John. The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. New York: Harper

and Row, 1989.

---. "Rage, Rage: Gay Novelist David Feinberg, After You've Gone."

Obituary. New Republic 212.7 (1995): 11-12.

CHAPTER 4

Cady, Joseph. "Immersive and Counterimmersive AIDS Writing about

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Crimp, Douglas. "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism." AIDS:

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Clum, John. "'And Once I Had It All': AIDS Narratives and Memories

of an American Dream." Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis. Eds. Timothy Murphy and Suzanne Poirier. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 200-224.

---. "'The Time Before the War': AIDS, Memory, and Desire." American

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Feinberg, David. "A Bitter Aftertaste." Rev. of Afterlife. Outweek. 4

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Holleran, Andrew. Ground Zero. New York: William Morrow, 1988.

Kaufman, David. "All in the Family." Rev. of Halfway Home. The

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Maggenti, Maria. "No Half Measures: Paul Monette on Maintaining

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Mars-Jones, Adam. Introduction. Monopolies of Loss. By Mars-Jones.

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Monette, Paul. "Choosing My Religion." Out May 1995: 136.

---. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. New York: Harcourt, Brace,

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---. Halfway Home. 1991. New York: Avon, 1992.

---. Afterlife. 1990. New York: Avon, 1991.

---. Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

---. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. 1988. New York: Avon, 1990.

Monteagudo, Jesse. Rev. of Afterlife. TWN 25 April 1990: 6.

Murphy, Timothy. "Testimony." Writing AIDS: Gay Literature,

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Roman, David. "Paul Monette." Contemporary Gay American Novelists:

A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. 271-281.

Singer, Linda. Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of

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Treichler, Paula. "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: an

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Yingling, Thomas. "AIDS in America": Postmodern Governance,

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Chapter 5:

CHAPTER 5

"AIDS among Racial/Ethnic Minorities - United States 1993." Morbidity and Mortality

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Fast, Howard. The Dinner Party. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

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Hemphill, Essex. Introduction. Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Ed.

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Whetstone, Muriel L. "New AIDS Scare for Heterosexuals: the Increasing Threat to Black

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---. Losing David. New York: Dell Publishing, 1993.

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* * *

[1] Not all novels about AIDS are by people living with AIDS (PLWAs), however, as I will discuss, those novels written by PLWAs develop significantly different relationships to AIDS than AIDS novels by other people.

[2] A good representative example of the work on the relationship between mental illness and art is Sander Gilman's Disease and Representation, in which he works from aspects of psychoanalytic theory to explain the connections between mental disease and artistic production. Allan Brandt's No Magic Bullet provides a good historical assessment of the role sexual disease has played in U.S. social and public policy, however, his study does not extend to the relationship between disease and literary production.

[3] I use the term "his" purposefully here, because Meyers' book concentrates on male authors and their relationship to the Romantic tradition he traces.

[4] In her book, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag illustrates how AIDS and cancer are represented differently, that cancer is usually described in spatial terms, whereas temporal terms are used to describe AIDS.

[5] Both Linda Singer in Erotic Welfare and James Jones in "The Plague and its Texts" write about the cultural logic of infection, which is exacerbated in the case of AIDS by the public perception of it as a "gay plague."

[6] Though the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 heralded the beginning of the gay rights movement, it wasn't until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association, and until 1975 that the American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness. My source for this is Wilfrid Koponen's Embracing Gay Identity.

[7] Treichler's article, "AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse," gives a thorough historical overview of the changing ways AIDS was signified in the United States in the early to mid 1980's.

[8] In particular, the CDC now includes invasive cervical cancer as an opportunistic infection indicative of AIDS.

[9] There were several important consequences of the fact that heterosexuals, particularly IV drug users and poor women of color, were invisible to the medical industry at this time; these included an underreporting of deaths due to AIDS and the much shorter life-span of women living with AIDS. This invisibility is also reflected in the lack of literature about their experiences with AIDS.

[10] Once more knowledge is gathered about AIDS and a vaccine or cure has been developed, the apocalyptic aspects of AIDS rhetoric may change. However, as Brandt argues in No Magic Bullet, as long as sexually transmitted diseases are culturally viewed as sinful, "there can be no magic bullet" (202), and I doubt that homosexuality any time soon will be declassified as a "sin" by the world's major religions.

