Free Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath by Andrew Holleran

scientific certainty what’s there, we tend to ignore it altogether. Not these people. The Greeks, the Etruscans, the Egyptians believed what Europe, upstairs, tried to forget, and America seems to have refused to contemplate: The Nude and The Netherworld.
    It’s five o’clock. Outside the sun has set. As I walk down the steps buttoning my coat, I feel the sharp stab of life that comes with the cold wind, the sight of the city after the museum. Welcome back to the world of fear and groaning, AIDS and the New York Post, doctors’ offices and vials of blood. It is more shocking than leaving a church. Life, with its competition and decay, fills Fifth Avenue. I am supposed to telephone a friend who lives on the Lower East Side in a neighborhood populated by young men who resemble the portrait of Juan de Pareja in this museum. He has for the past few years been photographing them and has amassed a collection of his own that the museum is not interested in. Tonight Junior is coming over for a photographic session. I’m invited to watch. Strange. One used to sleep with Junior, but now you watch a friend take his picture. The whole city’s a museum now. We’re all voyeurs or exhibitionists. Once at this museum, I saw a fat man walking around the paintings with a beautiful youth in tow, and when I went down to the Club Baths later that evening, I passed a room whose door was open, looked in, and there they were: the fat man lying against the wall, an impresario displaying his concubine, a beauty whose bored air in the museum was replaced here by a sexual leer, full knowledge of his priapic power in this red-lighted chamber: Caravaggio with poppers. Tonight it is simply to be photographs. I reach the pay phone and dial the number. The trees of Central Park form a dark crosshatch against the pale orange sky. The wind is turning bitter. My friend does not answer. The museum behind me is closed by now, the city before me darkening as night falls. I hang up the phone and stand there, not knowing where to go.

Talking to O.
    T HE FIRST PLACE I saw O. was Central Park—one sunny spring Sunday in the early seventies, after dancing all Saturday night, regrouping with friends the next day in an apartment on Madison Avenue, and then strolling west. The drummers were beating their bongos around Bethesda Fountain, the nannies from Park Avenue were watching their boys push sailboats across the pond, and clones were converging on the Rambles to cruise, when O.’s retinue was spotted on the horizon of blossoming apple trees. He was a man of medium height, with thick black hair, black eyes, and black mustache—of Hungarian and Turkish parentage. He spoke in a deep, resonant voice, slowly, with a pronounced Turkish-British accent that was, depending on his emphasis, capable of being either very funny or very serious. He had, even on a sunny Sunday in Central Park, surrounded by blossoms, a slightly melancholy, weary air—in those dark eyes, in that rich voice, was a sense of the difficulties of life. When he urged members of his entourage who split off that afternoon to go their separate ways to “Call me tomorrow, at the gallery!” “Don’t forget Tuesday night, La Escuelita!” “Irene is coming to town on Wednesday, let’s have dinner!” in each conventional exhortation there was an urgency, a seriousness, that might have characterized a father telling his child to watch out crossing the street and be home in time for dinner. This impression was not far off: O. had brought most of these people from a former life in London and ran a gallery with which several were connected—a gallery that sent O. traveling a lot. But when he was at home in New York, it was at his place that all of them got together.
    Food was only part of it. An evening at O.’s involved, above all, conversation—with people one had never met: journalists from Athens, an artist from Mexico City, an old boyfriend of O.’s from Rome. His circle—a circle of