Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture

Even if Silence=Death, it does not follow that Speech=Life. Slogans are not syllogism, and AIDS is not some neurotic symptom to be treated with the psychoanalytic talking cure. Certainly the writers in the Violet Quill never were confused on that score. For although virtually all of them wrote about AIDS—and I think that legacy is one of their most remarkable accomplishments—they did so doubtful that their writing would make any difference. For “AIDS writing” must contend with a paradox: it exists despite the fact that no one wishes to write or read about it. I know this from my own experience. Only after months of the most desultory work have I realized that I’ve been trying to put off the composition of this chapter in the hope that it would go away. Yet here I am writing, and in the two decades (and counting) since the first announcement of the disease, a body of writing has grown up and found its reluctant audience.

The story of the Violet Quill cannot be told without placing it within the context of AIDS. The epidemic and the construction of “gay liberation” have been the two historical events that have shaped not only the group’s writing but also its history and reception. The formal meetings of the Violet Quill ended in March 1981; the New York Times published the first article on what would become the AIDS epidemic in July 1981, when it reported an outbreak 216 of Kaposi’s sarcoma among gay men. Thus the AIDS epidemic began just as the formal VQ meetings ended. Larry Kramer has drawn a connection between the two when he attacked Edmund White, among others, for continuing in their writing “to perpetuate what got us into all this trouble and death in the first place.” He disapproves of authors such as White who continue to celebrate in their fiction the freedom of gay sexuality instead of condemning it as promiscuous and deadly (“Sex and Sensibility”:64). Yet AIDS did put an end to the VQ. It drove White to Paris; it kept Andrew Holleran in northern Florida. It sapped much of the energy of the group, energy that went into care-giving and activism rather than into literature. Felice Picano, the most prolific of the group’s authors, virtually stopped writing to take care of his brother and his lover, both of whom had AIDS, and then found himself so depleted and depressed after their deaths that it took several years for him to renew his activity. But AIDS brought an end to the Violet Quill in the most literal of ways: four of the group—Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, and George Whitmore—all succumbed to the disease; Edmund White is infected, although his health has shown little effect from the virus. Only Holleran and Picano remain free of the virus.

Yet it is Andrew Holleran who, better than anyone, has seen the paradox in writing about AIDS. Noting Henry James’s recognition during the Great War that “novels were beside the point, or were at least momentarily repudiated by the fantastic brutality,” Holleran argues that so, too, during the epidemic “the act of writing seemed of no help whatsoever, for the simple reason: Writing could not produce a cure. That was all that mattered and all that anyone wanted” (GZ:16). In his short story, “Lights in the Valley,” he writes that he “didn’t believe intellectuals could help [cure AIDS], and he didn’t believe plays and novels could help, and he didn’t even believe the great American panacea, Money, could” (328). Nevertheless, Holleran continued to write the essays that form Ground Zero, a selection of his extraordinary occasional pieces that appeared in Christopher Street during the 1980s. No matter that the writing seemed to change nothing, you wrote anyway. No matter that reading cured no one, you read and read and read.

One of the few appeals of AIDS writing and reading derives from “magical thinking,” the belief that if you wrote and read enough about AIDS, you could avoid contracting the disease. But such magical thinking doesn’t explain the writing done by people with AIDS or why reading was so important to those who had already contracted the disease. “As admirable as the writing or publishing of books about AIDS may be,” Holleran comments, “I really don’t know who reads them with pleasure—because I suspect there is one thing and one thing only everyone wants to read, and that is the headline CURE FOUND” (GZ:12). The pursuit of pleasure, which so many had seen as the cause of AIDS, now became the obstacle to reading about it.

If it does not bring pleasure, then why read about AIDS? Aristotle faced a similar problem in The Poetics: What do we get out of tragedy? How is it that we can repeatedly watch—and gain some sort of pleasure from watching—the calamities of other people. His answer was that such events produce catharsis, a word whose meaning is still debated. But Aristotle’s problem was simpler than the one facing AIDS writers—for in his day (and long after) the calamities of tragedies befall kings and queens, not ordinary citizens. Their troubles are not the audience’s troubles. And in that space between the life of kings and the life of the audience, Aristotle imagined a collective sigh of relief. But what if Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex focused not on the king’s problems but on the plague raging in Corinth? Could we feel the same comforting distance? Would the play be capable of catharsis? How far away must the reader or spectator be in order to gain catharsis? Or to put the question another way, how much discomfort can readers take before they stop reading?

If not tragedy in the classic sense, what sort of writing is AIDS writing? Michael Denneny has linked it with ethnic writings he deems literatures of witness:

The idea that the appropriate measure of writing is its impact on the continued existence and well-being of the community is the valuating principle of any ethnic or national literature; it is why Isaac Bashevis Singer is important to Yiddish culture, why the slave narratives undergird all African-American writing in this country. … All such writing has as its innermost principle the act of bearing witness. To bear witness is to declare oneself, to declare oneself present, to declare oneself in the presence of what has come to be. … Those who bear witness carry the soul of the community, the stories of what it has done and what it has suffered, and open the possibility of its existence in memory through time and beyond time. (“AIDS Writing and the Creation of Gay Culture,” 48)

The heat of Denneny’s eloquence makes it possible for him to fuse several ideas that might not cohere in cooler forms of speech. If we take seriously Denneny’s claim that the value of ethnic literatures is their ability to make an “impact on the continued existence and well-being of the community,” how good is the writing of I. B. Singer, who witnesses a Polish-Jewish community wiped out by the Nazis? Did Gimpel the Fool ever save anyone from the ovens? The very fact that Denneny must evoke “the possibility of [a community’s] existence in memory” suggests that witness literature anticipates the end of the community, or a breach in continuity so cataclysmic that it is virtually the end (Polish Jews did survive in exile). What if the witnessing is divisive and thus threatens the existence of community? I’m thinking about whites in South Africa who wrote witness literature about the effects of apartheid. Is that literature a failure because it helped bring about the end of the culture of white domination? AIDS writing is a kind of witness literature, but we need to be more careful about how we calculate its value.

The word witness comes from the Old English. Wit is knowledge, and a witness is a person with knowledge, someone who is wise. Witness is a term used in law and in theology, and witness literature grows out of both sources, for the AIDS writer speaks both of injustice and the supernatural—something awesome, terrible, and wrong.

No form of AIDS writing has been a more powerful or more disturbing witness to the pandemic than the diaries of those with AIDS. For Ross Chambers, who has studied both written and videotaped diaries, these works force a kind of “facing up” not found in either “Holocaust accounts or testimonios from Central America” (6). For in the diaries of those with AIDS, “the authority … is not so much ‘borrowed’ (as a matter of theory) as it derives from the actual death of an actual author” (4). We privilege the authority of the AIDS diary just as courts of law admit deathbed confessions. Only one of the Violet Quill writers, Michael Grumley, has left a diary of his illness, and it speaks with a depth and conviction found in none of his other writings.

Unlike several of the other diaries that Chambers examines, Grumley’s diary does not begin when he learns he has AIDS; rather it starts while he is a student and continues for twenty notebooks through his entire adult life. (Only Felice Picano among the VQ writers has left so detailed an account of his life.) Thus, it witnesses AIDS—which it rarely names, preferring to refer to the disease as “It”—as part of the history of daily events, and perhaps its testimony has all the more authority because it did not start out to document AIDS. In fact, Grumley at times seems uncomfortable in the role of AIDS witness. Take for example his account of the 1987 March on Washington, called in response to the Reagan administration’s inaction in the face of the growing AIDS epidemic. He and Ferro train down with friends, staying in the Presidential Suite of the Watergate Hotel. They gather for breakfast at the unaccustomed hour of eight, and Grumley remarks: “Lovely eating eggs and sausage, looking out on the Potomac” (VQR:282). Later they join the parade, and Grumley notes: “The Quilt is beautiful, the experience of wandering through the little coffin-sized patches of color with hundreds and hundreds of names stitched and painted and sewed on them is very moving—the Capitol looming over the spread of motley” (VQR:283). As in his writings about race, it is not politics but aesthetics that motivates him; he takes this experience, as he has taken virtually everything in his life, as a series of sensations that are beautiful, sensuous, and pleasurable. Ferro and Grumley leave, as one might expect, before all the speeches have been delivered. Nevertheless, Grumley concludes the entry with: “We’ve come and been counted—and that’s the thing.” Grumley does not lose sight of the political—it is the reason he has come—but he does not wish to give it particular attention. He is content to be one of the “mostly staid middle-class” foot soldiers who have come down with friends to enjoy the day and share in it.

Because Grumley is so attuned to the social nature of aesthetic experience, the way beauty is shared between performers and audience, his diary is particularly eloquent about the impact AIDS had on the artistic community. For Grumley AIDS is not an individual agony—it has not struck his world one by one—but a social calamity affecting an entire culture. The sense of being under siege created a climate of solidarity and fellowship unprecedented in the gay community, which the bitter squabbles highlight, since only under conditions of intimate pressure could such bitterness arise. I don’t mean to mitigate the horror of the epidemic or the culture of morbidity it created, but it would be untrue not to note at the same time the excitement, energy, dedication, solidarity, and creativity it also unleashed. Today, when AIDS has become so thoroughly bureaucratized, when treatment, procedures, and support systems have become so routine and professional, and when diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is hard to imagine the kind of intensity that surrounded the epidemic in the mid to late 1980s. Gay men and women were aware that they were engaged in an unprecedented project not only of creating an entire infrastructure of medical service, and of changing the relationship between doctor and patient in American medicine, but also in altering the entire dialogue between lesbians, gay men, and American culture. The underground network of communication that gay men had developed over the years came into play, and kept patients abreast of the latest developments, findings, theories, treatments, and services so that they were often as well, if not better, informed than their physicians. This sharing of information and help created a stronger sense of community than had previously existed, which the general indifference of government and heterosexuals strengthened. Ironically, Grumley cut himself off from some of that shared experience by limiting the number of people who knew he was ill. For example, when he attended a memorial dance program for his good friend Barry Laine, dance critic and founding member of the gay theater group The Glines, Grumley notes in his journal: “Arnie Zane presents his partner Bill T. Jones, who dances ‘Red Room.’ Bill is so glorious under the light—Arnie’s intro moving as he speaks of being ill himself, Barry’s words to him about their shared illness. … At the interval, more sociability—George Whitmore, Victor Bumbalo and friend Tom, Seymour Kleinberg, Allen Barnett, Saslova.” (VQR:292). The episode is telling. On the one hand, Grumley is moved by the sense of a “shared illness” that binds friends in a community of grief, for in some basic way the illness is shared with all the members of the community, those infected as well as those uninfected. Yet on the other hand, despite the sociability of the moment, Grumley does not want to reveal his illness to the community, and the people he talks to at the interval either do not know of Grumley’s condition or have been sworn to secrecy about it. Grumley’s journal virtually ends on this note of communal grief and personal reticence:

Edmund White shares Denneny’s belief that one must bear witness, and the focus of that witnessing must not be limited to AIDS alone but to the entire culture that AIDS brings to an end. Indeed, for White, what gay men witness as they live through the great waves of AIDS deaths is the way the disease has “laid bare the clanking machinery of history.” No longer can we believe there is something “natural” about history, that things are as they should be. What we see instead is “the arbitrariness of history,” its senseless and irrational lurching and twisting:

Holleran comes to a similar conclusion—that what one witnesses in AIDS literature is the arbitrariness of history itself: “The one thing about the plague that became clearer as it progressed was its senseless, accidental, capricious quality” (GZ:16). In retrospect, future readers of AIDS literature, for whom the pandemic “is a distant catastrophe” will see that “the best writing will be nothing more, nor less, than a lament: ‘We are as wanton flies to the gods; they kill us for their sport’” (GZ:18). Consequently, one of the finest AIDS artists for Holleran was Charles Ludlam, who never directly addressed AIDS in his plays. Nevertheless,

For Holleran, Ludlam’s performances embraced several of the most powerful and accurate ways of approaching the AIDS epidemic: (1) indirection, (2) anti-realism, and (3) a mode that combines tragedy and farce. Let’s start with the last. Northrop Frye speaks of the “incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined in tragedy” (42). Farce takes these elements and gives them a particularly mad spin, and, as Aristotle knew, tragedy was born out of the farcical satyr-play. Ludlam’s performance here, with its three discrete coughs—and Holleran gives as good a description of Ludlam’s effects as anyone—makes us see how farce and tragedy come together. But to get to this point one must avoid the documentary (the realistic) and the overt (thus, the need for discretion).

White comes to a similar understanding of the tactics needed to write truthfully and powerfully about AIDS. In “Esthetics and Loss” he provides a frequently cited formula: “If art is to confront AIDS more honestly than the media have done, it must begin in tact, avoid humor, and end in rage” (BL:216). For White, tact is necessary to avoid the reduction of people to their deaths or the expansion of AIDS as a symbol for other things. It will require tact to have AIDS be a disease “not caused by moral or intellectual choices” and to avoid becoming “a metaphor and metonym.” Holleran’s plea that AIDS writing must show discretion is a similar cry that the disease not consume those struck by it or be itself consumed by ideologies that would co-opt it for their own purposes. Holleran’s belief that AIDS can be best expressed in non-realistic, nondocumentary ways stems from the need to disrupt the narratives of cause and effect that realism invites. The very transparency of realistic or documentary modes provides too much opportunity for “meaning” to be imposed on AIDS, and for both writers AIDS constitutes, in White’s words, “a rupture in meaning itself.”

Where White and Holleran seem to take issue most is in terms of the role humor can play in the representation of AIDS. Yet I don’t think they are really as far apart as it may appear. White objects to humor not farce. He wants to avoid “a sniggering or wisecracking humor [that] puts the public … on cozy terms with what is an unspeakable scandal: death.” The humor he wishes to forbid is the sort that “domesticates terror, lays to rest misgivings that should be intensified.” Punning off the title of the 1970s sitcom often credited for tackling serious matters, he rejects humor when it “falsely suggests that AIDS is all in the family.” However, White allows a different kind of humor: “Baudelaire reminded us that the wise man laughs only with fear and trembling. Only a dire gallows humor is acceptable.” When Holleran praises Ludlam’s performances in Camille or Galas, he is recognizing not “an assertion of bourgeois values” but a disturbing, destabilizing, even terrifying “gallows humor” that forces the audience to confront the absurdity of death (an approach that could fit quite naturally into the brilliantly expansive concept that both named and described the Greenwich Village site for Ludlam’s artistic genius—the Theater of the Ridiculous or, later, the Ridiculous Theatre Company).

But if most of the Violet Quill adhered to a program that eschewed realism, cultivated indirection, and merged tragedy and farce (or at least destabilized existing modes), there was a holdout—George Whitmore, and perhaps it is useful to consider him first because, in many ways, his case is unusual.

Whitmore was one of the more politically engaged of the writers of the Violet Quill. (Chris Cox started out even more concerned with politics; he went to Washington to work for a senator and, later, started a chapter of SDS—Students for a Democratic Society—when he attended the University of Alabama, a most uncongenial place for radical political action at any time but particularly in the 1960s.) Whitmore came to New York as a conscientious objector whose alternative service was laboring in a social work agency, where he came under the sway of Old Left activists. The New York Times in its obituary of George Whitmore reports that he was a former member of the Gay Academic Union, an early organization to promote academic activity in gay studies and to further the gay community, as well as of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). In 1986 he sued Northern Dispensary, a Greenwich Village dental clinic, for refusing to treat him because he had AIDS. His suit was perhaps his crowning moment as an AIDS activist since it was the first successful one against a health care provider: the Human Rights Commission ordered Northern Dispensary to pay $46,000 to Whitmore and other patients denied treatment. His efforts helped open medical facilities to people with AIDS. But his triumph was mixed with bitter irony: the money from the suit arrived just a week before his death in 1988 (Newsday, August 17, 1993, sec. 2, p. 72).

As a playwright, Whitmore was highly political—The Rights, a comedy, is as much about gay rights as it is about the contested rights to the musical at the heart of the play; and Fight: The Legacy, a lyric play, concerns early feminists. His melodrama The Caseworker is a much more problematical work to pinpoint politically, which was—as Whitmore came to see—in fact its political message. If I linger over The Caseworker, a play written in 1972, nearly a decade before the appearance of AIDS, it is because in struggling with the play, Whitmore learned lessons about genre and audience that would affect his writing about AIDS.

