God Doesn't Make Trash

In Publishers Weekly April 23, 2001 issue, the industry magazinespotlighted the LGBT book scene in 2001. In his article prefacing a list ofnearly 200 selected Gay and Lesbian titles, Charles Hix stated:Significantly, the number of books dealing primarily with AIDS is downcompared to 2000AIDS is now more likely to be treated as an incidentalfact, not a focus. Indeed, scanning the titles and descriptions of thebooks listed in the article, I counted only eight titles that spoke of AIDSspecifically.
There appears to be little interest anymore in the personalstories of those lost. Indeed, it takes the stature of an Edmund White toeven interest a major publisher in another collection of cenotaphs. Whatthen do we make of Barbara Rose Brookers brave little book recounting thestories of friends and acquaintances long dead from AIDS?

The books title comes from a conversation Brooker had with former MarlboroMan and later AIDS model, Christian Haren. Brooker, a struggling novelistwith two young daughters had been a reluctant but loving witness to her nextdoor neighbors early agonizing victimization and discrimination preceedinghis death from the virus and its complications.

In an effort to fulfill apromise to her friend, Brooker sets about taping interviews with AIDSpatients in a half-hearted attempt to document their stories. ChristianHaren was her first interviewee.

Galvanized by anger and illness, co-opted by the nascent AIDS responsemovement as a poster child, Haren is in a unique position to usher Brookerto the Castro and San Francisco General Hospitals earliest AIDS ward in therapidly blackening early days of the pandemic. Constantly, Haren pushes herto listen, to record, to write. Alternately cajoling and hectoring, thedying Haren manages to inspire the straight, Jewish, liberal Brooker toundertake a project which was to haunt her for the following fifteen years.

The product of that haunting, some twenty-nine chapters profiling men andwomen, gay and straight in the grips of a time and a disease, is really asmuch a portrait of middle class Americas dawning awareness of and helplesswitness to the pandemic as it is of the dyings.

The dying themselves arevibrantly recalled in Brookers tender, elegaic chronicalling, but it is theportrait of Brooker herself that is most compelling. Her journey fromsympathetic bystander to paralyzed witness to stoic promise-keeper is agenuine document of a time and a place that seems, unfortunately, to have anexpired shelf-life.

That is the pity and the promise of this fine little book. Pity that itmight easily go unread and ignored for now, but it promises to be a classicfor the times to come. I have written before that history is most intimatelyexperienced by small people in small places. We are lucky to have this smallhistory now and waiting again in a huge unknown future.

-by Jay Quinn
Lambda Book Report
July/August 2001