[11] Not all AIDS theorists have agreed that the metaphor of AIDS as "gay plague" best describes the societal responses to AIDS. Thomas Yingling, for example, argues that "...AIDS shares more, finally, with genocide than with plague...it is the power of others to inflict dying that continues to shape the history of AIDS: the benign neglect of government agencies makes the epidemic a passive-aggressive act on the part of national society (the institutionalization of power as indifference)" (306). His point is well-taken, however, the metaphor that continues to dominate the cultural narratives about AIDS is that of "plague."

[12] Shilts' 600+ page book is actually more complex than Nunokawa gives it credit for. Indeed, Shilts' portrayal of homosexuality oscillates widely in the course of his lengthy book, such that one walks away from it with a sense that Shilts' feelings about homosexuality are ambiguously conflicted.

[13] Dewey 8.

[14] Jerry Falwell, for example, said during a television interview in 1983, "'When you violate moral, health, and hygiene laws, you reap the whirlwind'" (Shilts 347).

[15] In his article, "Testimony," Timothy Murphy talks at length about the important role testimonial writing plays in helping gay men cope with the experience of the AIDS epidemic. The Names Quilt Project is another example of keeping memories alive. As long as it continues to be viewed, the people whose lives it represents are not silenced, not forgotten, not simply dead.

[16] "An Evening with David Leavitt," at UCSB Nov. 16, 1994.

[17] Much has been made of the differences in public perception and rhetoric about PLWAs who contract AIDS by accident versus those who acquire it through their own, intentional actions (for example, an "innocent" blood transfusion versus shooting drugs or having sex).

[18] Almost all of the novels about AIDS have been written by white people and most center on the experiences of white, middle to upper-middle class characters, though as in Paul Monette's Afterlife, there have been some references to the experience of other cultural groups living with AIDS. This trend has begun to change in the second decade of the epidemic, with AIDS novels appearing from gay writers of color, like E. Lynn Harris and Steven Corbin.

[19] . Though there are a good number of novels written by women about the effect of AIDS on gay PLWAs and their loved ones, I have found only three novels written in the first decade that discuss the experiences of women living with AIDS. In Alejandro Morales' The Rag Doll Plagues, one portion of the novel depicts a hemophiliac woman's suffering from AIDS, which she contracts through a blood transfusion. Alfred Ingegno's Shared Legacy depicts a woman's experience of having contracted HIV sexually. The only female novelist to address this topic is Sharon Mayes in her novel, Immune. There continues to be a lack of novels that describe the experiences of women with AIDS, and I have yet to find even one novel that extensively describes the experiences of a woman of color living with HIV.

[20] Though Dorothy Bryant's novel, A Day in San Francisco, is the first novel to mention AIDS, Reed's novel is the first one in which AIDS plays a central role in the narrative. It is for this reason that I categorize Bryant's book as a secondary AIDS novel and Reed's as a primary AIDS novel.

[21] Terrence McGovern's review of Paul Reed's work in the reference manual, Contemporary Gay American Novelists, provides a good overview of the critical reception to Reed's novel.

[22] A perusal of the Annotated Bibliography illustrates this point.

[23] The work of literary and cultural critics, such as Susan Sontag's AIDS and its Metaphors and James W. Jone's "The Plague and Its Texts," has attempted to formulate a paradigm (what Sontag calls "metaphor" and what Jones calls "cultural narrative"), which "infects" (to borrow from Jones) so many of the cultural and artistic representations of AIDS. Where their work focuses explicitly on the representation of AIDS as a "gay plague," which has important political and social consequences, my project at first glance appears to address more private and philosophical concerns because of its focus on the problems of representing the temporality of AIDS in literature. However, as I hope to show through the course of the dissertation, it is precisely this issue over how to represent the temporality of AIDS that has had such crucial relevancy for those who are living with AIDS, and as such, is a social concern.

[24] I am reminded here of Peter Brooks' project in Reading for the Plot, when he establishes a pattern for the plots of late 19th-century novels using what he calls Freud's "Masterplot," only to say in a passing footnote that these do not include what he calls the "female plot": "a waiting (and suffering) until the woman's desire can be a permitted response to the expression of male desire" (330). One might wonder how he would describe a non-heterosexual plot.

