This is a book report/review of The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, but is it also a story of a life, or lives, cut short by a disease that took too long to acknowledge and, even when it had a name, never received the respect and compassion it deserved.
My earliest memory was being pregnant with my daughter Sarah (born September 1981) and watching an episode of The Phil Donahue Show, and the guests were a panel of men (from San Francisco and New York City), talking about a strange and insidious illness that was spreading like wildfire throughout the gay community, and no one was paying the least bit of attention.
Fast forward a few months (years?), when it officially became HIV/AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) and was still being ignored, most specifically by Ronald Reagan, our sitting president at the time.
Different/earlier time frame: I met my husband R midway through my college years (1974), when we began dating and, because he was/is older, he graduated and took a job in Tennessee with The Red Cross, and we continued our courtship long-distance for another two years. One of his college roommates was SteveV, a hilarious, brilliant, sharp-tongued (Scorpio), adorable man who may have been the first gay person I ever knew. Our friendship with him continued and solidified.
After Steve graduated (he was in our wedding party in 1976), he moved to Atlanta and then New York, where he was going to hit it big, writing a screenplay and rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. He was in his *element*, and we moved to Puerto Rico through R's job (1985-1989), keeping up our long-standing correspondence. Steve even came to visit us there, loving the gay beach area, that felt free and unencumbered from homophobia. At some point, we heard that Steve was very sick (yes, AIDS), and had moved back home to Newnan, Georgia, where his mom lovingly took care of him. We would come back to the states every December for a month, and I recall visiting him (must have been Christmas 1986). He looked so tired and frail, and I knew in my heart it would be the last time we saw him. He died in October 1987.
As soon as I started reading The Great Believers, I knew it would conjure all those memories of Steve, but I hadn't realized how far and deep they ran. The book is told in alternating chapter/timelines... one in the mid-80s, and the other 2015, as a group of friends deal with the infections/deaths of their Chicago circle/community... and the sister of one goes on to live and interconnect with those lost, and those who unexpectedly survived.
I read the chapter titled July 15, 1986 (p. 334 in the hardcover version) three times. So impossibly perfect. So devastatingly honest. The last 100 pages found me ugly-crying, waking up the next morning with swollen eyes and a broken heart.
Of course there are articles being written now, comparing the AIDS crisis with the current pandemic, and there are most certainly correlations. Innocent people are dead (over 180,000 via COVID; 700,000 via AIDS), because of negligence and dereliction of duty (I'm talking to you, RR and DT!).
Despite the wrenching subject matter, I highly recommend this book. The writing is exquisite and clever, the characters fleshed out in all manners of likability (or non-), the subject matter painful and poignant, but also curiously redemptive. This novel will stay with me a very long time... 💓
“The thing is,” Teddy said, “the disease itself feels like a judgment. We’ve all got a little Jesse Helms on our shoulder, right? If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it’s a judgment on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that’s almost worse, it’s like a judgment on all of us, like the act itself is the problem and not the number of times you did it. And if you got it because you thought you couldn’t, it’s a judgment on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn’t care, it’s a judgment on how much you hate yourself. Isn’t that why the world loves Ryan White so much? How could God have it out for some poor kid with a blood disorder? But then people are still being terrible. They’re judging him just for being sick, not even for the way he got it.”
“How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?”
“A handful of dead astronauts and Reagan weeps with the nation. Thirteen thousand dead gay men and Reagan’s too busy.”
“He wanted to spend the rest of his life building Nora's Paris out of sugar cubes, brick by brick. He wanted a one-way ticket to 1920. He thought about Nora's idea of time travel. What a horrible kind of travel, that took you only forward into the terrifying future, constantly farther from whatever had once made you happy. Only maybe that wasn't what she'd meant. Maybe she meant the older you got, the more decades you had at your disposal to revisit with your eyes closed.”
I miss you, Steve.
SONG: In This Life by Madonna
BOOK: And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition by Randy Shilts
POEM: Heartbeats by Melvin Dixon
Work out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.
Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.
Eat right. Rest well.
Sweetheart. Safe sex.
Sore throat. Long flu.
Hard nodes. Beware.
Test blood. Count cells.
Reds thin. Whites low.
Dress warm. Eat well.
Short breath. Fatigue.
Night sweats. Dry cough.
Loose stools. Weight loss.
Get mad. Fight back.
Call home. Rest well.
Don’t cry. Take charge.
No sex. Eat right.
Call home. Talk slow.
Chin up. No air.
Arms wide. Nodes hard.
Cough dry. Hold on.
Mouth wide. Drink this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.
Black out. White rooms.
Head hot. Feet cold.
No work. Eat right.
CAT scan. Chin up.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
No air. No air.
Thin blood. Sore lungs.
Mouth dry. Mind gone.
Six months? Three weeks?
Can’t eat. No air.
Today? Tonight?
It waits. For me.
Sweet heart. Don’t stop.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
QUOTE(S): "In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were A. ill, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, 'I have just lost the love of my life.' " ~ Judith Butler
"AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning." ~ Larry Kramer
