by Paul Monette
A Biography of Paul Monette
Paul Monette (1945–1995) was a prolific, award-winning American author and prominent AIDS activist. His novels, memoirs, and poetry gave shape to a volatile era in which gay men forging their new identities confronted the unforeseeable and devastating AIDS epidemic. Late in life, Monette wrote, “AIDS is the great cleave in the world, and nothing will ever be the same again.” A winner of the National Book Award for his memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Monette helped establish the broad cultural significance of gay and AIDS literature.
Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on October 16, 1945, to Paul Monette Sr. and Jacqueline Monette, Paul was considered by all accounts “perfect.” Attending the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as a “townie” on scholarship, he grew increasingly tormented by his suppressed homosexuality and the class divisions he observed all around him. In Becoming a Man, he describes those early years as a time in which he never lost his temper or raised his voice: “A bland insipid smile glazed my face instead, twin to the sexless vanilla of my body.”
After graduating from Yale in 1967, Monette descended into a dispirited period. He reluctantly taught literature and writing at preparatory schools, such as Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, and a women’s liberal arts college outside Boston called Pine Manor. Around the time he published his first book of poems, The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975), Monette met a lawyer named Roger Horwitz at a dinner party. The two men fell in love and soon moved to Los Angeles. There, Monette left behind what he saw as the strictures of the East Coast establishment and came out unequivocally as a gay man. Over the next decade, he wrote several novels, such as Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978) and The Gold Diggers (1979), that were influenced by Hollywood and its lore. His early novels featured openly gay men as central characters. Monette’s second book of poems, No Witnesses (1981), also appeared in these years; mostly dramatic monologues of fictitious and historical figures, the book received high critical praise from the literary world.
While the sexual mores of the 1970s and early 1980s challenged his partnership with Roger Horwitz, the bond between the two men held. Before his death from AIDS-related complications, Horwitz declared to Monette, “We’re the same person. When did that happen?” It was Horwitz’s diagnosis of AIDS in 1985 that plunged Monette into a crisis that would come to define his mission as a writer and activist. His book of forceful, grief-stricken poems, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, and his highly lauded testimony, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, both appeared in 1988. The latter chronicled Horwitz’s illness and death and was among the first memoirs to bear witness to the epidemic’s devastating impact. New York Times reviewer William M. Hoffman celebrated the book, saying that Monette had “etched a magnificent monument to his lover’s bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure.”
In the years that followed, Paul Monette turned his focus almost exclusively to writing books that confronted the terrible effects of the AIDS crisis and the closet. He published two more novels, Afterlife (1990), about “AIDS widowers” in Los Angeles, and Halfway Home (1991), a story of two brothers, one gay and facing AIDS, the other straight. His last book of poems, West of Yesterday, East of Summer (1995), garnered acclaim for its arresting, lyrical narratives of grief, anger, and loss. In 1992, Monette released what is now his best-known work, Becoming a Man. A memoir of his life leading up to meeting Horwitz, the book illustrates the costs of sexual repression and affirms the power of living life authentically. About Becoming a Man, novelist David Ebershoff has written, “Monette’s interior life, his ghosts, his turmoil, his final peace—in Becoming a Man, they have become our literature.”
During the last seven years of his life, Monette became a vocal and influential AIDS and gay rights activist. With his partner Stephen Kolzak, whom he met and quickly lost to the epidemic, Monette participated in political protests against the federal government’s neglect of AIDS research and campaigned for the rights and social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. “No one will find the way out of hate and violence unless we do,” Monette declared in one of his many speeches from this time. “Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”
As he grew increasingly ill from AIDS complications, Monette published Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994). Alternating between rage and remembrance as well as the personal and political, these ten essays offer insight into the life and mind of a powerful and determined writer galvanized by the injustices of his times. A film documentary of the author’s life, Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, was released in 1996. The slim, eloquent Sanctuary, a fable of same-sex love, posthumously appeared in 1997 and was hailed by critics as Monette’s final gift.
He died at his home in Los Angeles on February 10, 1995, at the age of forty-nine and was survived by his father, brother, and final partner, Winston Wilde. Inscribed on his grave are the words Champion of His People.
A two-year-old Paul Monette in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1947.
Monette at his graduation from Yale University in 1967.
The author on a Provincetown farm in 1973.
Monette’s faculty photo in Milton Academy’s 1975 yearbook.
The author with his mother, Jacqueline Monette; his father, Paul Monette Sr.; and his brother, Robert Monette in 1977.
Monette in 1983 with his beloved first partner, Roger Horwitz, at the Monte Oliveto monastery in Tuscany. This was the original cover photo of Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.
Monette and Horwitz in 1984.
Monette and his second partner, Stephen Kolzak, wearing AIDS protest pins in 1990.
Response stationery for Monette fans circa 1993.
The author with his final companion, Winston Wilde, on Christmas in 1994.
A promotional postcard for Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, a 1996 documentary on Monette.
All images courtesy of the Paul Monette papers (Collection 1707). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1998 by Paul Monette
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
Cover image credit: “Monette with Roger Horwitz Tuscay 1984, Paul Monette papers (Collection 1707). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.”
978-1-4804-7385-0
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