Summary:

Headcase explores themes of mental health, mental illness, and the experience of mental health care services by members of the LGBTQ community. The editors state, “We initially conceptualized Headcase in 2014 as a curated collection of personal pieces including essays, poems, illustrations, and photographs by writers and artists both established and new.” (p. xxviii) They further decided to include a broad array of patient, provider, social, racial, and ethnic perspectives to “present a broader, more in depth, and balanced conversation.” (p. xxviii)  
 
Schroeder and Theophano divide their anthology into five topical sections: (1) conversations about health and illness, (2) stories of survival, (3) encounters of a mad kind, (4) pushing boundaries, and (5) the poetics of mental health and wellness. Among pieces in the first section, Arlene Istar Lev’s “Queer Affirmative Therapy” (p. 12) introduces a concept that appears repeatedly throughout the book. Unlike traditional conversion therapy, which tries to “cure” gay persons, or even the more neutral DSM V approaches, queer affirmative therapy not only accepts LGBTQ identities, but considers them normal healthy variants. Fidelindo Lim’s and Donald Brown’s more personal essay, “Sa Kanyan Saring Mga Salita” (p. 38), explores the gay experience in Filipino culture. Among the sad stories in section two, Chana Williams tells the tale of her mother’s lobotomy as a treatment for depression and lesbian relationships. Lobotomy also appears in “Fix Me Please, I’m Gay” (section three, p. 169), where psychologist Guy Albert discusses the era of conversion therapy.  

In addition to essays, the conversation in Headcase includes poems, artwork (see, for example, Gabrielle Jordan Stein’s “This Work Is About Digested Socks,” p. 156), a suite of black-and-white images), a series of glyphs, and even a graphic story about J.R. Sullivan Voss’ attempts to fit into society as a trans-man, “Sisyphus (Or: Rocks Fall and Everyone Dies.” (p. 88) In the final section, Guy Glass presents an excerpt of his play, “Doctor Anonymous,” about the 1972 American Psychiatric Association meeting in which a closeted gay psychiatrist wearing a mask  asserted the normality of gay identity. (p. 260) To contemporary viewers, the most shocking revelation in the play is the fact that at that time homosexuality was considered a mental disorder and conversion therapy was a standard practice.  

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This extraordinary book is ostensibly "about" a doctor caring for persons with HIV/AIDS. That it is, but it is also a book containing multiple texts. It is a doctor's personal journey toward understanding the multiple meanings of HIV/AIDS for those who have it and those who care for them. It is the story of a physician, an Indian, born in Ethiopia to Christian expatriate teachers, in America since 1980, now in Johnson City, Tennessee, still trying to determine the meaning of "home."

It is, at the same time, a glorious pastoral account of practicing medicine in Tennessee--here making a house call to Vicki and Clyde, whose trailer is perched on the side of a mountain, now traveling through the Cumberland Gap to a cinder-block house to see Gordon, another native son who has come home to die. On still another level it is the story of a man trying to understand what it is like to be gay; a man trying to integrate his passion for his work with his life at home; a man trying to explain to his wife (and sadly, even some of his peers) his commitment to caring for persons infected with the virus.

The portraits Verghese draws of his patients are extraordinary: local boys now men, now sick, returning to Johnson City to be cared for by family; a woman infected by her husband who also infected her sister; a highly-respected couple from a nearby city seeking privacy, even from their grown children. Finally, part of what makes Verghese such a fine writer is that he is able to do so without romanticizing his relationships with his patients, and without self-congratulatory accolades for the kind of care he provides.

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Many of these poems are confessional accounts of gay love and sexuality. Another group clearly draw on the author’s clinical experiences as a physician. A few poems (e.g. "For You All Beauty", "Her Final Show") mix those broad categories in talking about the care of AIDS patients.The 11 short poems under the sequence title "Ten Patients, and Another" are the most clinical. They mimic clinical presentations during rounds in several ways: individual poems under patient initials--Mrs. G, John Doe; opening lines with the patient’s age, race, and gender; even presenting complaints with hospital shorthand. For example, in "Kelly" Campo begins: "The patient is a twelve-year-old white female. / She’s gravida zero, no STD’s. / She’s never even had a pelvic. One / month nausea and vomiting. No change / in bowel habits. No fever, chills, malaise." But in this poem and others of the sequence, the clinical gradually turns to the personal: "Her pelvic was remarkable for scars / At six o’clock, no hymen visible, / Some uterine enlargement. Pregnancy / Tests positive times two. She says it was / Her dad. He’s sitting in the waiting room."The cumulative effect of the series is a kind of horror at hospital cases and how they get there: a three-year-old who’s ingested cocaine, a homeless man with eyelids frozen shut, one man beaten, another man shot, an abused wife, a suicide, a drug overdose. To feel empathy for these cases, and to turn them into poetry, Campo has practiced the art of medicine as a form of love.Campo also writes as a patient who has experienced a serious arm fracture and subsequent threat of cancer in the 16-poem sequence "Song Before Dying." This changes his perspective on care-giving, as he writes in "IX. The Very Self." " . . . more dying waits / Downstairs for me. I almost hear their groans. / Same hunger, bones. Same face we all consumed. / As I examine them, I find the tomb / Toward which they lead. I know it is my own."

