Paul Monette’s memoir of his partner Roger Horwitz’s final two years is partly an elegy to his lover, partly a record of the fight against AIDS in mid-1980s California, and partly an angry account about prejudice and fear. This was a critical time – knowledge of HIV/AIDS was rudimentary; treatments for AIDS were in an early stage; HIV/AIDS was a scary diagnosis, and gay men were encountering considerable stigma. People with HIV were now attacked by opportunistic infections such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) that were diagnostic for the final stage of AIDS. Doctors and researchers were experimenting with new treatments, such as Pentamidine for the PCP – treatments that often had awful side-effects but with unknown effectiveness. In California the knowledge and awareness of AIDS lagged behind those in the New York gay community, and Monette’s memoir is an important witness of how knowledge travelled through these communities. As the virus spread, knowledge and myths alike followed behind. Paul and Roger had moved out west from Boston, and retained many links with the East Coast, both with family and with gay friends. Thus it was that Paul learnt of the first really effective drug treatment for AIDS, successfully campaigning for Roger to receive AZT before many of the west coast doctors were aware of its existence.
While networks of knowledge are important in this memoir, so are the networks that inhibit knowledge. At this period there were very good reasons to keep an HIV-positive diagnosis secret. Fear of losing a job is still today an important driver to secrecy among people with a long-term condition. But fear of AIDS in the 1980s was extreme. And if fear within the health services was high, it was far higher in other social networks related to work and position. Roger’s older brother Sheldon, who is also gay and also living in LA, takes charge when the PCP diagnosis is made and when Paul and Sheldon realise that Roger has AIDS. Sheldon feels that secrecy is vital, and bans any sharing of the news among all but a very small trusted circle of friends. A later episode shows that Roger’s legal practice would indeed have suffered if his diagnosis had become publicly known. But Paul and Roger find it very difficult not being able to inform friends not in their most intimate circle. Roger finds time with his visiting parents almost unbearable because he is hiding the truth from them. Paul Monette wonders what the effect would have been if they had been honest with those around them, and wonders why they went along with Sheldon’s lead. This is how people react at moments of extreme crisis, when there is fear of the unknown – turning to others to take decisions for them.
The relationships with Roger’s New England parents evolve during the book. Both Paul and Roger had to keep their homosexuality secret when they were young. Fear of judgement seems to be strong. But as the illness progresses Roger’s parents have to be told. And the fears are unfounded. Although struggling with his own grief, Roger’s father Al repeatedly shows his respect and love for his son’s partner, acknowledging Paul’s efforts and care. This echoes some of the parental responses to sons dying of AIDS in Abraham Verghese’s memoir of contemporary rural Tennessee. Families show bewilderment at the affliction that has arrived, but also a willingness to look after their own, and to acknowledge loving partners. (That said, Verghese also describes other families where the relationships are much more fractured, and where homosexuality is a cause for family division.)
Monette’s memoir is painful and vivid. It graphically records the anxiety and tension within the gay community in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and the added stress caused by stigma and secrecy. While the politics of AIDS and gay-rights are referred to throughout, this remains a personal memoir of Paul’s friend and lover, with tender reminiscences of dressing Roger’s skin lesions, and of Paul’s anguished phone-calls to doctors. Tears are never far away.
Monette, Paul (1988, 1996) Borrowed Time: An AIDs memoir, London, Abacus