By Karen Ocamb

Every minority in every era has its heroes and witnesses, seeking truth, justice and freedom. In the 1990s, gays and people with HIV/AIDS turned to author Paul Monette to articulate the horror of the AIDS holocaust and the impact of living in a perpetual climate of death.

Telling his personal story through poetry and books, most notably Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir and On Becoming a Man: Half an Autobiography, which won the 1992 National Book Award, Monette elucidated the agony of grief, the freedom from "the traps and lies" of the closet with its heterosexual "ventriloquism," and falling in love -- "from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love."

Monette died Feb. 10, 1995. He was 49. To mark the 10th anniversary of his death, the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library is holding a daylong conference, an exhibit and a dinner to commemorate his life and legacy. It is believed to be the first time a major university has sponsored such an in-depth event to honor a contemporary gay author.

In advance of the Oct. 14 celebration (and with a nod to James Van Praagh of CBSÕ The Ghost Whisperer), IN conducted a posthumous interview with Monette, culling his answers from books and interviews.

IN: First of all, we miss you. I guess you know that Cardinal Ratzinger succeeded Pope John Paul and is now conducting gay witch-hunts in the seminaries. No one yet has challenged the papacy like you did at the 1992 Creating Change conference, when you tore up the picture of the pope. Do you still call organized religion "The School of Hate?"

Paul Monette: Yeah I do. The Vatican supported that contention once again by supporting discrimination against gay and lesbian people. I take a lot of pride in groups like Dignity and Integrity to fight for their rights from [within] the church. Personally, I just don't think I could handle the uphill-ness of that fight. (Owen Keehnen interview, Sept. 1992, Chicago Outlines)

[But] I had this profound realization that worked its way into Becoming a Man about the difference between living a life of collaboration and a life of resistance. I've been furious and blunt, as you say, in my impatience and rage with churches and religions. But I have refined that rage, at least in my own head, so that my anger against the injustice and hypocrisy of religion goes where it ought to go, for instance, to the Vatican and the pope. Those people for whom God is only politics and not anything of the spirit -- those people are evil. They are evil in all forms of fundamentalism, be it their own fundamentalism or Muslim fundamentalism or the peculiarly disgusting Protestant fundamentalism in this country.

And yet, in the midst of this nightmare and calamity of AIDS, I have seen such eloquent work done by people who are part of the clergy or part of a religious commitment or calling. Here I am close to the end of my life, and I somehow think that I am an atheist who is, for better or worse, still an Episcopalian. (Mark Thompson, Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature,1994).

You were diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in 1992. Do you remember how you periodically described being sick?

[AIDS is] just scary. I'm scared this toxoplasmosis will make me lose my mind ... I have about 10 T-cells left and I feel more on a tightrope than I used to feel. I mean, I was the queen of seropositivity and pretty comfortable with that position. AIDS is a different business. (Keehnen, Ibid)

[In 1994] I was in bed for two months. What laid me low was a bronchial infection. They tried one antibiotic after another and after 31 days I'd lost 25 pounds and was still coughing like crazy. They finally tried an IV and it conquered the infection ... 13 hours a day [on an] IV ... (Keehnen, July 1994, Chicago Outlines)

In Borrowed Time you talked about the "bleating sound" your beloved Roger Horwitz made calling your name the day he died.

The cryptococcus had swelled his brain in the night and stolen his center of speech ... Through the pounding in his head, the blindness and the paralysis, all his bodily functions out of control, he had somehow heard me come in. Had waited [to die]. And once I understood that, I went mad. My moaning rose to a siren pitch, and I clawed at the grass that covered him. Possessed with a fury to dig the six feet down and tear open the lid and clasp him to me, whatever was left. I don't even know what stopped me -- exhaustion, I guess, the utter meaninglessness of anything anymore. Grief is madness -- ask anyone who's been there ..."

But you loved again -- Stephen Kolzak, Winston Wilde. Loving in the time of AIDS was like "dancing in a minefield," you said.

One of the ways in which AIDS has purified so many of us is in how much it tells us that this is not a dress rehearsal. You are being tested, even if there is no headmaster in the sky marking the grades or giving you board scores on those tests. We are being tested by something as deep in ourselves as we could ever be. If you needed any further proof that the material work is not enough to nourish you, that success and money and career are not enough, that the only real nourishment that you can count on is love and that love is possible for all of us, that you can generate it and find it, this is it. What's going to matter to people when they come to the end of their lives is how much they've loved." (Thompson, Ibid)

Any final words?

Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world. (SUNY Graduation Day speech, June 1992)

Thank you.

For more information about the free conference and exhibit, or to make reservations for the Monette-Horwitz Trust dinner, call (310) 794-4408 or go to www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/monette.htm