How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  I can’t help but long for Peter still, the sight of him, as I once did, love-struck and young, a star in my eye. The top corner of it dyed blue. My personal pantheon of heroes from that time—Peter, Derek Jarman, and David Wojnarowicz—inspired me to be an artist, to protest, to live as queerly, as confidently, and as openly as I wanted. Their deaths, from AIDS, from intentional government inaction—we were not believed to be worth saving—took them from me, from all of us, far too soon. They still inspire me. And so I stand here and balance what I’ve learned from them on the tip of a crush two decades old, the only communication possible.

  In some strange way, more than my other heroes, and more than my other boyfriends, Peter and I were alike. Both oldest brothers, both with family money, both with a sense of political responsibility. Both of us got away with all sorts of misbehavior as children, both of us liked to shock with the way we dressed, both of us liked science fiction. Both of us sang in boys’ choirs as children. Both of us studied ceramics in college. Both of us skied and swam and eschewed team sports, competitive behavior in general. But in the end I wonder if it is a mistake to think about what was lost. If it isn’t better instead to think about what he gave me.

  WHEN I FELL IN love with Peter, I fell in love with what I wanted to be next. Peter was a member of what was jokingly known at first as the BART 9, a group of nine activists who had handcuffed themselves to the pole at the center of a BART train when the doors were open, stopping the train in the station. This same group had also disrupted opening night at the San Francisco Opera and blockaded the Golden Gate Bridge. They’d done a lot of protests like these over the years, and while many of them were in ACT UP, for most this was simply another in a series of protests designed to draw attention to the AIDS pandemic and the various ways in which companies were looking to exploit the dying. The BART 9 protest had ended quickly, with the group arrested and taken away. The train was delayed but still left the station. Peter missed his medication that day as a result of his arrest, Laura recalls. “It was a nightmare.” Missing their medication was a constant risk for AIDS activists who had the illness. The police who denied them their pills, out of whatever rules the jail followed, were murderous.

  Peter felt the risk was worthy. We have nothing to lose, the HIV-positive contingent of ACT UP would say in those days. We have nothing to lose, having lost everything. Understand that in 1989 there was AZT and that was basically it. Understand that those of us in my generation who lived in San Francisco had to overcome the false impression that no one like us had ever existed before, because the ones who might have greeted us when we arrived were already dead. We lacked models for bravery and were trying to invent them, as we likewise invented models for loving and for activism. While writing an article about love and HIV, I interviewed many young gay people who would say, I can’t imagine getting older. Most of the people who might have shown them what it would be like to be gay and alive even at age forty or forty-five are dead. What happened to me is happening again, ten years later.

  In The Odyssey, Homer describes Poseidon Earthshaker as having blue hair. He is alternately “blue-maned Poseidon” and “Poseidon of the blue brows.” Peter, now returned to the sea, makes me think of that, his blue hair a mark across his brow from the ancient god.

  Peter D. Kelloran, resident of San Francisco, a town ruled by earthquakes and inhabited by people who understood some of the value of what the Greeks left for us. Peter the blue-maned, now in the arms of Poseidon Earthshaker—he belongs to a time that already we can’t imagine even though we lived through it, when there was one drug, and hope was hidden so it wouldn’t die.

  I like to imagine him as one of the science-fiction characters he favored, in flight through the sky, roaming the night in a nimbus of blue light, a smiling rogue punk-rock angel, his wings dyed blue to match, from a heaven where everyone dresses well and mercy means love and a man you don’t know will hold your hand for you when you die. A heaven where, when there’s injustice, you chain yourself to a train because you know that somewhere someone feels it. Somewhere along the spirit-chain world-mind oversoul. Someone somewhere who maybe thought there wasn’t a thing called strength feels how you care enough to stand in front of the passage of a train.

  As children, we thought Superman was brave to stand in front of a train. That’s not brave, though. Superman never stood before anything that could destroy him. Peter did.

  DURING HIS LAST TWO years, when he was very sick, he became so thin his pants would fall off him. He went in and out of dementia, regressing. He started smoking again. He would ask Jason, “Does my father know we’re boyfriends?” Or he would say, “I met you during high school, right?” One day at the hospice he went out with Janet, his aunt, to get cigarettes and burgers, and he looked around on the street and said, “These people, they’re all homosexuals! Every one!” He was so thin at that point that even in the Castro, where people were accustomed to the sight of wasting, Peter attracted attention.

  “He had wanted,” Janet says, “to be at Maitri. And so we went and there was no room, and it looked like he was going to have to go somewhere else, and then I called and found him a space there, which was good. It was where he wanted to be.” Janet had rented an apartment for Peter to spend Christmas with her down in Carmel, and it was shortly after, upon returning, that Peter called her to say, “It’s time. It’s my time.” He had been living at home until then, getting meals delivered and having home care, and when he called Janet, he gave as his reason, “I can’t take care of myself anymore. It’s my time.”

  Imagine yourself as a pool of light and sound altering as all your days run through you, and they pass again and again. From moment to moment, you are every age you have ever been, but in no particular order. Time courses through you, the time you lived, a flume of your days. This was Peter’s dementia.

