Like a Love Story(100)

Here’s what I learned from Stephen: You are not alone and never will be, because you have a beautiful, constantly evolving history full of ghosts who are watching over you, who are proud of you. If you ever feel lonely, just look up at the sky. José and Walt and Judy Garland and Marsha P. Johnson are always with you, and so many more. Just ask them to listen, and they will. Tell your story until it becomes woven into the fabric of our story. Write about the joys and the pain and every event and every artist who inspires you to dream. Tell your story, because if you don’t, it could be wiped out. No one tells our stories for us. And one more thing. If you see an elderly person walking down the street, or across from you at a coffee shop, don’t look away from them, don’t dismiss them, and don’t just ask them how they’re doing. Ask them where they have been instead. And then listen. Because there’s no future without a past.





Author’s Note


I realized I was gay before I had a word for it, before I knew there were thriving gay communities. Like Reza, I was born in Iran, and I moved to New York from Canada when I was young. But unlike Reza, I wasn’t exposed to its gay community. All I knew of the feeling inside me was fear and shame. All I saw of gay life was death. I thought I had a choice between being myself and staying alive, which isn’t a choice at all. Either way, I wouldn’t truly be living. The generation I come from wasn’t old enough to be on the front lines at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, nor were we young enough to come of age when treatment was available. We were coming into our sexuality with fear drilled into us, and it worked. That fear protected me from making risky decisions, but it also made it difficult to accept myself, since for most of my youth I viewed my sexuality as a death sentence. Writing this book was a way for me to reconnect with the scared teenager who still lives somewhere inside me, and to thank the friends, family, artists, and activists who helped me on my journey from shame to acceptance.

My first exposure to a celebratory depiction of gay life came through, who else? Madonna. I fell in love with Madonna when her very first video was released. I made my parents take me to the Virgin Tour when I was way too young for it. I created a Madonna Room in our home as a place of worship, a place where I could be with the person who let me dream big and seemed to understand and accept me before even I did. Yes, a Madonna Room, and it would be over a decade before I would come out to my parents! She was so much a part of my life that she practically became a member of our family. So when she started to explicitly and courageously include queer life in her work, there was no way to shield me from it. She was also a portal into other queer art. Thanks to Madonna, I discovered filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar and artists like Keith Haring, and I learned about the underground ball scene. Thanks to Madonna, I saw queerness not as a death sentence, but as a community and an identity to be celebrated. My gratitude to her is boundless.

In high school and college, I was exposed to more queer culture. One high school teacher introduced me to gay films like Paris Is Burning, The Times of Harvey Milk, and Maurice. I started to read queer authors. The impact of these works, and of the mentors who shared them with me, cannot be understated. This book could never exist without the spiritual mentorship of all the storytellers who gave voice to queer life and to the AIDS era. Those men and women helped shape who I am long before the idea for this novel came to me, and they guided me as I researched this novel. I hope anyone who reads and likes this book uses it as a portal into further exploration, and is inspired to read the words of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Armistead Maupin, Randy Shilts, Paul Monette, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Sean Strub, Tony Kushner, Amy Hoffman, Tim Murphy, Patricia Powell, and Cleve Jones, to name a few, and then watches films like How to Survive a Plague, Longtime Companion, Parting Glances, Tongues Untied, BPM, Angels in America, and Torch Song Trilogy, to name a few.

This book is an ode to the heroes and heroines of the AIDS movement, activists who saved lives, without whom I and many others would likely have met different fates. While the protests depicted here are all real, I chose to fictionalize the activists themselves. I didn’t want to put words into the mouths of people I admire as much as Larry Kramer, Marsha P. Johnson, Sarah Schulman, Keith Haring, Peter Staley, and others. To them, and to anyone else who was a member of ACT UP or other activist groups, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I recognize that my health and my freedom would not exist without your heroism. ACT UP was a diverse coalition of men and women of all races. Its leaderless structure, its affinity groups, and its joint actions with feminist groups spoke to an inclusive, diverse, and democratic movement that has served as a model to other activist groups. I am not a historian, and this isn’t a work of nonfiction. Though the important facts here are well researched, I did make some small changes for storytelling purposes (for example, I may have shifted Madonna’s Maryland Blond Ambition tour date up by two weeks). If you would like to learn more about the true history as it happened, I hope you’ll research these heroes and their work. It is thanks to them that so many of us have the abundant lives we have.

There is another person who was integral to my coming out and self-acceptance: my first boyfriend, Damon. He forced me to come out to my parents, threatening to break up with me if I didn’t. He pushed me past many of my fears and boundaries. He had in him the flamboyant spirit of an activist. He also had a tremendous amount of darkness, which he shielded me from during our relationship. Years after we broke up, he died of an overdose. He isn’t the only one. I know too many members of our queer community who have taken their own lives or overdosed. There is still shame to work through, still residual fear.