Gay author revisits NYC AIDS crisis

By Larry Nichols
PGN Staff Writer
© 2008 Philadelphia Gay News

“It was really a kind of time travel experience,” acclaimed gay author and novelist Andrew Holleran said after re-reading his essays some 20 years later.

Holleran was a columnist for Christopher Street Magazine, covering the arts, clubs and music scene in New York City in the 1980s. At least, he was until 1982, when the “gay cancer” (now known as AIDS) began exploding in the community. As the climate changed in the city, so did Holleran’s columns.

In 1988, a collection of Holleran’s essays about life in the gay community during the dawn of AIDS was published under the title “Ground Zero.” Now titled “Chronicle of a Plague,” Holleran’s account of that era is back on bookshelves for the first time in years, giving readers a vivid description of the fear, ambivalence and indifference that affected the community.

But times have changed.

In the book’s introduction, Holleran, 63, who now splits his time between Florida and Washington, D.C., describes his 2006 quest to find a copy of his out-of-print “Ground Zero” in a college library, where he found it mostly untouched, having only been checked out 12 times in the last 20 years.

Holleran, at the time, saw the seldom-used checkout slip in his book as a sign that the memory of those uncertain years was fading as people have become less afraid of HIV/AIDS. And he tried to consider the perspective of younger people today.

“I’m always wondering how a 26-year-old or a 32-year-old integrates the fact of HIV with his life,” he said. “Obviously people have come to form lives around it, but whether they are still living with that sense of potential infection when they have sex or have set personal limits, I don’t know.

“One of the weird things about AIDS is that there was never a moment when there was some consensus in which someone from the government came on screen and said these things are lethal, these things are safe. But everybody decided for themselves and there was a kind of consensus in the community that oral sex was not as dangerous as anal sex. But everyone had to decide for him or herself what they were going to risk. You established the equilibrium without ever being told.”

But “Ground Zero” wasn’t destined to fade away. Holleran found that other writers and editors wanted his work, along with other books of that period, to be accessible and remembered.

“It was not my idea at all,” Holleran said of reprinting “Chronicle of a Plague.” “There were two people: Dale Peck and Richard Canning. They had this idea of publishing a whole bunch of AIDS books that came out in the 1980s that they thought had not been really appreciated at the time because of the fact it was too close to what was going on and were forgotten. So they went to Don Weise, who was an editor at Carroll & Graff Publishing House. He was the last editor in New York who was publishing gay books at a regular clip. He said, ‘This is a great idea. We’ll do it.’”

After another publishing company purchased Carroll & Graff, an editor at the new house took on the project.

Holleran admitted that, before there was an interest in republishing his essays, it had been a long time since he read his writings from that era — about “as long as those people who left it on the shelf in that library.”

“But, it was always in my mind,” he said. “I had lots more essays than I was able to put in ‘Ground Zero.’ It was always on my mind that those essays were just sitting there and I would have loved to see some of them in a book. I leapt at this chance because it gave me an opportunity to reshuffle the contents. I got rid of about five or six and put in five or six new ones that meant more to me.”

Even with the new essays added, Holleran still feels the need to tinker with the collection from time to time.

“The weird thing about writing is that now that this one is published, I look at it and think, ‘Oh, God. I should have put in X, Y and Z essays,” he said. “That would have made it a different book still. But anyway, that’s that. I was grateful to have a chance to redo it.”

Holleran said reading his essays from the ’80s instantly took him back to that time in New York.

“It was so bizarre,” he said. “The most bizarre feelings were instilled by reading those essays and coming upon quotes from people that I had put in the essays. Often the quotes were not identified. But when I read the quotes, I immediately remembered who had said it and where we were at the time. That made me realize how awful and strange a time of life it was. We can be calm and detached about AIDS now in a way we could not be then because it was literally a time of panic. I kept thinking of an Edgar Allen Poe story called ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ where people were at a party and death was moving among them. A friend of mine compared it to a shark attack. Another friend compared it to living in Beirut. He said you never know when the next car bomb is going to go off. That same friend said that phoning New York was like phoning Berlin in the ’30s. It was a time of great fear and awful things happening to people at a rapid pace. Then the anti-retrovirals came in and calmed everything down. People were given hope, a chance to live longer and people were not as threatened by it.”

Holleran added that he doesn’t see his essays as the answer to any question about AIDS.

“I’m too much of a writer to say that I think the value of the book is some kind of warning,” he said. “I hope the book doesn’t scare people unreasonably. It paints a picture of a time, a place and people. Let the reader draw the conclusion he or she wants to draw from it. There’s no prescriptive message because all of them have been said already.”

Larry Nichols can be reached at larry@epgn.com.