Jun 13, 2008  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

Literature, whether fiction or non-fiction, connects us to our history in a way that no textbook or Powerpoint presentation can. A newly released essay collection “Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath,” by renowned gay author Andrew Holleran, brings us viscerally back to the sights, sounds and smells of New York in the 1980s during the earliest years of the epidemic. 

First published in 1988 and originally titled “Ground Zero,” this classic of AIDS literature has been out of print for a decade. Containing 10 pieces that weren’t in the previous edition and a new introduction, this volume describes and preserves a critical period of gay history for current and future generations.

Twenty years ago, long before Sept. 11, he chose the title “Ground Zero,” “because it felt as if AIDS had exploded in New York like a bomb among gay men and left a crater in our lives,” Holleran writes, “… many people died; others took care of them; still others organized. Everybody was afraid.”

In the ’80s, Holleran, born in 1944, wrote a column called “New York Notebook” for Christopher Street magazine. Before AIDS hit, his columns dealt with “art exhibits, dance clubs … and other minor issues of urban gay life,” he writes, “Then, around 1982, something called the ‘new gay cancer’ appeared. I was not sure how to write about it.”

AIDS has claimed the lives of 450,000 gay men as well as 22 million others, according to the press materials for “Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited.” Despite these grim numbers, many in this country (since the development of anti-retroviral medications in the mid-1990s and a lessening stigma against people with HIV and AIDS) are much less fearful of the virus than they were in the disease’s early days.

THOSE INITIAL YEARS, though, were a much different picture, and one that comes across strongly in Holleran’s writing.

He wrote the seminal gay novel “The Dancer from the Dance” in 1978. This work, often compared to definitive Jazz Age work “The Great Gatsby,” is a vivid, romantic portrait of gay life in the discos of New York and the beaches of Fire Island during the ’70s. Yet, when his friends kept getting AIDS and dying in droves, Holleran no longer saw the point of writing fiction. 

“Each time one tried to outline … a novel, one could not imagine the plot that would stand for, or include, all the stories one heard every day happening … to friends … stories that broke the heart, if the heart was not anesthetized already,” Holleran writes.

At the start of World War I, Henry James “abandoned fiction altogether … that elaborate manor house of tales and metaphors — and went to London to visit soldiers back from the front,” Holleran observes. Just as James realized that writing was irrelevant when faced with the horrors of war, Holleran writes “so now the act of writing seemed of no help whatsoever for a simple reason: writing could not produce a cure.”

“Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited” is an invaluable record of a time of terror. Its essays range from “Tragic Drag” a tribute to the late-Charles Ludlam to “Cleaning My Bedroom,” which quotes from Holleran’s 1970s journals. 

“Sitting by the pool with T … Rosa stoned … singing, ‘My man loves my big dick, and the bigger it gets the more he likes it,’” Holleran writes in his journal. This seems only summer sassiness, until Holleran comments on the entry. “The first person is alive; the second is dead, but he lives again, … in the bawdy song.”

Combining wit, elegy, understatement and reportage, Holleran creates words to describe an epidemic that defies language. In “Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited” all who died and all who survived live on.