From "the cauldron of the plague" comes a bitter memoir by the
author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and six novels
(Halfway Home, 1991, etc.). "Twisted up with rage," Monette is
urgent to tell his story: "the fevers are on me now, the virus mad
to ravage my last hundred T cells." He begins with his straight-A
childhood, darkened by his brother being crippled by spina bifida.
But the source of Monette's fury comes from growing up in "the
coffin world of the closet," losing a "decade of being dead below
the belt," and now finding himself a victim of what he calls "the
genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my
brothers." Clearly, Monette wants to berate and shock this "Puritan
sinkhole of a culture" with crude language ("Roger was up to his
tits in therapy" is a printable example) and explicit accounts of
his homosexual encounters, starting as a nine-year-old. After
describing a one-night stand, he mockingly asks, "Is this more than
you want to know?' and then explains that a late lover advised,
"rub their faces in it." Monette does. Later, he writes, "I was so
sick of hearing myself talk about sexuality - hetero, homo, and
otherwise." But despite the pose of no-holds-barred honesty, the
author's diatribe offers only a predictable view of his elite
schools (Andover and Yale) and little on gender theory beyond the
statement that "gay is a kind of sensibility." The offhand prose
veers from the flip ("I try not to be gayer-than-thou about bi") to
the melodramatic ("I have to keep my later self on a short leash as
I negotiate those hurricanes of feeling that propelled my time with
women"). A deliberately self-absorbed manifesto from the AIDS
battlefield, angrily slicing the world into us and them. (Kirkus
Reviews)
He grew up in a small town in New England in the 1950's, watching
lassie, going to church, getting straight A's at school, a scholar
destined for success. But he already had a secret, and his public
life with family and friends was already a constant round of
ventriloquism as he played the joker and pretended to be the same
as everyone else. For Paul Monette was gay. BECOMING A MAN is about
growing up gay, and about the tyranny and self denial of the closet
- one man's struggle, for half his life, to come out. From the
white-bread 1950's through the rebellious 1960's to the
self-creating 1970's and beyond, it forms a passionately honest and
unsparing account of the tortures of living a lie, a naked protrait
of one man's fight for freedom in a time of ignorance and bigotry.
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