Yet here I am, still. I jumped about 5 feet in the air the first time I stepped out of the shower, reached for the towel, and -- looking in the glass -- saw my 83-year-old father's body staring back at me: the same narrowed face, the same pigeon chest, the same skinny legs.

Aging is a bit more shocking to me than it might be to someone else, because I was never supposed to live this long. I've been HIV-positive since the AIDS epidemic "officially" began in 1981 -- although those of us who were first hit by it know that it started some time before then. In 1980, already, I was worried about what I'd read in the New York newspapers about "the gay cancer," which mystified everybody and seemed to have no origin or solution. I remember being alarmed because, in 1981, I burned my fingers on a cigarette, and the burn took forever to heal -- weeks and weeks, it seemed. From that time on, I haven't had a single day that wasn't lived at some level of trepidation, and, for many years, in a state of acute anxiety and fear.

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"Here I can keep the trophies and dangerous souvenirs I've collected from other worlds," Superman explained. "Here I can conduct secret experiments with my super-powers and keep souvenirs of my best friends!" The fortress became a gimmick, convenient, for the retelling of tales, a window on Superman's past adventures and a mirror of things to come. "I built it here in the polar wastes because the intense cold keeps away snoopers," Superman said. Its precise location was never disclosed, only that it lay "in a region of ice and snow" and that no one would ever read the diary Superman kept there, a "gigantic book, made of metal," which he wrote in Kryptonese with one of his fingernails, "while hovering in midair high off the Fortress floor."

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The "Fearless Scholar" of "Out of the Flames" is the 16th-century Spanish physician, philosopher and mystical theologian Michael Servetus (1511-1553), the guiding spirit, though not an actual founder, of the Unitarian Church. The "Fatal Heresy" is Servetus' denial of the doctrines of the trinity and original sin. And the very rare book, thought at the time of Servetus' death to be the last copy in existence, is his "Christianismi Restitutio" ("The Restoration of Christianity"), which was strapped to his side when he was burned alive in Geneva in 1553, more or less at the connivance of his sworn enemy and Protestant rival, John Calvin.

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On the other hand, Eggers is a hero to writers. At least, he's a hero to me, bucking his publishers, firing his agents, demanding this and that as he travels around -- I love the guy. It's a reliable measure of his ego, I guess, that when he formed his own publishing company he called it "McSweeney's Books" and not "Eggers' Books," and that his foundation to teach writing to underprivileged children in San Francisco -- where he lives, damn it -- isn't called "The Eggers Project" but "826 Valencia," after its address. I doubt I'd have the energy to do what Eggers does even if I weren't twice his age, or feeling like it when I look at his résumé.

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By contrast, a friend, infected for as long as I've been, died a few days ago of "AIDS-related complications." This was someone who worked out, lifted weights and once walked the length and breadth of the state of Vermont to raise money for AIDS and prove he could do it. In recent years, two sero-positive friends have dropped dead of heart attacks after embarking on healthful, "life-enhancing" diet and exercise regimes. I can't be impartial about Gary Null's book. I am also not an idiot, which I think Null takes me for.

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"I realize you don't need drugs to have a perfectly miserable time," Wurtzel sniffs in a recent interview. "I lost my life as it is now," along with her clothes, furniture, CDs, needles, tweezers, razor blades, Ritalin, cocaine and whatever else she keeps around the house to remind her that pain -- personal, psychic pain -- is the sine qua non of her existence. Wurtzel's cat, Zap, also made it out of the house that day, as his mistress ran for her life in a rain of pumice and ash.

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"Going upstairs I asked Isadora if she would like to see them," Mary wrote. "Like a stone image, with Augustin on one side and me on the other, she came down the long stairs to her immense studio, and as we entered the library, oh, so gently, so gently, she knelt beside them, taking their little hands in hers, and with a cry that has pierced my heart ever since, whispered, 'My children, my poor little children.'" Isadora later described that moment:

Only twice comes that cry of the mother which one hears as without one's self -- at Birth and at Death -- for when I felt in mine those little cold hands that would never again press mine in return I heard my cries -- the same cries as I had heard at their births. Why the same -- since one is the cry of extreme joy and the other of sorrow? I do not know why, but I know they are the same. Is it that in all the Universe there is but one Great Cry containing Sorrow, Joy, Ecstasy, Agony, the Mother Cry of Creation?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/11/12/excerpt_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2001/11/12/dancing_2/ http://www.salon.com/2001/11/12/dancing_2/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:53:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/11/12/dancing On the day I finished my book about Isadora Duncan -- a biography it took me 10 years to complete -- my computer gave up the ghost. I stopped writing on Nov. 29, 2000, and by midnight my hard drive was gone -- melted, disappeared, as if it never existed. My brother, who works for IBM, tells me this really isn't possible -- "It's in there somewhere," he says -- but he couldn't find it, either, and he doesn't know Isadora. I had backups of everything, but it seemed a strange coincidence.

