Summary:

The first part of this novel presents a detailed picture of the Jewish Californian Cooper family, centering on the sixty-year-old Louise, who is dying of breast cancer. Her husband, Nat, is unfaithful, and, she suspects, only loves her when she is at her weakest and most sick. Her daughter, April, is a lesbian folk singer who becomes pregnant with the help of a gay male friend and a turkey baster. Danny, the son, is also gay, living in New York with Walter, his lover, who is becoming increasingly detached and obsessed with internet sex groups.

Louise considers herself lucky, though, compared with her younger sister Eleanor, partially disabled by childhood polio, disorganized and ill-groomed and married to Sid, whom Louise finds deeply unattractive. Eleanor's son is a sociopathic drug addict, and her daughter has ovarian cancer caused by Eleanor's taking DES (diethylstilbesterol) in pregnancy. She sends Louise newspaper cuttings about the causes of homosexuality and the dangers of AIDS.

The first part having established the complex dynamics and histories of the family's relationships, the second brings the entire family together in the crisis of Louise's final illness and death (a reaction to chemotherapy drugs causes severe chemical burns and she dies in a burn unit in a San Francisco hospital). After her death, the new dynamics of the family are established, and Louise's son and daughter conclude that their mother had "a terrible life" (p. 261).

The short third part shows that no such conclusion is possible, that even those closest to us remain terribly but fascinatingly unknowable. A flashback to a point just before Louise's final illness describes her attempt to convert to Catholicism and a brief moment in which she experiences a marvelous sense of complete harmony.

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Summary:

Follows the last few months in the life of Wendal Bailey, an African-American bisexual male in his early 30's. Examined in this drama are Wendal's two worlds; one which revolves around his lovers, the other based in the home of his extended family - his mother, father, "aunt", brother and 12-year-old son. After nearly dying of AIDS, Wendal comes home to regain his strength and find comfort, but a festive evening celebrating his return turns into a disaster. Shortly after this debacle, the only support and love he finds as he lies in his death- bed comes from an unexpected source - his previously stern, disapproving and homophobic father.

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This AIDS play removes "the fourth wall" of a waiting room at an HIV clinic. Using numerous scenes the audience is able to sense how over a period of time a group of strangers thrown together by circumstance "travel the way to friendship, and, finally to family." (from author's note) Juxtaposed through the characters in this play are boundary issues dealing with differences and similarities among gay/straight, rich/poor, black/white, sick/healthy responses to HIV/AIDS.

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The narrator, William, is the younger brother of Clive, an enigmatic high school "hippie" who also is a mathematical genius. Most of the story deals with their relationship within a peace activist family living in an affluent Cleveland suburb in the early 1970’s. Two of Clive’s friends, Sandra (presumably his lover) and Elliot, figure prominently in the story. In fact, it is from a secret language which Clive and Elliot share that the title is derived. They also share a sexual relationship and are "discovered" by Clive’s father. This event sends this affable story into a hyperspeed tragic ending, placing William fifteen years later at the bedside of his brother who is dying from complications of AIDS.

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The nurse reflects on the men in the room with "B" for "blood hazard" on their door. They are too weak to make love, but they still take care of one another: "as they press cool cloths to foreheads, / pass tissues for sticky green phlegm." Being only human, when she enters their room and they cough, she confesses that "something inside me stiffens." Yet she sees them as "half a butterfly on gray cement . . . . " She cares and she wants them to know that she cares, these men who "are migrating back to the cocoon, / the place where brown masks / protect the unbeautiful.

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Summary:

This poem takes the form of a guided imagery, one woman talking to another about sexual love between two women. She urges the listener Barbara to picture this, nuzzle, touch, or imagine that, selecting sights and scents found in the natural world to guide this sensory projection from the known to the unknown (lilacs wet with rain, ocean foam, the feel of poppies, the smell of wild mint). The entire guided imagery is achieved without explicit sexual imagery, yet the poem is deeply sensual.

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A one-person performance of thirteen characters during a single night on a hospice unit. Portrayed are patients, family members and professional caregivers. With minimal lighting and few props the actor/writer, who has been a hospice volunteer for many years, is able to capture in words and action the poignancy and humor of caring for the dying.

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The male speaker describes being brought by a woman friend to a lesbian bar, on a mission "to educate me on the issue / of my own unnecessariness" where he feels quite out of place and uncomfortable. He is startled because he thinks he sees his mother there, "happy to be alive again / after her long marriage / to other people's needs . . . . " The lesbian who looks like his mother knows what she wants, and doesn't hesitate to take it.

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The subtitle of this collection is "A Voyage to the New World." In the first section, Campo begins his voyage to a new world of self-understanding by experimenting with the language of family, intimacy, healing, and magic. In "I Don’t Know What I Can’t Say, or, Genet on Keats," the poet writes: "There are two sides to life. The side where life / Remains unconsummated, reticent" and the other, which is "the act itself laid bare--a hand / Inside the lion’s mouth . . . . " Campo chooses the latter.In the next section, his voyage takes him through several connected series of 16-line sonnets; each of these series plumbs the depths of a different intimate relationship: Song for My Grandfather, for My Father, for My Lover, and for Our Son. Some of Campo’s finest poems are in this section, including (just a handful from the many) "Grandfather’s Will," "Anatomy Lesson," "Planning a Family," "My Father’s View of Poetry," "Translation," and "Political Poem."In the final section, Campo brings the insight of a seasoned voyager to his day-to-day life experience as a gay Latino physician: "To teach me my own life, to share my grief." ("Planning a Family," p. 49)

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Writer Paul Monette's first-person account of living through his lover Roger's last nineteen months with AIDS, from diagnosis to death (1986), told in language that is poetic and highly articulate. The couple faces not only progressive physical degeneration (Monette calls time with AIDS a "minefield") but also the agonizing issues of truthtelling with their families, friends gay and straight, and the world, in "the double closet of the war."

Fact-finding is a constant obsession in this story, not only about who is positive and who knows, but also in the rapidly-changing medical arena, where through Monette's extraordinary efforts Roger becomes the first person west of the Mississippi to be put on the drug, AZT. Monette is so devoted a caregiver that he often loses himself--a problem he solves in part by turning to the subject of AIDS as a writer.

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