[25] A classic example is Northrop Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism and his archetypal criticism that charts four basic "mythoi" as constitutive of the major literary genres.

[26] Jeffrey Meyers 6.

[27] Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan versus Larry Kramer and David Worjnarowicz are good examples of diametrically opposed, apocalyptic points of view about AIDS.

[28] In his article, "'All the Sad Young Men,'" Jeff Nunokawa points to a long literary tradition, including Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, that figures gay men as doomed. Lee Edelman, in "The Plague of Discourse," points to the slippery figurality of AIDS, which at times may undermine people's good intentions by insidiously reiterating homophobic representations of gays. Sodomy and apocalypse are also linked to Christianity, as Richard Dellamora writes in Apocalyptic Overtures, "the association of sex between men with end times is embedded in the political unconscious of Christian societies" (3).

[29] Meyers 16.

[30] A further distinction should be made between writers who are HIV+ but who are neither "healthy" nor who have full-blown AIDS, since they stand in a different relation to AIDS than these other groups.

[31] Paul Monette, for example, has written that during the months following the death of his lover, Rog, to AIDS, "writing them [the elegies] quite literally kept me alive, for the only time I wasn't wailing and trembling was when I was hammering at these poems" (xi).

[32] See Terrence McGovern's description of the critical response to Reed's novel in Contemporary Gay Novelists.

[33] The story of how HIV was both discovered and named is a long and sordid one, which Randy Shilts describes in detail in And the Band Played On. Throughout the 1980's and still today, there has been some controversy about the relationship between HIV and AIDS. Peter Duesberg has been a notorious figure in this debate; he continues to argue that correlation does not equal causation in the case of HIV and AIDS.

[34] It wasn't until 1985 and Rock Hudson's announcement that he had AIDS that the "general public" became conscious of AIDS as an issue for concern, especially with the silence of the Reagan administration and the mainstream press about the epidemic.

[35] The publication of Alice Hoffman's At Risk in 1988, by the mainstream publishing house Putnam's, was the first widely read (by the "general public") novel about AIDS, according to Judith Pastore in "Suburban AIDS." Who gets published and by whom is an important and difficult issue. Sharon Mayes has written in her piece, "It Can Happen," of the difficulties of finding a publisher for her novel, Immune, and in his Introduction to Brother to Brother, Essex Hemphill has written of the difficulties associated with being black and gay, having to live "through denials and abbreviated histories riddled with omissions, [by which] the middle class sets about whitewashing and fixing up the race to impress each other and the racists who don't give a damn" (xxviii). The maturation of the electronic age, since the later 1980s and continuing today, has led to a tremendous growth in small publishing houses, including ones that serve gay and lesbian audiences, which may also help explain the growing numbers of novels about AIDS.

[36] Interrante 6; McGovern cites this same quote in his discussion of Reed's work on page 356.

[37] It is this second storyline that has received criticism for not being more smoothly integrated into the narrative structure of the novel as a whole. For an example, see Interrante's review of Facing It.

[38] Other AIDS novels that utilize aspects of "medical mystery" include David Dawson's Double Blind and Sharon Mayes' Immune. The medical mystery that Andy and Dr. Branch seek to solve exposes the limits of the power of science. Thomas Yingling has noted the challenge that AIDS poses to cultural notions about the power of science: ...we have understood AIDS not only as a political crisis but also as a mystery to be solved by the power of science (understood as a pure domain of human knowledge wherein 'nature' progressively submits to the power of human intellection and technological advance). Part of what baffles about AIDS, of course, is its resistance as an illness to this scenario of empowered science... (298).

[39] Unlike Facing It, there are a large number of novels whose narratives use memory and the past as a way to talk about AIDS. (See Annotated Bibliography for examples). Some of these novels, like Christopher Davis' Valley of the Shadow and David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, develop narrative strategies to evade the tendency to represent AIDS as an apocalyptic future, by focusing instead on events in the past.

[40] Jones makes a related point in his discussion of the "infectiousness" of AIDS as a cultural narrative of plague, in his provocative essay, "The Plague and its Texts," when he writes of David Feinberg's novel, Eighty-Sixed, that "Once AIDS enters the novel, it becomes slowly a plague, transforming all it touches" (75). Here, my point is that the apocalyptic representation of the temporality of AIDS as the End is another dangerous and infectious cultural narrative.

