Essential AIDS Fiction BY ERNIE MCLEOD Fiction requires perspective. Perhaps this is why so many novels return to childhood and ado- lescence, and why the coming-out story formed the prototypical gay novel. When AIDS hit in the early ‘80s, gay artists were suddenly confronted by that which could not be understood. For how can a plague be compre- hended from its midst? It would be like attempting to grasp a hurricane’s path of destruction from the eye of the storm, the devastation of war from the battlefield. Gay writers—many on the front lines of the battlefield——were faced with a dilemma: the only thing more impossible than responding to the AIDS crisis was not responding to it. In many ways, journalism and nonfiction are better suited to describing events that seem horrific beyond imagination, particular- ly when (despite reports to the contrary) there is no end in sight to the horror. Much of the most powerful AIDS writing has been non- fiction—whether investigative reporting like Randy Shilts’ 1987 And the Band Played On, or intimate memoirs such as Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time and Mark Doty’s Heavens Coast. Nonfiction does not necessarily demand distance or resolution. It can say “Look, I am a witness. This is how it is.” The expectations for fiction, on the other hand, are that it will transport you to a height- ened world where life truths are revealed pre- cisely because they needn’t conform to the limitations of reality. Fiction that merely tries to duplicate reality seems, oddly enough, unconvincing. Sadly, many early AIDS sto- ries and novels, while important testaments to the astonishing will to create amid even the most dire circumstances, won’t stand the test of time because, ultimately, disease and death are predictable. Fiction must surprise, or even the most heart-rending subject matter becomes cliche. "I Here are five fictions from the battlefield that surprised me, works that should remain 'l‘l'CJ‘NALl3ESTSELL Martin and John a u iwol Dale Peck "Axtouialiiug....lf lliix l‘xenx:‘xy wrllttii nmel olfz.-is an Indzlibll-' P°““’-l‘ “:9? M‘ d‘“'5“K 9”’ plague ulso apem out to become a unixeisal story almt love ml luau met that redemptive poweisof Fusion.‘ —-:‘{'¢vIr 70'‘ 77"!" essential reading long after the war is over: The Body and Its Dangers (St. Martin’s Press, 1990) was Allen Barnett’s first and only published book. As it did with far too many artists, AIDS ended_ his career just as it _was beginning. Fortunately, he left behind the six beautiful stories in this collection, most of which chronicle the effect of AIDS on relationships among lovers, for- mer lovers, and longtime friends. Barnett poignantly reveals the enormity of the disease by illuminating small, sometimes trivial moments in lives under siege. The collection’s centerpiece, =‘ I‘ D (is l 0 re *3 ti till (I) I.‘ g. f . “The ‘Times’ As It Knows Us,” mines familiar, even stereotypical territory—a group of gay men dishing in the Pines—yet remains one of the most moving, nuanc-ed pieces of literature I’ve ever read. The fragmented structure of Dale Peck’s first novel, Martin and John (HarperPerennial, 1993), is at first confusing. Characters named Martin and John mutate from one chapter to the next. Sometimes Martin is dying, sometimes he’s well; at one point Martin is John’s stepfather, at anoth- er he"s .Iohn’s wealthy older lover, at yet another he’s a teen-aged boy. What unifies the work are its recurring themes—a parent’s death, sexual abuse, the relationship between violence and sexuality, AIDS—and Peck’s consistently fresh, fearless voice. At the book’s conclusion, a grief-numbed narrator/author eloquently describes our struggle to articulate the unimaginably real: “Sometimes Sarah 50 111122312 November 2000 | Out in the.Mountain.s I23 em&e A ND lDAN3% its ANl;_) C)'".l"l--IER STORIES ALLEN BARNETT.‘ you have to start over. The stories you make up for yourself don’t seem to have any relevance to the life you lead; the hor- rors you imagined pale beside the ones you experience, and in your mind there’s a bat- tle as it tries to find something to grab on to,iwhether it’s a memory of something that happened or a memory of something you imagined, a story you told yourself.” 1 Wearing activism on your sleeve can be deadly to fiction writing. Too easily, the propaganda line is crossed and the charac- ters become cardboard mouthpieces for the previously converted. If Sarah Schulman weren’t such an unflinching writer, she might walk the line less suc- cessfully than she does in her 1995 novel Rat Bohemia (Plume). Reading her work, activist trenches for the past two decades. : But her characters come alive, and she’s one of the few writers to put gay men and lesbians together on the page, warts and all. It takes brutal compassion to write this honestly: “One thing I know for sure is that AIDS is not a transforming experi- ence.... We expect that once people stare down their mortality in the mirror they will understand something profound about death and life that the rest of us haveto wait until old age to discover. But that’s not what happens. Actually, people just become themselves.” Irish writer Colm Téibin’s most recent AIDS- themed novel, The Blackwater Lightship, is cur- rently receiving a lot of mainstream attention. His previous novel, The Story of the Night (Henry Holt, 1996), was set against a backdrop of politi- cal tensions in Argentina, and was his first to fea- ture gay protagonists. T6ibin’s characters, unlike those in Rat Bohemia, reside far from the epicen- ter of queer life and of the epidemic; for them, the personal is not political, at least not by choice. I found The Story of the Night deeply romantic (‘and erotic) in part because Toibin’s characters are so completely isolated from American notions of identity. His style is unadorned to the point of >24 §you’ve little doubt she’s been in the l ,1 ..