Yet at the very moment his career begins to blossom, his personal life falls apart. We are taken back to 1985, when Yale Tishman, an art gallery development director is on the brink of acquiring a remarkable collection of 1920s paintings and letters for his institution. Rebecca Makkai’s new novel is set in Chicago, primarily in and around East Lakeview’s Boystown neighbourhood, which was the first officially recognized gay village in the United States. My memories, of course, are of a time when HIV/AIDS – or human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome – first arrived in the UK. It was a shameful chapter in our history, and one that I hope will never be repeated for any reason. Young men suffering with illnesses like Kaposi’s sarcoma were said to ‘deserve whatever they got’ and were accused of being a drain on the NHS, then hospital staff started refusing to treat them for fear of catching something.īecause of ignorance and indifference, the LGB community (the T had not been added at that point) was all but abandoned and left to take care of itself while a pandemic spread unimpeded by those in authority. As religious leaders proclaimed the outbreak was a sign of retribution from whichever deity they promoted, flustered politicians attempted to avert panic by insisting the ‘general public’ need not concern itself with a ‘gay disease’. The tabloids were in their element, describing the mystery illnesses as a ‘Gay Plague’ while rallying their readers to demand all homosexuals be deported somewhere remote, away from ‘decent people’. I remember vividly that bleak period in the early 1980s when a spectrum of bizarre but fatal conditions started afflicting gay men.

“ They were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy.” Home › LGBTQ › BOOK REVIEW: The Great Believers

The great believers book review