San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Young queer activist comes of age as AIDS rages in New York, S.F.
Lambda award-winning author K.M. Soehnlein (“The World of Normal Boys”) draws upon his personal experience as a queer activist in 1980s New York in his latest novel, “Army of Lovers”— a Künstlerroman (coming-of-age story about an artist) set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic.
Paul, an aspiring writer just shy of 22, moves to New York from his family’s home in New Jersey. It may be just a bridge away, but for Paul it’s a world apart. He quickly joins ACT UP, a grassroots group working to end AIDS, and spends most of his time protesting and partying with his new chosen family. He occasionally returns to visit his biological family in New Jersey — “reversing the suburb-to-city passage that has framed the transformation of my life” — but they don’t understand his new life. Paul wants to discuss all the things you can’t talk about at the family dinner table: sex, politics, religion, activism, death.
It’s nearly impossible to resist novels about young artists moving to the big city, and “Army of Lovers” is no different. The New York that Paul arrives in is cheap enough to afford an apartment, one he can furnish with scrap furniture and an “embryonic CD collection,” but the price is violent homophobia in the streets and a government hell-bent on letting his community die. Paul may have arrived fresh-faced and naive, but he grows up at lightning speed as those in his community literally fight for their lives.
He lives with Derek, his stable, HIV-negative boyfriend; they work to make enough money to survive by day, and organize and make love by night. Readers who complain there’s not enough sex in literature will revel in the novel’s intimate scenes, which amplify the particularly fraught nature of queer sex during the AIDS epidemic. For Paul and his friends, ACT UP meetings aren’t just business, they’re “flirty, cruisey, full of eye contact and kisses, hugs hello and stronger hugs goodbye.”
There is plenty of sex, but none without the specter of death looming. Paul and his HIV-negative friends experience the guilt of being alive due to a “matter of math” — the luck of being born at the right time. He wants “sex without worry, without fear of death. I want gay sex like it used to be.”
While Paul is HIV-negative and initially fantasizes about being infected through unprotected sex, he ends up falling in love with Zack, an HIV-positive artist whose health takes a turn, and Paul’s fantasy transforms: “What I want now is to pull off the condom and flood Zack with uninfected seed, as if I could transfuse strength and crush death.”
When Zack moves to San Francisco, Paul comes to visit, noticing that it “looks like a city only half tamed” yet one “you could fall in love with fast.” He buys a knit cap at Community Thrift on Valencia, eats burritos and visits bars in the Castro. While the book takes place mostly in New York, it accomplishes that rare feat of making the reader nostalgic for both iconic cities.
Zack highlights the difference between the two: “In New York, AIDS feels hidden. Here, it’s out in the open,” adding, “They call San Francisco a retirement home for the young.”
Back in New Jersey, Paul’s mother becomes ill and dies, and he loses his friends one by one, some from AIDS, others from suicide. “The losses we think we’ve assimilated are actually extraordinary events we can hardly comprehend,” he writes, trying to contend with the compressed loss of this era. Even though I thought I knew where the novel would end, it took a turn that hit me like a freight train.
The title “Army of Lovers” perfectly encapsulates how love helps sustain activism. When Paul and his friends are busy fighting in the streets, they make sure it’s sexy and fun. Protests are offset by parties, wigs paired with weed. And amid all of the incredible loss, Soehnlein manages to capture the hallmark humor and wit of queer activism, like crashing a Republican fundraiser wearing Lesbians for Bush buttons.
He also portrays the unique way in which the devastation of the epidemic perversely created an intimate sense of community and solidarity. One of Paul’s friends says, “HIV has messed with our lives … but it also revived our lives, because we met, we fell in love, we got to know all of you.”
The major gripe with the novel is that it’s told from 2022, with Paul looking back on his life, yet uses the present tense and peppers in historical “notes to self.” The overall effect is distracting, and gives off an air of indecision around point of view, yet luckily the storytelling is strong enough to overcome this fault.
Ultimately, this is a novel that delivers on literature’s great themes of love and loss, and Paul’s greatest desire is one we can all relate to: “I want death to stop happening to everybody I love.”