From: Sam Damon Date: Tue, 12 Apr 1994 15:34:51 -0400 (edt) Yep, I'm still cleaning out my desk and here's another piece I found that may be of LesBiGay interest. It's by Frank Rich, a man of whom a lot of [positive] things have been said. ======================================================= SOME PLACE THRILLING by Frank Rich (NY Times 2/3/94, "Journal") How are healthy heterosexuals supposed to behave in front of a gay man who is dying of AIDS? This question of etiquette confronted the New Yorkers who attended an unusual book party at an Upper East Side town house a week ago tonight. The celebrated book was "Diary of a Lost Boy," a funny new novel about a dying young gay man and his best straight friends, a couple who might have been played by Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in a 30's screwball comedy. The author is Harry Kondoleon, 38, who arrived at his party by ambulette from St, Vincent's Hospital, ignoring a doctor's warning that the mere trip uptown could be fatal. "Everyone was sort of waiting to see what was going to happen," said one person there, describing the "tentative" mood. "It seemed grotesque that no one else had a health problem that couldn't be solved by Prozac." But the skeleton-thin author had dressed festively, in a red jacket and black velvet pants. He signed books. His friends took turns sitting beside him to talk. Then the guests slipped away to dinner, and Mr. Kondoleon returned to St. Vincent's. I felt relieved not to have been at the party. Fascinated yet terrified by mortality, I wouldn't have known how to behave. In "How We Die," another new-book, Sherwin Nuland aptly writes of death: "We hide our faces from its face, but still we spread our fingers just a bit, because there is something in us that cannot resist a peek." The best peck I could muster was reading Harry Kondoleon's novel. He seduces the reader with humor: "Psychotherapy for the terminally ill is a little like a pedicure right before having both feet amputated." So you pull up a chair and listen to him as he dies. "Look at me," demands Hector, the book's narrator and its author's stand-in. "I'm a cloudy day when you've misplaced all your valuables. Hotel with no one at the desk." Still, not everyone wants to look. After attending a dinner party, Hector writes: "I know how off-putting it is for the well to be seated next to the unwell with all the ramifications of pain and death." It's the mission of Mr. Kondoleon's book to make us identify with those who embrace Hector. "Diary of a Lost Boy" kept tugging at me on Sunday when I went to the Metropolitan Museum to look at the British painter Lucian Freud's controversial nude portraits of men, women and children. Mr. Freud's most commanding model is a man of Mr. Kondoleon's young age but perhaps five times his weight. His mountainous flesh spills across the canvas. He is not ill. Yet decay seems inevitable in the furious brushstrokes of the densely applied, sallow colored oil paints. The ravaged flesh is so vulnerable, so frank, finally so moving that you cannot turn away. Or did Harry Kondoleon's book make me connect with Lucian Freud's nudes rather than be repulsed by them? The next morning I phoned Mr. Kondoleon at the hospital. I told him I wanted to write about his novel. He apologized for his speech, which was slurred by medication. "I said I've got to hang on and finish it," he explained when asked how he mustered the strength to write during a catastrophic illness. "As a personal achievement to show I wasn't dead." The decision to write a comic novel came easily: "I think I'm a funny person, and making the book funny would make a deeply unappealing subject sweeter." His mind wandered. He apologized for mid-sentence memory lapses. "In the United States the sick and the old are more or less despised. But some friends have been so loyal and good and true. Others have been callous and fearful and running away." And now? "All I do is lie down. It's hard to read. I'm losing my eyesight, which is very cruel." His voice thinned to a high whisper. "Dying, you see some things as quite beautiful and others as ludicrous." The conversation over, I picked up "Diary of a Lost Boy" again and turned to the epigraph on the final page: "Please do not feel sorry for me -- I go to some place thrilling!" By forcing a reader to see even death as ludicrous and beautiful and thrilling, a writer like Harry Kondoleon brings comfort to the living. You feel thankful for such a person, not sorry. His party, I realized too late, was definitely the place to be.