by Paul Monette
At the same time there began to appear a certain overview phenomenon under the general rubric of AIDS-and-the-Arts. Typically these were hand-wringing accounts of the impact of so much cultured dying, lamenting for instance the White Way silence left by Michael Bennett, the songs unsung. This litany was something of a mixed bag, bringing under the same umbrella the likes of Way Bandy and Halston, Miss Kitty and Keith Haring. Though it was surely true what Fran Lebowitz had so scathingly observed—
If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with “Let’s Make a Deal.”
—these roundups of the arts tended to foster in the general populace ever new heights of Not me.
As if artists breathed too rarefied an air, had far too much sex for their own good, and were generally frail from living on coffee and cigarettes. Reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s isolation of the consumptive personality in Illness as Metaphor, the Camille/Keats temperament, which served to distance a previous century from the country of the diseased.
Not that these various paeans to the disappeared among the artists weren’t well-meaning. But they tended to conveniently not notice how many of the creative folk died with a He on their lips, the death certificate as a kind of final cover-up. Died of lymphoma, died of a staph infection, anything but AIDS. The media couldn’t seem to make the connection between the silencing by death and the Neanderthal backlash against the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowich. There was mad rejoicing among the Philistines and the family-values thugs about the double good fortune of snuffing out fags and dangerous artists in one fell swoop.
The hand-wringing reached a sort of apogee of sentimental dithering in the Newsweek cover story on the death of Rudolph Nureyev. While they strewed the bier with violets, eliciting prayerful reminiscences, Nureyev’s doctor in Paris was rigorously denying rumors that the dancer had succumbed to AIDS. That was the final straw for this camel’s back. Twelve years of fighting to tear down the prison of shame, to give the stricken some dignity, and this prima ballerina had singlehandedly restored to AIDS the status of dirty little secret.
I didn’t question anyone’s desire to keep his illness private. But to keep up appearances after death, especially for such an international figure, simply would not do. “I don’t care how great a dancer he was,” I told Newsweek. “He died a coward.” This was not especially a popular sentiment at the time, but for my whole adult life I’d been hearing Nureyev pooh-pooh that he was gay. It was as if he lived in the high empyrean of the Muses, hors de catégorie, way above the tacky politics of gay. As Vanity Fair was quick to dish, this did not prevent him from cruising the parks and watering holes of queer Manhattan by night. So in denial about his own illness that he consistently rejected his diagnosis to his doctor’s face. And never a penny, so far as anyone knew, to a single gay and lesbian cause. But thanks for the pirouettes anyway.
I won’t pretend that my burst of outrage had any effect on the doctor’s decision to take back the he, owning up to AIDS at a second news conference a few days later. He may well have realized on his own what a grotesque distortion his cover-up represented, how dismissive of the sufferings of millions. What I did manage to achieve, however, was the status of full-fledged crank—especially among balletomanes.
But here I am getting ahead of myself. I went out on the road again in the spring of 1990, this time with a novel to hawk. It was fairly quickly obvious that the press was inclined to be more sympathetic, if no bolder. A couple of print reporters who’d interviewed me the last time around had died in the interim, and not of old age. Several others actually pleaded with me to give them some new angle—any new angle—since their editors and bosses had decided that AIDS was yesterday’s news.
I rose to the task immediately, sketching a portrait of the AIDS underground and its traffic in non–FDA-approved drugs. I was still pushing the fairy-tale notion that a regimen of effective medication was imminent—a mix of antivirals and immune boosters, what we called “the cocktail.” Yet even as those drugs became available, I cautioned, they’d be out of reach of America’s vast Third World of poverty, where the virus burned like an inferno. I gave ACT UP a plug wherever possible, countering mistrust that we activists had gone too far this time. What would YOU do, I’d ask, if you knew they had the drugs that would give you another year but refused to release them?