Now, it's the car. Something to do with the starter -- namely, it won't. A year has passed. "Isadora" is printed, published, shipped to the stores, and the car dies on cue, just when I need to get around and just when a small wad of money comes in from an old royalty account. It's time for new wheels, even if they're old ones (which they'll have to be). My mother says I've got "an 11th-hour kind of life," and a lover I once had in Paris called me a jusqu'au-boutiste -- loosely translatable as a "whole-hogger," and a compliment from a Frenchman, I think. At least, that's how I chose to take it: 1993 was a difficult year.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/11/12/dancing_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2001/06/22/spanbauer/ http://www.salon.com/2001/06/22/spanbauer/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2001 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/06/22/spanbauer This month, as the world commemorates the grotesquely conceived "20th anniversary" of AIDS, and as gay male pundits, ever narrow in their focus, hurl charges at each other over the merits and demerits of "bareback" sex, a novel appears to blow us all out of the water and remind us of what AIDS is really about -- people. People who need people, you might say, on the evidence of Tom Spanbauer's stunning new novel, "In the City of Shy Hunters."

If you've read Spanbauer's earlier books -- "Faraway Places" (1989) and the brilliant "Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon" (1991) -- you'll know that he's no ordinary "gay writer," just as his fiction, while riding on conventional coming-of-age, coming-to-terms, coming-out plots, is unlike any you've read or are likely to read before this epidemic ends. Yes, AIDS provides the thematic backdrop of "In the City of Shy Hunters." Yes, Spanbauer himself was diagnosed with "full-blown" AIDS in 1996. But "In the City of Shy Hunters" is so finely crafted, Spanbauer's characters so true to life, the New York City he remembers from the early days of the plague so exactly captured in its "unrelenting" mess and glory, you'll think you've been reading a modernist classic by the time you're through, rather than the latest entry in an artificial, post-post genre.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/06/22/spanbauer/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2001/06/20/kuh/ http://www.salon.com/2001/06/20/kuh/#comments Wed, 20 Jun 2001 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/06/20/kuh Reading Patric Kuh's witty and wonderfully entertaining "Last Days of Haute Cuisine: America's Culinary Revolution," I thought of that scene in Woody Allen's "Love and Death" when Allen, as Private Boris Grishenko, unwilling hero of the Napoleonic wars, asks his company commander what the Russians will win if they defeat the French.

"What do we win?" says the scandalized sergeant. "Imagine your loved ones conquered by Napoleon and forced to live under French rule! Do you want them to eat all that rich food and those heavy sauces?"

The disappearance of sauces and the democratization of dining in America are Kuh's topics in this, yes, delicious little book. It will leave you hungry for more of everything it has to offer, culinary and literary. Writing about "The Formidable Mrs. Child" -- that's Julia -- and her landmark 1961 primer, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Kuh presents his thesis in a nutshell: "The pursuit of gastronomy in this country was about to be transformed. No longer would it be the domain of the grande langouste but rather that of the frantic hostess in a Pucci caftan mopping at the flop sweat as she peered through the Pyrex oven door to see if the soufflé aux crevettes was rising."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/06/20/kuh/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2001/01/31/duchess_3/ http://www.salon.com/2001/01/31/duchess_3/#comments Wed, 31 Jan 2001 20:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/01/31/duchess So Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, was really a man. How did I reach the age of 47 without knowing that?

Probably because it isn't true. Certainly it's not demonstrated, much less documented, in "Dancing With the Devil," Christopher Wilson's trashy new book about the relationship between the duchess, a former Baltimore socialite, and F.W. Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, "a gay playboy twenty years her junior," as Wilson describes him. For four years, Donahue essentially supported the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's extravagant way of life. Wilson thinks that the duchess and Donahue "consummated their love" in 1950 aboard the Queen Mary, to the horror and humiliation of "the buttoned-up and inadequate duke" (a former king of England, Edward VIII, for whose mother the ship was named).

