Losing Time: AIDS Lessons in Love and Loss

LOSING TIME, a memoir, offers a frank account of gay life as I lived it in Sacramento, CA during the AIDS crisis--the Losing Time of the title. It focuses on the later life and too early death from AIDS of one man among the many remembered here--Dore Tanner (1949-98)--who taught me in that dark era that love was more than the heterosexual illusion I had always believed it to be. LOSING TIME offers an honest, sometimes humorous, depiction of two gay men who blundered into a love neither of us was looking for, and subsequently, the fat grief felt on so soon losing a lover so lately found and the determination it took to find my way again when my compass pointed only south. This memoir's interweaving of the account of a particular loss with the stories of so many others who lost time entirely in the AIDS era presents the texture of life as many gay men lived it during the Losing Time, which began nearly 40 years ago. The book's focus on personal experience particularizes an AIDS history fast becoming generalized, its human details being lost to memory.