Perhaps I had an easier time of it because the publisher had carefully avoided booking most of the drive-time call-in market. Or at least I was lucky to be playing the high end, Sonya Friedman on CNN and several appearances on Michael Jackson’s brainy show on ABC Talk Radio. When I reached Chicago I thought there had been some mixup, for I was scheduled to go on the air with a veteran right-wing smoothie who didn’t bother to hide his upright Mormonism or his loyalty to Reagan/Bush. The publicist in New York knew only that the guy had asked for me, promising to treat me and my social diseases with a little respect. Deep down I figured he’d probably ambush me, but I wasn’t afraid of a shouting match if it came to that.
I was ushered into the sound booth, two minutes to air-time, just as he was finishing sports. They went to commercial, and he shook my hand. A red-faced man in his sixties, bags under his eyes like steamer trunks and having a nuclear bad-hair-day. He told me he was sorry for all my losses and apologized for not reading my book. “I’m not going to take any callers,” he said carefully. “My audience isn’t exactly on your side.” Whichever way he liked, I retorted. “Ten seconds, Ray,” the producer bleeped in. But Ray was still taking his time, his basset face sagging with pain, looking away as he finally blurted it out. “I just found out—I mean he told me—my son is a homosexual. Good kid. I guess I’ve had it all wrong.”
And we were on. His voice took on a craggy upbeat tone, avuncular and cozy, as he warned his audience not to change the station. I understood that what he’d told me was off-the-record, and that I’d heard all he was going to tell me. In the on-air segment he treated me with kid gloves, letting me make an impassioned plea for tolerance and complain that we’d wasted a decade scapegoating AIDS. He thanked me and went to commercial again. My publicist/driver bustled in to whisk me away, leaving me scarcely a moment to shake Ray’s hand. “Your son’s a lucky man,” I said, and then both of us turned away.
All through Washington, Philadelphia, and New York I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Did he understand that I meant the boy was lucky to have him as a father? Didn’t his Mormon bylaws require that the kid be shunned, his name unchiseled from the stone mountain of the blessed forever? Was he just gay, or did he have AIDS? I can still see the grappling in his father’s eyes, the shaken faith. But more than anything else I saw the transfiguring power of a truth that had finally hit home. For better or worse, Mormon-wise, Ray was on our side now.
In New York we had managed to set up an appearance on Geraldo, and I agreed to be on the panel as long as Larry Kramer would join me. Talk about a venue where no respectable poet had gone before. Media-sawy friends warned me I was heading into quicksand, a tabloid format that managed to cheapen everything it touched. But I couldn’t pass up a chance to address so large an audience, especially if they weren’t the sort that ever read books. And the actual experience proved to be wholly satisfying, not least because Geraldo Rivera himself was superbly informed. He’d read the books and understood the numbers, and was using the occasion in a conscious effort to elevate the debate among his viewers.
Larry and I fell naturally into good cop/bad cop mode. Larry held up a sign accusing the writer on the plague desk of The New York Times of being “the worst AIDS reporter in America.” We’d both been doing it so long that we were able to bulletin the tragedies and crimes of the epidemic rapid-fire, scarcely pausing for breath. I was the widow, reeling off the unimaginable pain and grief of families and lovers. One of our panelists was a lachrymose TV reporter from San Francisco, clearly very far gone himself. We left it to him
to cover the dying part. And poor Mary McFadden, there to represent the design industry’s commitment to stopping AIDS. When she proudly announced that they hoped to raise a million at some event, Larry turned on her in high dudgeon. Million shmillion. Calvin Klein could write a check that big himself and not even miss it. Larry was especially hard on the self-satisfaction of charities. McFadden scarcely uttered another peep.
It was the AIDS circus in miniature. All that was needed to complete the circle was an official government liar and a peabrained televangelist. But I left that Times Square studio in a state of real exhilaration, figuring we had mixed it up in a way that showed how Hydra-headed was the monster we were fighting. And the upshot was that for weeks after the show aired, strangers would come up to me in the street, in coffee shops and multiplexes, to shake my hand and tell me they had seen me on Geraldo. Flattering in a surreal way, and meant to show support for my personal battle. But I was hard put to understand how so much individual decency would ever translate into public policy, however many minds we managed to change.
