Visions and Revisions

January 15, 2015
Witness to a transformative decade in gay history.By the time novelist and critic Peck (The Garden of Lost and Found, 2012, etc.) came out in 1987, a potent drug cocktail had emerged that controlled the course of HIV, lessening its likelihood to lead to full-blown AIDS and certain death. He recounts the effect of that discovery on gay culture, on America's attitudes toward homosexuality and on his own experiences. Woven through the book are references to serial killers of gay men, about whom Peck reported early in his career. Cobbled together from revised essays and articles, the memoir sometimes lapses into repetition and shows its seams. The author, who has honed a reputation for scathing critiques, offers a withering indictment of Andrew Sullivan, whose revisionist gay history demonized pre-AIDS gay culture "as a nonstop party" that he believed would be reincited by the development of combination therapy. Peck also dismisses some queer theorists whose "performative modalities...often seemed like experiments in egotism and anomie." He effusively praises Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham and Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America (2003) contributed to making gay activists "more visible, more capable of influencing the things said about us on a national level." As a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power when he was in his early 20s, Peck stood proudly among those activists, attending meetings and marches, helping out with mundane office work, preparing clean needles for addicts, and reading everything he could find written by a gay man, lesbian or transgendered person. Literature, he writes, "happened to get better in response to AIDS, at least for a while," since it reflected the visceral rage and despair of the time. He is despondent, though, about a tendency to normalize and distance AIDS. Instead, he calls for narratives that force readers "to find the existence of the epidemic unbearable." Raw and heartfelt-though uneven-Peck's hybrid memoir contributes to that goal.

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March 15, 2015

Chronicling the 1997 foundation of the AIDS Coalition through the 1996 emergence of the first successful combination of drug treatment therapies, a period the author dubs "the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic," novelist, columnist, and AIDS activist Peck (Hatchet Jobs; Sprout) examines this transformative and polarizing time in American history. The memoir is a compilation of a handful of previously published essays and straddles the line between literary narrative and journalistic exposition. Peck offers a humanistic albeit outspoken analysis of events during the rise of HIV diagnoses, public defamation and violence toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community; and the humanitarian obstacles American social revolutionists endured around the stigma of AIDS. The text is difficult to follow at times, frequently jumping from the author's personal reflection to larger societal AIDS-related events occurring in real time. VERDICT A powerful, gritty social commentary complemented by the author's coming-of-age story as a young adult during this tumultuous time. Recommended for progressive biography and memoir readers, human rights activists, and contemporary American history enthusiasts.--Carolann Curry, Mercer Univ. Lib., Macon, GA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015
Novelist (The Garden of Lost and Found, 2007) and infamous literary critic Peck presents a scholarly mix of memoir and a long-form essay about every facet of AIDS and its consequences during the 1990s. Moving personal recollections about his coming out and first loves segue into literary discussions of such writers as Gide, Proust, Genet, and his keen critique of media coverage of the AIDS epidemic. Death is present throughout this intense narrative, but it appears as a theme with particularly dark power in Peck's gutsy paralleling of the devastating impact of AIDS on the gay community with the horrors of gay serial killers of the era, namely John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Peck digs into the causes for social and governmental disinterest in, even disdain for, the entire AIDS disaster, and profiles seminal AIDS activists. Peck contrasts his findings about this tragic and frightening time of ignorance, discrimination, fear, suffering, and lack of compassion and support with today's far more enlightened attitudes toward illness, health care, and LGBT people.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)