Natalie took my class in The Ethics of Public Biography at the CUNY Grad Center while she was getting her MFA at Brooklyn College. This was a deep dive into the ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org) So I knew he had some background. But when I read Waiting on a Friend, I immediately understood that she had read everything, and also that she had done internal research to reach some emotional conclusions that are not obvious on the surface.
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Sarah Shulman:It’s clear to me from reading waiting for a friendThat you thought and felt about AIDS a tremendous amount – not only read everything you could get your hands on, but internalized the AIDS experience as much as possible. Do you have personal experience with AIDS? And if not, what attracted you to this field? I ask this with particular surprise, how did you feel knowing that people who experienced the epicenter of AIDS and who represented it would be among your readers?
Natalie Adler:Thank you for realizing that I read everything I could to write this novel. It was my responsibility to do so, especially knowing that there are so many false or misleading or incomplete stories about the AIDS crisis. There is the question of the “onset” of AIDS (the crisis begins when cases occur in a certain class of people); All misinformation, justified misconceptions and lies about transmission and etiology; The angle of Hollywood where a few brave individuals stood up and changed the world; And the insidious event that you credit for inspiring you to do the ACT UP oral history project is that there was once a prejudice against a scary disease, but then people came around. As if the flow of history naturally bends towards justice without pressure from the oppressed.
AIDS was the first thing I knew about sex. That was the first thing I learned about being gay.
In a way, these narratives took some of the pressure off me, because I knew all I could do was get my facts straight, read everything, and try to capture the emotion of the time as best I could as a fiction writer. Of course, I’m keen to get it right, and I hope the novel will be read by people who have lived it and feel that their experiences have been respected and fully realised. It has been an honor to read their stories and feel with them.
My personal experience with AIDS comes from my aunt, Lori LoBiondo, who became a hospice nurse after her best friend died of AIDS in 1987. She could not believe that anyone could be left to die in such a horrible way. She was thirty years old and had a good job, and it wasn’t necessary for her to go to school. So it’s remarkable that he turned his life around because that experience changed him, and he had to do something about it. I think that’s what you meant when you argued This is a Litre What motivates someone to take action is characterful. Becoming a nurse was the proudest decision of her life, but I think she clearly saw it more as the right thing to do than as any great moral stance. I just feel that she can’t be a spectator. So perhaps I had a certain amount of familiarity with writing a character who was close to the AIDS crisis and had to choose to work in solidarity with the PWA. But that’s not because my aunt told me stories. I’ve been close to her my whole life and I could feel what an impact those years had on her, even if she didn’t want to talk about it.
My personal experience of AIDS also dates back to the 80s. AIDS was the first thing I knew about sex. That was the first thing I learned about being gay. This is my history, and it needs to be recognized as such. This is also my gift. This loss has affected every queer person I have ever learned from. There is still shame and grief around testing positive, and I know people who found solace after connecting with AIDS history. Yes, the novel is about the ’80s, but what happened then is still with us, and my hope is that fiction can remind us, even make us realize the truth of that fact.
ss: It was very moving to see you represent the process of friendships being lost as ordinary people die of AIDS – a terrible loss in life that mirrors the loss of death. As someone who is more troubled by the living than the dead, I wonder how you decided to add a ghost story to a literary novel?
No: Ghosts seemed like a natural way for me to tell this story. The initial premise was, and remains, a grieving woman who sees ghosts when she cannot see the one she wants to see. For Renata, ghosts are a normal part of urban ecology. These are the same people who were here before. Typically, ghosts appear in literature when something that has been repressed escapes and becomes everyone’s problem. In this case, the problem concerns living people: hatred of urban life and homophobia.
Even though I wrote a ghost story, the living are Renata’s real problem. Even though she’s good at politics and generally has the right opinions about things – that is, as far as I believe, you have to get along with different people – grief can make anyone selfish. Her mind is on her loss, and she doesn’t always realize that she’s prioritizing some of her own sad delusions over her surviving friends, even when her friends tell her so, point blank. I knew I wanted a narrator who makes mistakes, admits them, and tries to make them right – maybe that’s a little wish fulfillment on my part. But I find fantasy interesting when characters make choices and face consequences. Renata is the heroine of this novel, but she is not the center of the world, or even her group of friends.
ss: For your day job you are editor at Lux, a revolutionary magazine – named after Rosa Luxemburg. How does the team make decisions about impact? What are your criteria for journalism that effectively aligns with today’s radical movements?
