He said, “Is everything okay with your daughter?”
“Lord only knows.”
“It’ll be okay. I can tell it will. I know these things. And my God, she’s just like you.”
Fiona laughed. “She’s nothing like me. That’s the problem.”
“Are you kidding? Don’t you remember yourself? You were the most bullheaded little—you were practically feral! Remember when you told your parents you’d climb in the coffin if we couldn’t all come to Nico’s vigil?”
“There was no coffin. I said I’d stand up and tell everyone.”
“Okay. But you see my point.”
“That was the only way I could survive.”
Julian smiled. “It’s not a bad way to be. Hey, are you really moving here?”
“I actually think so, yes. For a while. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but I am.”
“Well I’m proud of you. Hey, have you seen it yet?”
“Seen what?”
“Well, two things, really. Three things! Did you see me? Do I look okay?”
“You looked smashing, Julian.”
“Okay, two other things. This one.” He took her shoulders and angled her toward a glowing light box mounted on the wall and covered, every inch of it, with black and white contact sheets. As big as a picture window. Some strips of photos hung vertically, some horizontally. Occasionally they crossed each other. The piece was titled 1983. Magnifying glasses, strong ones, hung at each side—great, because Fiona didn’t want to dig her readers out of her purse.
She started arbitrarily on the top left. A strip of some kind of party, too many men in each frame to make anyone out. A strip of a face she thought was Katsu Tatami’s. Four in a row of what looked like that year’s Pride parade, men waving flags. There was the really tall guy who used to sell loose cigarettes on Halsted. There was Teddy Naples. They kissed and danced and lounged on couches and wore ridiculous clothes and flipped pancakes and sunbathed on the rocks.
She was hoping to see Nico there, but she didn’t.
Julian said, “Look.”
There she was herself, an arm around Terrence. In a restaurant, it looked like. She never remembered being that pretty, that happy. Claire was just an egg in an ovary, one more thing Fiona hadn’t ruined yet. At the left of the shot was Yale, mouth open, talking to someone out of frame. A mirror behind them all, in which you could see a room of tables, diners, and Richard himself, camera flash for a head.
She wanted to climb into the photo, to say, “Stop where you are.”
Wasn’t that what the camera had done, at least? It had frozen them forever.
Stay there, she thought. Stay there.
Julian gave her a minute and then he said, “I was thinking about Hamlet. You know I was in it three different times, and I never got to be Hamlet? Actually it’s Horatio I was thinking about. I never got to be him either.”
Fiona was filled with ridiculous, irrational love for Julian just then, for whatever he was about to say, because she could feel Nico beside her, and Yale and Terrence and all of them, rolling their eyes at Julian’s making this about himself, about his acting, which was such a Julian thing to do, and they all loved him anyway, and she still did too.
He said, “The whole play is about Hamlet trying to avenge his father’s death, trying to tell the truth, right? And then when he dies, he hands it all to Horatio. In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. See, I’d have made a great Hamlet! But what a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory. And what’s Horatio supposed to do with it? What the hell does Horatio do in act six?”
Fiona leaned her forehead against Julian’s. They stood like that for a moment, head to head, nose to nose. The warmth of his skin soaked into her body, all the way down to her feet.
She still had the magnifying glass in her hand, clenched tight. She wanted to call Claire over, show her these photos, tell her what Julian had just said, try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate.
But she could do that in a minute. Claire was still here and she wasn’t going anywhere, and Julian was drawing her further into the gallery. The magnifying glass fell from her hand, swung on its little chain.
He said, “This is the third thing.” The video installations. Two screens at the very back, far apart. He stood her in front of the one on the left. “The other is drag shows. This is the one to watch.” It showed a crowd on a sidewalk, standing very still. He said, “The Bistro. Do you remember the Bistro, or were you too young?”
“It was the disco, right? I remember everyone talking about it like it was some lost arcadia.”
“Well, yeah. It’s just that it was such a happy place. Not that there weren’t other places, but I don’t know if we were ever that happy again. This was the day they knocked it down.”
She took a step closer. There was sound to the film, although you had to be standing right in front of the speaker to hear it.
