I can’t help but approach Borrowed Time with this passage in my mind. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. Take you languor and easy tears somewhere else. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. We queers on Revelation hill, tucking our skirts about us so as not to touch our Mormon neighbors, died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. One of the essays in Last Watch of the Night, “3275,” which is the plot number of Monette’s grave site with Roger, ends with a call to arms: In fact, I’ve never been able to finish Borrowed Time - it’s just so intensely tragic. I’ve taught portions of Monette’s last collection of non-fiction essays, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise a couple of times, but this is my first time teaching Borrowed Time. It’s one of the most important accounts of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s, a classic text of Lesbian & Gay Literature. I’m not sure I can do it.īorrowed Time is Monette’s chronicle of his relationship with Roger Horowitz, his partner of ten years, as Roger is first diagnosed with and then dying of AIDS. My Lesbian & Gay Lit class is starting Borrowed Time for Wednesday’s class. I’ve wanted to teach Paul Monette‘s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir or Becoming a Man: Half a Life’s Story but have always been too afraid to do so.
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