I suppose it was inevitable that the Passing on the Pen reading at the GLBT Historical Society would turn away from questions of gay fiction and toward those of history. Both Trebor and I read from stories set in those years I think of as the AIDSies -- late eighties/early nineties, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Just saying "AIDS epidemic" positions me as someone who came of age at a time when the spread of HIV was exponential, unstoppable, and talk of "long term survival" was mostly wishful thinking. ... We are each more than simply a member of a generation, but none of us can escape being shaped by historical forces, it seems.
With my new novel, set in 1985, I'm trying to capture the imagination of a 20 year old gay man, in the New York City area, who's been sexual since he was 13. The section I read has Robin MacKenzie being dumped by his boyfriend, upon whom he had pinned all sorts of hopes for safety. His internal dialogue around his own actions is sometimes strategic, sometimes irrational, sometimes simply turned on and sexual, and then sometimes full of shame. "Safe sex" is a new idea. "Testing" isn't to be trusted. His boyfriend is freaked out because of Robin's sexual history. The idea that he's going to die because of the sex he's had has lodged itself in Robin's mind.
Trebor read a piece really strong on voice about a guy -- angry, sardonic, poetic -- who watches his love, Jimmy, die from AIDS, while his own psychiatrist tries to prescribe his grief away.
The conversation afterwards seemed to be circling around a question of what the 80s mean now. "Now" being a moment when there's a whole generation of twentysomethings coming of age, whose relationship to AIDS is completely different. "Mean" as in how do writers make sense of what happened back then, and how do readers relate to it?
How do writers make narrative from their own pasts, especially when the character isn't the author -- I mean, you're drawing on experience but you're creating a fictive persona with a different "story" than your own, and his thoughts, feelings, motivation have to be believable as his own. ... And then, beyond that writerly question, what's the potential value today of writing about what happened back then? Is my audience simply made up of my peers, or will younger readers, with a totally different relationship to sex/AIDS/gay-queer identity, find something to identify with in a protagonist born 20 years earlier?
In the audience that night was Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, who blogged about the conversation. Thanks, Mattilda.
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