In “Gay Theatre in the ‘Real’ World,” which appeared in Lavender Culture, one of the landmark anthologies that Karla Jay and Allen Young published in the 1970s, Whitmore points out that The Caseworker is an example of the standard naturalism of the day, “quite like anything you ever saw on ‘Playhouse 90’” (246). It was a play about people who happened to be homosexual, but it wasn’t about homosexuality per se, and that was its problem: Whitmore’s “naturalistic, cool, and ambiguous approach to the gay content in The Caseworker” puzzled straight audiences who were used to gay characters as either figures of amusement or as objects of social concern. Whitmore felt that straight audiences were unprepared to deal with gay characters merely as people; as the reader for an Off-Off Broadway company explained, the play didn’t “qualify as a human drama because the characters are gay” (248). Straight audiences didn’t reject the appearance of gay characters—or at least not New York audiences—but the plays in which they appeared had to be “less realistic, perhaps more sentimental … or conversely more political in [their] approach” for straight audiences to feel comfortable with the material (251). Straight audiences were prepared to deal with gay characters if the play was about homosexuality, but they were unprepared to deal with them if they were just another part of the human comedy. The Caseworker’s “naturalistic, cool, and ambiguous approach” left them feeling abandoned. Whitmore concludes that at least in theater and for the foreseeable future, the best strategy is to write either for gay or for straight audiences; writing for both required compromises that would damage the artistic integrity of his work.

These stylistic questions returned when Whitmore came to write about AIDS for the New York Times. Journalism was nothing new to Whitmore; he made his living as a journalist, writing for such journals as House and Garden, Travel and Leisure, and the Washington Post as well as for gay magazines such as the Advocate and Gai Saber. At times he could combine his gay interests and straight assignments—for example, when he wrote on the “New Frontiers of S-M” for Christopher Street and on shopping for leather in Florence for Harper’s Bazaar. But writing about AIDS presented different, more urgent problems. As with The Caseworker, AIDS journalism required a cool and ambiguous approach, and Whitmore worried “about the morality, even the feasibility, of producing a documentary-style piece of reportage like the one [he’d] contracted for … without putting [him]self into it” (VQR:365). Yet that is exactly what Whitmore did, keeping secret his own diagnosis from his readers as well as the people he interviewed and studied. What is notable about Whitmore’s work is its restraint. Whitmore finds in a photograph of a monk an image of how he conceives his role in Someone Was Here, his remarkable series of profiles of people with AIDS and their caregivers. Of course, the monk in the picture is not any monk. He is the keeper of the charnel house of the monastery on Mount Anthos, and the photograph shows him looking after the bones of the dead, “stacked up neatly in rows, one on top of the other” (SWH:1). As the picture is being taken, the monk averts his face, and Whitmore speculates on the monk’s motives for turning away:

Like the monk, Whitmore keeps his narrative face averted in Someone Was Here as an expression of both pride and humility—proud to be called on for such a sacred act and humbled by the enormity of the responsibility of writing for the New York Times what proved to be the first article for a general public on the human, not the medical, consequences of the pandemic. It is the blankness of the monk that allows the viewer to share the responsibility of witnessing, to be someone who was also there. Witness literature, after all, only emerges when events are kept from public view or denied by official sources—the Holocaust, secret wars, the disappearances in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador. Once readers know, they become secondary witnesses of the cover-up; they no longer—if honest—can be part of the process of denial or official inattention. By staying out of the limelight, the writer shifts the burden of witnessing onto the reader. This, at least, seems to be Whitmore’s strategy. No longer will he try to make it easy for straight audiences by giving them the distance and stereotypes to which they are accustomed. For Whitmore, the time for coaxing the reader was over. The allowances that he once extended to the straight audiences of The Caseworker can no longer be justified in the face of so much suffering. Readers must take on the burdens of witnessing, and they will be judged by their willingness to do so. Whitmore’s one responsibility is to present such lives simply and straightforwardly.

Nor did Whitmore choose lives—particularly in the first of his New York Times articles—that gave straight readers much room for distancing or stereotyping. As he had done in The Caseworker, he chose men who would “short-circuit the sideshow atmosphere,” men who “were nothing if not antistereotypes” (“Gay Theatre”:246). Edward Dunn was a freelance copywriter in his forties, and Jim Sharp, a man in his mid-thirties, was a media buyer for a small advertising agency. Not macho jobs, but the kinds of jobs with which readers of the New York Times could identify. Ed and Jim weren’t reckless kids or aging queens, whose fates might be more easily discounted. Jim Sharp was a relatively recent transplant from Texas, and Edward, who had come to New York from California twenty years earlier, was a churchgoer in a monogamous long-term relationship with Robert, a social worker, who had died from AIDS complications. Neither of the men were high rollers or party animals. Whitmore doesn’t try to butch them up. Jim’s lover, Dennis, a window dresser, has decorated their overstuffed apartment with a “deer head above the little fireplace” and “framed Erté prints on the opposite wall” (SWH:11). Whitmore makes sure to note “a vinyl satchel on the floor under the coffee table [which] holds Dennis’s knitting” (SWH:12). In short, what is most remarkable about these men is their ordinariness. For gay readers they are the unalluring men we ignore in bars; for straight readers they are the unassuming men they ignore everywhere else. Yet what is most skillful about Whitmore’s selection is that while avoiding stereotypes, he doesn’t fall into that other trap—the reverse stereotype, which is as artificial and as false as the stereotype.

Whitmore’s control is all the more amazing given his own struggles with AIDS. The seeming narrative objectivity and authorial invisibility appear to be the products of two contrary forces—his need to deny his AIDS diagnosis and his rage against it. As Whitmore explains in his article “Bearing Witness,” an autobiographical essay he wrote later for the Times, his earlier article on Jim Sharp was riddled with denial. “When I met Jim Sharp three years ago,” he confesses, “I could only see a dying man. A chasm had separated me from him and the other men with AIDS” he had interviewed at the time. But now that he is writing “Bearing Witness,” “that chasm was breached and there was no safety” (VQR:366). He could read the bodily signs that he was dying. Still, for the moment, denial had allowed him to achieve a kind of restraint. Harder to control was his anger. Whitmore learned how to use his anger from Jim Sharp, whom he says, “had a special gift” for it (VQR:367). By his representation of Sharp’s anger, Whitmore could express his own. Just as the image of the monk in the charnel house of the Mount Anthos monastery had given him a figure for the narrator, so Jim’s piranha gave Whitmore a figure for his own rage.

On top of a stereo speaker in Jim’s apartment is a stuffed piranha. Edward brought it back from Brazil last winter and when he gave it to Jim he said, joking, “This is how you look when you don’t get your way.”

The fish is mounted as if poised for attack, bristling jaws agape. Like AIDS, the piranha is at first glance shocking, repulsive. But on closer inspection, it doesn’t look real. It looks like something whipped up out of latex and horsehair for some low-budget horror movie. Thus demystified it can be dismissed—that is, until your eye happens to fall on it again. Then you wish it weren’t in the same room with you. (Someone Was Here, 16)

Whitmore’s Times articles, which became the center of Someone Was Here, provide the sole example of explicitly activist prose written by the Violet Quill. It was not meant just to bear witness but to give others no excuse for ducking the truth. In postmodernist terms, it is a discursive intervention to disrupt the then-normative rhetoric on AIDS. It was meant to stir action.

Reading Someone Was Here a decade after its publication, I found its science incredibly outdated. Whitmore writes, for example, that “researchers estimate that from 4 to 19 percent of people infected with the virus will eventually develop AIDS” and then amends that statement to “20 percent to 30 percent of HIV-infected people will develop AIDS symptoms within five years of exposure to the virus.” (SWH:24). The first statistic is entirely incorrect; the second has been altered by research and new treatments. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—such outdated information, Someone Was Here presents a remarkably vivid picture of the early stages of the epidemic. Unlike Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On or the pieces that Larry Kramer collected in Reports from the Holocaust or even Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, Someone Was Here gives a passionate account of the horror of the mid-eighties that is all the more terrifying because of its cool restraint and its seemingly unpolemical reportage. Ignored by gay readers at the time, perhaps because of its appearance in the much-hated New York Times Magazine (owing to what was viewed as the Times’s generally poor AIDS coverage), it probably reached more straight readers than those other books and contributed to the growing awareness of the epidemic.

George Whitmore’s journalistic activism was unusual for the Violet Quill writers, but that is not to say that they didn’t participate in various ways in the political action around AIDS. Edmund White was one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and served, albeit briefly, as its president. As an editor at Ballantine, Chris Cox published Dr. Jacques Leibowitch’s devastating critique of American research on AIDS, A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin (1985). But in general, the Violet Quill didn’t mount the kind of assault that Larry Kramer led. They did not pen their individual version of J’accuse. Their major effort went into finding a way to assimilate what was happening around them into their work.

But although Ferro was anxious to publish the first AIDS novel, his attitude toward writing AIDS literature was ambivalent. Among his papers is a short statement—perhaps intended for promotional material for the novel—in which he discusses the problems of dealing with the disease in fiction. The document is very strange. It is headed “Ferro Interview,” but no one else speaks to ask a question—although one can infer from his comments that the question, Why is he writing about AIDS? has been posed. Ferro replaces this unarticulated question with another one far less pointed: Why has it taken me and others this long to confront the idea of AIDS in fiction? He gives six long explanations for the delay in gay representation but, significantly, he omits the most personal one: that he has AIDS and is ill himself. This so-called interview is most notable not for its penetrating self-interrogation, but for its self-protective avoidance, and for its contradictions rather than for its consistencies.

It begins: “I did not set out to write a novel about AIDS. SECOND SON is not about anything. It’s a story, a love story actually, in which a life-threatening disease, never specified or even named, is a complicating factor.” Behind this denial that Second Son is about anything lay Ferro’s fear that the book would be read as a “problem” or “protest” novel, in the way so much gay fiction had been read. Like James Baldwin, whom he much admired, Ferro regarded such protest literature as inferior, a trap into which minority literatures too often fell or were pushed. To the last, Ferro insisted on seeing his work as literary art, not social critique. He wanted to write Madame Bovary, not Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Too clear a political agenda would tarnish his sense of being an artist, and we will see how deeply the aesthetic imperative of the work informs its view of AIDS. But Ferro’s comments go beyond trying to protect his book from being read as a protest novel; he appears determined to diminish the impact of AIDS on gay life: the disease is merely a “complicating factor” in what is primarily a love story. Thus AIDS is reduced to a plot device—like a stolen letter or mistaken identity. In this disengaged manner, he goes on to say “it was logical to deal with the subject, as it seemed logical in the seventies to write about gay life from a personal point of view.” Yet the logic of the choice is never spelled out, and for a writer whose interests are as gothic and occult as Ferro’s were, logic would not have been the basis for an artistic decision. By the end of the “interview,” although still holding the subject at arm’s length, Ferro admits:

The mixture of candor and evasiveness is a mark of its particular time. On the one hand, Ferro is insistent that he be regarded as “a gay writer.” “I’m proud of that,” he wants us to know. On the other hand, he avoids any indication that he himself might have AIDS. The indefinite pronoun, one, includes Ferro but never singles him out. Any human or any gay man might feel the responsibility to write about AIDS, not just those stricken with the disease. He never quite says that Second Son is an AIDS novel, not from some sensitivity about labels—he is content, for example, to speak about the “gay novel”—but from an unwillingness to be entirely associated with the disease. Instead he employs the euphemism, “a story in which disease and death played a part.” Finally he contends that, while putting off writing such a story will “eventually” seem “ludicrous,” it does not seem ludicrous at present. Indeed, Ferro implies that writing Second Son is an act that runs against conventional wisdom, an act of bravery that others will think of as foolhardy. Ferro is exhibiting here—as he does in Second Son—the quite understandable desire both to run away from the subject and to cry out against the denial that “has been and continues to be the major motivating dynamic of the epidemic.”

The voice of controlled distance can be ascribed to the rage and bewilderment that he felt were beneath him. For Robert Ferro was a man who liked to be in control of events or feel that he was the darling of the gods when he was forced to throw himself into the arms of the Fates. With AIDS he no longer exerted the control he was accustomed to exercise, and the Fates appeared to have turned their backs on him. Ferro was a man frequently enraged—his friends and family expected periodic outbursts of righteous indignation—but this AIDS rage was different from his usual anger. Ferro’s habitual rage was against unfairness, unkindness, incivility, and insensitivity. In contrast his AIDS rage is cosmic in dimension. Matthew Arnold argues that the intolerable emotion—at least in literature—was one in which there was “everything to be endured and nothing to be done.” Second Son is a fantasy against the passivity of enduring meaninglessness. The characters are constantly busy and unwilling to put up with anything.

The plot of Second Son is simple enough. Mark Valerian, the eponymous second son of a highly successful Italian businessman-engineer, has contracted the Plague, a deadly sexually transmitted virus that has disproportionately affected gay men. He takes refuge in the family’s beach home, a house beloved by his recently deceased mother and threatened by his father’s business reversals. Against the background of his dying is the feud between Mark and his father, a feud in which he enlists the assistance of his two sisters against his father, who is allied with his elder brother. So close is this narrative to the Ferro family that when I visited on a research trip, Ferro’s sisters introduced themselves as the characters in the book. After the publication of The Family of Max Desir, he wrote his father a conciliatory letter that begins: “I would like you to know it was never my intention to hurt you with the book. It was not written as an act of vengeance, as I have heard that you call it.” Clearly these plots came very close to home.

To break out of the passivity that is undermining his resistance to the disease, Mark, who is a landscape and interior designer, takes on a project in Italy to redo a friend’s penthouse. There he meets Bill, a set and lighting designer, who also is stricken with the Plague. They fall in love, return to the States, and try to make a life for themselves. Mark’s doctor wants them to try out a new experimental drug which, though highly dangerous, may bring about a cure. (Among Ferro’s papers is the informed consent declaration for a study on “the Safety and Efficacy of Interferon Betaser Given Intravenously.” His alias in the study is Mark Roberts.) Their friend, Matthew Black, presents another plan: he has connected with a group of gay men who believe the only hope is to leave Earth for the planet Splendora, a sphere of peace and advanced knowledge inhabited exclusively by males.

Second Son mirrors Ferro’s ambivalence at being identified as a person with AIDS. Mark, Ferro’s alter ego in the novel, discusses with his friend Matthew (based quite clearly on Andrew Holleran) whether to tell his family that Bill has the Plague:

The attitudes that cross one another in this little speech are central to the novel. Mark and Bill insist on the family regarding them as a gay couple; they are aggressively out of the closet about their sexuality. But illness is another matter. Vile is a complicated word, which although generally denoting something morally base or wicked, also carries here its older meanings of being “common” and of “small worth” as well as physically repulsive and foul. Mark clearly feels that illness reduces his worthiness by making him common. Homosexuality in one sense elevated Mark—made him a person of superior taste and morals—but the Plague reduces him to one of the masses. There is a disturbing way that Ferro associates good taste with morality, physical beauty with proper conduct, and social elevation with a higher ideal. Illness is vile in all senses of the word. It is in bad taste; the good are healthy, strong, and beautiful. Second Son slides too easily between physical, moral, and artistic soundness as though these three conditions are equal.

If Ferro were alone in equating ethics, aesthetics, and health, Second Son would be an interesting, complex, but essentially idiosyncratic work; but for better or worse, he articulates values quite common in American culture in general and gay culture in particular. The most explicit—but hardly the most subtle—exponent of the equation of moral, aesthetic, and bodily soundness is the photographer, Tom Bianci, whose Defense of Beauty is an apologia for the spiritual perfection of muscle queens: in Bianci’s world, swollen pecs are the outward sign of enlarged consciousness. Of course, Ferro’s position is not as crude as Bianci’s, but they have much in common: for Ferro a “magical” lighting effect is the closest man will ever come in this world to transcendent grace. Indeed, Mark in Second Son speaks of his ability to landscape in mystical, even visionary, terms. “It’s not imagination. … Sometimes I see something already done, all its details at once, and after that it’s not a matter of imagination but of recollection of the actual thing” (16) To place Ferro’s attitudes in historical perspective, one might do well to recall that Susan Sontag published AIDS and Its Metaphors only a year after Second Son. Its purpose was “to calm the imagination, not to incite it. Not to confer meaning … but to deprive something of meaning” (14). Sontag argues that “the metaphoric trappings” around a disease “inhibit people from seeking treatment early enough, or from making a greater effort to get competent treatment.” In short, her analysis is designed to uncouple the equations that Ferro so painfully constructs, in particular that illness reveals “moral laxity and turpitude” (Sontag:57). Ferro exhibits the tendency Sontag so strenuously argues against—the projection of meaning onto the meaninglessness of disease.