A man in the crowd saying, “It was the biggest place, it was the best place.”
Another man: “It was our Studio 54. No, wait. It was our moon. It was our moon!”
Another: “Is someone going to tell him about the Bearded Lady? Someone explain about the Bearded Lady.”
And there, dear God, were Yale Tishman and Charlie Keene. Charlie with his open bomber jacket and pins. Yale in an oxford shirt, hopelessly preppy. So incredibly, impossibly young. Had anyone ever been that young? Moving easily, their limbs loose, faces full. And there now, right behind them, was Nico. His hair tousled in the wind. Fiona held her breath.
Yale saying: “I keep waiting to find out it’s a joke.”
Charlie to the camera: “This is where I brought him when he was new to the city.”
Yale: “I couldn’t believe it existed.”
Charlie: “You want to know the state of this city, you want to know whose pocket city hall is in, look at this. You think this isn’t political? You think this is an accident?”
Yale: “They had these glitter cannons, and they’d—one time, the cannons shot foam stars. I don’t even know how they did that.”
Nico: “I’m still hung over from the closing party, and it was four days ago.”
His voice.
It traveled down her neck and arms.
The building, small and undefended.
A voice off camera: “It’s mob bosses tearing this place down.”
Another: “Well. I don’t know.”
Charlie: “They’re making a bloody parking lot.”
Yale: “Watch.”
But nothing happened. A shot of the building, just standing there. Static.
Nico: “Now. Look.”
The wrecking ball swinging, colliding. Not the topple you’d expect, not a skyscraper’s collapse. Just a cloud of obscuring dust and, when that cleared, a hole.
Then another.
Someone shouting “Whooh!” as if out of obligation.
A slow, awkward minute of wrecking ball, and faces reacting. Yale’s face. Charlie’s face.
Fiona felt Julian take her hand. She’d forgotten where she was, forgotten the gallery and the museum and all of Paris.
The film cut forward; time had passed.
The building, destroyed. The entire place downed, the dust clearing. People leaving.
The sound of wind.
Charlie’s voice: “Better be a hell of a parking lot.”
Yale: “Oh my God, look.”
Yale on his knees, digging in the gutter.
Yale surrounded by the remaining people, showing them something in his hands.
Yale showing the camera: a handful of dust
.
“There’s glitter in it!” he said.
A man Fiona didn’t know peered over Yale’s shoulder. “That’s not glitter. Where?”
It just looked like dust. Yale turned and smeared it down Charlie’s shirt.
Yale and Charlie and Nico laughing hysterically. Charlie rubbing the dust between his fingers, sprinkling it on the sidewalk. Nico rubbing it into Charlie’s jacket sleeve.
A man smearing it on his cheeks, a woman saying, “That’s asbestos, I’m sure.”
Charlie, laughing still, giddy: “We’re gonna take it home with us!”
A shot of the gutter filled with dust. True, there were glints of light there, but they could have been tiny shards of fiberglass. Surely they were. Fiona tried hard to believe it was more than that.
Nico’s voice one more time, disembodied: “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Campo!”
The gutter, and a long silence.
She expected the film to end right there, but instead, as the laughter died down, the camera lingered uncomfortably on a man collecting his long black hair into a ponytail. On a mother walking by through the last gawkers, pulling her young son by the hand. On Yale and Charlie walking off down the sidewalk, so clearly a couple—inches from each other, but not touching. Around them, a silence as big as the city.
Then the whole film looped again. There they all stood, the Bistro whole. Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
While these characters and their lives are fictional, I’ve stuck as closely as possible to actual places and public events, taking liberties only when necessary. A few of those liberties: In order to avoid writing about real people, I reimagined Chicago’s gay press scene; none of the publications mentioned here are real. While the fictional Brigg Gallery shares some characteristics with Northwestern’s Block Museum, it is not the same place. The Wilde Rumpus was not an actual theater company, but gay companies such as Lionheart did operate out of other theaters. Some of the events of the 1990 AMA demonstration have been compressed. And while the restaurant Ann Sather has been a constant source of support to Chicago’s gay community, and was host to many fundraising events, there was not, as far as I know, a benefit there for Howard Brown in December of 1985.
