This book was recommended by someone on Facebook, so it wasn’t the most trustworthy of recommends. Generally I find the books I want to read by browsing in a bookstore, reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and then recommendations from people I’m actually talking to or listening to.
And then it turned out to be a memoir, a genre which is very popular right now but one I don’t like too much. Generally speaking, memoirs often blow up the writers trials and tribulations into much more than they are.
This one is about the death of the guy’s lover in the early 90s due to AIDS. And because I don’t read back covers, covers, flaps, jackets, or forwards, there began to develop a strong tension as I was reading whether or not the writer, Tim, was going to die also, or if he made it to the point where he could start taking combo therapies and survive. In fact, there were times I thought that maybe the narrator was dead, like in Sunset Boulevard where the voice over tells you, as you’re looking at a floating body in a pool, “That’s me.”
But it turns out he does not die in the book. And then I read the forward, afterward, which said that he had written this memoir in a frenzy, got it published in 1993 and died shortly of AIDS shortly after. So the book is basically the story of their relationship. And that’s why I hate memoirs.
But in some sense I am pleased to be able to add to my “taken too soon,” list of artists and writers and poets who simply didn’t have enough life span to become the writers they were meant to be. An artist needs time, above all, and privacy, and continual work. In some sense, I am taking my much longer life for granted, and have to stop that, and resume my writing. It’s basically what I planned my whole life for, and just because I never really achieved anything of much significance, I have to stop the self pity party.
So far, in addition to this, which was a mediocre book for me, other artists gone too soon are Donald Britton and Larry Stanton (and ironically, Larry painted numerous portraits of Donald Britton, as well as many other young gay artists who all perished too young.) They all might have achieved great things, but AIDS took them.
Someone who was writing about the joys of The Mineshaft, the notorious bar/sex club, said that it embodied the freedom between Stonewall and the condom. I think that’s a very simplified and probably stupid way of looking at it. Other STDs were off the chart in those days — and there was a pandemic of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia that nobody cared about because you’d just take some penicillin and go out and do some more. And according to the latest science, HIV and Hepatitis C spread almost at the same time, peaking in around 1977/1978. It spread for years before the first cases started showing up. Somehow I only got Hepatitis C which is now cured. But the 2 are almost always seen together. And the fact that Prep is the penicillin, these STDs are rising once again, and HIV is spreading also, because not everyone takes the precautions they should.
Anyway, the book was heartfelt, but really didn’t have much of a punch.