In going through my book closet a while back I saw I had one more book from a gay bookstore in Sydney, Australia, which I had bought two years ago. I just finished it.
The book is Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave. I will read the back of a paperback book when deciding to buy it, but I don’t read it just before reading it. And, over two years, I had forgotten what it was about. I had an idea when I read the About the Author paragraph at the beginning, which said that Conigrave had died in 1994 shortly after finishing the book. Ah, yes, this is a story about AIDS.
It took me a while to realize this wasn’t a fictional novel, but a memoir. Tim started the story in Melbourne in the early 1970s at age 12 when he first became fascinated with men. At 14 he went to an all-boys Catholic high school where he fell in love with John. I was rather surprised how little condemnation he got from the Jesuit brothers and didn’t get much from the other boys.
After high school they went to different universities and Tim wanted to explore what it’s like to be gay. He discovered sex is a poor substitute for love. He returned to John. John’s father forbade Tim from visiting. John solved that by choosing Tim over his father. They settled in Sydney, John as a chiropractor, Tim as an actor.
They took an HIV test and learned both were positive. Tim channeled some of his fears into creating a couple AIDS-themed plays, but soon dropped acting for AIDS work.
The last quarter of the book is about John’s illness and death. As Tim was coping with that he also had a few medical episodes. When one doesn’t have much of an immune system there are a huge variety of ways to become seriously ill. When John was ill and his father visited Tim felt invisible.
It’s a sweet story and reminded me that gay men my age and a bit older went through horribly painful times (and that was just the medical) before their pandemic was brought under control.
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