Love in the Light

His words, fired in barrages of grief and anger, were an odd contradiction to the serenity of the afternoon, like war in the ebullience of spring.

He said he had two years to live, five at the most, as sunlight filtered through the trees of his quiet yard, touching the amber petals of bougainvillea that cascaded over a low wall.

“I bury someone almost every two weeks,” he was saying, “and that has gone on for years. At least 200 of my friends have died.”

I remember being aware of life’s affirmations as he spoke, the far-off barking of a dog, the soft whack of a hammer on wood, the trill of a bird.

And I remember looking at the man, so alive with rage and talent, and wondering precisely what fears burned like magnesium in the darkest corners of his soul.

What heed to the ticking clock does he pay in the quiet hours of night when a brutal awareness of his own mortality flashes across the face of insomnia?

Four hundred years ago John Dryden wrote, “All human things are subject to decay, and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

But the intrusion of disease through an immune system that has failed is not the best way we die.

This is as much a column about me as it is Paul Monette, in whose West Hollywood garden we sat that sunny afternoon.

Monette, 44, is a gay man and a gifted writer who has tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the precursor of AIDS.

He lives, he says, in a surrealistic world--”on the moon,” he calls it--where time and reality are distorted by one’s vibrant awareness of life, and the shadowy proximity of death.

It was through this man that I came face to face with a prejudice so ingrained in my generation that it is almost invisible, the way small flowers pale in comparison to the abundance in Paul’s garden.

It has taken me awhile to face it.

I am not a man without compassion, despite small angers that surface within the boundaries of my work.

I have wondered with growing discomfort why so gentle an emotion as love should have released so deadly a plague as AIDS, and I bristle at the notion of God’s vengeance.

But, still, I have done little in this space to convey my own growing horror toward a disease that has killed 300,000 people in the world since 1980.

Why haven’t I employed this forum to clang alarm bells down Spring Street and into the valleys and canyons, and toward the clustered communities of the desert?

I can only blame that reluctance on a prejudice planted without hostility by those who shaped my attitudes with the same clay passed on by their progenitors.

They are them, we said, and we are us. We drank to that difference with indifference, and watched from the safety of our own sexual orientation the shadows that fell over another.

This began to change for me when I came across Monette’s book. It is called “Borrowed Time,” and is about the death of his “beloved friend” for 10 years, Roger Horowitz.

Horowitz died of AIDS in 1986. “Borrowed Time” is not only a haunting chronicle of the years Paul and Roger spent together, but a history of the “gay cancer,” whose fatal cells continue to creep insidiously around the globe.

Few books I have ever read are more compelling or more beautifully composed than this. “Borrowed Time” is simultaneously full of sorrow and love, and a pain of loss that claws at the heart.

Where once I might have thought of love between two men as a disquieting anomaly, I can only think of it now in terms of the feeling Paul and Roger must have had for one another.

Was it any less than mine for my Joanne?

“I am only saying,” Monette writes, “that I loved him . . . (and) . . . that love became the only untouched shade in the dawning fireball.”

It was after I read “Borrowed Time” that I sat with Monette in the filtered sunlight of his back yard and listened to his rage of grief and loss, directed now toward the indifference that continues to characterize the spread of AIDS.

“We all have a lot of relearning and evolving to do,” Monette said, as a soft breeze stirred the petals of the flowers. “The most we can achieve is to understand that all men are our brothers.”

What I have come to understand, I guess, is that Paul’s pain is my pain, and his grief my grief. What we own, we own together and what we lose, we lose together.

The man grows older, but the man keeps learning. We are indeed brothers, and it’s time I took my brother’s hand.