Coming Out / 2019

Last Friday was the "official" National Coming Out Day. Sunday's Post had a thoughtful piece by Richard Morgan. (He had a fairly terrifying Father's Day memoir there a few years ago.) Amazon offers a 63-page "Kindle Single" Born in Bedlam and new fans, which I guess I'm becoming, can check out his homepage Charm and Rigor (anagram lovers may enjoy a thoughtful pause first).

Memoirs of a Queer Revolutionary

I am embarrassed to admit that until recently, I had never heard of Louis Sullivan, who died in 1991 at the age of 39 from complications related to HIV/AIDS. But his Wikipedia page hails him "as perhaps the first transgender man to publicly identify as gay," and says he is "largely responsible for the modern understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity as distinct, unrelated concepts."

Mr. Sullivan also kept comprehensive diaries beginning at the age of 11, and Nightboat Books has now published selections from 24 of them as We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991. If the fascinating excerpt in the Oct. 2 Paris Review is at all representative of his voice, I look forward to reading the book.

Is "Such Times" one of the great AIDS novels?

While preparing to lead last night's lively discussion of Christopher Coe's 1993 novel, Such Times, I first looked online for biographical background. I found remarkably few references to the author or his two novels, which should not have surprised me given the fact that his Wikipedia page is a stub.

Fortunately, Coe's New York Times obituary is a bit more informative. Note that he died 25 years ago last month, just before the paperback edition of Such Times appeared.

Next, I sought reviews and commentaries, but found few even though it appears the book has remained in print the whole period. Most of the critiques I did find were laudatory, but few went into much depth beyond calling it one of the great AIDS novels. Just how great is a question few of the writers attempted to answer, but I would certainly put Such Times at or near the top of the heap.

One happy exception to the scant discussion of the genre is "New York Stories," a 2014 essay by Jameson Currier in Chelsea Station that not only discusses Coe, but lists about a dozen other books centered on HIV/AIDS. (N.B. In my original version of this posting, I lazily used the term "AIDS novel," but only about half the titles are fiction.)

Caveat lector: Conveniently, several of the novels on the list happen to be by Mr. Currier himself.

We've already read several of them, but here are a few that strike me as candidates for our future reading lists:

Eighty-Sixed by David B. Feinberg (1986)

Ground Zero by Andrew Holleran (1988; reissued and updated in 2008 as Chronicle of a Plague Revisited)

The Body and Its Dangers by Allen Barnett (1991)

Hard by Wayne Hoffman (2006)