Still with me? The Duke of Windsor was apparently so undone by his wife's infidelity that he wept for days, "crisscrossed" the oceans, contemplated suicide and went right on spending Donahue's money as if nothing had happened. Because, I suspect, nothing had. Wilson is a one-time "Fleet Street columnist" -- say no more! -- whose previous books include a biography of Prince Charles' mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, and the definitive life of Goldie Hawn. "Dancing With the Devil" shouldn't be critiqued so much as held at a distance with tongs. These quotations from an article Wilson wrote about the book for the Express in London capture his technique in a nutshell:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/01/31/duchess_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/07/19/eszterhas_review/ http://www.salon.com/2000/07/19/eszterhas_review/#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2000 12:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/07/19/eszterhas_review Well, blow me down! I had no idea before reading "American Rhapsody" -- bad-boy screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' "long-awaited," "talked-about," "must-read," "buzz-generating," "steamy," "titillating," "juicy," "sensational," "scandalous," "tell-all" "blend of fact and fiction" (quotes courtesy of America's fourth estate) -- that former President Gerald R. Ford was famous for his flatulence.

I'm telling you the truth -- I didn't know that about Ford. I knew that Betty Ford normally had to be carried off Air Force One, drunk, after listening to her husband's speeches, but not that, when she got home, she was subjected to blasts of wind beyond the call of love or duty.

Neither did I know that Lyndon Johnson had scrotum skin that hung "halfway to his knees." I did know that LBJ had a big dong, Texas style, that he fucked his playthings on the floor of the White House, if not in the Oval Office, and that his creatures used to brief him in the morning while he was sitting (if you like) on the toilet -- assuming he got that far. Johnson was known to conduct the high business of state in bed, lying on his side while one of his nontyping secretaries gave him an enema.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/07/19/eszterhas_review/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/harrison/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/harrison/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/01/19/harrison If you like your novels mean, tough, ugly and male, you're going to love "Afterburn," Colin Harrison's latest exercise in New York noir. Harrison is deputy editor at Harper's magazine, a creamy stylist and crack storyteller whose previous books, "Break and Enter," "Bodies Electric" and "Manhattan Nocturne," established him as a master of the "literary" thriller. I put the word in quotation marks because -- let's be serious -- Tolstoy he ain't.

"The drill went into the outside of his left ankle," Harrison writes, "just above the boot. It was worse this time, the bit grinding into the joint capsule until it punctured through the tendons on the other side, then continuing through the flesh until the spinning tip spurted through the inside of his ankle. 'Oh, God, please,' Rick cried, gripping the table and squeezing his eyes. 'Oh! Fuck, fuck!'"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/harrison/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/12/08/warner_7/ http://www.salon.com/1999/12/08/warner_7/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/12/08/warner Cast your mind back a couple of years and you might remember Sex Panic, the "pro-queer, pro-feminist, anti-racist direct action group" founded in New York in 1997 "to defend public sexual culture" in the age of AIDS. The year was something of a watershed in the American gay-rights movement, exposing the rift between a vocal band of conservative gay publicists who were calling for same-sex marriage rights and an end to "anonymous promiscuity" in the gay community and the movement's traditional activist wing, which remained anchored in the politics of Stonewall, with its ethos of confrontation, defiance and public celebration of sexual differences.

"A whole lot of things were happening and there wasn't any resistance," according to Sex Panic's Michael Warner, a journalist, editor and professor of English who teaches American literature and queer studies at Rutgers. "Bars and sex clubs were being closed, and increasing numbers of gay men being arrested on the streets of New York under public lewdness charges -- very old-fashioned kinds of intimidation. And there was no community protest. One of the reasons that there's no protest is that the only prominent gay spokesmen are a handful of media celebrity journalists who are, in fact, encouraging this kind of crackdown."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/12/08/warner_7/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/kessler_review/ http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/kessler_review/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/11/03/kessler Quick, class: What's the "most wealthy, glamorous, opulent, decadent, self-indulgent, sinful spot on earth"? In which American city can you put your dead husband's body on ice for 40 days -- literally -- because you "want to party at Mar-a-Lago" and a funeral would only spoil the fun? On what "3.75-square-mile island paradise" can you murder your wife, rape the maid, plow the gardener and bar Jews from your club but find yourself shunned for cruelty to the Pekingese?