Physical beauty—particularly of surroundings—is an important part of all of Ferro’s novels, but it is especially important in Second Son. Mark and Bill, the protagonists, are both designers—Mark of gardens and interiors, Bill of theatrical sets and spectacles. Of course, designing was an important part of Ferro and Grumley’s actual life. Michael Grumley for a while considered going to interior design school, and he worked as an illustrator, exhibiting in Europe and America. Robert Ferro helped design and furnish his father’s house, and throughout his life both delighted and frustrated friends by rearranging the furniture in their homes whether they wanted him to do so or not. An angry George Stambolian once told them they would have to leave if they so much as touched another chair. In Second Son, Mark has a similar obsession and tells his sister, in a not-entirely-self-mocking tone, “the point of existence is the rearrangement of the furniture” (149). If you believe that the goal of life is to make things beautiful, then disease will be something you wish to deny, hide, and disguise. For Ferro, writing and interior decorating are related; Mark in Second Son wishes “to rearrange words as he did furniture” (68).

I don’t remember who pointed out that the hallmark of gay interior design is that it transformed a room—not into a space for gracious living but into a stage set made to be admired. Whether that is true in general, it is certainly true of the aesthetic that permeates Second Son. Mark and Bill turn their Berkshire cabin into a site of pageantry, of ritualistic display, of sacred acts. They place their emotions in the appropriate stage setting, for as Mark comments, “Love is half theatrics—the right song at the perfect moment” (98).

Another implication of Ferro’s feeling that the point of life is rearranging the furniture is that the beautiful is not natural. Beauty is made rather than found, and once created it requires obsessive attention to maintain. Take, for example, Mark and Bill’s redesigning of their summer home in the Berkshires. This episode is highly autobiographical: in 1987 the Ferro-Grumleys actually rented a cabin on Tully Pond in the Berkshires where Ferro wrote Second Son and Grumley busily revised the book that became Life Drawing. In the novel, Bill enhances the natural beauty of the house by first installing a chain of tiny lights around the pond that come on as the sky darkens and “a jet of water shot sixty feet into the air over the marsh at the west end” (146). Asked by Mark whether these improvements were permanent, Bill answers, “Nothing’s permanent. But it can be maintained” (146). Beauty is a discipline achieved not once but by an endless effort of maintenance and control. In this sense the beauty of the body is the same effort to keep up appearances.

Ferro’s concern with landscaping is a traditional one in the novel. Like Jane Austen, Ferro is concerned with the improvement of the estate. Both see aesthetic choices as growing out of ethical values. But Austen’s views about landscaping are in sharp contrast to Ferro’s. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen celebrates landscapes “without any artificial appearance … where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste” (267). In contrast, Ferro revels in changes—such as the lighting around the pond and the fountain in the end—that transform the natural into the magical. Bill also creates “theatrical effects, sets and lighting; and magic … I’m interested also in magic. I want to combine the two things” (SS:113; ellipses in original). Pressed to explain what he means by magic, Bill says that he performs “tricks that look real, that could be real someday, some way” (114). Whereas Austen is unsympathetic to theatrics (see Mansfield Park) and regards magic as beneath comment, Ferro wishes to create something so spectacular that it suggests a nature yet to have been evolved.

Bill’s desire to create an illusion “that could be real someday” indicates that he anticipates further evolution, and nowhere is this faith more explicitly developed than in his discussion of the lights around the pond. Bill tells his sister Vita:

I am not entirely sure how to take this little speech, nor how seriously Ferro intends for the reader to take it. Should we read it as a comforting fantasy for the moment or as a long-range strategy for living one’s life? How we decide to take such narratives is at the heart of the novel and at the core of what links the issue of aesthetics to AIDS. Bill regards such leaps of the imagination seriously. Mark is less certain (but not entirely rejecting). Yet Ferro insists that openness to the as-yet-not-real of the imagination is necessary for coping with AIDS, for it is the basis of hope. At the end of Second Son, Mark and Bill face two treatment options: the first is a terrestrial medical cure for the Plague; the second is a trip to the planet Splendora where aliens feel confident that they can not only save Mark and Bill but rescue human beings from their almost inevitable environmental destruction.

Ferro would agree that the medical cure and the interplanetary journey are not narratives of similar probability. The grouchiest skeptic would have to admit that scientists might develop a cure for AIDS. Without such a belief—without such an imaginative leap of faith—medical progress could not be achieved. Unless some people believed their fantasies could eventually be turned into reality, we would not have advancements in knowledge. Ferro’s point seems to be that the difference between the narratives (or metaphors) of a magic bullet for AIDS and the interplanetary trip to the planet Splendora is one of degree rather than of kind, and that people need such narratives—no matter how unlikely—in order to keep living.

At the end of Second Son, Mark and Bill do not choose between these two narratives; the decision is held in abeyance. Mark’s doctor is not ready to place them on the new experimental treatment until their condition worsens, nor are they ready to plunk down $600,000 for a ticket to Splendora, which they fear could be a hoax. Instead they keep both stories open—indeed, the two stories get twisted together:

In 1993, Edmund White, speaking at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, criticized himself for “my nearly total silence in the face of AIDS, with the exception of my stories in The Darker Proof” (BL:367). While this is not entirely true—he was one of the founding members of GMHC, had contributed one of the pivotal essays on AIDS (“Esthetics and Loss,” first published in Artforum and widely reprinted), and had given his face to a series of posters of people living with AIDS—it does suggest how difficult a topic it was for him and the degree to which he had avoided AIDS not only as a subject but as a social reality. In his biography of White, Stephen Barber suggests that one of the reasons White left the United States in 1983 to live in Paris was to gain a “provisional release” from the AIDS “deluge” that had begun to descend on White’s world in New York (Barber:110). Eight years after leaving the United States, in his 1991 article on gay literature for the New York Times Magazine, White is still uncertain about the ethics of AIDS literature:

White’s relative silence about AIDS is not just a result of unresolved artistic matters but also a consequence of guilt. White and his fellow gay liberationists were accused of being responsible for bringing about the AIDS epidemic. Larry Kramer, for example, finds fault with The Joy of Gay Sex as a work that advocated dangerous sexual practices on “the eve of the epidemic.” No matter that The Joy of Gay Sex appeared in 1977, four years before the first reported cases, and never extolled “the virtues of fist fucking”; Kramer spoke what others felt: that the Violet Quill writers and those of their kind had celebrated a culture of sexual freedom which had brought death to the community. White and his coauthor, Charles Silverstein, were anxious to revise the book once AIDS had appeared (BL:64). Unfortunately, the original publisher had been sold, the book licensed to others, and White and Silverstein’s inquiries left unanswered (NJ:xii). Yet White could not help feeling guilty—not about writing the book, which he described as “the most liberating act of my life,” but that those reading the book after 1981 would not be properly warned about the health risks of particular practices (NJ:xi). Of course, White and Silverstein did not face this problem alone. Throughout the AIDS epidemic, writers have been sorely tried in keeping pace with changes in medical research and with what practices were advisable. Consequently, even if one wanted to write about AIDS, it was difficult to determine what was best to say—what could warn without demoralizing, what could hearten without providing false hope. Yet despite all his misgivings and uncertainties, White could not stay silent for long, and in The Farewell Symphony (1997) and The Married Man (2000), he has dealt in a sustained way with AIDS in his fiction.

But first came The Darker Proof (1987/1988), one of the books in the first wave of AIDS fiction appearing only months after Second Son. The Darker Proof is an unusual volume, a joint if not entirely collaborative effort between White and the British writer Adam Mars-Jones. The book is a collection of short stories, four by Mars-Jones and three by White. (In the original 1987 British edition there were only two stories by White.) The volume appeared as a “paperback original” (a book without a hardcover edition) in both Britain and the United States—the only one of White’s books to appear in this manner—because such a mode of publication not only made the book cheaper to produce (with the result that the subsequent lower price would make it accessible to more people) but also available more quickly for sale since paperbacks require only a month of production compared to the year of most hardbacks. White and Mars-Jones felt there was an urgent need to bring a nonmedical voice to the discussion of AIDS and to articulate the human dimensions of the epidemic. Moreover, the immediacy of publication brought the project closer to journalism—a mode in which Mars-Jones felt more comfortable. For although Mars-Jones wrote copiously for newspapers, he became frozen at the prospect of writing serious fiction, and one of White’s chief reasons for involving himself in the project was to help his friend overcome writer’s block (telephone conversation June 6, 2000).

Indeed the sense of urgency governed everything about White’s Darker Proof stories. Since the stories hovered between journalism and fiction, he employed a style even more direct than the one in The Beautiful Room Is Empty, which appeared at about the same time. Under the pressure of events, White compressed the material he might have expanded into a novel into a few dozen pages. In fact, the autobiographical material in “Palace Days” is a condensed version of the central section of The Farewell Symphony. Here, for example, is a breathless paragraph describing the business owned by Mark, the protagonist of “Palace Days”:

A computerized dating service, a rental agency for Key West and Rio, a caterer that put its waiters in shorts, T-shirts and, to emphasize those powerful calves, orange work boots and sagging knee socks—these were just a few of the satrapies in Mark’s empire. Actually the whole business was run by Manuela, a tough Puerto Rican everyone assumed must be a dyke, though after two rotten marriages she wasn’t into anything but money and good times. She did the accounting, hired and fired the staff, organized the trips. Mark was just there to socialize, to “circulate” as his hostessy Virginia mother put it. (The Darker Proof, 131)

But the very rapidity of the narrative—its lightning-quick in-and-out movement—fulfills a larger purpose: White was concerned that the very nature of the disease—which at the time, before combination therapies and the entire arsenal of treatments for opportunistic infections, had a time span counted in months—lent itself to a narrative line unremitting in its downward trajectory, beginning in health and ending rapidly in death. For political as well as artistic reasons, White wanted to find a way out of that narrative pattern. He was not alone. Michael Grumley bristles in his diary at George Stambolian’s description of Second Son as a novel “about someone dying of” AIDS. “It’s about someone living through it, surviving,” he angrily insists (VQR:270). Technically, Grumley is correct: the central characters are still alive at the end of Second Son, but only because the novel ends on an unresolved note. White hoped that an angular short story—hard and fast-paced—cutting quickly between episodes could avoid that neatly classical structure of a concluding deathbed scene. He wanted to avoid suggesting that AIDS stories had to end in death, if for no other reason than to escape the medicalization of the epidemic. In fact, White’s Darker Proof stories are devoid of hospital scenes; the closest he is willing to get are doctors’ offices.

“Running on Empty” is the last of the three stories that White contributed to the volume, and it was first published in the American edition as a response to criticism of the British edition that White’s two other stories were exclusively about wealthy, mature, gay New Yorkers. Luke, the protagonist, is neither wealthy nor as old as the men in the other two stories, but he’s not very different: sophisticated, culturally sensitive, attractive, and (at least at the start of the story) living in Europe after a period in New York. In fact, all three stories are fictional versions of White and his friends, and why shouldn’t they be? If one aims to give AIDS a human face, one should begin with the human faces one knows best. “Running on Empty,” as Barber points out, was inspired by White’s own visit to his Texas relatives (161). The other inspiration was the translator Matthew Ward, whom White dated in the 1980s. Like Ward, Luke (and White has simply substituted one apostle’s name for another) comes from a working-class family in the West, a family that he loves but from which he feels increasingly distant and threatened by religious fundamentalism, cultural parochialism, and gender stereotyping. I knew Ward, and White captures in this story his passionate, quirky, divided nature. The last time we met, we had been invited to lunch by Richard Howard, “the king of the translators,” as he’s referred to in the story, who has “taken [Matt] under his wing” (DP:215). But Howard had forgotten about the lunch and gone out. On the elevator down from his apartment, Ward pulled me against him, embraced me with a deep kiss, then fled out of the building when we reached the ground floor. I never saw him again.

In “Running on Empty,” Luke, a young translator who has been living in Paris, returns to Texas to visit his cousin Beth, a recent widow. Luke is uncertain what this visit means. His uncertainty is both a symptom of the disease and a consequence of the very terms under which he has lived. Taxoplasmosis has seriously reduced his ability to think decisively, and since “translating requires a hundred small dares per page in the constant trade-off between fidelity and fluency,” Luke feels that he’s at the end of his career as a translator (218). More significant perhaps is the fact that since Luke has always “lived on nerve, run on empty,” he can’t judge how little gas he has left (217). The story begins with Luke on a trans-Atlantic flight, and in a sense, he is up in the air throughout the story, uncertain what future, if any, he has. The plan is that he and Beth “were to visit relatives in East Texas and then drive over to Lubbock, where Luke would stay with his parents for a week before flying home to New York,” but the conditional suggests that the plans are tentative (218).

If Luke floats in weightless suspension, then his two maiden aunts, Ruby and Pearl, whom he and Beth go to visit in Hershell, Texas, are chained to an unending cycle of ritual. As the name suggests, Pearl, although a semiprecious gem, has never moved out of “Her-shell,” and lives in her parents’ house, a building that started as a log cabin shack and, through a process of addition, has become like a chambered nautilus. Pearl, fittingly, is the “local chair of the Texas Historical Society” and takes “pride in every detail of their heritage” (222). But if Ruby and Pearl’s world is narrowly parochial, especially in comparison to the cosmopolitan existence Luke has lived in Paris and New York, it nevertheless is more genuine than the “brand-new housing developments [he] had seen on the Dallas–Fort Worth Beltway” (222). Moreover, theirs is a world that does not deny mortality. The aunts take Luke to the local graveyard, where they are joined by “ten or so families” in an annual ritual “to set the tombstones upright, hoe and rake, stick silk or plastic flowers in the soil—real ones burned up right away—and then eat” (224). Still, their religion is a barrier to facing death since “you must be happy in the Lord. The Bible tells us to be happy in our faith” (225). There’s something stunted in this unrelieved geniality, which is all too happy to stick plastic flowers in the soil because their vivid colors don’t burn away as easily as the real thing.

Up in the air for most of this trip, Luke “crashes” at the end. Out for a walk with Beth, they encounter three shirtless, drunken teenagers by a parked pickup truck, one of whom has his “jeans down, taking a leak.” Beth is horrified. When Luke argues that they’re not doing any harm, Beth with her “big missionary smile” replies, breaking off in midsentence, “You think not? Some folks here might think—” (230). For the first time in his visit, Luke comes up against the kind of fundamentalist parochialism that warps and stunts and ultimately poisons the pioneer vitality and peasant richness of East Texas. That evening, he goes out for a run—literally emptied, this time, by a bout of diarrhea—and finds the spot where the boy had peed, and touching “the dirt to his lips” starts “running again, chewing the grit as though it might help him to recuperate his past if not his health” (233).

What then is Luke trying to reclaim as he eats the urine-soaked dirt? Clearly he wants to reconnect with the earth and to ground himself quite literally in the landscape of his youth. But the landscape that he wants to reclaim is not the arid world of Beth, Pearl, and Ruby, who shun the sexual vitality that Luke seeks. The Baptist contingent of his family has always cultivated what Luke comes later in life to call Schadenfreude, “malicious pleasure in someone else’s pain” (213). In contradistinction to his Catholic mother, they are proud to be held in place by “the buckle of the Bible belt” and would be pleased to find in Luke’s death a confirmation of their shriveled parochialism (213). Luke’s clandestine communion with the piss-stained soil is both his reassertion of the liberating power of the sexual in the face of death and a way of incorporating the past’s earthy best as ballast to the urbane weightlessness of Paris and New York. “Running on Empty,” which concludes The Darker Proof, ends with Luke still running—slowed perhaps but still moving—and while the story does not hold out much possibility for a medical miracle, it does suggest that a spiritual or psychological reconciliation fashioned in his own terms is yet possible.

