A Fragile Circle: A Memoir. – book reviews
Robrt L. Pela
I tend to remember moments of my life as snapshots,” says Mark Senak, discussing his new book A Fragile Circle: A Memoir (Alyson, $12.95). “Writing about my life started out like looking at a big, friendly stack of Polaroids. But after a couple of weeks, it was like some endless motion picture.”
Less brave souls might see Senak’s life as a horror film. Soon after completing law school, he took a job with Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City during the initial years of the AIDS epidemic. One of his tasks was writing deathbed wills for men tn quarantined hospital rooms.
“AIDS was all so much more terrifying in the early days,” Senak recalls. “We didn’t have the kind of knowledge we’ve come to take for granted today. Plus the agencies were still trying to figure out how to be helpful. I mean, GMHC didn’t even advocate testing until around 1987. Everyone was trying to figure out the social ramifications of being HIV-positive, and the sub-subculture of PWAs [people with AIDS] was new terrain. It was truly a scary time to live through.”
Senak’s book recalls run-ins with the likes of writer and activist Larry Kramer and actor Brad Davis, who became a friend after Senak moved to Los Angeles in 1988.
The middle section of the book is devoted to Senak’s short Oust over a year) romance with Joe, his late lover, who was diagnosed with both AIDS and lung cancer and who died of complications from AIDS in 1987. At the time it was very rare for couples to bond when one partner was HIV-positive and the other was negative. Friends accused Senak of having a death wish. He didn’t listen. “I had never fallen in love before,” he writes. “I was not going to give the virus the satisfaction of taking this away from me.” His reward was “the most wonderful and awful time of my life.”
Now that the writing’s done, Senak–who recently left Los Angeles and AIDS work for a gig at a New York public relations firm–is anxious to get on with his life. “I didn’t realize how hard the past ten years had been until I sat down to write about them,” he says. “I strongly identified with the people in those hospital beds, and I hope I was as helpful to them as they were to me. All those lost men helped me appreciate life.”
Pela is the Arizona arts correspondent for National Public Radio.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
