The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 July 2005
by David B. Feinberg
This book is many things. It is funny and heartbreaking. It is sweet and bitter. It is entertaining and sad. It is insightful and explicit. This is the story of B.J. Rosenthal, a young gay man in New York City in 1980. His lifestyle is promiscuous and fun, though he's a bit neurotic and his protestations that he's looking for a long-term boyfriend sound a little hollow when we see the many tricks and affairs he has. Here, the book is often very funny, and it paints a picture of a subculture in a particular time, with gay bath houses, cruising on the subway, days at the gym, and the struggle to survive as a grad student in New York. But, the lifestyle has changed. It is 1986, now, and AIDS has painted it's black brush across the gay population. B.J. is doing a lot of growing up, as he and his friends cope with the anxieties of the disease, and the passing of far too many friends. B.J. knows one man, with whom he once had a brief affair, who has AIDS and is declining over a period of months. All the while, B.J. is afraid he's been exposed to HIV and that his own days are numbered. Feinberg captures the feelings of fear and anticipation very well in this half of the book. It is dark, but also full of human survival tactics, evasion, denial, humor, coping and simple tears. The book is somewhat graphic, and the characters described somewhat at a distance, but both in a surprisingly relevant way. This is powerful reading of a dark time. While the AIDS epidemic has changed its demographics, and sufferers are living ever longer after diagnosis, the story of loss and pain continues.
(This book won a Lambda Literary Award in 1989. -- In the opening of its second half, Feinberg wrote: By the time you read these words I may in all likelihood be dead. Indeed. Feinberg died of AIDS related illnesses in 1994 at the age of 37.)