White’s Darker Proof stories reassert—as do the stories of Picano and Holleran—the validity of the culture that White’s gay friends had constructed before AIDS, a culture that attempted to combine abject sexual adventures with the most rarefied aesthetic experiences: rough trade and La Traviata, bondage and Balanchine, the Mineshaft and MoMA. By returning to Hershell, Luke is not rejecting the high culture he has acquired in Paris and New York, but he wants to infuse that experience with the earthy yet austere vitality of his youth. Like the other heroes of White’s Darker Proof stories, Luke wants to possess a trans-Atlantic experience that combines both pagan sexual joys and urbane aesthetic pleasures. All his heroes are men whose salvation is to be found in being cosmopolitan, able to bridge the transcendent modernist achievement because it had never lost contact with the raw—even abject—sensuality of the pagan and its austerely sweet simplicity. What all his protagonists wish to avoid is the middle-class smug self-satisfaction that blinds people from “a radiant vision of society” (166).

White directs his anger at times at those who cave in to these narrow religious beliefs, with their “phobia about pleasure, a hatred of the body and a fanatical prudishness” (FS:380). He knows how easy it is under the pressures of illness to give up on the difficult project of self-liberation and give in to the self-hatred that has always lingered beneath the surface. In The Farewell Symphony, Leonard, who had seemed to triumph over his childhood, in which he’d been “the despised creep … tormented by his alcoholic, bedridden father” reverts to “the pinched, shabby, willfully ugly Catholicism of his Florida youth, the church of glow-in-the-dark dashboard Madonnas and plastic flowers, of sin management and grace accountancy. … This was the church of an angry deity, the neighborhood bully who sent fags and unwed mothers straight to Hell for eternity … but who sped bigots and old, holy-water frogs straight to a Heaven that smelled of chalk dust and wet blackboards and that rang out with the excited voices of constant bingo winners.” “Broken-hearted and angry,” White concludes, “I was sorry that he had lost his confidence, his belief in everything he’d so beautifully achieved” (FS:381). In The Darker Proof he could not express his anger so strongly, perhaps because he was less certain that such a loss of confidence would not be his own fate.

But if the Darker Proof stories attack Southern Baptists and trailer-trash Catholicism, they have equally harsh things to say about the indifference of French bureaucrats. “Palace Days” ends with Mark and Ned, two Americans who have moved to Europe to continue “the party” that had come to an end in New York, attending a Robbins-Balanchine evening at the Paris opera house. Let me quote this epiphany at some length:

[Mark had] never been able to make Parisians understand that the lobby of the New York State Theater had been the drawing room of America and that we, yes, we Americans saw in the elaborate enchaînements on stage a radiant vision of society.

Hadn’t Robbins called his best piece Dances at a Gathering? The old hymn said, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.” Now there was no Lord left to ask anything of, but in the book on modern poetry Joshua was struggling to finish, hadn’t he quoted Wallace Stevens, who’d said that if Americans were to have a god now it would have to be art?

The last movement of the Violin Concerto was clearly both Stravinsky’s and Balanchine’s homage to the square dance, and just as clearly these Parisian dancers had never seen a square dance in their lives; nor had the people in the audience. The idea of a courtship dance held in the midst of a whole smiling world of grown-up (“alleman left and do-si-do”)—oh, the sweetly unsensual spirit of checked, flouncy dresses and hand-held Stetsons—eluded these bored Parisian performers, all state employees eager to wrap it up and head home. (The Darker Proof, 167)

As they attempt to figure out what to do with their lives—catching their breath before running on their nerves—Mark (another apostle) and Ned understand the difficult balance they must strike to go on. Their god—if they must have one—will have to be the gods of art: Apollo and Dionysus together, the intricate cosmopolitan linked with the down-home. Stravinsky and Balanchine, two Russians who became U.S. citizens, are able to construct a “radiant vision of society” that would appeal to gay men, for it celebrates the inclusiveness of a society able to operate as communitas, to borrow social anthropologist Victor Turner’s term—that is, to come and work together in seeming spontaneity—a society that can combine the simple vitality of the square dance with the refined sophistication of classical ballet and unite “the sweetly unsensual spirit of checked, flouncy dresses” with the highly erotic “enchaînements on stage.” Although Stravinsky and Balanchine are both dead, their deaths, White insists, cannot invalidate their ballet’s vision of society.

Significantly, “An Oracle,” the earliest and arguably the finest of the Darker Proof stories, is the most critical of gay life in the 1970s, for Ray—the story’s central character—has been diverted from his development by the hedonistic, material pleasures of New York gay life. Like Luke, Ray is a working-class boy who, through hard work and intelligence, has been able to transcend his class origins. Born in “northern Ohio near Findlay” (as opposed to White, who was born in southern Ohio’s Cincinnati), Ray wins second prize for his cow at the state fair, a letter jacket for high school athletics, a first prize in the Belle Fontaine spelling bee, and a scholarship to Oberlin, where he switches from majoring in agronomy to philosophy and ends up earning a doctorate from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on Durkheim’s concept of anomie. After getting his Ph.D., Ray moves to Toronto, joins an urban gay commune, grows his hair to his shoulders, writes articles “lamenting the lesbian–gay male split,” and adopts the name Anna “as a statement of his position against gender distinctions,” a name only his friends in the commune could use “with a straight face” (DP:174). He finally arrives in New York, where he drifts from one marginal job to the next and from one meaningless relation to another—in a life not unlike Malone’s in Dancer from the Dance—until he finds George.

If Ray represents one of the recognizable and relatively long-standing trajectories of New York gay life—the intelligent, good-looking boy from the provinces who finds excitement, pleasure, and aimlessness in the big city—George represents a newer story line: the masculine, aggressive gay businessman, successfully competing against his heterosexual counterparts.

George’s motto is work hard and play hard. He gets Ray lucrative jobs working for the worst sort of multinational corporations (the kind that systematically poison the Third World and ruthlessly exploit workers) and introduces Ray to Fire Island for weekends of drugs, sex, and socializing, and where they’ve spent twelve summers around a pool “with just a phone, a little acid, and thirty hunky men” (170). Then George gets AIDS and, throughout the fifteen-month illness, Ray takes care of him with selfless devotion. But afterwards, when Ray tries to pick up the threads of his life, he discovers that the threads are bare. “‘You must look out for yourself,’ George had always said. But what self?” (172). The highly ritualized gay life that emerged in the 1970s among certain gay men often stripped them of their selfhood, and the result was a kind of anomie that Durkheim never anticipated. “He who’d won the Belle Fontaine spelling bee and written one hundred and twenty closely reasoned pages on anomie … [now] saw that without noticing it he’d drifted into the joking, irresponsible, anguished half-world of the gay actor-singer-dancer-writer-waiter-model who always knows what Sondheim has up his sleeve … who feels Europe is as extinct as a dead star and all the heat and life of the planet must radiate from New York, who had heard most of his favorite songs from his chronological adolescence resurface fifteen years later in their disco versions, at once a reassurance about human continuity and a dismaying gauge of time’s flight” (177).

Ray’s solution is to reverse the process: if the attitude of gay New York is that “Europe is as extinct as a dead star,” then it’s to Europe Ray must go, and not just any part of Europe but its deadest, most archaic site—Crete—and not to some postcard perfect town of “blazing whitewash and strong geometrical shapes,” but Xania where “everything was crumbling brick, faded paint” (182).

Despite his dislike for the way the wealthy tourists exploit the young men of the town and the rather stereotyped gender roles that the young men assume, Ray finds himself having sex with Marco, a local boy of extraordinary beauty who is clearly “not the usual harbor trash,” as Ray’s friend Homer knowingly observes (200). As Ray’s relationship with Marco develops, he understands that he is feeling “more, far more, than the occasion warranted” (204), not simply because Marco is young enough to be his son, or because he’s quite beautiful (Ray has had sex with scores of men just as handsome), but because their lack of a common language has made their relationship almost entirely nonverbal, which precludes the kind of posturing and pretense that got Ray into trouble in the first place. In any event, the night before Ray is to leave, he has an acquaintance translate a letter to Marco saying that he plans to return to Xania to establish a guesthouse, which he hopes Marco will help him run. Marco, after a long pause, replies in perfect English: “I know you love me and I love you. But Xania is no good for you. … You must look out for yourself” (209). Marco leaves without another word, and Ray, “blown back in a wind-tunnel of grief and joy,” allows himself finally to cry over George, “who’s just spoken to him once again through the least likely oracle” (209).

Sex—and “An Oracle” is a very sexually explicit story—is once again the means by which a man cut off by AIDS from living, reattaches himself, finds himself, learns to “look out for” himself. For White, as for many of the writers of the Violet Quill, sex became not merely a refined form of communication but a way of discovering and expanding the self—even if, as is the case with “An Oracle,” the sex is meticulously “safe sex.” There is in this story, as well, a transcendent element to the sex (although the supernaturalism could be explained away as hysterical projection).

The story’s key phrase—“look out for yourself”—is wonderfully ambiguous. Look out for yourself obviously means that Ray should take care of himself; yet the expression can be used to mean to be wary of oneself, as when people say, look out for trouble. Finally, it suggests that Ray needs to be alert for signs of self as though he possessed a “secret sharer” à la Joseph Conrad, a double who makes brief appearances often in disguise. Whatever the meaning of the phrase—and oracles traditionally speak in ambiguities, their truths not just open to interpretation but inviting uncertainty—it suggests a reflexivity that is complex, ongoing, and suspicious as well as nurturing. Looking out for yourself is something subtler and more complicated than mere self-preservation; it requires being attuned to one’s desires and conditions even as they change. And it is more urgent, more dreadful, and more necessary than it had been before. White carefully avoids stating Ray’s HIV status so that “Look out for yourself” could also mean watching for symptoms of AIDS. “An Oracle” in the age of AIDS is in one sense the antibody test, that voice of certainty that speaks ambiguously of one’s future. White explores over and over again the problem of how to understand its predictions. Nor have the enormous changes in AIDS treatment made the oracular voice of the scientific test any easier to understand. When a friend recently told me that his viral load was undetectable in a test that could detect fifteen particles per milliliter (or some such quantity), the degree of accuracy hid the greater uncertainty of his condition. What does such a statement mean? Cure? Remission? Complete control? Chronic treatments? Such tests speak in riddles, and Oedipus is no less relevant in a time of DNA profiling than he was in the age of talking sphinxes.

Perhaps because he’s both seropositive and asymptomatic, White is especially aware of the ambiguities of what it means “to look out for” himself. Like Mark in “Palace Days” and the narrator of The Farewell Symphony, White learned early about his HIV status at a time when such knowledge was particularly difficult to evaluate. All sorts of figures were given about what percentage of cases would develop into “full-blown” AIDS. Some said a third; others three quarters; still others believed everyone would succumb to the disease. But few would have predicted at the time that White would remain symptom free even as I write. Indeed, quite the opposite was true. The life expectancy of anyone who had developed the requisite opportunistic infections was calculated in months, and of the five members of the Violet Quill infected by HIV, White is the only one still to be alive—in fact, the only one to have survived the 1980s. In “Palace Days” the precariousness of the situation is compared to preunified Berlin: “this pocket of glitz and libertinage surrounded by the gray hostility of East Germany—an emblem of their endangered, quarantined happiness” (DP:151). The irony of the longtime AIDS survivor is that he lives to see the ones around him—those that seemed so much healthier, younger, and stronger—die while he continues on; it is this irony that informs all of White’s AIDS writing of the 1990s and has allowed him to view AIDS not only from the perspective of the person infected but through the eyes of the caregiver.

In the nearly ten years between the publication of The Darker Proof in 1988 and the appearance of The Farewell Symphony in 1997, White wrote no fiction about the disease. In fact, White wrote little fiction of any sort. He worked on his massive and highly esteemed biography of Jean Genet and also as a journalist. Those pieces collected in The Burning Library (1994) that deal with AIDS—including “Straight Women/Gay Men” and the eulogies he wrote for David Kalstone and Robert Mapplethorpe—had never before appeared in print, so although White gave voice to the discourse on AIDS, he usually did so within private forms of eulogy and remembrance. I have addressed earlier several of White’s reasons for being reluctant to speak of AIDS; one additional reason now needs to be examined. In his essay on Juan Goytisolo, a major Spanish novelist, White compares Goytisolo’s position as a public figure with Genet’s and Pasolini’s, the three most important gay writer-intellectuals in postwar Europe.

White refused to be limited in that way. He had lived long enough in England and France to know that their gay writers were not so constrained. In the United States, there were many who would write about AIDS more forcefully than he could as an HIV-positive but unsymptomatic man. It is significant that he has taken up the subject at the very time gay discourse has left it behind. Just as AIDS has become a more controllable disease, just as it has become a disease in the United States of minorities and intravenous drug users, just as it internationally has become a disease of Third World heterosexuals, just when Americans are all but content to ignore AIDS, White has turned his fiction once again to the subject. In this we can see both how difficult it has been to find a voice for his personal losses and how willing he is to take up the unfashionable.

But, in fact, White’s silence on AIDS is matched by his relative silence on all matters. Between 1988 and 1993, White published no books. To be sure, the work on the Genet biography occupied a great deal of his time, and he returned to the United States to teach at Brown University—in part because he was afraid of becoming ill in Paris and believed he needed the health insurance he would get with the job—but in general White experienced a certain “closing down” (if one can draw connections between the narrator of The Farewell Symphony and White himself). The narrator of The Farewell Symphony goes to bed for a month when he hears the news that he is HIV-positive.

He marvels at his friend Joshua (modeled on David Kalstone), who had always seemed lazy, but who now, with his growing weakness, works with an uncharacteristic urgency, which seems to the narrator a form of “desperation” (FS:391). He marvels at his sister who, at nearly fifty, adopts four biracial babies, works as a therapist “with large groups, often alcoholic lesbians and gay men,” and manages to live “a rich, complex, productive life.” White through the narrator regrets his lack of energy: “I became lazier and lazier, as though I were dreaming, not writing, the big book of my life” (399), and he fears he will become like Ned (modeled on his lover John Purcell), whose life is reduced to watching TV with a friend and seeking “proof that life was still flowing vigorously through the wires” (402). The ability to work is, for White, the crucial test of whether you have given into AIDS or whether you have resisted it.

For White, the person who is HIV-positive must resist the tug of self-hatred and of indolence, which are both products of despair, the chief sins of his personal Protestant faith. Work is the sign of physical and psychological well-being. Although White often likes to speak as if he were a man of leisure, he is one of the more disciplined and hard-working writers that I know, and he particularly values those writers who sacrifice everything for their art. In his biography of Proust, for example, he emphasizes the determination to continue writing despite incapacitating illness:

White’s difficulty working, his inability to speak about what was so central to the experience around him, indicates how deep and how deeply conflicted his feelings were, or as Marianne Moore once pointed out, “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.” Although White criticizes himself for being silent about AIDS, it would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that AIDS silenced him, that for once the fluency that has marked his writing—what the uncharitable might call a certain glibness in his personality—escaped him. Indeed, his very inability to speak was a symptom of the paralysis that AIDS created, a testament to the very power it had over him.

Throughout his career, White had spoken with an assurance he did not personally possess. He presented a façade of having worked through feelings that he had not in actuality assimilated. He made his gay characters often act as though they regarded homosexuality as their most inevitable trait, whose origins were of no interest to them, because such nonchalance was necessary to bring that state of acceptance about. “I knew,” White has written, “I didn’t have the equilibrium or self-acceptance of my characters, but I thought by pretending as if … this utopia already existed I could authenticate my gay readers if not myself” (BL:371). But in the face of the AIDS crisis, this bluster could not be maintained. The as if had turned into a nightmare. In a peculiar way, White’s insistence on viewing his silence as a moral failure—a personal lapse of political engagement—normalizes the experience, makes AIDS less threatening. It pretends that the deaths of so many around him might have been assimilated into a coherent and humane response had he tried or been a better person. But the powers of sublimation are finite, more limited than the powers of denial. In the end, White was simply driven into repressive silence—a writerly death—for his penance.