  “I always knew where he was,” Laura says of his dementia. “God, he would say something and people would say, ‘He’s crazy,’ but he wasn’t. No, people thought it was sad, and it was, but it was beautiful, really, because he was back in the days that he loved, just all at once. I remember he said once, ‘I have to give Laura a baby!’ and the people at the hospice really thought he’d lost it, but I knew. We used to talk about having a child, and then, well, he got HIV, and he never talked about it again. And so he mentioned the baby again there, and I said, ‘No, remember? You got sick. And so we didn’t have it.’ And he got quiet again.”

  Jason remembered him saying, “I am supposed to tell you something, Jason. They want me to tell you something.” So Jason waited, and then Peter said, “It’s about love. I am supposed to tell you, they want me to tell you, it’s about love.”

  “He was so angry at the end,” Laura recalls. “Before Christmas we went out to dinner for his birthday, and he had chocolate. And it made him all warm, as he wasn’t eating any sugar and hadn’t for a long time. And so we took him home, and I stayed with him and it was then I knew, we’d lost him. That he was going to go. He was very lucid then, very disappointed. He was talking about how he’d never been properly loved by a man, and how he wouldn’t be now. He spoke of everything he wouldn’t do, the music, everything. And when I heard him talk like that, I knew he wasn’t going to make it.”

  BEFORE THIS PETER HAD wanted to live at least until 1995. Research that he and Laura had done in astrology said that 1995 would be an important year, and it would be. It was the year of the advent of protease inhibitors, the year many people mortgaged their deaths. Laura had done so much research into trying to keep Peter alive that she was awarded a full scholarship to Mills College to study microbiology. She received the letter notifying her the Monday after he had died. “It got me out of bed,” she says. She had taken to her bed for a week after Peter’s passing and would later in the year be hospitalized for two weeks for severe depression. “I’ve had a number of breakdowns since,” she says. “I just felt that I had failed him. That I wasn’t able to keep him alive. And it hurt too
damn much.”

  Laura divorced her husband later, in part because without Peter she felt her marriage reduced, and she likewise gave up her research. She has lost more friends than Peter to the epidemic, but more than that, she lost the one she loved best. “If I thought for a second,” she says, “that I could love like that again . . .” Her mother and Peter’s mother both had not so secretly wished the two of them would marry—Laura was a Lister, as in Listerine, and Peter was a Morgan, of the banking family, on his mother’s side—but eventually both accepted the situation for what it was.

  Laura and Peter were closer perhaps than if they had married. They had divined several important concordances in their astrological charts, but for Laura the most significant was that he was Aries moon at twenty-seven degrees, and she, Aries sun at twenty-seven degrees. “Your moon sign is your relationship to yourself, how you talk to yourself,” Laura says. “The way he talked to himself, that was me. And your sun, that is how you greet the world.”

  Peter was not buried. He was cremated and his ashes were spread on a sunny day from a catamaran that sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge. “There’s no marker,” Jill says. “Just our hearts. We know where he is.”

  My Parade

  WHEN I’M IDENTIFIED AS a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. “Did you go to school for it?” someone asks. Yes, I say. “Where?” they ask, because I don’t usually offer it.

  I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I say.

  Over the years, I’ve received two standard reactions when I say this. The first is a kind of incredulity: The person acts as if he or she has met a very rare creature. Some even challenge me, as if this is the sort of thing people lie about (and some probably do, though that makes me sad). Some ask if I mean the famous school for writers—and there are other writing programs in the state of Iowa, excellent ones, but I know they’re referring to the Workshop, and so I say yes, though instantly I feel as if I have been made an impostor, hiding in the clothes of a great man.

  The second reaction is condescension, as if I have admitted to a terrible sin. To these people, I’m to be written off. Nothing I do could disprove what they now believe of me. All my successes will be chalked up to “connections”; all my failures will prove the dangers of overeducation. If they ever like a book of mine, they will say, “It’s okay as MFA fiction goes.”

  I suppose this is just part of the price I pay for having been one of those people, the doubting kind, sure that it was all bullshit.

  I GOT MY FIRST glimpse of Iowa City when I moved to San Francisco, after graduating from college. I told the friend I was driving with to take the Iowa City exit off I-80, and we pulled into a truck stop.

  “I just want to look at it, in case I decide to go to school here,” I said. This seemed safe to say sarcastically, like saying I wanted to look at the White House because I was going to be president one day. I got out, pumped some gas into the car, looked around at the truck stop, and said to her, “It looks terrible. Let’s go.” And we laughed as we drove away.

  Even then I felt a vague premonitory knock that would haunt me: Someday you’ll eat those words. But I pushed it away. It was impossible for me to go to Iowa. I would never go, I told myself, and they would never let me in.

  At Wesleyan, the college I’d left behind, I’d studied fiction writing and the essay, and the three teachers I’d spoken to about my future offered strong opinions. Mary Robison warned of studying writing too much. “No one is doing anything like what you do,” she said. “You don’t want to mess that up by taking too many classes.” Kit Reed was dismissive: “Don’t waste your time. You just need to write, you don’t need the program. There’s nothing there you need. Just go write.”