Over the next months I found it harder and harder to get it up for a one-man show of defiance and tempered optimism. I’d written four books about AIDS, and began to despair that a hundred books like Borrowed Time couldn’t seem to save a single life. A period of diminishing returns, which ended up leaving me feeling both useless and used. I received plaques and proclamations from various organizations, glad to do it if it helped raise money to ease the dying. But I started to feel like a monument before my time, already stuck in a niche. And then Steve died at the end of the summer, not a month after I’d finished writing a love story whose joy was all because of him.
Sometime that autumn I heard that Larry was telling the press and our so-called leaders that the AIDS war was over and we’d lost it. That expressed it best, it seemed to me. Those magic bullets we’d smuggled in from Thailand and China and Mexico and France had all proven to be duds. The scientists bickered, and the politicians slashed. Nothing was going to stop the deaths of hundreds of thousands more gay men before this beast was brought under control. And as salt in the wound, new studies were reporting that younger gay men weren’t practicing safer sex anymore. Who cared, after all?
And yet, like a trained seal, I went out on tour again in the summer of ’91, happily with Winston at my side. I talked about the novel I’d written for Steve, and what it meant to fall in love in the midst of war. AIDS was an absolute fact of life by then, intractable as poverty, no new angles and not much hope except among the New Age happy talkers. It was all I could do to speak about the difficulty of love in a race with time. I got about as much coverage as any other AIDS institution—a certain pro forma respect, lip service to the notion that two men could love as wholly as anyone else. As to how grotesque it was to bury two lovers and know that a third would bury me—that was a bit too much for the lifestyle pages.
By the time I took the dog-and-pony show out for Becoming a Man, I was six months into my own diagnosis, having nearly bought the farm with a drug reaction over New Year’s. Two months later I had my first KS lesions, on my shoulder blade and the roof of my mouth. In June I was in for toxo, forcing me to cancel the East Coast leg of the tour, but somehow pulling it together in time for the western leg. By then the only occasions that meant anything to me were the bookstore signings, especially the queer ones. You knew that whoever showed up didn’t need AIDS 101, and they seemed as ready as I to talk about something else for a change. In this case, the suffocation of the closet and the struggle to free ourselves from the last vestiges of self-hatred.
That ought to have been my swan song as a public figure in the flesh—though admittedly the last five years were beginning to resemble the farewell tour of an aging mezzo-soprano, milking those high notes for all they were worth. But I hadn’t counted on the nomination for the National Book Award. Thus we found ourselves in tuxes, Winston and I, in the solid gold ballroom of the Plaza. Sitting around a table with my editor, agent, and publicist, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Harcourt Brace. Having sternly announced to everyone I knew that I didn’t stand an iceberg’s chance in hell of winning.
Be careful what you don’t dare wish for. When they announced my name the table fairly levitated in shocked delight, and the next five minutes were practically an out-of-body experience as I made my way to the judges’ dais. All the Oscar speeches I’d made in my pajamas since I was eight—or kneeling before the King in Stockholm—happily didn’t fail me. Like Maureen Stapleton I had the urge to thank everyone I’d ever met.
But I never did get back to my veal scallopini. With barely a segue I was in the middle of a press conference, grinning ear to ear as I answered the questions they lobbed at me, not a spitball in the bunch. I only recall them asking if I was the first gay “writer to cop the prize. Probably not, I replied, but certainly the first person with AIDS. Of course I could’ve talked all night, but they had deadlines to meet. And it was time to yield the mike to Mary Oliver, who’d won the prize in poetry for an unsparing body of work—the smell of skunk in the morning air, the “old woman made out of leaves.” In her own acceptance speech she’d paid tribute to her lover, so the story of these awards was a gay and lesbian story, one way or another.
The avalanche of press attention would continue from mid-November to Christmas. Camera crews tracked heavy cable through the house, sending the dogs for cover. The print photographers had me frozen in various pretzel poses for hours at a stretch. But what was not to like about so much attention? The level of intelligence was gratifying in the extreme. They weren’t too timid to include the dying part, and yet managed not to exploit it either. If this was my swan song with the press, it was easy as eating ice cream. All the same, by New Year’s I was weary of it—time to go back to my essays and this race against the clock.
