Monette, Paul

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MONETTE, Paul

MONETTE, Paul (b. 16 October 1945; d. 10 February 1995), writer, activist.

Paul Monette is a complex figure who combined love and anger, talent and ambition, insecurity and arrogance to forge a rich life and a significant body of work. Though he will be remembered as a central voice of the AIDS crisis, AIDS did not make his career. He had produced a number of books, in particular the promising first novel Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978), before AIDS became the primary reality of his life and work in the mid-1980s.

Monette divided his life into two parts, as his National Book Award–winning memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992) indicates. His early life—until his mid-twenties—was a suffocating time, full of torment and hiding. He was the product of the repressive Puritan culture of New England. Born into a lower-middle-class family in Lawrence, Massachusetts, at the end of World War II, Monette saw himself as the quintessentially repressed child of the 1950s and 1960s: "Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at all….That's how the closet feels, once you've madeyour nest in it and learned to call it home. Self-pity becomes your oxygen" (Becoming a Man, p. 1). As a day student on scholarship at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and at Yale University, Monette subjugated his body's urges to his mind's queries, excelling as a student but growing little as a man. He watched the Adonis culture of prep school as an outsider, and his chronicling of that experience in Becoming a Man makes that book a useful, enlightening contribution to contemporary understandings of the gay male experience in the second half of the twentieth century.

The second part of Monette's life began when he met Roger Horwitz in Boston in September 1974. Horwitz, who grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household in suburban Chicago and earned both a Ph.D. in comparative literature and a law degree from Harvard University, was an unassuming, brilliant man who supported Monette emotionally and who believed in him and his work unflinchingly. The two men left Boston for Los Angeles in 1977, in part so that Monette could pursue a career as a Hollywood writer. The twelve-year relationship with Horwitz was the great touchstone in Monette's life in his struggle to become an actualized, functioning gay man. Monette expresses this at the end of Becoming a Man, taking an inventory of his life before meeting Horwitz from the point of view of a decade after losing him to AIDS: "That much fate I believe in, the tortuous journey that brings you to love, all the twists and near misses. Somehow it's all had a purpose, once you're finally real" (Becoming a Man, pp. 277–278).

That second act of Monette's life developed into the horror, loss, and intensely lived struggle of the first wave of the AIDS crisis. Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (1988) and Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988), eulogizing and documenting the death of Horwitz, are surely two of the most moving and important works on the early AIDS era. They are among the earliest and most eloquent personal testimonies of the epidemic, putting the faces of gay men on the cold, impersonal statistics of AIDS. As Monette emerged as a public figure, especially with the "crossover" success of Borrowed Time, his life and work became more politicized. He wrote in the preface for Love Alone, "What is written here is only one man's passing and one man's cry, a warrior burying a warrior. May it fuel the fire of those on the front lines who mean to prevail, and of the friends who stand in the fire with them. We will not be bowed out or erased by this….Pityus not" (Love Alone, p. xiii).

Monette had two major relationships after Roger Horwitz's death, and those bonds—with Stephen Kolzak and Winston Wilde—allowed Monette to combine his life and his work, as he wrote two AIDS-focused novels, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991), which are partly based on his life with Kolzak, and two memoirs, Becoming a Man and Last Watch of the Night (1994) , while he was with Wilde. Perhaps the overarching questions of the last decade of Monette's life are these: How did the battleground of AIDS come to dominate his life, and how did the urgency of "dying by inches" (Becoming a Man, p. 2) shape his creativity and his emotional life as a gay man struggling with the ravages of illness?

Monette died at his home in Los Angeles in February 1995 of complications from AIDS, a few months before his fiftieth birthday. The last years of his life have been chronicled in an award-winning documentary, Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End.