BECOMING A MAN: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 22, 1992

From ""the cauldron of the plague"" comes a bitter memoir by the author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and six novels (Halfway Home, 1991, etc.). ""Twisted up with rage,"" Monette is urgent to tell his story: ""the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last hundred T cells."" He begins with his straight-A childhood, darkened by his brother being crippled by spina bifida. But the source of Monette's fury comes from growing up in ""the coffin world of the closet,"" losing a ""decade of being dead below the belt,"" and now finding himself a victim of what he calls ""the genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my brothers."" Clearly, Monette wants to berate and shock this ""Puritan sinkhole of a culture"" with crude language (""Roger was up to his tits in therapy"" is a printable example) and explicit accounts of his homosexual encounters, starting as a nine-year-old. After describing a one-night stand, he mockingly asks, ""Is this more than you want to know?' and then explains that a late lover advised, ""rub their faces in it."" Monette does. Later, he writes, ""I was so sick of hearing myself talk about sexuality--hetero, homo, and otherwise."" But despite the pose of no-holds-barred honesty, the author's diatribe offers only a predictable view of his elite schools (Andover and Yale) and little on gender theory beyond the statement that ""gay is a kind of sensibility."" The offhand prose veers from the flip (""I try not to be gayer-than-thou about bi"") to the melodramatic (""I have to keep my later self on a short leash as I negotiate those hurricanes of feeling that propelled my time with women""). A deliberately self-absorbed manifesto from the AIDS battlefield, angrily slicing the world into us and them.

Pub Date: June 22, 1992

ISBN: 0060595647

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992

Categories: NONFICTION