Hidden :
Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire
-
- $25.99
-
- $25.99
Publisher Description
Hidden Richard Giannone s searingly honest, richly insightful memoir eloquently captures the author s transformation from a solitary gay academic to a dedicated caregiver as well as a sexually and spiritually committed man. Always alone, always fearful, he initially resisted the duty to look after his dying female relatives. But his mother s fall into dementia changed all that. Her vulnerability opened this middle-aged man to the love of another man, a former priest and Jersey boy like himself. Together the two men saw the old woman to her death and did the same for Giannone s sister. In Hidden Giannone uncovers how, ultimately, these experiences moved him closer to participating in the vitality he believed pulsed in the world but had always eluded him.The mothering life of this gay partnership evolved alongside the AIDS crisis and within and against Italian American culture that reflected the Catholic Church–s discountenancing of homosexual love. Giannone vividly weaves his reflections on gay life in Greenwich Village and his spiritual journey as a gay man and Catholic into his experience of caring for the women of his family.In Hidden Giannone recounts a gripping religious conversion, drawing on the wisdom of the ancient desert mothers and fathers of Egypt and Palestine. Because he was raised a Catholic, the shift is not from nothing to something. Rather, it is away from the modeling power of institutional Christianity to the tempering influence of homosexuality on the Gospel. Gay or straight, so long as we remain hidden from ourselves, the true God remains hidden from us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this memoir, Fordham University emeritus professor Giannone (Flannery O'Connor: Hermit Novelist) thoughtfully entwines his sexual and spiritual maturation as a Catholic gay man who comes to terms with death and faith over the course of four decades in New York City. His romantic partner, a Catholic ex-priest named Frank, resurrects the reclusive, sexually abstinent narrator while powering the sluggish plot line. Frank serves as a robust foil to the emotionally remote Giannone, who must tackle his fraught sexuality to confront his mother and sister's failing health. As their caretaker, the author learns from Frank to develop his maternal, spiritual nature as he faces the death that he tried to evade by sequestering himself from the AIDS virus that ravaged his community. Although his pious wisdom can disintegrate into a soup of repetitive affirmations, Giannone manages to dish up kernels of simple truth: "All things are God's. HIV and dust, too." He emphasizes otherwise indiscernible patterns of grace, thereby sieving the essence of Catholicism from the dogma to redeem the gay community's place in the Church. However, painfully bereft of scenes and concrete details, the writing tends to conceal more than it reveals.