Speaking From Experience : LAST WATCH OF THE NIGHT: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise, <i> By Paul Monette (Harcourt, Brace: $21.95; 320 pp.)</i>

Depending on who is remembering the event, it was a black lesbian or a Latin drag queen who hurled the first bottle that summer night. The particulars of the rioting that followed the 1969 police raid on a New York gay bar called Stonewall have since lapsed into the convenient shadows of legend. Twenty-five years later, the burning barricades that were part of a larger bonfire--the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, Women’s Liberation--have been paved over with the creamy concrete of parade ground.

The rapid flow of history can easily dislodge moments in time like Stonewall, sweeping them up into a tidier narrative of banner waving and chest beating. Or simply usurping them to sell beer and dance tickets. In his 12th book, Paul Monette probes the core of what lingers behind, beyond the tides of history and memory.

The 10 essays of “Last Watch of the Night” form the latest installment of his autobiographical writings and round out the trilogy that began with “Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir,” then “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story.” Writing between August, 1992, and New Year’s Eve, 1993, Monette was battling full-blown AIDS, “leashed to three separate IV drugs and a small mountain of oral medication.” Yet the resulting collection is not just a descriptive journal of disease and treatment. The broad range of the essays, from a portrait of his stalwart dog, Puck, to a meditation on the gravestones of his two lovers, attest to more cerebral ambitions. “What I wanted to do instead was look at the vectors of my life, the people and places and politics that had stuck with me, resonant still despite the deluge of the last twelve years of calamity. How had it changed the way I looked at things? Had anything survived intact? And did anything mean the same anymore?”

Yes and no. Widowed twice, Monette writes eloquently about loss. A lapsed atheist, Monette writes lucidly about belief. A veteran novelist, Monette writes acidly about the homophobic press. While he writes about change competently, substantive transformation is another issue. Monette has subtitled this collection, “Essays Too Personal and Otherwise,” and there’s the rub. Rather than speak from an experience, Monette tends to speak for it. Much of this has to do with the conventional way Monette employs the personal: Throughout the collection, “I” too easily lapses into “we,” which Monette uses to speak as the definitive voice of all lesbians and gay men. Throughout, this proves a handicap in addressing the broader contradictions that have sharpened in the last two years of political upheaval. These incongruities surfaced most clearly during the 1993 march on Washington, which Monette covers in his essay, “Mustering.”

After undergoing radiation treatment for Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his penis and his left thigh, Monette crosses the country with a volume of Sappho’s poetry. Surveying the masses of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans-gendered people assembled in the nation’s capital that weekend, Monette asks: “Would we leave no doubt that we were assembling here for patriotism’s sake?” He does so without irony, without even a pause to discuss the crimes that are being committed around the world in the name of American patriotism. Although Monette bemoans the relegation of people with AIDS to the background of that weekend (“That’s not what this march is about,” an organizer remarks), he eventually gets caught up in the festive swirl, and the deeper problems of the moment get swept under the rug: the hypocrisy of a lesbian and gay “civil rights” movement clamoring to join the American military even as the Pentagon drops another round of Tomahawk cruise missiles on Iraqi heads and rues only that “there were no CNN cameras there to record the strikes.”

Throughout these essays, Monette’s personal tone has trouble keeping up with the complexities of the issues he examines. Leafing through Sappho’s poetry on the flight to Washington, he muses on her legacy as a lesbian poet: “Even if all the books are burned, I thought, somehow the emotions survive.” Then he introduces a lukewarm argument against the idea that sexual identity is a social construction. “The post-structural theorists define what ‘knowing’ is, and it doesn’t include self-knowledge about sexual orientation.” Confused? So is Monette. “Doesn’t make any sense to me,” he writes, and then begs off by saying that his own “limited expertise is the history of the heart, and there are no breaks in its utterance through all written time.” Then he quotes some Sappho, as if this will clarify everything.

For all the emotionality Monette invokes, however, most of the essays in “Last Watch” feel strangely tepid. His command of literature is impressive, but Monette is more effective when he dusts away the canonical reveries and courts the vein-biting stealth of Joan Didion in “Getting Covered.” Uncovering his own battles with the press, both “alternative” and “mainstream,” Monette turns to the case of Tony Johnson, 14 years old and living with AIDS when his book, “A Rock and A Hard Place,” debuted. One reporter launched a cruel campaign to discredit Johnson, claiming that he was merely a publisher’s invention. While not surprised at some of the media’s more callous gibes, Monette’s indignation is righteous and sharp: “The disappearing of Tony Johnson’s account of the unaccountable world is rather more sinister still. Because it’s a way of denying AIDS as well as him. And a hundred years hence, when all the tabloid victims of 1993 will be dust and ashes, the names no longer ringing the teensiest bell, the course of the plague will still attract the bewildered gaze of history. And when the Elvis sightings no longer fire the populace, and everyone has chewed Howard Hughes’s two-foot fingernails to the quick, the storm troops of revisionism will trumpet their distortions from the rooftops.”

Yet Monette seems more concerned with retelling the grand narratives of history than questioning the monstrosity of the original text. “Always, you understand, the right wing questions our patriotism, as if the flag were all theirs as well as the Bible,” he writes in “The Politics of Silence.” If there is any doubt as to who owns such material, Monette closes the essay by quoting the national anthem. Rather than problemize the right wing’s Bible thumping and flag waving, he simply claims it as his own. “No one in America seemed to want to draw the circle that connected the World Trade Center bombing, the killing of a doctor at an abortion clinic in Florida, the standoff in Waco,” he complains in “Mustering.” “No one in America was interested in the rise of worldwide fundamentalism, the politics of retreat from the modern world.” Without distinguishing between the real assault on women’s reproductive rights and the media-imagined Islamophobia that billowed out of the World Trade Center that year, the links Monette is trying to make fall short.

By merely lumping events together into one glorious milkshake of homogeneity, the connections seem even more strained. “I didn’t think the Lincoln of my understanding would have had any trouble equating the Civil Rights struggle of people of color with the latter-day dreams of the gay and lesbian movement,” Monette writes, as the march swarms across the Lincoln Memorial. But the disparities in conflating these two struggles are often painfully evident and unexamined in Monette’s own writing: the African American woman with a “crisp white uniform and billowing apron worthy of Tara”; the thieving Asian cabdriver who “could have been Aziz in ‘A Passage to India,’ oversolicitous but not without charm.”

It’s easy enough to excuse such lapses by invoking the license of liberal individualism and personal testament. If “Last Watch of the Night” is about anything, it is about how a writer who hopes to be immortalized or at least remembered by each succeeding generation in a way that he himself defines. But Monette’s book exposes the limitations of conventional uses of the personal essay. His vision of history is seen from a solitary viewpoint that erases the diversity of voices that make history. Well-written though they are, what these essays fail to acknowledge is that there are more than a million beings in the human heart. Ultimately, “I” is just one of them.