[41] Though many of the novels include last words spoken by survivors, AIDS still brings about the end of many of the AIDS novels. A few examples include Bo's death from AIDS in Michael Bishop's Unicorn Mountain, Tommy's suicide in Vance Bourjaily's Old Soldier, and Erich's death from AIDS in Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World.

[42] I suppose there is a certain irony inherent in the structuring of my analysis of the novel, since if I follow the linear course the novel itself establishes, my own critical readings may very well mimic the apocalyptic thrust of the novel, moving from beginning to death.

[43] "Facing it" is also exactly what the Reagan adminstration of the early 1980s and the "general public" had not done, so in another respect, Facing It has larger political and social implications, and it resonates with the other early AIDS projects to raise consciousness about AIDS, like the work of Larry Kramer, Michael Callen and David Worjnarowicz.

[44] This emphasis on exact time and location is frequently used in AIDS literature. Besides Shilts' And the Band Played On, Jean Warmbold's June Mail, Geoffrey Mains' Gentle Warriors, Mayes' Immune and Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed are examples of AIDS novels that use an emphasis on time and place as a way to stimulate a sense of urgency with regards to AIDS.

[45] Most of the AIDS novels do not so thoroughly document the opportunistic infections their characters' suffer, though references are made in passing to various AIDS-related ailments. For example, Emma in Helen Chappel's Acts of Love has KS, Sandra in Alejandro Morales' The Rag Doll Plagues has PCP and Josh in Michael Nava's The Hidden Law has CMV.

[46] Teddy in Davis' The Valley of the Shadow, Clarence in Christopher Bram's In Memory of Angel Clare, and Eddie in John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket are just a few examples of beautiful men stricken by AIDS.

[47] The description of Bob Broome's AIDS in Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, as well as that of Eddie's AIDS in Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, also graphically depict with clinical detail the ravages AIDS causes to the body.

[48] In his review of Facing It, Interrante praises the novel for its accurate portrayal of the emotional issues involved with AIDS. Reed himself has said in an interview with Deb Price, "I felt... the best way to reach people was at the emotional level, to explain to them what this illness was about in a novel."

[49] See the Annotated Bibliography for a category of AIDS novel, the science fiction/intrigue novels, that is wholly concerned with the larger issues related to the AIDS epidemic. There are also other novels, like Marty Rubin's The Boiled Frog Syndrome, that deal with political and medical paranoia about plots to imprison and destroy gay men, but which do not directly deal with the AIDS epidemic.

[50] Examples of friendships with other PLWAs include Peter and Yale in Joel Redon's Bloodstream and Zero and Randy in Peter McGehee's Boys Like Us.

[51] Another important point to note is that early in the epidemic, people died quite quickly from AIDS. As more has become known about HIV and AIDS, and as more treatments have become available, people have been able to live much longer with it. The changing life expectancy for people diagnosed with AIDS has no doubt helped alleviate some of the earlier panic about it and there has been an increased effort by people living with AIDS to educate others that they live with HIV and AIDS. Unfortunately, however, the primary cultural narrative about AIDS continues to represent it as a death sentence. (The recent mainstream and widely publicized movie, Philadelphia, demonstrates the continued prevalence and popularity of representing AIDS this way).

[52] Many of the AIDS novels describe the difficult and oftentimes strained relations between gay men and their biological families. AIDS often stretches the relations to a breaking point. Besides Facing It, Larry Duplechan's Tangled up in Blue, Robert Ferro's Second Son and Dorothy Bryant's A Day in San Francisco portray some of the difficulties experienced by gay men in their relationships with their biological families.

[53] There are many AIDS novels that represent alternatives to the traditional, heterosexual and biological family structure. For example, in his AIDS novel Halfway Home, Monette juxtaposes a traditional family with one composed of two lovers, a lesbian and an elderly lady as a way to illustrate the pros and cons of each, and in Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, Clara, Bobby and Jonathan set up house together.

[54] Because of its relation to sexuality, AIDS insinuates itself into the personal lives of sexual couples, especially gay couples, and most of the AIDS novels describe the fall-out of AIDS on peoples' love lives. Examples range from Bill and Mark in Ferro's Second Son, to Sharyn and Rob in Alfred Ignegno's Shared Legacy to Stephen and Mark in Monette's Afterlife.