When I interviewed agents, I used the phrase “dyke about town” to describe Renata.
No:Thanks for asking lux. Our tagline is “We want it all,” and indeed, we take a maximalist approach to what matters. Since we define feminism, as bell hooks once said, as “the struggle to end sexist oppression,” we must show everywhere that this struggle is the most powerful. Reproductive justice, prison abolition, trans liberation — wherever people are working in the here and now to end oppression, we want to know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and how people can apply those strategies on their home turf. Our reporting takes place internationally, even though most of our readers are in the US, because the US has a lot to learn from events around the world.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what to prioritize when there are fires to put out everywhere, so we plan special issues around some of our most pressing issues. After the fall of Roe, we had an Abortion International issue, where we looked at underground networks around the world to see how people in repressive countries provide abortion care to each other. We also planned a double issue around fascism when we thought Trump would be re-elected – not because he’s a unique example or the worst of all bad guys, but because he’s part of a trend we want to track.
We have a small editorial group that strives to publish a mix of known names and emerging voices and keep the balance from being too white, American, straight, and cis. We are proud of how beautiful and ornate our glossy magazine is. One of our strategies is to create a gorgeous but accessible magazine, like a Teen Vogue (RIP) for adults. Not everyone who buys Lux has radical leftist politics, and we hope we can move some people on every issue. Overall, I would say we have a big tent approach, because again, there is no one way to end sexist oppression. We, as leftist feminists, have everything to do, which means each of us, as individuals, has something to do.
ss:36 years ago I published people in troubleLike waiting for a friendA novel with a gay protagonist that sits within the context of the suffering and heroism of gay men. Then in 1995 I did it again rat bohemia. Over the next decade, whenever men were at the center of my books, I got compliments and lots of “You’re so smart,” “You’re a great writer.” But whenever I write a novel about lesbians, where the younger male characters are not seen the way men see themselves, I get upset and dismissed and refuse to have conversations about the work. It’s a constant ricochet of reaching social death and then back again. Similarly, waiting for a friend You’ve been treated with respect by the publishing industry, you’ve had a great publisher and renowned editors. Are you worried about what might happen to the future of work if you only focused on adult gays and our experiences in the world?
No: I could not write waiting for a friend Without people in trouble Or rat bohemiaSo let’s start from there. These are novels about bohemian communities of friends and lovers and artistic collaborators, which is a big part of my interest in AIDS activism. But Marlowing, the downtown dyke in all your novels, hurt by his former partners and broken by their families, inspired my heroine, Renata.
When I interviewed agents, I used the phrase “dyke about town” to describe Renata. I thought this phrase did a lot of work in a short space to give people an idea of how she was self-fashioning. (Honestly, I think I came up with this phrase, but who knows, I may have read it somewhere and added it to my regular lexicon. Later I Googled it and saw that it was the title of a column for Seattle Gay News, which I probably didn’t know but also shows that if an idea is good, more than one person can come up with it.)
Anyway, this phrase survived my query letter, was included in my agent’s submission letter to editors, and ended up in my editor’s copy in the back of the book. I’m grateful he supported the Dyke Agenda! I’m still surprised that Penguin Random House is stopping casual use of this term, especially in this conservative climate. I know “Sapphic” books are being read in large numbers at the moment, but I think it’s mostly in genre novels, and I suspect that calling these books “Sapphic” is a way to avoid saying they’re gay. Although in good faith, this could be a way to be more inclusive.
But to answer your question directly: The book I’m writing right now is about the history of two lesbians, and so far, there are no men in it. So we’ll see how much we all love Sapphic literature when the time comes to bring it into the world. and if waiting for a friend Doing well enough, let’s see if they let me write a sequel about the gay infighting over women and AIDS.
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waiting for a friend by Natalie Adler, available from Random House.
