Monette, Paul Landry

(b. 16 October 1945 in Lawrence, Massachusetts; d. 10 February 1995 in West Hollywood, California), autobiographer, poet, and novelist who wrote two influential works on modern American gay life.

Monette, the son of Paul Monette, a truck driver and dispatcher for a coal company, and Jackie Monette, began his memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992) with his unhappy childhood in Andover, Massachusetts, fifteen miles north of Boston. He felt “invisible,” not only because he struggled with his homosexuality, of which he became aware at an early age, but also because his parents focused their attention on his younger brother, Robert, who was born unable to walk.

Despite his unhappiness, Monette’s wit and charm made him popular at school. He won scholarships to the Phillips Academy in Andover, from which he graduated in 1963, and to Yale University, where he majored in English and started writing poetry. The summer before his senior year in college Monette went to Cambridge University in England on a fellowship and then traveled in Europe. During that summer he wrote his first novel, “The Beautiful Brick Day,” which was not published. Monette maintained a high profile at Yale, but he felt emotionally isolated, experiencing what he described as an “extended nervous breakdown.” Although he found refuge in writing poetry, Monette wrote in Becoming a Man, “I would have gladly given up being a writer if I could’ve been queer out loud.”

After receiving a B.A. degree in 1967, Monette stayed at Yale for another year on a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship.

For the next two years he taught eleventh grade at Cheshire Academy in central Connecticut, leaving after a sexual relationship with a male student became a near scandal. From 1970 to 1976 Monette lived in Boston and taught at Milton Academy and Pine Manor College. His sexual conflict reached its height in the early 1970s, when he dated several women and underwent therapy, neither of which eased his torment. He finally accepted his homosexuality in 1974, when he met and fell in love with Roger Horwitz, a Harvard-educated attorney who also had a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

Monette’s poetry collection The Carpenter at the Asylum was published in 1975, and he stopped teaching in 1976 to write a novel. Two years later, in 1978, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, the first of Monette’s six published novels, appeared. The novel’s explicit gay themes forced him to come out to his parents. In 1977 Monette and Horwitz moved to Los Angeles, where Monette embarked on a full-time writing career. None of his screenplays was produced, but he published novelizations of hit movies, including Scarface (1983).

Monette and Horwitz spent some ten good years together, surviving a “ruinous affair” Monette had with another man in 1981. Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in March 1985. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) chronicles Horwitz’s diagnosis through his death from cryptococcal meningitis in October 1986. There were occasional moments of hope. On the “front lines” of the AIDS battle, Horwitz was among the first to try every new drug rumored to be promising. These twenty months, however, were marked mainly by his deteriorating health and repeated hospitalizations, a battery of drugs and intravenous injections, an eye infection that left him nearly blind, and the deaths from AIDS of numerous friends and acquaintances.

Unsparingly documenting Monette’s personal tragedy, Borrowed Time humanizes the fear, anger, love, sorrow, and enormous loss of the AIDS epidemic. Nominated in 1989 for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, the memoir joins Randy Shilts’s reportage And the Band Played On (1987) as one of the most important and widely read books about the epidemic. Monette also memorialized Horwitz in a volume of poetry, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog (1988). This volume and much of his other poetry are collected in West of Yesterday, East of Summer (1994). AIDS also transformed Monette’s fiction. His earlier novels are lighter genre exercises with gay protagonists, the comic Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll and the 1982 mystery Lightfall, for example. His later novels, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991), are more serious political considerations of how AIDS altered gay men’s lives.

In contrast to the invisibility he felt in his youth, Monette was one of the most visible spokespersons in the fight against AIDS, even as his own health began to fail from the disease in the early 1990s. In his writings, speeches, and television and radio appearances, he expressed anger and frustration at the indifference of the government and the media and the generally slow response to the health crisis. Raised an Episcopalian, Monette became an atheist and a vocal critic of organized religion, especially of the Vatican. He often spoke in favor of the radical AIDS protest movement.

In 1993 Becoming a Man won the National Book Award for nonfiction. In a tribute to Monette in the Los Angeles Times on 19 February 1995, Robert Dawidoff called Becoming a Man “the ultimate coming-out story, that genre so central to gay and lesbian literature.” Monette wanted to be identified as a gay writer. He once told a reporter: “You have to understand that I spent twenty years being turned down because my work was considered ‘too gay.’ Which I came to regard as a compliment, and proof I was on the right track” (Last Watch of the Night, 1994). In addition to novels, autobiographies, and poetry, Monette’s prolific output included a play, Just the Summers (unproduced and unpublished), and a fable, Sanctuary: A Tale of Life in the Woods, published posthumously in 1997.

After losing another companion, a Hollywood casting agent named Stephen F. Kolzak, in 1990, Monette developed a relationship with Winston Wilde, a general contractor. Monette died of AIDS complications in 1995. He is buried at Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, next to Horwitz.

Monette’s two memoirs are testimonials to the major themes of the modern gay American experience, coming out and AIDS. His mission, he told an audience at the State University of New York at Oswego when he received an honorary degree in 1992, was “to serve witness to the calamity that has befallen my brothers.”

Monette’s papers are at the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Los Angeles, Library. Monette’s two memoirs and Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994) give the most complete biographical details of the writer’s life, although for privacy Monette changed certain names in these books. Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times (both 12 Feb. 1995). A 1997 documentary written and directed by Monte Bramer, Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, includes footage of Monette’s last years.

Jeffrey H. Chen