It’s been the biggest honor to get to know the people involved, and they graciously allowed me to use eight images of the quilt panels in the book. I like disappearing in books. I disappear twice in What Artists Wear, like when artist Lee Mary Manning does a photo essay about Nicole Eisenman. I like allowing the book itself to pivot the narrative.
My uncle died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1993. My nonna—his mother—would hold onto letters she wrote to his friends who, over the years, would stop writing back one by one as they too passed away. That ephemera was very important to her to hold onto. I’m lucky to have even such small touch points with him.
It’s incredible your family was able to hold onto his memory and share that when a lot of people wouldn’t. I’m good friends with people who are a few generations above me and they were just expected to carry on. There was no compassion or sense of magnitude for what people were living through, so a huge part of the book is also attempting to now offer them space to grieve. I hope it’s cathartic for some.
I often think about Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, which starkly lays out how many thinkers and countercultural creative movements we lost to AIDS.
There is an entire ecosystem lost that we can’t begin to fathom, so what we can do now is imagine a parallel universe where it all would have happened. We can consider how we can encourage alternative ways of living, thinking, and making, rather than acquiescing to what’s become the norm when the norm has happened against us, and the norm is not good enough.
You first came to London around the time of the book’s arc. Did your experience inflect the book?
I came to London in ’92. With the book, I was interested in who I wasn’t. No one in the book is me—obviously, there’s things about me that informs them, but to me, they still live when I read the book, they’re alone, and they could have done something since. I knew I wanted to write a book about someone of a similar age, who came to London, but who had another kind of emotional intelligence. See, I couldn’t even approach a guy. Here’s Johnny, someone who can speak up for what they want. When I did start sleeping with men, there were times I wasn’t able to voice my own feelings. I channeled all my energy into writing, doing student papers, and shutting down libido or a sense of who I was as a fully flesh, human being. In Bring No Clothes, I wrote about the fact I didn’t sleep with anyone until I was 27. It was important to do so to express how that reflected in the life of E.M. Forster. It was liberating for me to write that. With this book, I can really understand my desire to form this character.
