Free Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette Page A

at the San Vicente corner of the Boys' Town strip, had been postmodernized within an inch of its life. Charlie Milhaupt called it the Tallulah Bank.
    Many of those in power considered Sheldon the most important—or at least the most visible—gay man in California politics. He was close to Governor Brown and had addressed the Democratic Convention in 1980. Yet his constituency in the gay community was a curious one, since he also owned the trendiest bathhouse in southern California, wildly popular with the gym and disco crowd and noted for barring the door to men who were not "hot" enough. Sheldon's world was rife with small-town Adonises who came to L.A. for the good life. Roger and I always got rather tongue-tied around these men, feeling ourselves far too cerebral for the disco beat that roared through Sheldon's house. The two brothers lived in very different lanes of the freeway.
    Yet it was a matter of some crisis in the family that both of Al's sons had turned out gay. Sheldon didn't come out to his father till '79, aged forty-eight, when he was made the centerpiece honoree at the first Center dinner. In saying yes to the testimonial he was already so far out that he had to tell his family. Of course they knew already, all of them, but knowing is very different from talking about it.
    In '77 Roger and I had been living together in Boston for two years, and my parents had welcomed him into the family with pretty open arms. But nobody ever said the word gay. My own point of no return occurred when my first novel was about to be published. I slipped a copy of the bound galleys to my parents, figuring they'd better know what was coming before the book hit the stores. They reacted predictably, I suppose—telling me they would have to sell their house and leave town, that I'd never hold a job again with this infamy to my name, and besides, my mother had the idea I wasn't really gay. Roger was just a phase, I guess.
    It's just an unavoidable mess, this coming-out business, and there don't appear to be any shortcuts through the emotions, though we try to make it easier for those who come after. Someday the process will be more human, perhaps, because we are open forever now, and people can't hate their children or themselves for that long.
    When Roger finally sat his father down to tell him he was gay, we had been living together for six years, so obviously happy that to everyone around us we were a hyphenate, Roger-and-Paul, such a unified field had we become. Yet despite Sheldon's status as a gay leader, despite Roger's depth of feeling and his grown-up marriage, the double knowledge had thrown their father into a terrible depression. Roger and Sheldon were half-brothers, Sheldon's mother having died a generation ago. When Al went home to Chicago and told his doctor the news was twice as bad as he'd thought— two sons now—the enlightened doctor rolled his eyes and made it plain that Al must have done something very wrong. Thanks, Doc. For the next year and a half Al couldn't look me in the face, couldn't speak my name or enter our house. We got through it and were all very close now, as close as Roger had come to be to my family, but that doesn't mean that getting there was fun.
    On January 22, Tuesday, Joel left a message on the machine: "Leo has AIDS." I called him back and learned that Leo was going into the hospital for tests. I remember getting very precise with Joel: There had been no diagnosis yet, it was still just speculation, in any case if was pre. I made the same pedantic distinction to Leo, as if the nightmare could be outsmarted with hairline distinctions, as if Leo could really care, feeling as wrung out as he did.
    On Thursday the twenty-fourth we had dinner in Beverly Hills with a motley cross-section of the extended family—Sheldon's ex-lover and his current lover, various in-laws and out-laws, maybe hi teen altogether. They were talking that night about a miracle drug that had just been announced,