Those lines capture what I discovered in those journals and diaries—that life with its mundane obligations and sentiments went on in the shadow of AIDS. Thus, in an entry in one of these diaries the writer is hospitalized for what appears to be a bout of pneumocystis pneumonia, one of the harbingers of AIDS and then, a dozen pages later, out of the hospital, in another entry he moons over a cute boy he spots at the gym and berates himself for not working up the nerve to say hello. I found passages like this to be almost unbearably moving. They reminded me forcefully, viscerally, that what is now passing into history, into the official record as statistics, chronologies and judgments began in the bodies of young men who wanted for themselves what most people want and not least of all to love and to be loved.

Reading these innocent scrawls in dime store notebooks I was reminded, too, that they and I, then also young, lived in a country where such aspirations were jeered at by the majority. A recent book about the changing attitudes toward LGBTQ people notes that as late as 1987, “the General Social Survey found that 78 percent of the American public thought that same-sex relations were ‘Always Wrong.’” (Garretson, The Path to Gay Rights (New York University Press, 218) p. 3.) The disapproval of the majority, even before the epidemic, manifested itself in aggressions both macro and micro. At several points in this novel, I have tried to capture the attitudes toward gay men at the time which ranged from suspicion to disdain to outright hatred. Needless to say, these attitudes, coupled with the virtual invisibility of the gay and lesbian community (as it was then known) in mainstream media and the pervasive and unrelenting celebration of heterosexuality could be morally and psychologically isolating if you were gay or lesbian. It’s hard for any human being to be hated for something that he or she cannot change and even those who are strong enough to resist the hatred as irrational cannot help but be damaged by it. Those who lack this strength, which is probably most of us, can be driven into the darkness of self-destructive thought and behavior out of which they may never emerge.