I had my moments of comeuppance, to be sure. A friend from Boston had left an impish message to the effect that now I had my Oscar for Butterfield 8—a reference to the prize they withheld from Elizabeth Taylor for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and the sympathy vote that put her over two years later in homage to her tracheotomy. The implication was that the powers that be in bookdom were making up for Borrowed Time. In some quarters there were dark rumblings that the judges had bowed to Political Correctness—though one of their number assured me at the ceremony that PC had worked against me first to last.
In any case, lest I be getting a swelled head from so much attention, I could always bring myself down a peg by recalling the People interview. During which I expatiated at length about the Greeks and the river of wisdom that coursed through all the centuries. When I finally paused for breath after fifteen minutes of loftiness, the interviewer grabbed his chance to ask the overriding question: “Who does the cooking?”
II
Bear with me now—I have to backtrack to September ’91. I’d finished the draft of Becoming a Man on Labor Day, seventeen years to the day after I met Roger. Winston and I were scheduled to leave for New York in mid-September, where I would attend two days of meetings at WNET, preliminary to writing a script about a multicultural cross-section of people with AIDS who are brought together in a drug study. We planned to drive up to Provincetown afterward, for a weekend on the cusp of autumn. Before we left I spent a few days answering a pile of mail from my readers, the old Wasp etiquette rearing its head: no letter must go unacknowledged.
An unusual missive had arrived that very week, written on lined paper in a kid’s most earnest penmanship. His name was Tony Johnson, age thirteen, and he was writing to commend me for Borrowed Time and Love Alone. Apologizing that he hadn’t actually bought them, but traded them with a guy in the hospital for a stack of sports magazines. He didn’t have AIDS, he told me, but understood about pain and chronic illness from his own experience. Parenthetically almost, he revealed that he’d been physically abused for years by his birth parents, hastening to add that he’d been adopted since by wonderful people. No self-pity, and especially no wish to bother me.<
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I sent a reply, just one of a couple of dozen, wishing Tony Johnson well and telling him he probably had the distinction of being my youngest fan. Ten days later we were back from our East Coast jaunt, and I discovered a message on my machine from Tony’s adoptive mother—I’ll call her Gayle. She said my note had really given him a boost, especially as his health just then was very rocky. She asked nothing from me either, but on impulse I picked up the phone and called. I coaxed from her the details of the boy’s punishing journey—the sex abuse by his parents and their friends, serving him up like a sacrificial lamb for the sake of their darkest pleasures. Virtual starvation. And constant savage beatings, such that when he finally escaped the horror, the x-rays showed fifty-four bones broken throughout his riddled body.
As I would later say in my foreword to Tony’s book, all I wanted to do right then was run. I’d been through enough torment and meaningless tragedy for close to a decade, and the last thing I needed was another case assignment. Gayle could hear the flinching in my voice and hastened to reassure me: “You don’t have to talk to him. But you’ll like him, I promise. He’s not depressing at all.”
Well, all right. And a half-minute later he was on the line, shy at first or a little in awe, but with an overriding hunger to talk to someone who understood. Now I have to say how cautious I was in these matters, having heard a veritable Homeric catalogue of miseries in the previous few years, as readers reached out to connect. I drew a certain line in the sand, answering a letter once but almost never writing a second time to the same correspondent. I couldn’t serve as everyone’s support group; couldn’t begin to slog through the piles of manuscripts that arrived every week, written in blood and tears. Besides, I wasn’t in the market for any new friends. Even if most of my own friends were ghosts now, they were still the only ones who really understood me—as opposed to the Paul Monette who wrote my books. Otherwise I had Winston and the dogs and Victor, and that was about the limit of my heart’s capacity. And I need to add that I’d never been especially good with kids, old as I was before my time, old by the time I was ten in fact. I never quite got the hang of them as a species.
