by Paul Monette
While the sexual mores of the 1970s and early 1980s challenged his partnership with Roger Horwitz, the bond between the two men held. Before his death from AIDS-related complications, Horwitz declared to Monette, “We’re the same person. When did that happen?” It was Horwitz’s diagnosis of AIDS in 1985 that plunged Monette into a crisis that would come to define his mission as a writer and activist. His book of forceful, grief-stricken poems, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, and his highly lauded testimony, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, both appeared in 1988. The latter chronicled Horwitz’s illness and death and was among the first memoirs to bear witness to the epidemic’s devastating impact. New York Times reviewer William M. Hoffman celebrated the book, saying that Monette had “etched a magnificent monument to his lover’s bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure.”
In the years that followed, Paul Monette turned his focus almost exclusively to writing books that confronted the terrible effects of the AIDS crisis and the closet. He published two more novels, Afterlife (1990), about “AIDS widowers” in Los Angeles, and Halfway Home (1991), a story of two brothers, one gay and facing AIDS, the other straight. His last book of poems, West of Yesterday, East of Summer (1995), garnered acclaim for its arresting, lyrical narratives of grief, anger, and loss. In 1992, Monette released what is now his best-known work, Becoming a Man. A memoir of his life leading up to meeting Horwitz, the book illustrates the costs of sexual repression and affirms the power of living life authentically. About Becoming a Man, novelist David Ebershoff has written, “Monette’s interior life, his ghosts, his turmoil, his final peace—in Becoming a Man, they have become our literature.”
During the last seven years of his life, Monette became a vocal and influential AIDS and gay rights activist. With his partner Stephen Kolzak, whom he met and quickly lost to the epidemic, Monette participated in political protests against the federal government’s neglect of AIDS research and campaigned for the rights and social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. “No one will find the way out of hate and violence unless we do,” Monette declared in one of his many speeches from this time. “Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”
As he grew increasingly ill from AIDS complications, Monette published Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994). Alternating between rage and remembrance as well as the personal and political, these ten essays offer insight into the life and mind of a powerful and determined writer galvanized by the injustices of his times. A film documentary of the author’s life, Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, was released in 1996. The slim, eloquent Sanctuary, a fable of same-sex love, posthumously appeared in 1997 and was hailed by critics as Monette’s final gift.
He died at his home in Los Angeles on February 10, 1995, at the age of forty-nine and was survived by his father, brother, and final partner, Winston Wilde. Inscribed on his grave are the words Champion of His People.
A two-year-old Paul Monette in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1947.
Monette at his graduation from Yale University in 1967.
The author on a Provincetown farm in 1973.
Monette’s faculty photo in Milton Academy’s 1975 yearbook.
The author with his mother, Jacqueline Monette; his father, Paul Monette Sr.; and his brother, Robert Monettein 1977.
Monette in 1983 with his beloved first partner, Roger Horwitz, at the Monte Oliveto monastery in Tuscany. This was the original cover photo of Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.
Monette and Horwitz in 1984.
Monette and his second partner, Stephen Kolzak, wearing AIDS protest pins in 1990.
Response stationery for Monette fans circa 1993.
The author with his final companion, Winston Wilde, on Christmas in 1994.
A promotional postcard for Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, a 1996 documentary on Monette.
All images courtesy of the Paul Monette papers (Collection 1707). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by Paul Monette
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7381-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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