November 29, 2002 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

27

eveningsout

Six recent AIDS memoirs have a wide range

by Earl Pike

"We have put something of ourselves everywhere; everything is fertile, everything is dangerous...

""

Marcel Proust

The broad, collective narrative of AIDS has birthed any number of individual narratives: memoirs, first-person accounts, personal testimonies, reflective poetry, autobiographical drama. It is impossible to underestimate the ongoing importance of those stories in the life of the epidemic. They have served to inform, sympathize, comfort, mobilize, indict. AIDS is about nothing if it is not about the lives within it.

Literary memoir can be a perilous pastime. It requires a commitment to honesty and narrative integrity. It's all too tempting for us to cast ourselves in the heroic leading role in the story of our lives, and in most milieus, there's nothing wrong with that. There is a place for "I've been challenged but now I'm victorious" stories, even when lessthan-perfectly written. They help inspire, offer hope.

But memoir that survives must meet stricter criteria. A "fearless and searching personal inventory" (to use A.A. jargon) invariably unearths both the delightful and despicable, and all of it belongs on the written page.

Six recent memoirs about AIDS reflect the range of uses of personal narratives. Coincidentally, they also vary widely in literary quality. Between those two qualities— intended use and literary quality—lies the shakiness in criticizing any memoir: Are you reviewing the life, or the telling of the life? Since people will read AIDS memoirs for any number of reasons, both factors need to be taken into account.

Two that don't work well on either leveluse or quality—are Lance Lerner's A Handful of Empty But a Heart Full of Love (Squire Publishers, 2000) and Ann Baker's Walk Like a Man (Writer's Club Press, 2002).

Baker's book is a mother's story of her son Clay, and her embrace of him as gay and a person with AIDS. Like many AIDS stories, it focuses largely on Clay's dying and death, instead of his life. The writing is adequate at best, and one finishes the last page without really knowing much more about Clay than at the beginning.

What redeems the book is Baker's plucky attitude. Her family is dysfunctional in a way that most American families are dysfunctional, and therefore more real. She sings the praises of ACT UP, and she includes a few angry letters she wrote to the local media while her son was sick.

Lerner's book, however, is a muddled mess. There's no real narrative thread, and

there are endless, breathless exclamation points: "Good news! Wonderful family friend coming from Canada for a week! That will boost everyone's morale!"

Some of the story is told by Lance, through letters and excerpts from a journal. The rest is told by his mother as editorial comments on her son's final days. At its core is a familiar theme: Gay man finds out he has HIV, comes out to his mother and finds love and acceptance. But the book is nearly unreadable.

While Baker's and Lerner's books may resonate with some, such as church-going mothers of gay sons who have HIV, very few others will want to read them.

A far better book for the same audience is Fritz and Etta Mae Mutti's Dancing in a Wheelchair: One Family Faces HIV/AIDS (Abingdon Press, 2001). A traditional couple in many ways-high school sweethearts who married young; Fritz is a United Methodist bishop the Muttis had three sons. Two came out as gay, and within a short period of time, as HIV-positive.

Their story is told in alternating voices. We hear from Etta Mae, then Fritz, back and forth. There is an authentic tenderness in this memoir. As parents, the Muttis become true advocates for their sons, openly calling for reforms in the Christian church and standing by their sons through the ups and downs of their illnesses.

Marcie Hershman's Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures (Beacon Press, 2001) presents a sister's voice. Hershman, author of the novels Tales of the Master Race and Safe in America, knows how to write with a lyrical, restrained touch, and these ten meditations about the loss of her brother Rob to AIDS are filled with elegant sorrow and the poetic evidence of a sibling's love.

Speak to Me is bookended by truly haunting imagery. At the beginning, Hershman recalls the recordings we put on Voyagers 1 and 2 before we flung them off to the far ends of the galaxy in 1977. On the golden disks are voices in 60 different languages. saying "Hello." At the end the book, she returns to that image, noting that the Voyager greetings are still circling around the universe, the voices of the living and the dead, and we still hear them. It's a lovely meditation on the way we keep alive the voices of those no longer with us.

Despite its deficits, Patricia and Hydeia Broadbent's You Get Past the Tears: A Memoir of Love and Survival (Villard Press, 2002) is significant because it casts light on a phenomenon that no one, in the mid-1980s, anticipated. There are a growing number of people born with HIV infection who are now 18, 19 and 20 years old. They have never known any other reality than living with HIV and AIDS.

Hydeia Broadbent is one of those kids. Adopted in 1984 shortly after her birth, she is now 19 and an internationally known AIDS educator and activist. As an educator, she is wonderful. But You Get Past the Tears has serious faults, not the least of which is the almost total invisibility of gay and bisexual men in representations of the epidemic. Most people with HIV or AIDS cannot talk about the support and friendship they've experienced from Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, and dozens of other celebrities. For the vast majority, there is no glamor in HIV whatsoever.

Finally, Paul Reed's The Redwood Diary (Xlibris, 2001) is a refreshingly honest, though sometimes uneven journal of a quiet year of reflection spent in the redwood forests of northern California. Reed, better

known as the author of the novels Facing It and Longing, is a good writer. He speaks with clarity and nerve about loss, illness, mortality, friendship and love, without becoming maudlin or centering himself as the hero in his own narrative.