White’s willingness to blame himself for his relative silence on AIDS disguises a larger cultural issue: that most people with AIDS and most gay men without AIDS cannot bring themselves to speak about what has happened to them. Eric Rofes, writing in the mid-1990s, argues that “the inability of gay men to provide a certain kind of testimony about our current circumstances may be rooted not in individual cowardice or personal failure, but in the limitations that extreme historical events impose on the human psyche” (23). Researchers have pointed out how few people who survived concentration camps have been able to describe in anything but “broad brush strokes” their experience. The difficulty of witnessing is compounded when one tries to witness in the very midst of an unfolding crisis. Rofes quotes Dori Laub (professor of psychiatry at Yale University), who reminds her readers that, for those who experience psychic trauma: “The historical imperative to bear witness could essentially not be met during the actual occurrence. The degree to which bearing witness was required, entailed such an outstanding measure of awareness and of comprehension of the event—of its dimensions, consequences, and above all, of its radical otherness …—that it was beyond the limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit or to imagine” (Rofes:23–24). Those who blame themselves for being silent only rub raw wounds that are not their fault.

For his silence, White inflicted on himself another punishment, a self-imposed artistic failure. Even as he added a narrative frame to The Farewell Symphony—the death of the narrator’s lover (and it was a very late addition to the manuscript)—he knew it would not hold the novel together and he was not ready to deal with his lover’s death. In The Farewell Symphony White adopted a structure he had used in Nocturnes for the King of Naples, as a confession of affection to a dead lover. But in Nocturnes this framing device made sense—not only because the dead lover is a central character in the novel and because of the very lyric nature of that work. (Nocturnes and Farewell Symphony are tied together by the musical references in their titles, but whereas Nocturnes has the feel of a dreamy summer’s night, Farewell Symphony is essayistic rather than orchestral, more concerned with ideas than with the musicality of language.) White knew, while writing The Farewell Symphony, that he was unable to deal with the autobiographical material that was the proper conclusion to that novel and to which in some ways the entire novel was moving. In short, one could say that he built into the novel his own failure. Or perhaps one could say The Farewell Symphony, like any novel, always moves toward the experience it does not have the power to assimilate into its structure. As capacious as the novel is—and of his works, only his biography of Genet is longer—it is still not long enough to digest the death of Brice, his fictional version of Hubert Sorin. All novels, one could say, underscore their author’s limitations, but The Farewell Symphony goes further—engineering artistic punishment for the author’s inability to speak. But there is another reason that The Farewell Symphony has problems ending: White was afraid that he would die before he could finish his long-planned trilogy. The Farewell Symphony enacts the problem of endings in works written under the shadow of AIDS.

The Farewell Symphony gets its title from Hayden’s great work in the last movement of which “more and more of the musicians get up to leave the stage, blowing out their candles as they go” until “in the end just one violinist is still playing” (FS:405). White had every reason to believe when he began the novel that it would be his last. He had, in fact, originally planned his group of autobiographical novels to be a tetrology, but having completed the second, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, he reasonably assumed that he would not live long enough to complete two more novels, so he combined them into one. The framing device was meant to give unity to the sprawling work. Even when the book was completed, White didn’t feel that he had the time (or the desire) to engage in extensive rewriting, preferring to leave the history of its compositional moment embedded in its design—turning a flaw into an expressive element in the belief that a work written so close to the skin should retain the defects, the uncertainties, and the frailties of its maker. That The Farewell Symphony has not been White’s final work is one of the unexpected happy turns in the long history of AIDS. For White, the death of Hubert Sorin, a much younger man who seemed, at least at the start of their relationship, so much healthier and more robust, calls into question how creative energy can and should be spent, where beauty is to be found, what pleasures are to be generated and griefs expressed, and when love is to be revealed and left unsaid—in short, the forms in which we live our lives and witness its passing.

White does not indicate any causative relationship between the deterioration of Sorin’s health and his ability to overcome his “misgivings and laziness”; indeed, White insists that he did not know how little time Sorin had to live, and yet only a few pages later he writes that he “had so much trouble working on my text, largely because I had the superstition (which turned out to be clairvoyance) that if I arrived at the end of our one thousand and one nights he would die, as proved to be the case” (OP:xiii). One can excuse such contradictions within only three pages since the introduction was written in the hours after Sorin’s death. But the contradictions aren’t very difficult to reconcile. The sort of magical thinking White talks about—his superstitious fears and clairvoyant knowledge—are part of the entire process of denial, the knowing and not knowing that come together in the life of any couple or in any person facing so untimely an end. Here, more clearly than in any other place, we see how White’s reluctance to write, his “laziness,” is a way of holding off what he sees as inevitable, an inevitability that needed no powers of clairvoyance to predict. All of White’s excuses for delaying the project are transparent attempts to fend off his growing awareness of Sorin’s deteriorating health, for although he may sincerely dislike collaborations, such dislikes had not stopped him before from collaborating. He started at Time/Life working with others on books; he collaborated with Charles Silverstein on The Joy of Gay Sex and with Adam Mars-Jones. My own rather distant collaboration with White on The Burning Library was marked by the easiest cooperation. Still, as a man who gives extraordinary weight to social occasions, White must find it difficult to deal with the conflicts that arise in any collaboration, and I found him, like a genial and gracious host, giving assent to my ideas far more rapidly and unquestioningly than they deserved.

In fact, no book of White’s is as genial and gracious as Our Paris. The tone—if not the style—is very different from that in his other works. White credits Sorin for encouraging his “slightly childlike, perhaps faux naïf, certainly stylized quality of words and images” (OP:xiv). Their concierge, Madame Denise, the favorite of the local hairdresser who tries out his latest styles on her, elicits a fine example of White’s sophisticated simplicity:

White would have us believe that although he is sophisticated enough to compare Madame Denise to Suzy Solidor, he can be like a child, “betwitched” by her transformations. The final parenthesis is a particularly telling gesture. In a paragraph filled with exaggeration or, at least, fancifulness, White pretends to be careful about not giving us the “wrong” impression that he might be up at eight in the morning. Behind this childlike honesty is the desire to project a life of ease and frivolity, to suggest that Sorin and he are merely flâneurs roaming about the city, feeling no particular urgency to get up or get things accomplished. White concludes a chapter on the various shopkeepers he visits daily to buy food—the butcher, the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the fruit seller and wine merchant—with the exasperated cry: “And to think my publisher wonders how I spend my days” (12). There’s a Tom Sawyer-ish delight in his truancy. His crimes aren’t serious ones; quite to the contrary, they are just the indulgencies we wish we would have granted ourselves had we been lucky enough to find a raft on which to sail down the Mississippi, or as, in their case, an editor willing to advance the money needed to finance such Parisian escapades. White and Sorin love playing eternal adolescents, unbothered by the exigencies of work, money, and time. From the opening sentence (“We were lying in bed one evening after dinner, digesting, idle as ever, the windows thrown wide on the pulsing sky”) they assume the roles of aimless, pampered waifs. The faithful Fred, their large and incorrigible basset hound, who accompanies them through all their adventures, accentuates the sense of childhood idyll—boys and their dog on summer holiday. All this helps to distract White from the real reason they are resting, namely, that Sorin is too ill to get out of bed. Such unpleasant truths are banned from everything but the book’s introduction, or when they are raised, dismissed again, as though a mere inconvenience. The effervescent, carefree style of the book—with its adolescent belief that Time’s wingéd chariot can be stopped indefinitely at the celestial streetlight—is as insistent as it is untrue. If White’s voice is desperately charming in Our Paris, it is because he is so desperate for a charm that will take away the reality of anger, regret, anxiety, and loss.

For that reason the book is filled with the names of celebrities both living and dead—Garbo, Piaf, Tina Turner, Julian Schnabel, and the offspring of the famous, Claude Picasso (son of Pablo), Rachel Stella (daughter of Frank and the art critic Barbara Rose), Ed Hemingway (grandson of Ernest), and even a reference to “Allen Ginsberg’s latest twenty-year-old”—for celebrities (true fame and not the fifteen minutes of media coverage that now serves as its facsimile) possess a glamour, a charm, that keeps them eternally alive. Of course, White has always been interested in glamour and the glamorous, but in Our Paris it becomes an obsession because he wants to believe that this aura can rub off on friends and relations and give them a little shared immortality. So desperate is his need to hold on talismanically to these objects of celebrity that he becomes momentarily panicked when their immortality is questioned. In conversation, Peter Kurth, Isadora Duncan’s biographer, laments that Duncan has become an obscure historical figure: “No one even knows who Isadora was anymore” (OP:113). Only when the street singer who has interrupted their discussion tells them that she wants “to become the new Isadora!” can White breath easily (115). See, White seems to say, such glamour does live on—art is eternal, and artists’ beloveds are all mysterious Mr.W.H.s whose golden youths are immortalized with sonnets.

Yet White can’t keep all references to AIDS out of Our Paris. In a paragraph on Madame Denise’s discretion—rare in a concierge—he offhandedly refers to knowing that Sorin is ill, “and when he’s in a bad way she’ll offer to shop or cook for us” (30). He encounters his psychiatrist, who is helping him cope with Hubert’s illness and with “depression accompanying HIV,” a man who is particularly associated with AIDS because both his parents have died from the disease, the psychiatrist having been “raised by two gay men” (95). But in the final chapter, the anxiety that has been kept generally under wraps comes out.

White and Sorin are reading Mario Praz’s House of Life, a book in which “he describes all the objects in his palatial apartment in Rome” (OP:117). The couple considers writing a similar volume and how funny it would be “to do a sort of comic version about our own apartment and all our junk.” What holds White back from the project is that he’s “sometimes worried [Sorin] won’t have enough time left to do the pictures” (117). This comic project excites the most euphemisticly expressed anxieties. It will not do to ask why Hubert might not have enough time—is he about to leave on a trip? start a new demanding job?—for White immediately turns his attention to Hubert’s rather remarkable collection of horrifying objects: a scorpion under glass, a tarantula in a paperweight, a Chinese cricket cage, and an ostrich foot that “resembled a lethal homemade weapon cobbled together by a Road Warrior” (120). The chapter—like much of the book—is an exercise in free association, a technique that Freud designed to give the repressed an opportunity to appear, albeit in disguised form. Such at least is the result in Our Paris. The ostrich foot triggers a discussion of Sorin’s two years in Ethiopia after his graduation from architecture school, which in turn brings up his wife and her monstrous photograph of a “strangely hairy arch of triumph” made from the “severed testicles” of Italian prisoners. And so the chapter that began as a discussion of The House of Life has made its curious way to this grotesque monument of death and disfigurement. In the last two paragraphs, White no longer resists the topics. Sorin, he notes, “gets skinnier and skinnier” and as Sorin finds it harder to hold down food, he stuffs more things for the apartment “so I’ll have a place to live after he’s gone, though I can scarcely imagine rattling around it alone” (122). The concluding phrase—so simple and compact—is filled with an understated pathos. What can White scarcely imagine? By now, he has been able to imagine Sorin gone, but he cannot imagine—or rather, can “scarcely imagine”—continuing on alone. Art—here, the art of interior design—cannot fix life, keep it bolted into place. That truly would be erecting a hairy arch of triumphant emasculation. If Sorin is to live beyond his mortal life, it will be in a more mobile, more creative, more fitting place for the imagination than in a shrine to their domesticity.

White was not ready to tell the story of Sorin’s death in The Farewell Symphony, nor could he tell it—for the most part—in the main body of Our Paris; that story was left for The Married Man. White has carefully differentiated The Married Man from the trilogy of novels that preceded it. Most important is that White abandons the first-person narrator he used in the trilogy. He has draped these autobiographical events more in the cloak of fiction. For example, the protagonist of The Married Man is an American art historian living in Paris whereas the narrator of The Farewell Symphony is an American novelist living in Paris. A slight change, perhaps, but not merely a cosmetic one to answer critics of The Farewell Symphony who complained the book was too autobiographical. Such fundamental alterations signal a more subtle change in White’s attitude toward the events of his life. For if The Farewell Symphony is about memory—the reconstruction of history—The Married Man is about projection—the myths that we insert into our experience to make life more intelligible and workable. That is to say, The Farewell Symphony is about making fiction out of life, and The Married Man is about living life out of our self-imposed fictions.

In its conception The Married Man is the opposite of the Darker Proof stories, which were indebted to journalism. The aim of those tales was the urgent need to provide readers with a sense of the human cost of AIDS and to depict the “reality” of AIDS in the way gay men lived their lives. Although The Married Man conforms in many ways to more conventional AIDS stories by giving a rather grisly account of an AIDS patient’s last days as he and his companion wander from desert hospital to desert hospital in search of proper medical care—a tale that recounts in detail the events sketched in Our Paris—The Married Man is about the failure of any journalistic or realistic endeavors to do justice to the complexities of what happens between people. Moralists might say that The Married Man is about deception and self-deception, but White is concerned about the way people create a narrative, a myth, about each other and then live out that myth, make that myth real, whether it corresponds to the “facts” of their life or not. AIDS then, although essential to the story, is also just one of the narratives that construct their lives and, in some ways, is as fictional a disease as Millie Theale’s fatal illness in Henry James’s Wings of the Dove, a work to which The Married Man bears more than a little similarity.

The plot of The Married Man is simple enough: a lonely American art historian living in Paris, Austin Smith, a man in his late fifties, meets a young Frenchman, Julien, who is in the process of divorcing his wife. They fall in love. Austin is seropositive and, after much fear of losing Julien, finally tells him his HIV status. When Julien finally is tested, he proves to be seropositive as well. Austin blames himself for infecting Julien, although the doctor tells Austin that there is only the smallest chance that he could have done so. Julien becomes ill and dies, leaving Austin alone once again.

So schematic a retelling of the action only hints at how Austin comes to view the relationship. He places it in two rather outworn patterns of male sexuality—the Greek model of mentor and young man (erastes and eromenos), and the late nineteenth-century model of the fairy and trade. On the one hand, Austin sees himself as the older man who must protect and advance the interests of his younger and more vulnerable protégé. On the other hand, he sees Julien as the “real” man, and thus the more powerful person, whose needs must be satisfied. This second model is perhaps more important in setting the terms of their relationship (at least in Austin’s eyes). Julien is the married man, the ostensible heterosexual who has made an exception for Austin, for whom love has overridden the usual direction of his erotic attachments. George Chauncey defines trade as “masculine heterosexuals who would accept homosexual advances” (20). Although later the term came to be used for “straight” male prostitutes, it continued to be used for ostensibly heterosexual men “who had sex with queers or fairies for pleasure rather than money.” As Chauncey puts it:

Austin’s attitude toward Julien comes straight out of White and Silverstein’s discussion in The Joy of Gay Sex, which is worth quoting at some length:

What if you are about to enter into an affair with a man who has been heterosexual till now? What can you expect? Should you avoid the whole experience? From time to time straight men, especially if they are sophisticated and live in big cities, develop a crush on a man they know to be gay. If you find him attractive, there is no reason not to go ahead. But if you know his wife or steady woman friend, you may find yourself entering deep waters and you should withdraw or be prepared to lose both his friendship and hers.

Once you have him in bed, you will probably be surprised by how gentle he is. Most women train their male lovers to be gentle and romantic. … And you should expect him to become frosty with guilt in his dealings with you the next time you meet. You might head off his anxieties by assuring him that you will sleep with him only on condition that he tell you when he wants to return to your old sexless friendship. Don’t worry that you are “corrupting” him. … On the other hand, don’t expect to have a lasting relationship with him. … The main rule in dealing with straight men is: be discreet. They worry more about their reputations than a Spanish virgin. (The Joy of Gay Sex, 25–26)

Austin looks at Julien in exactly these terms—the sophisticated man in perhaps the most sophisticated city in the world, sensitive about his reputation and appearing “straight” acting. Even when Julien’s behavior doesn’t exactly correspond to the pattern, Austin tries to view it within this construct. Julien’s “utterly fake booming laugh,” for instance, isn’t a sign of aping a machismo he doesn’t possess, but “a private homage to a friend or relative he’d emulated in the past” (MM:38). Where others see the phony in Julien, the mythic lens of “the married man” blinds Austin. Julien and Austin cannot look beyond their pride and prejudice, an association reinforced by the homonym with that other Austen (Jane).