I’d feel bad if I didn’t say that the new penguin enclosure at the Lincoln Park Zoo is spectacular, and the penguins look happy; there is nothing grimy or depressing about it now.
There isn’t as much in book or film form about Chicago’s AIDS crisis as I’d hoped when I began this project. Fortunately, I can recommend a few excellent sources if you want to learn more. MK Czerwiec has written a beautiful graphic novel, Taking Turns, about her time as a nurse on Illinois Masonic’s AIDS Care Unit 371. She’s been a friend to this book as well, and was an invaluable early reader. The documentary film Short Fuse, about the life of Chicago ACT UP founder Daniel Sotomayor, is hard to find but absolutely worth watching. Two writers, Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen, have done much of the heavy lifting in recording Chicago’s gay history. I found their journalism and books incredibly helpful, and am additionally grateful to both of them for giving me their time. Owen was also a brilliant early reader for the novel; if you’re in the city, stop in and see him at Unabridged Bookstore.
The online archives and oral histories available through the Windy City Times—archives Tracy Baim is largely responsible for—are a treasure. The Windy City Times itself began publishing in 1985, and I’m grateful to the Harold Washington Library for keeping those earliest issues available. (Speaking of Harold Washington, a tangential acknowledgment: The words he speaks in this book at the 1986 Pride parade are his own.) The Gerber/Hart Library is a wonderful resource on LGBTQ issues and history and provided me with essential assistance and materials. There is footage currently available on YouTube of the April 1990 march on the AMA, and I recommend it highly. The best written account I’ve found of the protest is “The Angriest Queer,” from the August 16, 1990, issue of the Chicago Reader. Photographer Doug Ischar’s series Marginal Waters beautifully documents gay life on the Belmont Rocks in the ’80s; while I imagine Richard Campo’s fictional work to be quite different from Ischar’s, I’m thankful to him and to the other photographers, both artistic and journalistic, who brought the era to life for me.
This project was undertaken with a great deal of ongoing thought and conversation and concern about the line between allyship and appropriation—a line that might feel different to different readers. It is my great hope that this book will lead the curious to read direct, personal accounts of the AIDS crisis—and that any places where I’ve gotten the details wrong might inspire people to tell their own stories.
Some book world thanks: Kathryn Court and Victoria Savanh; Nicole Aragi, Duvall Osteen, and Grace Dietshe; Eric Wechter; Francesca Drago. Three intrepid summer interns came to me courtesy of DePaul University: Felipe Cabrera, Megan Sanks, and Natasha Khatami. Gina Frangello, Thea Goodman, Dika Lam, Emily Grey Tedrowe, Zoe Zolbrod, and Jon Freeman were essential early readers. Portions of this novel were researched and written at Yaddo, Ucross, and Ragdale residencies. This book, like so many others, wouldn’t have been possible without support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Huge thanks to Maureen O’Brien, Patty Gerstenblith, Adair McGregor, and Cassie Ritter Hunt on the subjects of art, inheritance, and university galleries; and to Paul Weil, Steve Kleinedler, Todd Summar, J. Andrew Goodman, Michael Anson, Amanda Roach, Amy Norton, Charles Finch, and Edward Hamlin, for conversations and introductions too varied to enumerate.
Lydia and Heidi, thank you for being so good at entertaining yourselves while I was writing and editing.
Most important, my endless thanks for the time, patience, and encouragement of those who lived through all this and sat down to coffee or let me into their homes or emailed with me endlessly, in many cases about personal and traumatic things. In addition to the writers mentioned above, thanks to Peggy Shinner; to TB; to Justin Hayford of the Legal Council for Health Justice (a tireless resource and amazing early reader); to Dr. David Moore, Dr. David Blatt, and Russell Leander, who made Unit 371 a beautiful place; to Bill McMillan, who was out there on that ledge with the banner; to the inimitable and indomitable Lori Cannon; and to the memories of the amazing men you all told me about. I did my best.
About the Author
Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, which won the Novel of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Harper's, and Tin House, among others. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters.
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