Sweetheart

Rating:
Summary: An important moment in the history of AIDS rhetoric(s)
Review: One of the most personal, readable novels about living well in the face of HIV infection and all the changes it brings about in one's life. The companion work to McGehee's "Boys Like us," both of which are important texts in constructing a literary response to the damaging rhetorics of AIDS. This book picks up where "Boys Like us" left off, with Zero MacNoo's ongoing search for authenticity and meaning in the spectre of AIDS. It is a warm, funny, life-affirming work, refreshingly unapologetic and inflinching. The restless Zero (who is "searching for the moment, not a lifetime" [14]) finally finds, in Jeff Lake, the one romantic and sexual partner he has long searched for. "After all," Zero says, "a guy only has so many lifetimes to give" (14). It is, however, Zero's emotional and spirtual journey which is given the greatest weighting. We get the sense that McGehee was a seeker, searching for a new, brave, transnational identity. Returning to Arkansas, Zero stares out the airplane window at the Arkansas River: "It slithers through the landscape of bluffs and pine trees like some kind of prehistoric serpent. I love to stare at it. It hypnotizes me. It gives me a sense of my whole life being one blazing moment" (78). Voyages through time and space are thus evoked as the character travels through his life, with AIDS menacingly looming. Zero goes through life armed with wit and courage, so happiness is always attainable. Love, happiness, and memory are necessary elements in the construction of an AIDS counterliterature. Without this counterliterature, the voices of gay men who died of the disease (McGehee included) are in danger of being erased from history. The characters in McGehee's works still manage to live and love meaningfully despite their HIV status. Testimony means a reconsideration of how we record the history of our culture, and whose stories we weave into the greater tapestry of voices. In the end, Zero's testimony, like McGehee's text, is all that stands between his "self" and oblivion. This is a gentle, funny, and very heart-felt work, and proves without a doubt that McGehee's brilliant voice was silenced way too early.