Among the myths associated with AIDS is its power to strip away the polite, artificial surface of reality and force people to confront how they really are. It is the enabling and ennobling convention of tragedy. The Darker Proof stories rely on this convention of the AIDS narrative. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America also rely on this convention. Love, Valor, Compassion shows just how trite the convention can be made. The Married Man takes the opposite position—a position that I think is, in fact, closer to how people more often behave—that in the face of a terminal disease people cling even more tenaciously to the narrative they have constructed about themselves and each other. Indeed, because modern medical practice strips patients so mercilessly of any sense of privacy, mystery, or dignity, patients and their families may need to hold on more than ever to the protective coloring of their personal myths. Second Son ends on a similar note—Mark and Bill need to hold on to the idea of the trip to Splendora as firmly as the idea of a new medical treatment on earth.

In The Married Man, Austin and Julien conspire to maintain three myths: first, that Julien comes from provincial aristocracy; second, that his family was romantically bohemian, with a grandfather who died from erotic asphyxiation and a mother who gave up a concert career to marry a philanderer; and finally, that Julien’s homosexual experience before meeting Austin was extremely limited—in other words, that he was much more a heterosexual who had had occasional homosexual experiences (a 2 in Alfred Kinsey’s famous scale). All these stories are untrue—and as fictions rather uninteresting—yet Austin and Julien maintain them even at considerable cost. For since Julien permits Austin to believe that he has had very little homosexual experience, Austin is torn by guilt because he is convinced that he infected Julien. Julien, through his silence, encourages that guilt, perhaps because he fears not only that Austin might love him less if he didn’t maintain the façade of “the married man,” but also that Austin might be less devoted to nursing him through his final days. Yet the discovery of Julien’s “lies” is rather an anticlimax because the reader (and even Austin subconsciously) has already figured out that Julien is neither so butch nor so aristocratic nor so bohemian as he wants others to believe and because in the end these falsehoods don’t amount to much compared to the enormity of Austin’s love and their shared experience. These fictions become merely more evidence of Julien’s vulnerability, and Austin realizes that vulnerability is the thing we most forgive in the dead whom we love. In any event, Austin sees that he and Julien were “co-dependent,” a term whose “description sounded like Austin’s idea of love” (299). Moreover, Austin realizes that Julien’s tales of nobility were created because he felt Austin and his friends were so much better, more elevated, than Julien (296).

At bottom, The Married Man is a story about ethical behavior. It begins with Austin unwilling to go swimming at his gym in Paris because “he wasn’t young enough and what he had to offer—his accent, his charming if broken-down apartment, his interesting profession, his kindness—wasn’t visible in a shower room” (1). It ends in an airport terminal in Miami, where Austin has gone to give a final vacation to his friend Peter, who is dying from AIDS. At his own expense, Austin has brought along an Englishman, George, a “big blond giant” to be “a cheerful, decorative presence for Peter and to help with the cooking and shopping”; but George has spent the time whoring around and, therefore, been unavailable to help Austin move Peter, who has become increasingly incapacitated. Austin tells George off: “I don’t like cruel, selfish people, and it will be a cold day in hell before I see you again once we’re back in Paris” (310).

What brings these passages together is the theme of “kindness.” Austin belittles his own kindness at the start of the novel. Whatever its value, it doesn’t help you meet men at the gym, and meeting men at the gym is the yardstick against which virtues are measured. At the end of the novel, George’s decorative presence isn’t worth much because he isn’t kind. What Julien has taught Austin, or at least his experience with Julien has taught him, is the value of kindness, and that as a kind person he is a good person.

Kindness is an interesting word. It isn’t self-sacrifice or altruism or self-abnegation. Austin doesn’t require such saintliness. Kindness asks only that we see the connection between ourselves and others, that we are of a kind. Not identical. The worst unkindness occurs when people mistake each other as—or force each other to be—identical. Kind people respect differences, and truly kind people treat others differently from how they treat themselves because, after all, they are not themselves. One of the things that is similar between people is that we are all imperfect. The willingness to accept imperfection is one of the hallmarks of the kind person. Austin, after he tells George off, lets him fall asleep on his shoulder. The book ends with the sentence: “Here was this big blond giant, his face blotched and red, spreading the splendor of his hair across Austin’s shoulder, his huge hand with his sportsman’s calluses pressed to Austin’s chest in the dark as the other passengers watched the movie or slept” (310). Acts of kindness occur in the dark, while others are busy or asleep. They do not call attention to themselves. They are not more than themselves. Yet in the end they are what AIDS can and must teach gay people. We cannot save each other from mortality, even if we discover how to cure this particular disease. We must learn to treat each other with a kindness that has been denied us by the society which ignores us, a society that sits or sleeps in the dark. In the end, White seems to argue that we are all married men, whether we believe it or not—married to each other’s fate, to each other’s loss, to each other’s fictions.

It is important to see what a reversal this is from White’s earlier work in which betrayal—the need to betray, the inevitability of betraying—is a central theme. In A Boy’s Own Story, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Caracole, characters betray each other to assert their independence or because of Oedipal identification, to imitate their fathers. But in The Married Man, loyalty and solidarity are more important than any kind of betrayal. To be sure, Julien lies to Austin, but such deceptions will not keep Austin from maintaining his commitment to Julien even in death. White does not confuse loyalty, solidarity, and faithfulness with monogamy. One of the more intricately drawn aspects of the novel is the crisscrossing of affections—not only Austin’s for Julien but for Peter as well. Peter and Austin are lovers; although never monogamous, they have arrived at the moment where neither feels sexual desire for the other. Nevertheless, Austin continues to pay for Peter’s apartment and to give him enough to live, take him on vacations, and, in the end, nurse him when he is sick. While Austin fears that he has not given Peter all that he might have, once Julien enters the picture Austin never betrays Peter. Indeed, one is touched by the continuing tenderness that passes between them. Of course, White’s change of focus from betrayal to fidelity is not so radical a change, the two being merely different sides of the same coin, but it does represent a change of heart. In the face of AIDS, White comes to emphasize the connections that bind people together rather than the steps it takes to assert individuality.

Between 1975 and 1985, Felice Picano published ten books, about one a year, with no more than a year separating any two books. But after 1985, there is a gap of four years, at which time he published two novels, Men Who Loved Me and To the Seventh Power, both in 1989. They were followed by a six-year gap ending with the appearance of Like People in History in 1995, after which time Picano renewed his early pace, publishing in quick succession Dryland’s End (1995), A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay (1997), Looking Glass Lives (1998), and The Book of Lies (1998). (Looking Glass Lives, it should be noted, was written at least a decade before it was published.) Many factors, no doubt, account for the relatively fallow decade between 1985 and 1995 (fallow, perhaps, only by Picano’s standards), but two factors seem most important—the illness and death of both his brother and his partner, Bob Lowe (Like People in History is dedicated to the latter). Picano came up against the same limitations that White encountered: the impossibility of simultaneously attending to the sick and dying, and writing about AIDS.

The one book that falls in the middle of this period is The New Joy of Gay Sex (1992), which he cowrote with Charles Silverstein. The New Joy is a direct response to AIDS, and it contains a number of entries about HIV and AIDS and topics that AIDS has made important: J.O. clubs, mixed HIV couples, piercing, phone sex, and vanilla sex. Of greater significance are the entries on wills and insurance, issues more related to the grim realities of gay relationships than to their joys. Most of the old original entries were rewritten to reflect how AIDS had changed gay life in the fifteen years between the two editions. “Lubricants,” for example, has been substantially revised. Before, readers were told that “vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible” (JGS:118); now they are told that it is “not water-soluble, and therefore, should never be used with latex condoms” (NJ:114; italics in original). Whereas the old Joy ended the entry with “the best news from medical research centers is … a lubricant that has properties to kill some of the organisms that cause venereal disease,” the New Joy tells readers that “safer” lubricants “contain water-soluble nonoxynol-9, which kills the HIV virus.” To make room for all this important medical information, Picano and Silverstein dropped the entries on hot stuff, how to spot another gay man, meccas, meeting people, and motionless bliss. The old edition had a lyric lushness that is muted in the new one. For example, the old Joy used the analogy that “making love without noise is like playing a dampened piano—fine for practice, but you cheat yourself of hearing the glorious results” (JGS:140) and continues for another page exhorting the silent to sing out their pleasures. But the new edition is mum on the topic. Such omissions make the New Joy a much more sober and factual book. If the original Joy of Gay Sex projected the exuberance about being gay that White hoped to achieve, The New Joy of Gay Sex aspired to a nononsense matter-of-factness about AIDS that hid Picano and Silverstein’s numbness and exhaustion.

No doubt, these alterations reflected the mood of the times—the joys of sex are clearly as culturally constructed as they are biologically triggered—but they also reflect Picano’s and Silverstein’s experiences of living through multiple losses from AIDS. Picano lived in what Andrew Holleran calls “ground zero,” the place “where the bomb fell” (GZ:22), but unlike Holleran and White, Picano stayed in New York until the mid-1990s. His immersion in the culture of morbidity came early. His friends Nick Rock and Rick Wellikoff were among the first recorded cases of AIDS, and their mysterious battle with what was first thought to be “cat-scratch fever” is chronicled in And the Band Played On. Picano attended a party given in Rock’s memory attended by two hundred men. Of these, Picano estimates, only six are still alive. On New Year’s Day of 1982, Picano’s journal already has him counting the friends sick from Kaposi’s sarcoma (VQR:74), and it became in subsequent years, like Grumley’s, a running necrology. By 1989, Cox, Ferro, Grumley, and Whitmore had all died. Picano writes about “walking around the Upper West Side with a friend … who’d gone off to northern Michigan” and who asks him: “Where are all the men of our generation?” “‘Dead,’ I said.” (LPIH:98). How Picano remained uninfected remains a mystery even to him, for like Roger Sansarc, the hero of his novel Like People in History, Picano “did all the wrong things with all the wrong people in all the wrong places at all the wrong times” (99).

As Eric Rofes and others have argued, AIDS for Picano’s generation of gay men, the generation of the Violet Quill, cannot be understood as a series of personal losses. “We have pretended,” Rofes writes, “that the impact of AIDS … has been limited to the discrete deaths of individuals and otherwise has not undermined our communal life” (30). In Rofe’s view, terms such as “cumulative grief” and “multiple loss” minimize what gay men in such big cities as San Francisco, New York, and Washington went through in the two decades since AIDS was first identified. Like Holleran and Kramer, he compares it both to the Holocaust and to the bombing of Hiroshima—events that wiped out a culture, changed the physical landscape, and disrupted the transmission of history and social practice. Seronegative gay men, such as Picano and Holleran, are dispossessed persons; their survival is tinged with guilt, loneliness, and cultural dislocation. In 1995, Picano pulled up stakes to start over in Los Angeles. The sort of things that often keep gay men in one place—the network of friends and the comfort of familiar surroundings—no longer were present. Most of the friends he had in New York were dead; most of the places had changed. It was no longer the city he had known. In fact, Picano held on to New York longer than others. Nearly a decade earlier, Holleran had noted the disruption:

In the end, Picano found it more difficult to traverse that minefield of memory than to leave. He went where he had few memories that might be tripped—to the other side of the continent. As a gesture to put the East Coast behind him—when Alyson Books, headquartered in Los Angeles, decided to reprint Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love, his short story collection, along with An Asian Minor, a novella—Picano retitled the collection New York Stories, as though that part of his life were finished. Significantly, his New York Stories are all pre-AIDS stories—suggesting that the only part of New York he wished to take to sunny California were those memories that predated the epidemic.

Picano gives only a hint of what he went through in his foreword to a collection of articles titled Gay Widowers. He divides AIDS widowhood into three periods: the period while the beloved is ill, when you first learn to start living alone during the repeated hospital stays; the period for the first year or so after the beloved dies, when people still expect you to be in mourning; and the third period, “the least obvious and the least talked or written about part of widowerhood,” when everyone around you no longer recognizes the loss, but “you’re still stuck with it” (xix). Such statements suggest the invisible widowerhood he experienced in his last years in New York, the loss with which he was stuck, a loss no one else recognized but which everything recalled.

Still, before leaving New York, Picano finished his major work dealing with AIDS, Like People in History. Indeed, in retrospect one could say that Picano needed to write Like People in History so that he could finish up the business of being in New York and allow himself to go on. But Like People in History is not the only work of Picano’s in which he gives himself permission to go on. One of his finest short stories is “The Geology of Southern California at Black’s Beach” in which Roger, a seronegative geologist who has moved to L.A., entertains his lover Mark, a New York lawyer with AIDS, who is also thinking of relocating to California. (There is more than a little autobiography to the story: Picano moved to Los Angeles after Bob Lowe, his lover, a distinguished lawyer, died of AIDS.) Roger and Mark have always had an open relationship, and while in L.A., Roger has acquired a new boyfriend, Craig, a somewhat twinky, fairly jealous, much younger man. The three go to swim at Black’s Beach, but to get there they have to walk quite a distance through difficult terrain that Mark cannot negotiate. For the first time, Roger realizes how ill Mark has become and how deep has been his denial of Mark’s condition. Mark, however, is quite aware that he has entered that period of accelerated decline, and his real reason for visiting is to make sure that Roger will not be alone after he dies. Mark’s gesture may have, for the time being, the opposite effect of breaking up Roger’s tryst with Craig, but ultimately it serves not just to permit but to demand that Roger go on, in much the way George tells Ray in White’s “An Oracle” that he must “look out” for himself.

Picano called Like People in History “a gay American epic,” and at slightly over five hundred pages it is his longest and most complex work to date. The span it covers—thirty-seven years—is four times the length of Odysseus’s journey, and it travels across the country, picking up the major events of the period. Like People in History appeared at the very moment several gay writers—White in The Farewell Symphony and Ethan Mordden’s How Long Has This Been Going On, to both of which it was invariably compared—were trying to bring a historical perspective to the experiences of those who had lived through the 1970s and survived into the 1990s.

The structure of the novel emphasizes the effect of AIDS and the sense of an end to an era. Each of its six books is divided into two parts (making the canonical twelve books), alternating between a day in 1991 (the year Picano’s lover, Bob Lowe, died) and a period in the past. Like the Odyssey, Like People in History is told in a series of flashbacks that eventually merge with the present. As Roger Sansarc—author of The Sexual Underclass, a groundbreaking analysis of the seventies—helps his cousin Alistair put an end to his AIDS-ravaged life and is arrested with his young lover, Wally, for demonstrating at Gracie Mansion in an ACT UP protest, he is forced to recall his life from 1954 onward. Thus, all the flashbacks are placed in the shadow of AIDS—something that White only half-heartedly attempts in The Farewell Symphony.

The protagonist’s name suggests the importance of AIDS in the book. For Roger is sans ARC, an acronym for AIDS-Related Complex (ARC), a term used in the 1980s for seropositive people who had yet to develop the opportunistic infections needed to qualify them as having “full-blown” AIDS. And, further, Roger is a man without an ark—he has no lifeboat to save him from the deluge of death all around him. The central issue of Like People in History is how this gay Noah-without-an-ark can manage to live on without being swept out to sea by the undertow. But more, it is not just about surviving, but continuing with life when those closest to you are either dead or dying.

The opening sequence sets the tone for the entire book. We encounter Sansarc and Wally taking the elevator to Alistair’s forty-fifth birthday party.

For all of Roger’s New York hardness that registers as contempt for his surroundings and his unsentimental evaluation of his lover’s appearance, one gains a glimpse of his vulnerability and uncertainty. Roger can’t help seeing himself through the eyes of others, in this case the snickering building staff. Nor can he avoid placing himself in a historical context, here provided by the faux adobe walls that are themselves a sign of a faux postmodernism, which ironizes his own trendy clothes and his own faux youthfulness. Once positioned before the wall-sized mirror, he is reduced to one of two “homosexuals,” in their stereotypical black denims, black sneakers, and army jackets (the 1990s equivalent of the blue jeans, construction boots, and flannel shirts of the 1970s). And as the paragraph progresses, he can’t help seeing himself in an unflattering contrast to Wally, who is young and handsome “whereas [he] …” The sentence ends in ellipses because, as with all comparisons of generations, the difference need not be enumerated and can’t be articulated.