[55] Many scholars of AIDS literature have noted how important bearing witness or offering "testimony" (as Timothy Murphy calls it in an article of the same name) to those who have died of AIDS. In many of the AIDS novels besides Facing It, though the narratives may serve to "testify" to the worth of the person that has died, the emphasis is on how the death affects those who remain living. Consider, for example, the effects of Clarence's death on the group of friends in Christopher Bram's In Memory of Angel Clare, Vic's death on Steven in Monette's Afterlife, and Darren's death on Amelia in Klass' Other People's Children.

[56] Many of the AIDS novels address the troublesome connection between AIDS and gay sexuality, though some, including Oscar Moore's A Matter of Life and Sex and Daniel Curzon's The World Can Break Your Heart, are like Facing It, in their explicit consideration of AIDS as a punishment for being gay.

[57] I am reminded here of the movie, Philadelphia, which unlike Christopher Davis' novelization of the screenplay, includes a repeated juxtaposition of a happy, heterosexual couple and their new baby, versus Andy Beckett's languishing relationship with his lover, Michael.

[58] Several reviewers have criticized the ending as forced. For an example, Interrante writes, "I found the novel's ending a bit contrived in the interests of gay affirmation" (7).

[59] Besides evocatively depicting how AIDS has killed the earlier times of sexual liberation, Mains' Gentle Warriors, like Facing It, depicts political activism as failing, when Gregg does not succeed in assassinating the President, because he has collapsed and died from AIDS.

[60] Not all AIDS novels show characters accepting that AIDS means death, though most of the novels reach some form of acceptance. For example, BJ in Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed learns emotional acceptance and "how to cry"; Leonard in Howard Fast's The Dinner Party learns the peace of meditation, and Amelia in Klass' Other Women's Children retains her pediatrician's hope for children.

[61] Though most of the AIDS novels do not end this abruptly, their description of the characters with AIDS generally do end with death, which implicitly confirms the cultural narrative that AIDS=death. An example of this is Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, in which (besides Eddie who dies), none of the other characters has AIDS or are HIV+ and no one else dies.

[62] Most of the AIDS novels written for young adults serve a similar educative function, though they are primarily concerned with teaching young people not to succumb to AIDSphobia. For example, Laura in Miriam Cohen's Laura Leonora's First Amendment, Karen in Martha Humphrey's Until Whatever, and Erick in M.E. Kerr's Night Kites, all learn to stand up against both the ignorance about AIDS and the AIDSphobia of their families and communities.

[63] Subsequent to the publication of Facing It, Reed not only lost his lover and countless friends to AIDS, but found himself also infected with the virus. My source for this is an article by Deb Price, "The Broadening Literature of AIDS."

[64] Roman's criticisms of reviewers for "mainstream" publications may also reflect his allegiance to the gay audience he addresses. As he writes, "Many of these reviewers proclaim, for example, that these novels 'transcend the label of gay novel' suggesting that there may be something inherently negative in such an identification" (279).

[65] Roman's politicized stance also leads him to criticize reviewers for gay publications and what he sees as their essentialist positions about gay men: these particular critics "complain that the novels are not realistic enough, suggesting on their part a bias for gay male representations that can be grounded only in the 'real' experiences of gay men in contemporary society" (279).

[66] Counterimmersive AIDS writing, Cady feels, may evolve from "a lingering depression about homosexuality and in stereotyped understandings of it" (258), and oftentimes, it relies on a "...significant degree of obedience to the dominant culture..." (260).

[67] Though I find Cady's distinction between "immersive" and "counterimmersive" AIDS writing a useful one to describe trends in the larger field of AIDS literature, I might be tempted to argue that when the category of "immersive" AIDS writing is applied to novels about AIDS, it runs into problems. Indeed, I would argue that all too often, "immersive" AIDS writing in novels may merely lead to a reenactment of the dominant cultural narrative about AIDS, which robs agency from those living with it, by insisting that AIDS=death. I do not so much disagree with Cady's distinction, but find that it needs to be nuanced with respect to novels about AIDS.

