Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS, edited by Edmund White. University of Wisconsin Press, 305 pages, $29.95.
In the aftermath of the terse 1981 announcement by the Centers for DiseaseControl (CDC) that a strange new disease was killing homosexuals, gay menmastered the art of throwing a funeral. This was not something for which we wereprepared or trained--no Martha Stewart or Miss Manners to offer helpfulhints--but, of course, no one was prepared for AIDS. Like the citizens of Oran,about whose plight Albert Camus writes feelingly in The Plague, we were devastated by the kind of wild contagion that, not long before, scientists had confidently pronounced to be a thing of the past.
Gay men and their allies had to learn a great many things, and quicklytoo--how to administer IV drips and change soiled bedsheets, how to organize fordecent health care and mobilize friends for around-the-clock attendance upon thesick among us. So, too, with funerals. With so many young men dying (sometimes adeath a week, for those of us who lived at the epicenters of the epidemic), weneeded to devise a fitting way to say our good-byes. Because those who perishfrom AIDS are dying out of their season--at 30 or 40 years old, most of them, notthe four score years they might once have imagined for themselves--their funeralsinvariably carry the lament of might-have-beens. But amid the necessary tears,there is, as well, a bracing dash of irreverence in the words of friends andlovers whose excruciating sense of loss does not blind their gaze.
That kind of clarity suffuses the best of the essays-cum-eulogies that Edmund White has gathered in Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS. White is a highly regarded gay author, whose writings include memoirs--A Boy'sOwn Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty--and, most recently, an autobiographical novel, The Married Man. While this collection is no Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's homage to Harold Bloom, some of the pieces are wonderfully entertaining--funny, sharp, pungent. All of them provide a glimpse into the looking-glass world of then and now, a might-have-been and a how-it-was during what, for gay America, has been the age of AIDS.
The period of gay liberation was extremely brief--barely a decade separatesthe Stonewall riots from that CDC statement--but for homosexuals it irrevocablychanged the world. "Come out!" was the rallying cry, and many did just that. Forsome of the artists celebrated in Loss within Loss, like the architect Frank Israel and the landscape architect Bruce Kelly, there is no direct connection between their sexuality and their art: There's no gay monopoly on edgy postmodern houses and Olmstead-inspired landscapes. Yet for many, sexuality became their chief, if not their only, subject. They turned their lives inside out, making them into the stuff of art. Some, like James Merrill, already ensconced in the pantheon of great American poets, began gradually to acknowledge the fact that they were gay. Impatient with such hesitancy, a younger generation coming of age at a time when the closet door had been burst open seized the moment as an opportunity for experimentation. What the sixties had been for straight America, the seventies were for gay America. And what resulted was sometimes good, sometimes self-indulgent; it was only a beginning.
The advent of AIDS raised the stakes--how suddenly the playground became thecharnel house!--and AIDS, inevitably, made its way into art. Being marked becamefor some people the means to making their mark artistically. Sometimes, as in the polemics of David Wojnarowicz--hustler, performance artist, andmemoirist--AIDS is the text. "My rage," he writes in Postcards from America:X-rays from Hell, the capitalized words a printed rendering of a howl, "is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I'D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN'T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I'D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL." On occasion, as in Paul Monette's overpraised memoir Borrowed Time, AIDS is the instrument for whiny self-indulgence; no one else, the writer insists, has ever suffered as I have. Always, AIDS is lurking in the background, the sentence of death against which these artists feverishly work, pushing to make themselves admired or notorious, to squeeze out their best work, the composition or the painting or the puppet show, before they die.
For every Mozart, a genius from birth, there is a Verdi, still writing operaswhen he's 80. Of course, most artists are neither Mozarts nor Verdis: Their worksimply doesn't measure up. Who can tell into which category these gay artistsbelong? Many of the essays point to the frenzy of renown. There is Paul Monette,hoping for acknowledgment by Hollywood's glitterati, and the filmmaker DerekJarman, making use of his political activism to give his work the edge that'snecessary if it's to be noticed. The contributions also reiterate the familiarartistic aspiration to be immortal--or at least to be remembered after deathwith, characteristically, an obituary in The New York Times.
Among the artists memorialized in Loss within Loss, only Merrill is an indisputably major talent. (Curiously, two of the most noteworthy artists to have died from AIDS, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring, go unremembered here.) Some others--Monette, Israel, Jarman--did memorable work, but most of the rest seem destined to be forgotten, except by their friends. Yet such a rough summing-up cannot begin to measure the meaning of these deaths, these incomplete lives. Who knows what might have been--who peaked early and who would have bloomed late? (Who knows, for that matter, about those who died before they could begin to make art?)