  Only Annie Dillard made the case for an MFA. “You want to put off the real world as long as possible,” she said. “You’ll write and read and be around other serious young writers.”

  Two against one.

  The real world I moved to was San Francisco during the AIDS crisis. My activist friends from college were all moving to the Bay Area, getting apartments together, going to rallies, protests, marches, direct actions, street theater. I saw the AIDS activism and queer politics movement emerging as a response to the fight of my generation, and I joined with the seriousness of a soldier. My friends and I were people who knew AIDS could kill us all, and we were fighting against those who believed it would kill only gay people. To this day, I can’t tell you if we were trying to remind them of our humanity or their own. My time there felt more like a preview of the end of the world.

  I would stay two years.

  I MOVED TO NEW York in the summer of 1991, for the love of a man who lived there. I had a job waiting for me, courtesy of A Different Light, the LGBT bookstore I’d worked at in the Castro. They had a New York store as well, and arranged me an employee transfer. My new bosses set me to work cataloging the contents of a warehouse in Queens that had belonged to a mail-order gay and lesbian bookstore that A Different Light had acquired at auction. After the chaos of San Francisco, New York wasn’t much quieter, but this job was: it was like going to sit in a padded room every day—a room padded with books.

  If I went to San Francisco with something of the seriousness of a soldier, I left with a soldier’s bitterness. I had seen friends beaten by the police and hospitalized, or arrested and denied their AIDS medication under the pretext that they were taking illegal drugs. I had been profiled by the police, baselessly suspected of plotting against them. When one of the groups I belonged to had asked me to find out if my then boyfriend was a police plant, and this hastened the end of our relationship, though I don’t think he ever knew he was under suspicion—at least he never found out from me—I knew I wanted to leave.

  After all that, it was nice to sit alone in a quiet room every day, surrounded by books. And there were thousands of them, books I knew alongside books I’d never heard of, spilling off the shelves and out of boxes. They ranged from pulp pornography paperbacks to Vita Sackville-West first editions to the works of the Violet Quill group. My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers—Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Christa Wolf—writers who were political as well as literary. Their work was in this room, as well as that of their predecessors and teachers: Muriel Rukeyser, for example, whom I discovered in that warehouse and whose poetry I still love. I hoped, like them, to find a way to fuse my work with my belief in the possibility of a better, more radicalized world.

  Slowly I became aware that for me, a young gay writer who wanted to write, well, everything—poetry, fiction, essays—this time in the warehouse was an education I could never replicate. And that the catalog I was creating was a catalog of what kinds of gay writing had succeeded and failed—what the culture allowed and what it did not.

  For every writer like Gore Vidal, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, or Susan Sontag, there were so many others no one knew. The fame of the well-known writers seemed to me a protection against the void, and thus, worthy of study. How had they managed to survive against whatever it was that had erased so many others? Two of my literary heroes, the artist David Wojnarowicz and the filmmaker Derek Jarman, were quite publicly dying of AIDS at the time, facing another, newer kind of erasure in the process, and I feared increasingly, from the work I’d been doing, that nothing was likely to save them except posterity. It was clear their impending deaths, the result of the epidemic, were in some way welcomed, if not wanted, by the government. AIDS was not God’s punishment, but the government inaction around it certainly was the government’s punishment—a kind of de facto death squad composed of the conservatives who were, incredibly, in charge of these public health decisions instead of the medical establishment, though the medical establishment had its own problems, in the form of for-profit health care. Those exposed, those in danger of exposure, all seemed likely to die because it was too expensive to save us.

  Structural
death: a preview of the approach conservatives would take for the next thirty years.

  Back in San Francisco, a certain Beat poet used to come into the bookstore and move his books from the poetry section in the rear to the new-books table up front. After he left, we’d move them back. Sometimes I’d let them stay awhile; other times what I thought of as his pettiness angered me. But here in this warehouse, I understood him. Fame seemed like a terrible, even a stupid thing to want, but it also could protect you from vanishing forever, especially if you were a gay writer, already disadvantaged when it came to publication, much less posterity. Fame would push your book to the front table whether you were there or not.

  The question was, as always, how do you become famous?

  The best and only honorable way, to my mind, was to write things people wanted to read. I’d made some progress on that front since arriving in New York. An editor at a publishing house invited me to lunch, because he was interested in whether I had a novel, based on a travel feature I’d written for a magazine.

  I was also interested in this question of whether I had a novel, and had shown up to that lunch cocky, with my hair in a blue James Dean pompadour, wearing a ripped black T-shirt and black jeans. My tweed-jacketed new friend smiled in the dark pub as he sipped his water, and we somehow got onto the topic of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he had attended. Underneath my performance of San Francisco queer punk cockiness, I took mental notes as he told me stories about Michael Cunningham, one of the few male writers I admired. His story “White Angel,” which had appeared in The New Yorker, a part of his novel A Home at the End of the World, was the stark marker against which I measured my own ambitions. The dishy story I still treasure from this chat is how Cunningham would go running at Iowa and smoke Gauloises afterward by the track, and how this led the other students to call him “French Cigarette.”