read by Michael Crouch
It’s 1985. Yale’s career as the development director for an
art gallery has just begun, his friend Nico has just died of AIDS, and almost
everyone he knows is terrified or in denial or both. Nico’s little sister,
Fiona, has become the key to a coup that could make or break Yale’s reputation
in the art world.
It’s 2015. Fiona is trying to find her daughter, who
disappeared into a cult years ago; a random bit of footage has led her to
Paris. She’s staying with an old friend, Richard Campo, a photographer who
famously documented the ravages of the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s and
90s.
Days pass in Paris. Fiona is frustrated at the pace of the
private investigator’s search for her daughter and heads out to seek her on her
own. Meanwhile, Richard and his partner urge her to just enjoy the city while
she’s there. She’s not so sure she’s ready for the sorts of enjoyment that are
on offer, though. Romance, trips through her own past—that’s not where she’s
at. She's in too much pain, too worried about her daughter.
Weeks pass in Chicago, and then months. Disaster looms over
Yale’s entire community; some people flee, some descend into debauchery, and
some get political and fight to be seen and heard. But for Yale, there’s
nothing to do but soldier on, try to close the next deal, try not to feel too
alone and scared as his friends get sick, one by one. Meanwhile, he’s getting
to know the elderly benefactor whose art collection may or may not be a
windfall for his gallery. And she seems to know more about him than he thought
he was revealing.
This story winds a sinuous path back and forth, back and
forth, between a past when nobody knew who would be struck down next and a
today shaped by the loss of a generation of young men. We get to be there in
that past with Yale. We see what it does to him, what it feels like on a daily basis
to be subject to irrational hatred and constantly on the edge of existential
terror, meanwhile going through all the normal growing pains of being a young
man just getting started in the world.
And we get to see, 30 years later, what carrying all that
history, all the stories of all those extinguished lives, has done to Fiona,
how it has scarred her—and, through her, scarred her daughter, who was only a
baby during the worst of it.
I wasn’t there for the AIDS crisis in the same way Yale and
Fiona were. Although I lived in San Francisco, or within an hour’s drive,
during the 80s and 90s, and a relative I hadn’t seen in years died pretty early
on, I was in middle school when things really hit the fan. So I was a little
young to be very deeply affected, though of course I was aware of what was
going on all around me.
I did work at a dry cleaning shop a few blocks from the
Castro during the mid-90s, and I remember watching a lot of customers get
sicker and sicker and eventually disappear. It was horrible, but they weren’t
my community, my family, my friends. I knew I could become infected if I wasn’t
careful, but I also knew I wasn’t at high risk. It wasn’t *personal* to me. It
was just how things were. (I never believed I’d make it to age 30, but I didn’t
think a virus would take me; I thought it would be that cowboy running the
White House with his finger hovering a little too near The Button that would
get us all in the end.)
The Great Believers makes AIDS personal. You will walk away
from this book shaken. You’ll have some appreciation, if you didn’t before, of
what a loss to us all was the loss of those young lives. What living in the
middle of it was like—it was like a war, but one that you had to be ashamed of
being the victim of, one that you kept to yourself as hard as you could if you wanted to have any
chance of a happy life. What caring about and caring for so many young men who
didn’t make it was like, what it was like to survive and try to build a life
after losing literally everybody you cared about.
The book does this all unsentimentally, cleanly, without
tear-jerking melodrama. It just lays the stories out, one beautifully-formed
slab after another, each atop the last in ways that seem impossible because of
the way the story goes back in time, and yet somehow perfect.
Read this book. Once you start you won’t be able to walk
away, and it will hurt, but that lost generation deserves to be mourned. You’ll
be glad you didn’t turn away.
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