There are no rules for such eulogies, no conventions to be followed. Is it theart that's the proper subject, or the relationship, or the phenomenon of thedisease? What needs to be said in the name of a hunger for knowing, and what, inthe name of privacy, should be left unsaid?
The straight men who contribute to Loss within Loss have to decide what to make of the sexual divide between themselves and their subjects. In novelist John Berendt's account of landscape architect Bruce Kelly, it's Kelly's work that occupies center stage. There's barely any mention of his life--odd, given that Berendt describes himself as an intimate friend--and nothing at all about his sexuality. To be gay and an artist, Berendt may be implying, is not always to be a gay artist--or perhaps Kelly's sexuality was simply unknown territory to Berendt. Sex does figure centrally in writer Philip Lopate's essay on experimental filmmaker Warren Sonbert, but in ways that only confirm the stereotypes about heterosexual obtuseness. Sexual orientation wasn't initially an issue between them, Lopate says, since "Warren never spoke, acted, or gestured effeminately"--as if limp wrists defined the psychological terrain. While Lopate gestures to his blind spots, referring at one point to "the potential queer within me," he can't stop himself from generalizing. "The novelist in me was ever on the lookout to interpret individual behavior as an extension of tribal or sociological patterns... . I began to interpret his velvety, throaty vocal tone ... as a possible ågay reflex,' the result of gay men choking back a good deal of rage in their determination to be nice." Better that this would-be anthropologist stick to his day job.
When the tale-tellers are onetime lovers, sex is inescapably part of the narrative, and the many varieties of gay sexuality, from whips and chains topicket fences, are prominently on display here. But the sex talk, too, isproblematic. Is it essential to truth telling, or a posthumous way to even thescore--or simply highbrow pornography that titillates without informing? Forseveral of these artists, the answer is clear: The blunt display of gay sexualityis at the core of their art. What David Wojnarowicz, or painter Peter Kelloran,or playwright John Russell do in the bedroom is manifested in their creations."The timid be damned," novelist Randall Kenan writes about Russell. "He wasqueer; his plays would be queer. He was a child of the porno generation; hisplays would be the epitome of the postmodern theater." Playwright Craig Lucas,crafting an elegy for an entire generation, is blunter: It's all aboutfucking--fucking and dying. "Shall I give you all the names? Let's just sayeverybody. Through with possibility. Spent." The best of the essays bring to lifethe artist, warts and all, and the sexually charged relationship between writerand subject. I'd never heard of composer Chris DeBlasio, but William Berger'stough and tender portrait makes me wish I'd known this "possessed" man.
Those of us who have done funeral duty know that AIDS can bring outdeeper--perhaps truer--selves in that time before dying. Why, poet J.D. McClatchyponders in his incisive essay, does Paul Monette decide to die in public, to turnhis death into the subject of a documentary film: Is it an act of selflessness,or the ultimate in narcissism, to record such intimacy? At the other end of thespectrum of self-disclosure, James Merrill refuses to acknowledge that he's dyingof AIDS, and tacitly enlists others, including McClatchy, the executor of hisestate, in maintaining the fiction. Not until McClatchy's essay "outs" him is thetruth revealed. Was Merrill intent on secrecy, McClatchy wonders, because "hismother, the emotional center of his family, would have to be shielded" from theknowledge, or to "protect his lover from possible professional handicaps (he wasan actor)"? Was Merrill protecting himself from "be[ing] put on display, to beshown and thereby be made åmonstrous' ... or was it merely hisåimage' he wanted obscurely to protect"?
There is, of course, no certain answer to such questions, just as there is no wayof divining the contours of the cultural landscape in a society that never knewan age of AIDS. We're certainly poorer for the early deaths of these men who wereamong the best and most brazen and brightest--not Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke,maybe, but close enough.
Merrill's "Tony: Ending the Life" can stand as an epitaph for a generation.
"Just see," the mirror breathed, "see who's alive,
Who hasn't forfeited the common touch
The longing to lead everybody's life"
--Lifelong daydream of precisely those
Whom privilege or talent set apart;
How to atone for the achieved uniqueness?
By dying everybody's death, dear heart... .
"Dear heart," indeed: A phrase at once fey and saccharine, knowing and immenselymoving, a mixture that's much like the best of the art these dead young men leftbehind.