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In this remarkable book of essays, Rafael Campo explores his coming-of-age as a gay Cuban-American physician. He presents us with a series of stories illuminating his childhood and college experience, skillfully interweaving them with narratives from his life as a young physician, especially his interactions with patients dying of AIDS. We follow the author from Amherst College, through Harvard Medical School, to his medical residency in San Francisco. At each step Campo is a close observer of human character and motivation--his own and others. At each step he asks, "Who am I? Who am I becoming?"

He discovers his identity as a gay man, an Hispanic man, a poet, and, finally, as a healer--not four identities, but one. He discovers, too, the healing power of connecting with patients, the "poetry of healing," something far different from the orthodox image of the physician-as-detached-or-distanced from his patients. Though Campo rejects the concept that physicians are agents for social change ("naive," he calls it), he brings sensitivity and poetry to bear on his continued search for "some way to give."

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In his third collection, Campo presents visceral poems that grow organically from the body: his own body and the bodies of patients, lovers, family, and friends. He doesn't write about being a gay physician of Cuban background--rather he crafts poems that address pain, love, and memory within a metrical framework so seamlessly that readers might feel they are healing, seeking, and singing alongside him.

Outstanding poems include "Sonnet in the Cuban Way," "The Return," "The Dream of Loving Cuba," "Madonna and Child," "Baby Pictures" (a prose-poem sequence), "A Poet's Education," "The Changing Face of Aids," and "Recognition." Section V, "Lorca," gives us Campo's translations of Federico Garcia Lorca's Sonnets of Dark Love.

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Terrified of dying from AIDS but even more afraid of living with it, the title character of this romantic comedy--a gay actor/waiter-- makes the ultimate safe choice: to give up sex entirely. Determined to find both a substitute for sex and the meaning of life in the cruel meaninglessness of an epidemic, Jeffrey embarks on a journey through a picaresque and postmodern landscape. What he discovers is that while his desperate renunication of human connection may remove him from the physical experience of death, it will not protect him from the emotional experience of loss.

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Constructed as a triptych, the novel chronicles several generations of a Scottish family, the McLeod’s, across three Junes: Part I Collies, 1989; Part II Upright, 1995; and Part III, Boys 1999. In the first part, patriarch Paul McLeod assuages his grief and loneliness following his wife’s death by traveling to Greece on a tour. He tells the tour guide about his wife’s lung cancer: "A terrible ordinary death, you might say. Or an ordinary terrible death." (p. 23) Paul’s unrequited yearning for Fern, a young artist, heralds a succession of missed opportunities for expressions of love involving the McLeod’s.

The second part is a first person narrative by Fenno, Paul’s eldest son. Fenno, the gay owner of a Manhattan bookstore, cares for Malachy, a New York Times music critic, who has AIDS. Paul’s death brings the three sons together (Fenno and his younger twin brothers David, a veterinarian who lives in Scotland with his wife Lillian, and Dennis, a chef, who arrives from France with his wife and children).

The family relationships are complicated, and David’s infertility leads to revelations about strengths and weakness of various family members. Meanwhile, Mal’s illness and his decisions about controlling the end of his life, also give Fenno insight into loyalties and family secrets.

The last section, a coda, reverts to third person narration and reintroduces Fern, now widowed due to a freak accident and also pregnant. Themes of parenthood, responsibility and relationships continue to be developed.

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George, a strong introverted African-American man and Guilio, a delicate and flighty Italian man, have been lovers for many decades. Guilio's deteriorating heart condition strains their relationship. Guilio is haunted by childhood death fantasies and George becomes frustrated trying to help him to deal with his illness and his fears. In the end, however, George is comforted by Guilio, who has sensed his pain and grief over being the surviving partner.

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This work is an AIDS play based on the Faust legend. The main character, Simon, is both homosexual and homophobic, a combination which the author believes to be less threatening to the "latent homophobes in the audience." Simon strikes a deal with the devil in order to reverse his HIV positive antibody status. The bargain struck entails deceiving and then abandoning his friends and changing his sexual identity. The vehicle for Simon's change is an "Andrew Dice Clay-like" nightclub act, the source of the play's dark humor.

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This beautifully crafted short novel chronicles a twenty year period, from the early 1970's to the early 1990's, in the life of a law professor, Max Strong, and the interesting highbrow characters who influence his life. Most notable among those characters are a college friend, now a world renowned architect, Charlie Swan, and Charlie's lover, Toby. The final sections of this novel offer a remarkable account of Toby's death from AIDS and Charlie's reaction to his death.

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