The difference between Sansarc and Wally are reinforced when Sansarc meets Wally’s friends for a meal before their demonstration. James tells Roger that he never could understand “why a great-looking guy like Wally would get involved in a trans-gen thing.” Roger translates for the reader: “Read transgenerational. Read I’m old enough to be his father but neither look it nor act like it. Read eternal Peter Pan” (50). The very language James uses—“trans-gen thing”—tells us all we need to know about the cultural divide in the gay world between those who came out in the seventies and those who acted-up in the nineties. (Today, with ACT UP dormant, James’s language itself has a decidedly passé quaintness.) For all their language in regard to queering conventions, the young men of the nineties were self-conscious about staying apart from older men. Instead of relishing the chance to destabilize ageist categories or to participate in the Greek tradition of mentorship, as Austin and Julien do, they adopt the conventional age-divisions of consumer culture and the pseudoclinical terminology of “transgenerational.” Sansarc, on his part, is stuck with his allusion to Peter Pan. Roger and James place themselves within very different cultural referents.

It is not merely that James isolates himself socially from gay men of the previous generation; he isolates himself intellectually as well. The hunger for high culture and for intellectual sophistication that marked gay men in Sansarc’s circle, the kind of sophistication White records in “Palace Days” when Mark and Ned attend the ballet to see once more Balanchine and Stravinsky’s “radiant vision of society,” is missing in James, who is turned off by the “transgen thing.” Although one of his friends at NYU has had Sansarc’s book assigned in his sociology class because the professor said “it was the best study of the rise of the gay political minority after Stonewall,” James expresses little interest in what Sansarc has written. The past of twenty years ago might as well be two thousand years ago, or two million years ago. Indeed, James would have shown more interest if Sansarc had been an actual dinosaur that had escaped extinction.

But even if James were interested in the earlier generation of gay men, understanding them would not be easy. The Book of Lies, Picano’s 1998 comedy, dramatizes that problem. It follows Ross Ohrenstadt, a young scholar who is researching the gay literary group the Purple Circle, which clearly bears a distinct similarity to the Violet Quill. Although Ohrenstadt is bright, interested, intensely ambitious (and cute), he doesn’t get much out of the surviving members of the Purple Circle, who have a love for deception, obfuscation, and nastiness. Having felt that the world has played unfairly with them, they have little interest in passing on their secrets or even their knowledge to others. The Book of Lies is a sort of comic whodunit—although in this case it is more a who-wrote-it—so the portraiture is quite broad. But there is a sense in The Book of Lies that the survivors of 1970s gay culture have circled the wagons and are careful about what they say and to whom they speak.

Any culture—even the most literate of cultures—is passed down primarily verbally and nonverbally through contact with older generations. Gay culture is no different; in fact, it might have been even more dependent on such personal transmissions since for so long it relied on coding messages only those “in the know” would understand and because it is one of the few cultures that is not transmitted in childhood. One of the glories of gay literature is its recording of a certain verbal effulgence, a queenly discourse we find in Sutherland in Dancer from the Dance or in Matthew in Second Son. Sansarc is too butch to indulge in too much campy repartee, but his cousin Alistair represents that line of gay culture. When Alistair hears that Wally has gone off for Szechwan food, he emotes: “Bless his metabolism. … Indeed. Bless anyone for still having a metabolism! I was thinking of installing paramecia or something prevertebrate like that into my intestine so I might once again recognize what used to be called an appetite” (LPIH:37). There is a gulf—perhaps a not unbridgeable gulf—between this blast of language and “the trans-gen thing.” That gulf is only made harder to bridge because there are so few gay men of Sansarc’s generation left—five or six by his hyperbolic estimation—who might afford the friendship, the community, needed to make that connection.

Sansarc experiences this loss of his own generation. Hearing that a friend, Cleve Atchinson, had died, Sansarc meditates on the cultural and philosophic nature of these losses:

Another page in my life erased. … Without the young Kentuckian around anymore, did that mean my relationship with Cleve was now, in some twisted Lockean manner, relegated to the purely empirical—just one man’s experience, forever uncheckable, doomed to unreliability? And didn’t that make it tantamount to it not ever having happened? What about all those paragraphs and chapters others had filled in my life—Alistair most notably—would all that soon cease to exist? Was that what had made the past decade’s losses so increasingly horrendous: the knowledge that my life was being reduced before my eyes from the richly detailed Victorian triple-decker we all supposedly carry, to a mere chapbook, a pamphlet of few pages, with wide white margins, spelling out a single, unclear thesis, accompanied by a single sheet of footnotes? (Like People in History, 101)

Most older people share Sansarc’s feeling of erasure. My grandfather at ninetyfour spoke of the horror of having no one left who could share his memories. But Sansarc isn’t ninety-four; he’s forty-five—and surely one of the impulses to write a book of the length of Like People in History (or The Farewell Symphony) is to make certain that the triple-decker version of our lives that we carry around in our memories is not reduced to the thin pamphlet, a “Communist Manifesto” of the heart that would declare: memories of the queer unite; you have nothing to lose but your pain. In fact, Picano’s series of memoirs-in-the-form-of-novels—Ambidextrous (1985), Men Who Loved Me (1989), and A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay (1997) were written under the shadow of AIDS.

Like People in History ends with a renewed commitment on Sansarc’s part to press on. In a scene reminiscent of the conclusion of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), another epic treatment of American culture, Sansarc, having fulfilled Alistair’s wish for death, finds himself lost in the Bronx, somewhere near the Bruckner Boulevard Interchange, that symbol of urban chaos, and needing—if not to cry—at least to urinate. He pulls over to a vacant lot and relieves himself. As he stands in that scene of urban desolation and neglect—where DeLillo stages his passion play of divine grace and regeneration—Sansarc hears a lonely radiator hissing in an abandoned and partially demolished tenement:

This defiant note stands in contrast to the seeming pugnacity of the opening; for whereas the hard-boiled tone at the beginning tries to hide its vulnerability, this concluding defiance is built on a recognition of that vulnerability. The night is immense, frigid, and indifferent—and if that were not enough, it is also “vitrescent.” Picano dares us with the word (not in my Webster’s Collegiate) to test our mettle. Sansarc may be up the river without an ark, but he is also the Little Engine That Could, sputtering away. Unlike the Odyssey, Like People in History does not end with the hero safely home, having recovered his kingdom. Rather, it finds him lost with his zipper down, but still in motion.

Two truisms: (1) people responded to AIDS in terms of attitudes developed before its appearance; (2) people’s attitudes changed toward AIDS as they learned to live with the disease as a part of their world and as the disease and its treatment changed. Those who saw AIDS as a government conspiracy were already predisposed to conspiracy theories; those like Larry Kramer who saw AIDS as a result of gay “promiscuity” were critics of gay sexual license before the epidemic. Nothing is wrong with this process; indeed, it is unavoidable. Still, we must recognize that AIDS—despite the enormity of its consequences—did not force people to give up their conventional ways of understanding the world and confront the disease on its own terms; to the contrary, the very enormity of the problem probably made people cling more desperately (at least at first) to whatever terms of analysis they had in their possession. But since the disease changed and people’s experience of the disease changed, those terms also changed. People, of course, continued to be fearful of AIDS, their fear switched from a fear of the unknown to a fear of the all-too-familiar. Such changes are clear in the works of Edmund White and Felice Picano, but they are even clearer in Andrew Holleran’s novels, essays, and short stories.

Although Holleran has never published as prolifically as either White or Picano, the late 1980s and early 1990s were particularly lean ones for him. Like Picano and White, Holleran fell relatively silent during this time. In the thirteen years between 1983, when he published Nights in Aruba and 1996 when he published The Beauty of Men, Holleran’s only book was Ground Zero (1988), a collection of the pieces he had written for Christopher Street. Like White and Adam Mars-Jones’s collection The Darker Proof, it appeared as a paperback original, a form that suggests its more timely and marginal status. Holleran hadn’t stopped writing. In fact, he labored for years over a novel expanding the material in his AIDS short story “Friends at Evening,” but the novel never came together. (Just how many unfinished novels Holleran has in his house is a matter of some speculation among his friends.) Like White and Picano, other events in Holleran’s life were also responsible for this fallowness. The relatively poor reviews to Nights in Aruba disturbed him, but a more important reason is that during this period he took care of his invalid mother, who was confined to a nursing home in northern Florida. Nevertheless, Holleran felt keenly the difficulty of writing about AIDS, a difficulty exacerbated by his physical and emotional distance from events.

Holleran’s situation was very different from the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano and he were the only two uninfected by HIV, but unlike Picano, he did not remain in New York (in what he called the “ground zero” of the epidemic) to care for a lover and a brother. Instead he returned to his parents’ home to tend to the needs of his father and mother. Both “Lights in the Valley” and “Friends at Evening,” two of the stories published in Men on Men anthologies but not reprinted in In September, the Light Changes, feature Ned, a character whose return to Ohio to tend to ailing parents mirrors Holleran’s own situation. Ned’s guilt, grief, and loneliness are all heightened by his physical removal from his friends. Yet like Holleran, Ned keeps in close contact with those he left behind. A tireless correspondent and telephoner, Holleran did not use his isolation as an excuse for ignorance. Nor did he break connections with New York; he kept his name on a lease on an apartment in Manhattan, which he would visit when his sister spelled him from his nursing responsibilities. Since his parents’ death, he has traveled quite regularly across the country and through Europe, and these excursions serve as the subject of many of his finest stories in In September, most notably, “Sunday Morning: Key West,” “The Sentimental Education,” and “Amsterdam.”

Holleran’s work about AIDS falls into three groups: (1) the essays he wrote through the 1980s and early 1990s for Christopher Street (some of which were collected in Ground Zero); (2) the two stories he published from his failed novel and which then appeared in Men on Men; (3) his novel, The Beauty of Men, and the stories of the late nineties, most of which were collected in In September, the Light Changes. Together these represent a picture of AIDS early and late, and they reflect the shifts in the way AIDS impacted the gay community.

No work of the Violet Quill quite captures the terror of the early years of the epidemic as fully as Holleran’s short story, “Friends at Evening,” which George Stambolian in 1986 published in the very first Men on Men. Like so many of Holleran’s stories, “Friends at Evening” has no plot but presents a potent situation—a group of friends gathers together before the funeral of a mutual friend. Not all of this closely knit group are present: Spruill is in France “because he’s even more terrified that we are. … He won’t go to the funerals of his friends because he’s afraid the germs are floating in the air” (108). Although the story makes reference to blood tests, it is unclear whether this refers to the antibody tests or to T-cell counts, a crude marker used in the early years of the epidemic to measure immune suppression. The story was written between 1984 and 1985; the announcement of the isolation of the HIV virus was made in April 1984, and antibody testing began soon after, but it was met with considerable uncertainty since its reliability was unknown and its efficacy doubtful. The atmosphere of the story is much closer to the mood before tests became available, when sexually active gay men in large cities such as New York and San Francisco, Washington and L.A., monitored themselves for such vague symptoms as swollen glands, night sweats, and weight loss, when every bruise was the source of panic, every cough an omen of disaster, and every cold a death sentence, the “hideous times” when “everybody [was] sick, or sick with fear” (107). The mood of cosmic destruction is so intense that one of the characters speaks of falling “down on the boardwalk one night this summer on Fire Island and … screaming: We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die!” until a companion picks him up and calms him down (110). The nightmarish state of those early years is captured by Curtis, one of the characters in the story, a man who finds the sound of “the door of a bathhouse” closing behind him one of the “two things in life … as exciting to me now as the first time I experienced them” (102) and who explains to Ned that the reason gay men didn’t stop having sex when they knew the dangers was that gay men

knew but didn’t believe. … For a while there was a gap, you know. On Friday we were rational, and celibate. On Saturday night we were terrified, and in bed with someone. We didn’t know Third World diseases. Doctors at the Ford Foundation knew about those. We didn’t know some Australian flight attendant was going to sleep with someone in Africa on Monday, and then with David on Fifty-first Street on Tuesday. Would you have believed me if I had taken you aside on one of those nights you loved, with Mario and Raul and Umberto … and said to you: ‘Ned, don’t fall in love with them, they’re carrying a virus from Kinshasa that can shrivel you up to ninety pounds, give you cancer and kill you in two weeks!’ You’d have looked at me and said: ‘What science fiction movie did you see on Times Square this afternoon, dear?’. … We knew, but we didn’t believe! (“Friends at Evening,” 109)

Now, when the ravages of AIDS have become commonplace and the idea of the globalization of disease a concept that has wide currency, the idea of AIDS seems reasonable—in fact, almost inevitable. But at the time it had a fantastic ring to it, particularly since gay men had been given so many theories about the origins of AIDS; by various accounts it was “caused by chicken salad in a restaurant on Forty-first Street … or fake fog in discotheques. Or the newsprint that comes off on your hands from the Sunday Times” (“Friends at Evening”:11). It is useful to remember that the New York Native, the most widely read gay newspaper in the city (and the one in which Larry Kramer published his famous broadsides about AIDS), maintained until it ceased publication that AIDS was caused by swine flu. Gay men had to make their way through this circus of medical opinion in order to decide what they should or should not do.

We can gain a sense of the surrealism of AIDS research from Dr. Jacques Leibowitch’s A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin, one of the last books that Chris Cox edited. Unlike the more famous And the Band Played On, which has an almost reverential attitude toward medical authority, Leibowitch—perhaps because he is French—maintains a highly ironic tone in discussing what passed as “science” in the early period of the epidemic:

The first cases then seen in Paris permit the hypothesis that an “American pollutant consumed there” might be involved. The few Frenchmen infected have had, in most cases, New York contacts. Without being absolutely convinced of this hypothesis, but lacking a better conductor, we inform the CDC, with the diligent assistance of gay physicians, as to the brands of poppers used in Paris, their apparent origin, and their principal distributors. …

The poppers fable will become a Grimm fairy tale when the first cases of AIDS-without-poppers are discovered among homosexuals absolutely repelled by the smell of the product and among heterosexuals unfamiliar with even the words amyl nitrite or poppers. But, as will be habitual in the history of AIDS, rumors will last longer than either common sense or the facts would warrant. The odor of AIDS—poppers will hover in the air a long time—long enough for dozens of mice in the Atlanta epidemiology labs to be kept in restricted cages on an obligatory sniffed diet of poppers 8 to 12 hours a day, for several months, until nauseated but still healthy, without a trace of AIDS, the wretched rodents were released—provisionally—upon the announcement of a new hypothesis: promiscuity. (A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin, 5; italics in original)

The grim fatalism of the mid-eighties saturates “Friends at Evening.” When asked if he thinks the epidemic will stop, Mister Lark, flatly replies, “No … I think we’re all going to die.” Although not ill at the moment, Ned is certain that the virus is “in me along with the one thousand other things swimming in my blood.” This sense of fatalism is heightened by other imagined and real disasters surrounding them. Mister Lark, who is reduced to living in a welfare hotel, has adopted “the advice given in the Times to people traveling to countries on the verge of revolution,” and takes his valuables everywhere with him since he always expects the building where he lives to be reduced to a “towering inferno” from a resident’s accident: “Imagine a methadone addict operating a hot plate!” (97). But those living uptown are no less subject to displacement. The Whitney Museum is tearing down the apartment building where Curtis and Spruill live (in different apartments) to build an addition “that gives new meaning to the word ‘silly.’” So after twenty years, they are being evicted. Death and homelessness stalk the story, reminding readers that those with AIDS were often threatened with eviction, not just because they couldn’t pay the rent, but because hysterical landlords were scared of being infected by someone with the disease living in their building. (In Florida, where Holleran lives, families with infected children were being run out of town.)