Interestingly enough-and perhaps disturbingly so-his is the only book of these six written by a person with HIV or AIDS.

There is still nothing that quite matches the beauty of Paul Monette's Borrowed Time, but there are still a million stories waiting to be told. These are but a few; you decide. Better yet, if none of these are good enough— if your life is not among them-write your

own.

Earl Pike is the executive director of the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.

OUTSTANDING

Come and See the Newly Redesigned 2003 4Runner... It's ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS!

or

New & Used

Seer Jim Greenfield Sales & Leasing Call

Experience the Metro difference!

METRO TOYOTA

W. 137th & Brookpark Road OFF 1-480

32 Years of Sales & Service Excellence!

216-267-7000

Body Language's Very Special Holiday Gifts

Personalized Autographed Gay Classics!

Looking for a special gift for someone special? We have a deal with some of today's best gay authors you order their books from us, and they will personalize and autograph a copy of their book just for you in time for the holidays. These books will certainly be treasured by whoever receives them.

Call us at 216-251-3330 or toll free 888-GAY-7733 to order.

Choose from: David Thomas Lord's "Bound in Blood" $14

Ben Tyler's "Tricks of the Trade" $14

Patricia Nell Warren's "The Front Runner" $14.95 or THE WILD MAN"

$19.95

Dykes Towatch Out For by Alison Bechdel

TOP

IT'S

10

Analyses of the

Republican Rout

@2002 BY ALISON BECHDEL

404

PLUS IT COULD HURT BUSH BECAUSE NOW HE'S GOT NO ONE ELSE TO BLAME.

THE (NOUN OR NOUN PHRASE), STUPID.

BUT THE WAR CARD WOULDN'T HAVE WORKED, IF THERE HADN'T BEEN A TOTAL NEWS BLACKOUT ON ALL THE ANTIWAR PROTESTS.

1. WAR 2. MEDIA WELL, THEY PLAYED THE WAR CARD, AND IT WORKED. AND AS IF THINGS WEREN'T BAD ENOUGH, NOW WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THE NAME" SAXBY CHAMBLISS FOR THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE.

...TO HELP MAINTAIN REGULARITY. METAMUCIL.COM. THIS IS NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.

6. (&7.) NEW DEMOCRATS

KNOCK KNOCK!

WHAT'RE YOU DOING WITH MY FACE IT THIS SUCKS! AND THANKS YOGA MAT?TO THE LILY-LIVERED LITE-G.O.P LOSERS WHO'VE BEEN POSING AS DEMOCRATS, IT'S GONNA KEEP SUCKING FOR YEARS, IF NOT TILL. THE END OF THE WORLD.

MOM! KNOCK KNOCK!

WHO'S THERE?

8. END OF THE WORLD "THE FACT THAT TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT ITS OPEN CRIMINALITY NOTWITHSTANDING, RESTS ON MASS SUPPORT IS VERY DISQUIETING

3. PLUTOCRACY

BUT THEN, WHAT DO I EXPECT? WE HAVE CORPORATE MEDIA, WE GET CORPORATE GOVERNMENT.

SAXBY

CHAMBLISS!

9. INHERENT FLAWS OF THE TWOPARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM

IT'S NOT "MASS SUPPORT," OKAY? IT'S A RAZOR-THIN MARGIN. WHAT I WANNA KNOW IS, WHOSE BRIGHT IDEA WAS THIS VOTING BUSINESS?

4. RELENTLESS CAMPAIGNING BY THE PRESIDENT.

SAXBY CHAMBLISS! SAXBY CHAMBLISS SAXBYCHAMBLISS SAXBY CHAMBLISS!

5. BEST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU LOOK AT THE REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LONG TERM. OR AT LEAST A MORE PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

EVENTUALLY, THIS WILL TRANSLATE INTO MORE SUPPORT FOR THE GREENS.

IF THE FOUNDING FATHERS COULD'VE SEEN THE FUTURE OF WINNER-TAKEALL ELECTIONS, THEY'D HAVE TORCHED THE CONSTITUTION AND CAUGHT THE FIRST FRIGATE TO PICCADILLY CIRCUS.

10. MEDIA AGAIN

AT LEAST THEN WE'D BE WATCHING

THE BBC.

I THOUGHT IT MIGHT HELP WITH YOUR CONTORTIONS:

www.DykesToWatchOutFor.net

THE

ORIGINS

TOTALI

TARIAN AL

ISM

"ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHTS OF CNN'S TWO DECADES ON THE AIR HAS TO BE OUR AWARD WINNING COVERAGE OF THE GULF WAR...

4964

VERBATIM CNN

"REPORT"

福康

NOW HBO, WHICH IS OWNED BY OUR PARENT COMPANY AOL-TIME WARNER, HAS MADE A NEW MOVIE ABOUT THE STORY BEHIND OUR COVERAGE. ACTOR MICHAEL KEATON IS HERE TO TALK WITH US.,