Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone

A collection of essays about AIDS activism and living with AIDS details the author's experiences in the 1988 ACT UP seizure of FDA headquarters, presents no-holds-barred descriptions of his symptoms, and offers his opinion about Larry Kramer. 15,000 first printing.

Novelist Feinberg (Eighty-Sixed) brings together an unsettling but frequently affecting collection of autobiographical essays and miscellaneous pieces (originally published in the Advocate, Details and other publications) about living with AIDS. Sometimes Feinberg's attempts at black humor merely confirm Edmund White's contention that joking about AIDS is to attempt in vain to domesticate it; an essay on etiquette for the HIV-positive begins, "Avoid bleeding in public." Less facile are the more autobiographical pieces, complex blends of rage, despair and wit. Of his relationship with a friend who is HIV-negative, Feinberg writes, "Sometims I feel like damaged goods. He has a fifty-year warrantee, and I'm stuck with a failed inspection slip in my shirt pocket."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Feinberg's reflections on AIDS are often annoying and mediocre, frequently witty, and sometimes deeply disturbing. Novelist Feinberg (Eighty-Sixed, 1989) starts out unpromisingly. The first and title essay of the collection is burdened by zeitgeist clich‚s (e.g., ``I plead the Twinkie defense''), patronizing scorn for the reader's supposed ``bleeding liberal heart,'' overuse of italics for emphasis, and insights more appropriate to a T-shirt than an essay (``Reality is for people who can't cope with drugs''). After that piece, though, the writing picks up. With dark humor and rage, Feinberg brings us to ACT UP meetings and demonstrations and recounts the deaths, funerals, and memorial services of his friends. He also chronicles his own physical decay in unsparing detail; some of these sections are so visceral that they are hard to read. In lighter moments, he reflects on red ribbons, the gym, and the etiquette of HIV disclosure. Though Feinberg's humor can fall flat, most of the essays have their moments: At one point he muses, ``Gays call straights breeders...I'm sure we'll come up with a derogatory term for neggies [HIV-negative people] soon enough: Aseptic? Hermetically sealed?'' His rudeness can be delightful; on a bus, he tells some young people pondering the meaning of life to keep it down, ``because some of us are thirty and we have already had these conversations.'' Sometimes his campy, flippant style seems trivializing, but it can be highly appropriate, as when he exposes the cynical selling of AIDS, from criminally insensitive direct- mail campaigns for AIDS organizations (one group's letter begins ``Before he died, he asked me to mail this to you'') to LifeStyle Urns (cremation urns marketed specifically to people with AIDS and their survivors--some even come engraved with a lambda symbol). Despite this collection's title, Feinberg is no Hunter S. Thompson, but he does have an effective, biting edge. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his nonfiction debut, a collection of autobiographical essays chronicling their author's descent into HIV hell, Feinberg merges irreverent humor, incisive observation of all things political, and grim documentation of physical deterioration. Included with manic lists of "100 Ways You Can Fight the AIDS Crisis," "Sex Tips for Boys" and, especially touchingly, of his life regrets are notes on waiting for the end of the world, documentation of his fiendishly multiplying warts as well as diminishing T-cells (and consequent official classification as a person with AIDS), and the entry that gives the book its title, his gonzo-journalistic recollections of his part in the 1988 ACT-UP seizure of the Federal Drug Administration's headquarters. Though maybe a bit too long and tedious for some tastes, that essay establishes the book's overall tone--a compound of rage, desperation, and courage that in the piece itself resounds from a background of governmental bureaucracy and demonstrators' factionalism and in-fighting, all heavily laced with black humor. "Faced with the AIDS crisis," Feinberg writes, "sometimes one laughs to avoid crying." Whitney Scott

The author of the autobiographical novels Eighty-Sixed (LJ 11/1/88) and Spontaneous Combustion (LJ 10/1/91) offers 36 essays dating from 1989 to 1994, some of which have been delivered as talks and/or appeared in such gay publications as Gay Community News, QW, Out, and the Advocate. Feinberg writes, "I would probably literally go mad if I tried to deal with AIDS at face value, without the filter of humor." His anger and impatience with hypocrisy and ignorance is palpable as he tears with biting sarcasm, bitter irony, and bitchy insight into issues of love, friendship, ACT-UP demonstrations, doctors, death, drugs, and T-cells in essays such as "Memorials from Hell," "Etiquette for the HIV-Antibody Positive," and "How To Make a Will." Vibrant and caustic, this "Eighties gonzo journalism" from a New York, Jewish, HIV-positive gay perspective is a devas- tatingly powerful personal statement.
James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.