Among the most moving aspects of the story is the careful accounting that characters make of their situation. “Don’t you make lists?” Mister Lark asks his friends:

The terror that permeates “Friends at Evening” is somewhat mitigated by the affection the men exhibit for one another, their humor, their knowingness, and their irrepressible response to beauty—both the beauty of men and of the world around them. The narrator at the end finds his heart pounding because of “that never-failing feeling of excitement that accompanies the entrance of any cab in New York City; as if one renews one’s life each time a meter switches on” (113). Ned finds the drive across Central Park as thrilling as the first time he went through it (107). And they retain their appreciation of “the incalculable, the divine, the overwhelming, godlike beauty of the … male body” (110; ellipses in original). Even Ned, who claims to be losing his romantic spirit, must admit that he has just transplanted it to “more and more exotic” settings (113). Like White and Picano, the friends gathered in the evening in Holleran’s tale resist seeing the virus as anything other than a “tragic accident. … [But that] does not invalidate the thing which still persists in the midst of all this horror” (110). If anything, they see AIDS as a badge of honor since it will only be “the germophobes, the analretentives, the small and mean and cold and ungenerous” who will survive, while those “who loved life” are dead or dying (105). To love life is to court death. The terror of AIDS is in direct proportion to the ecstasies of eroticism.

Although Edmund White argued that AIDS writing should end in anger, he was never able to achieve the roar of indignation that is Larry Kramer’s hallmark. Neither does Picano. Nor does Holleran, who lacks that capacity—not for outrage but for fury. Holleran titled one of the essays in Ground Zero “The Absence of Anger.” It describes attending a rally in which speaker after speaker urges the audience to get angry. But although the logic is simple enough, anger—like any emotion—rejects logic. Holleran has no simple answer to the question he poses himself—Why isn’t he angry?—but he does suggest that anger requires enormous immediate energy, energy that has been expended in the care of friends. Anger is a luxury that the men of Holleran’s generation can ill afford. Felice Picano rightly depicts this generational difference in Like People in History. The hotheads for the most part are the young; the older men are more efficient in their protests, or involved with caregiving.

One more reason for Holleran’s lack of anger is worth mentioning—a suitable object for anger. Unlike Larry Kramer, Holleran was unable to construct enemies on whom to focus his anger, an enemy whose actions can be held accountable. AIDS represents a cosmic injustice, the absurd arbitrariness of the Fates on which it is useless and hollow to expend one’s anger. Indeed, the terror and despair of “Friends at Evening” is heightened by the absurdity of the disease, which they must resist trying to fit into a moral or logical system.

The terror and despair of “Friends at Evening” is not repeated in any of Holleran’s other stories with the possible exception of “Lights in the Valley,” a portion of the aborted novel Holleran tried to write as an expansion of “Friends at Evening.” When he came to assemble the stories in In September, the Light Changes, he found that “Friends at Evening,” which he considers one of his best stories, didn’t fit. Its note of terror sounded shrill beside that volume’s somber elegiac stories. Yet in “The Ossuary,” anger flairs because of the characters’ need to make sense of AIDS and of death.

“The Ossuary” is the first, and in some ways the most complex, of the stories in In September, the Light Changes, and it bears a striking resemblance to “Friends at Evening.” Once again a group of friends have gathered together, although this time on a journey to see Mexico. Leading this party is Mister O’Connell who, like Mister Lark and Mister Friel, is a middle-aged Catholic man whose extensive learning, delightful campy humor, sensitivity toward others, and sexual inhibitions have won him a circle of friends to make up for his empty pockets and even emptier bed. Holleran based these characters on his friend Richard Hayes, who was “the beautiful ruin of a long Catholic education,” Holleran’s favorite line in the story. They encounter a gay couple also making the rounds of Aztec ruins, “a tall silver-haired man in a green blazer [and] a short dumpy man in wrinkled shorts and a gray T-shirt whose black beard and vulpine face gave him a rather sinister aspect.” The silver-haired man, Richard, is trying to fulfill his obligation to his late lover, Larry, by spreading Larry’s ashes on Monte Alban; but just as he is finishing this sacred act, the shorter man, Donald—a Jesuit priest and friend he had invited to come along—lifts a fragment of bone and refuses to return it or explain his actions. Richard is beside himself with anger. To help Richard and to satisfy his own curiosity, Mister O’Connell engages the Jesuit in conversation, hoping to get him to reveal the reason he took the bone. But the Jesuits, as Mister O’Connell knows, are “slippery creatures.” O’Connell fails, as does the young med student with “universal appeal.” But at the end of the story Donald goes over to Mister O’Connell, and tells him:

This explanation is so full of logical inconsistencies it can hardly be said to explain anything. The priest is unwilling to bend to New Age superstitions but is quite willing to keep to Dark Age superstitions. On the one hand, he’s afraid his explanation will hurt Richard’s feelings; on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that Richard’s feelings could be hurt any more than they are already. But in the end, what is most important is that even the Jesuit doesn’t understand his response to death and to AIDS. His actions are irrational, and being a knower (which I take to mean someone who needs to understand what happens around him) is in fact a liability in cases of such absurd arbitrariness. We are angry because we do not understand our losses, but that anger neither clarifies the irrational nor cuts the loss. It is an anger as archaic as the temples built by Jesuit and Aztec priests, the one on top of the other.

Since neither metaphysics nor science can make sense of AIDS, Holleran’s remaining strategy is to place it within its historical context. From the first, Holleran has zeroed in on how people’s failure—especially straight people’s failure—to view AIDS in a historical context has led to misunderstanding. An incident that Holleran mulls over in several pieces—both fiction and essays—concerns his sister’s question about AIDS: “Why did you trust one another?’ (GZ:186; “Lights in the Valley”:334). Holleran answers that, “Getting AIDS is like being told you were exposed to asbestos in the high school you went to, learning later it can cause cancer” (“Lights in the Valley”:335). Those who blame gay people for not taking precautions—especially at the beginning of the epidemic—fail to understand that at the time of exposure there was no sense of a danger against which precautions were needed.

Yet Holleran also wants to remind people that AIDS alone did not cause the changes in gay culture that it is often charged or credited with producing. One of his finest stories, “The Penthouse,” records the events of 1980, the year when the men of Holleran’s generation were “all confused” and “waiting for something new.”

“The Penthouse” is one of several portraits of pre-AIDS New York—although only one of the stories in In September, the Light Changes was actually written before AIDS: “Someone Is Crying in the Chateau de Berne,” which appeared in Felice Picano’s 1980 anthology, A True Likeness. Reprinted with the newer stories, “Someone Is Crying” takes on a strange foreshadowing of things to come. “The Penthouse” very consciously forces readers to see these pre-AIDS events in light of what will come soon after by concluding with two of the habitués of Ashley’s apartment meeting later in the decade and catching up on who’s alive, who’s sick, and who is dead. In one of the more chilling scenes Ashley, the mean, rich, but beautiful designer, asks a friend why he cannot win the heart of the Prince, the beautiful Jewish man he loves. “I’ve got money, looks, fame, and a big cock,” he tells the novelist. “It’s not what you are. It’s what you’re not that’s the problem,” the novelist replies, and what Ashley is not is vulnerable. He hasn’t suffered, and quoting Lucretius the novelist tells him, “Tears are in the nature of things” (ISLC:54–55). The penthouse’s terrace, the novelist declares, is a place with “no tragic vision.” Such a statement could have been made in 1980. But in two or three more years, no one could tell a gay New Yorker that he wasn’t vulnerable or dare to repeat so obvious a truism that tears are in the nature of things. For if White, Picano, and Holleran must “look out for themselves,” to find their own image in a world that has in so many ways erased their figure, they must do so through a tragic vision of the Fates’ arbitrariness.

But even the stories that do not mention AIDS—indeed, particularly the stories that do not mention it—cannot be understood without registering the lacuna. The title story, “In September, the Light Changes,” offers an especially fine example. The unnamed central character has returned to Fire Island after Labor Day, when “a sense of exhaustion and peace lay over the island” (ISLC:284). Like the hero of “Petunias,” he is trying to restart a life that has somehow stalled. Sitting in his beach house in September, “he made vows, he made plans, he tried to figure everything out. He wanted to come to conclusions as clear as the light on the sea, and then he gave up, it was pointless” (287). Living beside him next door are two remarkably handsome men (“two centaurs … two caryatids”), lovers who traveled together laboring “in the rarefied world of restoration; they knew the way to paint faux water stains on faux marble, not to mention trompe l’oeil … and everything about them … was the work of a sophisticated taste and a conscious effort to be attractive” (288). Consequently, they seem “forbidding in their sensuality and reserve” (292). Skillfully, Holleran paints a subtle and powerful portrait of mid-AIDS gay culture—a world of domestic isolation and body sculpting, a world of contrivance artfully designed to hide its artificiality, a world far removed from Victor Turner’s sense of communitas, that spontaneous sense of community that flourished in the seventies dance clubs.

A storm comes, and for three days the narrator is entirely isolated. Desperate for company and in need of cooking oil, he makes his way to his neighbors’ house, and although they are nice enough to him, cheerfully supplying the cooking oil he needs, he realizes, “after the smallest of pauses,” that they are “not going to ask him to stay.” Even under these severe conditions—when for all practical purposes the main character is the proverbial last man on earth—this couple of demigods will make no room for him. The next morning, he takes the first ferry back to New York, and the story ends with an echo of its opening: “In September the light changes—as he crossed the bay, it was once more beginning to break, in long, beautiful shafts, through the clearing sky—but not the human heart” (294). His heart is not broken by their rejection; if anything, it revitalizes him, forces him to reenter the society from which he has remained apart.

“In September, the Light Changes” comes to the same conclusion as the story “The Married Man,” which appeared in the 1998 edition of Men on Men. In that story a man more explicitly suffering from years of sexual abstinence because of his fear of AIDS finally reawakens sexually, not because of finding a new lover, but because he has been humiliatingly rejected. Walking away from the man who has turned him down, he thinks, “There is nothing quite like rejection … there is nothing quite like losing one game to make you try again. He felt like a baby who’s just been slapped into life by the doctor’s hand. He realized he had no choice now; he would have to go back to having sex” (187).

If all writing is a function of the abject—which for Julia Krestiva is that part of ourselves that we eject from ourselves—then AIDS writing is an extreme form of that confrontation with the abject, a way of being “slapped into life” by humiliation. To suffer from AIDS is to experience at the very least bodily humiliation, and most probably the humiliation of ostracism and stigmatization. In early AIDS dramas there was an almost obligatory scene in which the PWA lost control of his bowels—symbolized in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart by a carton of milk spilled across the stage, its contents ripped open and uncontrollably released. For the most part, the AIDS writing of the 1990s by the Violet Quill leaves that scene behind (although White’s The Married Man chronicles such debilitation painstakingly). It is replaced with scenes even more humiliating because they are more psychological. In Picano’s “The Geology of Southern California at Black’s Beach,” Mark finds himself unable to climb down a steep embankment to Black’s Beach because—weakened by AIDS—he’s paralyzed with fear that he will fall. He tries to cover this humiliation of childish terror with a story of reliving a childhood nightmare, but it is clear to Craig that the climb down the cliff has exposed Mark’s muscular and neurological decay. The incident is humiliating not just to Mark but to the narrator as well, who has tried to hide from himself the extent of his lover’s decline and his own failure as a caregiver. In Holleran’s “Amsterdam,” the friend, Ray, who has gone to Holland to die, who is keenly humiliated by his physical decay and social isolation, strikes out at all his old friends and in turn tries to humiliate them. He accuses the narrator of having a “scrofulous coat, bad breath, and body odor,” projections of his own fear of decay. (Ray, for example, keeps a bottle of Dutch mouthwash at his side on all occasions.) But the greatest humiliation is sexual. Ray makes almost daily visits to the Day- and Nightsaunas, where he manages to have sex but only in the total darkness of the orgy room “because no one was coming into my cubicle” (ISLC:260). In the orgy room the “great beauties. … don’t care who puts his mouth on their dicks” (259). But although the Duchess of York may be “beyond any concept of humiliation,” happily appearing on Larry King Live, Ray is bowed low, “disgraced by fortune and men’s eyes.” Yet even the dark of the orgy room cannot cover Ray’s humiliation. “Like a man in a prison cell in some ancient dungeon, filled with seawater when the tide came in, he’d had to make sure his depression did not drown him utterly—not to mention his sex life, whose orgasms the Prozac dampened, so that he had to balance the two things … lower the dosage in order to reach climax, raise the dosage in order to be able to leave his room for the sauna” (266–67).

Even escaping AIDS causes humiliation. There is, of course, the humiliation of having been granted undeserved good luck—survivor’s guilt. But for Holleran, there is another humiliation in surviving—by becoming old in a culture that overvalues youth. To have lived through the 1980s and 1990s and remained seronegative is to have escaped one kind of mortality only to be forced to confront another which is not so different. “Amsterdam” begins with the premise “that there was no way one could bridge the gap between a person who carried HIV and one who did not” (260). Ray pushes the narrator so far away that the story seems to support such a conclusion. But the narrator is humiliated not only by Ray. Each day, sometimes just to get away from his host, the narrator goes to one of the saunas, and each day he returns frustrated. No one has shown any interest in having sex with him either. On the last night he tries for the first time the darkness of the orgy room and has sex with a young man “without the risk entailed in the usual seduction” because the young man “did not care, apparently, what I looked like.” This epiphany seems “to join” the narrator with Ray in a “strange mixture of shame and exultation” that expresses itself in “a certain contempt … anger, sadness and despair” (283).

Like White and Picano, Holleran understands how surviving into the second decade of AIDS brings into focus two competing ideas of mortality. There is the sense that one has beaten the odds and lived, and there is the sense that one is now well into middle-age and therefore closer to death than to birth. Without being young, one is not quite old; and though surrounded by friends, one is very much alone. All three understand the message of that unlikely oracle of White’s story; they must look out for themselves, in all the senses of that rich construction.

Humiliation takes us back to the issue of why writing about AIDS has been so difficult and why Picano, White, and Holleran, after periods of silence, felt compelled not just to take the subject up but to make it central to their work. For to speak about AIDS is to be humbled by its enormity and to risk the humiliation of banality, to give the fear and loathing that is part of all of us an independent existence that is open to others. In Picano’s novel Onyx, a seropositive man goes scuba diving for the first time, and on this maiden trip he is approached by a shark. He has heard a swift punch on the snout will repel a shark, but instead he caresses the shark with infinite tenderness and affection and is left alive. Death from AIDS and death by shark are not so different, and by embracing one, he has embraced the other. The man’s gesture astonishes his swimming companions, who do not know he is infected with HIV. It even astonishes him. But we are meant to see that we can transform, through tenderness, the potentially humiliating into the life-enhancing. Similarly, in The Married Man, Austin might have regarded Julien’s lies as the final humiliation. Instead, he sees them for what they are—the protective coloring that the vulnerable use to feel safer, the frailty that is all too human and requires his tenderness and affection.

Writing is humiliating. Writing about AIDS is especially humiliating. It shows our fears, our weaknesses, our failures to cope. It shows our pettiness, our desire to control and our need for love. The anger that in the 1980s White called for in AIDS writing was a way to hide the humiliation of the communal sense of vulnerability, abjectness, neediness. But the absence of anger—which Holleran found at the time so humiliating—becomes in the 1990s part of his strength. For the surviving members of the Violet Quill to find a way to use sympathy, tenderness, affection took time. They had to find a way through their grief and loss, their guilt and humiliation. From the middle of the 1990s on they found themselves “slapped into life,” not only by their failures but by the sense of possibility.

AIDS broke up the Violet Quill, but it also brought the group together. Much of the conflict within the group occurred between George Whitmore and the Ferro-Grumleys. For quite a long time they had little to do with one another. But at a clinic office, Whitmore met Grumley quite by accident, as they were both waiting for appointments. Grumley asked Whitmore to keep the fact that he had AIDS secret, and Whitmore complied. He attended Grumley’s memorial service, and as he walked weakly up the aisle—for he, too, would die within months—Robert Ferro embraced him, expressing his gratitude for keeping Grumley’s secret, but also for the brotherhood of what they had shared as writers forging a literary movement. The rift was healed. It seems to me that that moment signified a great deal of the sense of community that united these writers despite their often bitter disputes. They understood that they were—for better or worse—engaged in the creation of a certain culture that had never existed before, a culture which aimed to give the beauty, wit, and eroticism that exists between men its freest chance for expression. In the dozen years between Stonewall and AIDS, they had watched, supported, and chronicled how such a culture could arise, flourish, and slip away.