Subject: Bookshelf:  Bringing AIDS Into the Open 
Date: Published: 11/28/89 (113 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    LEISURE & ARTS -- Bookshelf:
    Bringing AIDS Into the Open
    ----
    Raymond Sokolov

    It is a remarkable fact that almost everybody wants AIDS
 kept quiet, in one way or another.  The squeamish want to
 protect teen-age students from hearing about it in class.
 Social workers treating children born with the disease don't
 want their schools or schoolmates to know about it.  Some
 adults with AIDS oppose health regulations that would compel
 doctors to tell their patients' lovers about the risk they
 run in continuing their relationships.
    A doctor friend of mine did not stop me from consulting an
 internist, although she knew that the internist had AIDS and
 probably would not be the ideal practitioner for someone
 searching for a long relationship with a doctor.  My doctor
 friend said nothing about her colleague's infection.  As it
 happened, my new doctor soon began displaying erratic
 behavior, misdiagnosed an ailment, did not return urgent
 phone calls, and died within the year.
    Recently, the U. S. Congress entered this arena of denial
 and suppression, in the matter of Sen. Jesse Helms and his
 crusade against federal subsidy of "offensive" art such as
 AIDS victim Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of homosexual
 and sadomasochistic behavior, which led to the recent waffle
 act by the newly appointed director of the National Endowment
 for the Arts, John Frohnmayer.  First, he took away $10,000
 from the Manhattan gallery Artists Space, because of
 intemperate language in the catalog of its exhibition of work
 about AIDS.  Then he gave back the money, but stipulated it
 couldn't go for the catalog.
    In the background of the entire tedious debate over the
 NEA, the First Amendment has loomed, misunderstood and abused
 as usual, claimed by some as justification for their right to
 express a preference for causing pain to others during the
 sex act and asserted by others as the basis for a
 constitutional right to receive federal grants.
    The legal right to exhibit anything anywhere has never
 been infringed, but all the misguided jabber about free
 speech has distracted the attention of most people from
 something almost as serious as the possible misallocation of
 $10,000 from a trillion-plus federal budget.  That is the need
 for serious, informed debate about the AIDS plague, the need
 for open discussion and for an end to pretending the disease
 isn't there.  The Artists Space show, whatever one makes of it
 as art, is a small step in that direction.  It bears
 (literally) graphic witness to the ravages of AIDS.  It is a
 documentary about people dying, and it has a sobering power.
    In a far more controlled and brilliant way, John Weir
 reports the same news in his first novel, "The Irreversible
 Decline of Eddie Socket" (Harper & Row, 277 pages, $17.95).
 This is a sexually explicit book, in the best sense.  It takes
 us into the lives of its characters through the specific
 details of their most intimate acts.  But the sex parts are
 only one kind of insight that Mr. Weir gives into his
 extremely various cast of characters, most of them gay men in
 New York coping with the bad hand their sexuality recently
 dealt them.
    Eddie Socket is the silly, pathetic pseudonym of the
 novel's young gay hero, a silly, pathetic yet powerful
 character whose last few weeks are Mr. Weir's subject.  In its
 utter lack of sentimentality or missionary frothing, it makes
 the highly touted fiction of David Leavitt look like
 cheerleading or PR, boys' adventure stories in the homo
 jungle.
    Mr. Weir looks this world straight in the eye, and doesn't
 turn away from the horrors.  He gives us the urban gay world,
 from its romantic trysts to its constant AIDS funerals.  He
 takes us into Eddie's hospital room and lets us have a look
 at the man as he slides painfully away from life.  Such lurid
 material is the hardest kind of thing to make worthwhile
 fiction out of.  The facts are so strong that they tend to
 overwhelm any possibility of narrative refinement.  But "The
 Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket" is an elegantly
 written, even a witty book.  For much of its length it is in
 fact a social comedy verging on French farce.  Eddie, who
 lives a life of almost monastic bleakness and sexlessness, in
 a dank apartment with his hapless pal Polly Plugg, falls in
 love with a "married" man, a Waspy rich guy whose live-in
 lover is a petulant Jew.  The Wasp abandons the Jew for Eddie
 and then leaves Eddie for a young yuppie who was briefly
 Polly's lover (unbeknownst to Eddie) and goes off with him to
 Europe.
    The elaborate plot machinery that sets all this up is
 seamless.  The small-world comedy of errors just flows
 naturally.  Everything that happens actually is horrible and
 painful, but you can't help seeing the humor of it.  The same
 thing is true of Eddie's encounters with his mother and his
 father.  They aren't married any more.  The father left her and
 Eddie when Eddie was a boy in exurban New Jersey, and
 communicates with his son only through hilariously earnest
 postcards mailed on obscure Catholic holidays.  He keeps an
 altar in his dining room, "adorned with a hand-tooled
 mahogany cross which looked to Eddie like an enormous pepper
 grinder."
    Eddie's mother keeps dogs, lots of them, in a rambling
 Jersey house and talks a blue streak.  Mr. Weir manages to
 take all of these people seriously, even the transvestite
 entertainer who looks after Eddie when he flees New York
 after learning he has AIDS.  Eddie has trouble at first coming
 to terms with his disease and trouble telling his friends
 about it.  Soon enough, though, he comes home and his friends
 find out.  But it's much too late.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the 
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the 
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering 
from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]