"It's Palm Beach, darling," says a resident of that preposterous pile of egotism, money, social pretension and silicone boobs. "That's what it is. You move into a big house, you drive an expensive car and everybody accepts what you're saying without asking, 'Isn't this a little bit strange?'"

"Grotesque" might be a better word to describe the denizens of the world's most pompous resort. Not even the Grimaldis' Monaco can rival Florida's gilded swamp for sheer parading and enslavement to appearances. The comparison is relative, of course: Monaco is still a police state, but Palm Beachers are no longer allowed to fingerprint the servants. "It was a nice feature of living in a town like Palm Beach," says the city's mayor, the son of a Romanov grand duke.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/kessler_review/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/10/21/doherty_vieira/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/21/doherty_vieira/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/10/21/doherty_vieira "Yes, I wrote the story of 'I'm No Angel' myself. It's all about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it." So said Mae West in 1933, the last year before the American motion-picture industry voluntarily surrendered to three decades of censorship by the Hays Office, properly known as the Production Code Administration. Nominally, the Production Code had been in effect since 1930, when mounting protests against sin and scandal in Hollywood (both on-screen and off) prompted nervous studio heads, producers and distributors to adopt it as a safety measure against government regulation. Then as now, however, Hollywood paid nothing but pious lip service to the concept of self-restraint. Until July 1934, when the Code finally gained teeth under the direction of Roman Catholic newspaperman Joseph I. Breen, the studios not only ignored but flouted its directives in a series of wild, racy, sexy and subversive films that, up till now, have been largely forgotten by both audiences and film scholars.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/10/21/doherty_vieira/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/09/01/strasser/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/01/strasser/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/09/01/strasser The next time you think about the Constitution, consider this: It might once have been worn by somebody. Probably by many people, on the evidence of Susan Strasser's "Waste and Want," a smart and lively history of 200 years of American offal, rubbish, refuse and trash and the various means employed for their disposal. In Colonial times, paper was made from cotton and linen rags that had been boiled, mashed to pulp and pressed into thin sheets; during the Revolution, when all paper was scarce, "rag drives" were conducted on patriotic grounds as well as through appeals to the ultimate arbiters of any rag's destiny, women.

"When the young Ladies are assured, that by sending to the Paper Mill an old handkerchief, no longer fit to cover their snowy Breasts, there is a Possibility of its returning to them again in the more pleasing form of a Billet Doux from their Lovers, the Proprietors flatter themselves with great Success," read an advertisement for a paper manufacturer in North Carolina. Neither was the donation of rags expected to be voluntary, as recycling is now. In earlier times, people were paid for their trash, either in cash by wholesalers or, more often, in barter by the army of peddlers who wandered the United States in search of scrap metal, ashes, bones, fuel and fertilizers until well into this century.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/01/strasser/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/08/18/st_james/ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/18/st_james/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/08/18/st_james Dear James,

Oh my GOD!!!

I've just finished reading your FABULOUS book, "Disco Bloodbath." I mean, it's FABULOUS! Do you know what I'm saying? It's just FABULOUS, that's all. Oh my GOD!!

Of course, you don't know me, James, and by the sound of your book you wouldn't have known me even if you did know me. Believe me, I understand. It isn't easy being an insane, drug-soaked drag queen "in the upper branches of the nightclubbing hierarchy," as you put it, constantly "schmoozing" and falling into "K-holes" and worrying about your "look." What with all the attention you need for yourself, you can't be expected to notice your inferiors. You're far too FABULOUS for that!

As for me, James, I was never part of the downtown club scene, either in the late 1980s, when Newsweek dubbed you a "celebutante" and Details made you "famous," or later, after your "REALLY GOOD FRIEND" Michael Alig became New York's No. 1 "party promoter" and "THOSE WACKY CLUB KIDS" took over everything. It's true, James, I swear: I was never even TURNED AWAY from Limelight! I've never met Peter Gatien or seen the inside of the Tunnel. I didn't turn up anywhere with a Virginia ham on my head or Christmas lights up my ass or drinking glasses of my own piss or swimming in "a giant, filthy, germ-ridden cesspool filled with hundreds of naked drug addicts" as you did with Alig. FABULOUS!

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