In Jameson Currier's short story "Pasta Night," a character wonders: "If, to me, AIDS is not a retribution, is there some sort of meaning in the challenge it provides? Is there meaning in suffering or merely meaning from experience?"
Currier has been wrestling with such questions for more than two decades. Every short story in his 1993 debut collection, Dancing on the Moon, focused on AIDS and gay men's personal experiences with the epidemic. The disease continued to be a main focus in subsequent work: his 1998 novel "Where the Rainbow Ends," his screenplay for the documentary film Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness and his articles in such publications as Body Positive, Art & Understanding, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
At a time when many gay authors have stopped writing about AIDS, Currier continues to create compelling work on the subject. His new collection, Still Dancing ( Lethe Press ) , brings together 20 short stories—half taken from Dancing on the Moon, and the others ( including "Pasta Night" ) written more recently. Some are reminders of another age, when gay men lost friends and lovers by the dozen with horrific speed, and life was a blur of hospital rooms and funerals, blood tests and bodily decay. Others deal with issues that are still current, from sero-discordant relationships to ongoing anxieties around sex.
A native of what he calls "Georgia's notorious Cobb County," Currier, 53, has watched the epidemic unfold in New York City, where he has lived for more than 30 years. The breadth of his personal experience is evident in his writing, which is moving without resorting to melodrama, familiar without feeling clichéd. In the new book's title story, for instance, he describes a man who has lost many friends to AIDS as feeling "like a boy lost at an amusement park who can't find his family and doesn't understand why they are not where they should be." It's a characteristically vivid yet unsentimental description of what it's like to wake up and find that your entire chosen family, your whole support system, is suddenly gone—and many people who survived the worst years of the epidemic will likely find that Currier has, once again, put into words the things that they've felt for years.
I have known Currier for a decade; we were editors together at the New York Blade in the 1990s. Recently, I had the chance to ask him about how the AIDS epidemic has changed—and how his own writing in response to that epidemic has also evolved.
Wayne Hoffman: What first motivated you to focus so much on AIDS in your writing?
Jameson Currier: As early as 1980, I had written a book of linked short stories about gay men. I was trying to be Armistead Maupin. They were okay stories, but they were clearly by a young man who had a lot of energy and was just thumping at the typewriter. Then I started reading David Leavitt and Andrew Holleran. They made me aware that I could write about an issue that was important to me. Holleran was writing in Christopher Street magazine, and I was an avid reader of Christopher Street. He was writing about AIDS, the fear and confusion and the sense that you were watching a world at change. I wanted to capture that as well, from my own perspective. Then, almost concurrent with a friend becoming HIV-positive, I started writing fiction about all the themes that were coming up, such as sex and grief and change and loss and guilt.
WH: Several bits of narrative pop up in multiple stories: sick friends rushed to hospitals, ailing lovers taking care of each other, men going home to their often homophobic families to die, survivors struggling to move on. How many of these elements come from your own life?
JC: Most of it is coming from my own life, whether or not I experienced it myself. I draw inspiration not only from my own life, but also from the people around me. Many stories were inspired by my being a care-partner for a friend who got infected and became sick and died in 1988. A lot of the stories are almost as non-fiction as fiction can be, particularly a story like "What They Carried." That's almost verbatim how things happened. A lot of the stories in Dancing on the Moon came from personal experiences.
WH: How has the epidemic changed since you started writing about it?
JC: The turning point was around 1996, when Andrew Sullivan wrote that piece called "The End of AIDS" in the New York Times Magazine, about the cocktail-drug therapy. That was a changing point for me, too, in the way I regarded it. I had just finished writing Where the Rainbow Ends, and when I finished reading that article, I said, "Oh, so my novel is no longer current, now it's history." Because the course of medicine had now changed how people were looking at the infection. I thought, "What do I do to continue trying to be relevant?" That's when I started shifting more into writing stories about sex and relationships. I thought that would keep myself relevant in the literary market.
WH: But now you've come back to AIDS?
JC: I never really went away. Even though I was writing erotica and stories about gay men and their relationships and sex, there was always an AIDS consciousness there, an AIDS awareness layered onto my characters. It never left any of my stories.
WH: As you made particularly clear with your erotically charged 2004 collection, "Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex," you've never shied away from writing about sex. For instance, in "Chelsea Rose," the story that opens Still Dancing, we are quickly introduced to a leatherman with a box full of dildos in his closet. What does it mean to write about sex in the context of the epidemic?
JC: Even when AIDS arrived, gay men never stopped having sex. It was always important to me to write a character that has a full life, and if you're going to write about gay men, you're going to have to write about sex in some fashion. I never wanted to avoid writing about any of the issues that gay men face on an everyday basis, and what gay men face on an everyday basis is how they view their sexuality and how they look for their partners and view their relationships. So a closet full of leather clothes and a box full of dildos is part of a gay man's apartment, and I'm not going to avoid writing about that. I need to write about sex and show all of its glory and fear.
WH: Some readers, I'm sure, would prefer it if your stories were even more explicit, while others would be happier if you left the sex out altogether. How do you balance how explicit you are?
JC: There are times and scenes in stories where I tame down the language and I consciously decide not to be explicit, because I don't want it to become erotica. Even in a story like "The Best of Bobby Red," which is about a porn star, I wanted to go as far as I could go, but it's still pretty tame. I don't give you all the graphic content. Part of writing about sex is letting the reader imagine that they can fill in the gaps of what you're not presenting.
WH: While AIDS is far from over, it certainly seems like less of a constant, urgent, all-consuming crisis than it did for most gay men a decade or two ago. Why continue to focus on it in your writing?
JC: A lot of these issues aren't fully discussed. They were never fully discussed back in the '80s, and they're still not. It's like the lost subject, or the invisible subject. AIDS has drifted into history; it's not on the top of the gay agenda. We seem to have focused on gay marriage, as opposed to other issues. I find it very interesting. I'm supportive of the gay-marriage issues, but it seems that when you pick up the paper now, AIDS and even the hate-crimes stuff has fallen off the map.
WH: When you look back on the stories you wrote for your first collection, before the advent of protease inhibitors or most other effective HIV medications, do you still tap into the same raw emotions you had at the time?
JC: Because I have personal experiences associated with some of the early stories, they still have the power over me to elicit the same reaction. I think that someone who'd gone through the same experiences and was still alive, if they were reading the stories for the first time, they might be able to summon up the same experience and think, "That's what it was really like."
WH: For gay men who have come out in the past decade, the early years of the epidemic are something they never experienced first-hand. How do you think they'll relate to your stories?
JC: I hope that they might look at it as a little bit of a historical document. I don't find any problem with that, because I want it as a record of what happened. I hope that a young reader picking up the book will say, "Oh, so that's what it was like back then," but I also think that young gay men today might still find a lot of relevance in these stories, grappling with the same issues of moving to a new city; creating family and friends and relationships; and struggling with change.
Wayne Hoffman is the author of Hard: A Novel.
