10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE December 7, 2001
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A rundown of some the best gay writing on AIDS
by Earl Pike
Winter's coming, it's time to get out the extra blankets and stock up on some good books. In honor of World AIDS Day just past. here is a list of some of the best AIDS literature, written from a GLBT perspective. since the beginning of the epidemic.
Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart, an early theatrical response to AIDS, is shrill. pedantic, powerful, and elegant all at the same time. It is the first real literary cry against the coming storm of the epidemic.
SANDRO 159£6.*** ***** VIRDIE
Randy Shilts And the Band Played On. while
MARK MERLIS not fiction. comes
close to Truman Capote's idea of the "non-fiction novel": it reads like the most gripping and apocaAN ARROW'S lyptic medical mysFLIGHT
name
tery of our times.
Mark Merlis An Arrow's Flight is a brilliant re-telling of Greek myth. in
which AIDS--though never identified by figures prominently as both an emblem of loss and wandering, and of salvation and "homecoming." Merlis is an extraordinary writer: in lesser hands, this book would have been silly: Achilles son Pyrrhus is recast as a gay go-go dancer in a wildly clever reinterpretation of Homer and Sophocles. But it works: it's profoundly moving, and at times downright magical.
David Feinberg`s Eighty-Sixed is a bitterly hilarious novel of the "boundary-less years just before the epidemic in gay New York, and of the years immediately afterwards, when attendance at funerals, for many, became the dominant social outing.
In Lev Raphael's Dancing on Tisha B'Av. a volume of short fiction, at least half the stories focus directly or covertly on AIDS. As one of the leading gay Jewish writers in America. Raphael, like Larry Kramer, sees intimate con-. nections between AIDS and the Holocaust. and maintains a particular interest in the politics of "passing" as gay or Jewish in the face of oppression.
Tom Gunn is one of America's finest poets working in traditional forms, and his "The Man with Night Sweats" is one of the best poetic responses to AIDS, in large part because Gunn deftly avoids both sentimentality and diatribes, and instead reveals the poignant moments and images at the heart of the crisis. Carolyn Ferrel's Don't Erase Me is a harrowing novel about the multiple intersections of poverty, violence, racism, homophobia. addiction, mental illness, and AIDS. Most of the characters are young people: none of them are Ryan White which makes it truer to the reality of post-millennial AIDS than a lot of mass media representations.
Rabih Alameddine`s Koolaids: The Art of War comes closer to a literary representation of HIV itself than anything else I've read. The text mutates, expands. hides, multiplies, constantly forms and reforms. Alameddine, a gay Lebanese visual artist, brought multiple sensibilities to Koolaids: the sense of lost homelands and identities; the feeling of relentless.
LOOK!!!
·
ongoing warfare: the struggle to locate spiritual meanings while living in post-apocalyptic wastelands. A fair number of people haven't liked this book. I adored it.
Tony Kushner's Angels in America comes close to perfect. mythic theater-even Harold Bloom, the leading curmudgeon of English literature over the last three decades, lists it as one of the essential works in the Western
canon.
Chu Tien Wen's Notes of a Desolate Man is a maddening Chinese novel about gay invisibility and resistance in the shadow of the plague: maddening because it is, on some level, a post-modernist mess of contradictory ideas and narratives, but nevertheless, essential because it presents perspectives on gay identity and AIDS that lie outside the New York City, gay white male universe. Notes won the China Times Novel Prize when first published in Taiwan in 1994.
David Wojnarowicz was a chaotic, reckless. confrontational and visionary gay artist who died of AIDS at the age of 37. In the Shadow of the American Dream, a collection of his diary entries, offers rare glimpses into the soul of an artist consumed by, and fighting back against. his disease.
Andrew Halloran's The Beauty of Men is an evocative look at loss and exile in the age of AIDS. and about what it means to have "survived" when so many have died.
Anything by Paul Monette is worth reading. but most especially Borrowed Time, Afterlife, and Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog.
BORROWED TIME
Monette's work is always lyrical and unflinchingly courageous.
Although E. Lynn Harris and James
WVAIDS MEMOIR Earl Hardy don't deal
directly with AIDS very often-The Day Eazy-E Died is an exception-AIDS is. since they both write about African American gay/bisexual life, always part of the narrative backdrop.
PAUL MONETTE
Finally, all three of Michael Cunningham's novels A Home at the End of the World. Flesh and Blood, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours address gay identity and AIDS. and all are astonishing and luminous. The Hours contains moments of nearly flawless literary craft, and may well be the best novel ever written. directly or indirectly, about AIDS.
There are, of course, other works addressing AIDS from non-gay perspectives; memoirs, novels, and even children's books abound. One of the best is Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, a novel about an African American woman's struggle to maintain balance and hope while living with HIV. But the most powerful literary responses to AIDS have comenot surprisingly-from gay men, and with people like Merlis, Alameddine, and Cunningham still writing, the literature of AIDS. and gay literature, are likely to overlap. to a significant degree, for some time yet to come.
Earl Pike is the executive director of the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.
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