I heard myself say, to my immense surprise, “I’m moving to L.A.”

“You’re what?”

Although the thought had just occurred to me, I knew it was what I had to do.

“There’s nothing keeping me here,” I said. “A basement apartment. A small practice that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I like L.A. There’d be more opportunity for me and, honestly, San Francisco is filled with ghosts.”

“Are you doing this because you have some crazy idea you can rescue me?”

“No,” I replied. “Well, not entirely. I want to be near you, that’s true, but that’s not why. You said I have a second chance at life. I believe you. I want a fresh start. I want to see the sun rise in a different sky. Is that so hard to understand?”

“You know you can’t run away from yourself.”

“I’m not trying to,” I said. “I’m not running away, I’m running towards.”

“Towards what?”

“I won’t know until I get there, will I?”

There was a long silence on his end and then he said, “In that case, Henry, welcome to L.A.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There is no single story of how the AIDS epidemic swept through the gay male community in the 1980s and I make no claim that this novel is anything other than one, fictional version. I was born in 1954 so, of course, I lived through the era but my experience was rather different than Rios’s. I lived in Los Angeles in the early ’80s, not in San Francisco, and the full impact of the epidemic came a little later to L.A. than to San Francisco which truly was, along with New York, the front lines.

To reconstruct what it was like to be in San Francisco in those years—between 1981-1984—I consulted the invaluable archives at the city’s GLBT Historical Society. They contain, among other material, the diaries and journals of ordinary gay men who died during the plague. Reading them brought that world back to me, and what was most interesting was how ordinary life went on despite the emergence of AIDS. There is a famous poem by W.H. Auden called Musee des Beaux Arts that begins:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…