[68] In Erotic Welfare, Linda Singer develops the idea of an "epidemic logic," a particular dynamic process, which she argues helps explain both cultural and regulatory practices the United States has developed, in particular, to deal with the AIDS epidemic. She writes:

"Epidemic logic depends on certain structuring contraditions, proliferating what it seeks to contain, producing what it regulates...[It] depends upon the perpetual revival of an anxiety it seeks to control, inciting a crisis of contagion that spreads to ever new sectors of cultural life, which, in turn, justify and necessitate specific regulatory apparatus which then compensate - materially and symbolically - for the crisis it has produced." (29)

I suppose one way to describe what I am trying to articulate would be a "narrative logic" of AIDS, which in the AIDS novels generates particular plot structures that work to proliferate and reiterate the dominant cultural narrative that insists AIDS=death. From this perspective, Monette's two AIDS novels can be read as struggling to resist this "narrative logic" of AIDS in order to develop alternative ways to plot AIDS.

[69] Other critics have noted Monette's emphasis on the importance of love, including Sharon Warner and Jesse Monteagudo. As Monteagudo says, "In the end, Monette and his characters seem to agree with Michael Callen (another survivor) that love is all that matters, if only because love is all we have" (6). Unfortunately, neither Callen nor Monette has survived AIDS.

[70] It is interesting to note that reviewers of Afterlife tend to pick one plot strand to focus on rather than acknowledge all three, and this leads them to particular conclusions about the novel's overall effect. For example, Sybil Steinberg finds the novel, "sad and moving," whereas Christopher Davis says that, in Afterlife, "Monette seems to equate a positive HIV test with a death sentence" (21). My reading of the novel counters both these conclusions.

[71] In contrast to Afterlife and its textured depiction of urban life, Facing It, for example, focuses on an elite group of white characters, and, though the action of the novel transpires in New York City and San Francisco, neither these cities nor their general inhabitants are portrayed in the novel. Other examples include Robert Ferro's Second Son, Clayton Graham's Tweeds and Paul Redon's Bloodstream. See the Annotated Bibliography for more examples of the insular groups that most of the AIDS novels represent.

[72] The most common forms of HIV transmission include infected male ejaculate coming into contact with broken membranes of another person's anus or vagina or from an infected needle being used to inject drugs.

[73] Not all black gay men are without community, however. For example, a group called Us Helping Us: People Into Living was founded by black gay men in the Washington, D.C. area in order to support black gay men living with HIV disease (Rosin 23).

[74] I use the term "Hispanic" to refer to people of Spanish origins and to those places colonized by the Spanish. Unlike "Latino," Hispanic is a gender-neutral term.

[75] Unlike the epidemiological trends here in the U.S. which have shifted away from financially elite white gay men, in African countries like Uganda, HIV still exists primarily in the "elite" classes and is a heterosexual disease. Instead of homophobia, there is discrimination against the "elites." (For a discussion of this, see Barnett and Blaikie).

[76] Corbin's criticisms of the racist assumptions about black literature reflect his personal experience and frustrations as a black gay novelist trying to find places willing to publish his work. Though I think he has an important point about the hurdles to publishing black gay novels, I disagree with his easy totalizing of these difficulties to include all black literature. Novels by and about black women have continued to find mass appeal, including Terry McMillan's recent smash-hit, Waiting to Exhale, about which a popular Hollywood film was recently made. Novels by and about black men, whether gay or straight, have not fared as successfully.

[77] Corbin rightly criticizes several "gay" anthologies for their failure to include any work by contemporary black gay men, besides the canonized token, James Baldwin ("White Men" 14).

[78] Melvin Dixon died of AIDS-related complications in 1992.

[79] Alejandro Morales' The Rag Doll Plagues also includes a description of a woman living through the course of HIV disease. The novel is composed of three sections, linked by their sharing of the same narrator, though each section is separated by about 200 years time. The central section, which is set in the contemporary period, describes the narrator, Gregory's love relationship with an "innocent" AIDS victim, a woman who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. Morales' representation of Sandra enacts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative for this section of the novel and ends sentimentally with Gregory's undying love for her: "While I looked upon the faces that cared for Sandra, she gently expired. She, Sandra, who entered, changed and loved my life exactly as I loved hers, who called from deep within my soul an ancient tear that would forever taste to me like our love, the tear both of us shared at that final moment of her passage" (129). 
