Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 20:27:13 -0500 From: Chris Hagin To: Multiple recipients of list GLB-NEWS Subject: Paul Monette Dies of AIDS Complications Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 Homosexual Writer Paul Monette Dies of AIDS Complications WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- Paul Monette, whose memoir ``Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story'' traced his torturous path from the stigma of a gay man to a celebration of homosexuality, died of AIDS complications. He was 49. Monette died at his home Friday, five years after he was first diagnosed as HIV-positive, said close friend Elisabeth Nonas. A private memorial service was held Saturday at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills. In addition to 1992's ``Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story,'' which won him a National Book Award, Monette wrote about the agonizing AIDS death of his lover Roger Horwitz in the 1988 tome ``Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.'' He also wrote a collection of poems, ``Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.'' Born in Lawrence, Mass., on Oct. 16, 1945, Monette described in ``Becoming a Man'' about suppressing his homosexuality. He wrote of his struggle for identity in the 1950s and '60s, and survival in a homophobic society. He studied at Andover and Yale, then publicly acknowledged his homosexuality in 1974, when he met Horwitz. Monette was strongly influenced by the Stonewall rebellion, which occurred when angry gay men resisted a 1969 police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar. Then he watched as an interested observer as the gay pride movement began to develop across the country. Monette received his first critical attention in 1975 with a collection of poetry, ``The Carpenter at the Asylum,'' described as a dead-serious comedy of manners, and in 1978 he turned to prose fiction with ``Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll,'' a comic tale of two gay men who conspire with an aging actress to inherit considerable riches. ``The Gold Diggers'' was about homosexual lovers who let a female friend intrude upon their lives, while ``No Witnesses'' was a series of poems about the imagined adventures of such famous characters as Isadora Duncan, Noel Coward and Henry David Thoreau. But it was the torment of AIDS that preoccupied his later writings. In ``Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir,'' he offered a poignant examination of Horwitz's struggle and death. The New York Times Book Review said it ``has the leanness and urgency of war reporting.'' Monette also wrote about AIDS in ``Afterlife'' in 1990 and ``Halfway Home'' in 1991. Shortly before his death, Monette told the Los Angeles Times that he didn't feel he had given up on life because he decided to refuse medication. ``I owe it to all the people I buried to keep fighting. We all have suffering in our lives. The best we can do is help each other and take the world seriously,'' he said. Survivors include his father, Paul; a brother, Robert, and his companion, Winston Wilde.