Natalie Adler Talks to Sarah Schulman About AIDS History and Dykes Around Town

Natalie took my class in The Ethics of Public Biography at the CUNY Grad Center while she was getting her MFA at Brooklyn College. It was a deep dive into the ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org) so I knew she had some background. But when I read WAITING ON A FRIEND, I understood, immediately, that she had read everything, and also that she had done internal research to reach certain emotional conclusions that are not apparent on the surface.

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Sarah Schulman: It is clear to me, from reading Waiting on a Friend, that you did an enormous amount of thinking and feeling about AIDS—not just reading everything you could get your hands on, but internalizing—as best as one can—the AIDS experience.  Did you have personal experience of AIDS? And if not what attracted you to this realm? I ask this especially wondering how you felt knowing that people who experienced the epicenter of AIDS and who created its representation would be among your readers?

Natalie Adler: Thank you for sensing that I read everything I could to write this novel. It was my responsibility to do so, especially knowing that there have been so many false or misleading or incomplete narratives of the AIDS crisis. There’s the question of the “beginning” of AIDS (marking the start of the crisis when cases occurred in a certain class of people); all the misinformation, fair confusion, and lies about transmission and etiology; the Hollywood angle where a few brave individual men stood up and changed the world; and the insidious one that you credit as prompting you to do the ACT UP Oral History Project, that there once was prejudice against a scary disease, but then people came around. As if the arc of history just naturally bends towards justice without aggrieved people putting pressure on it.

AIDS was the first thing I knew about sex. It was the first thing I knew about being gay.

In a way, these narratives took some pressure off me, because I knew all I could do was get my facts straight, read everything, and try to capture the feelings of the time as well as I could as a fiction writer. Of course, I’m anxious about doing it right, and I hope the novel is read by those who lived it and that they feel like their experiences were honored and fully felt. It’s been my honor to read their stories, and to feel along with them.

My personal experience of AIDS comes from my aunt, Lory Lobiondo, who became a hospice nurse after her best friend died of AIDS in 1987. She couldn’t believe anyone could be left to die in such a gruesome way. She was thirty and had a decent job, and it wasn’t necessarily in the cards for her to go to school. So it’s remarkable that she changed her life because that experience changed her, and she had to do something about it. I think this is what you meant when you argued in LTRS that what makes someone take action is characterological. Becoming a nurse was the proudest decision in her life, but I think she saw it more as the obvious right thing to do than some huge moral stance. I just think she couldn’t be a bystander. So maybe I had a certain amount of familiarity in writing a character who was up close to the AIDS crisis and had to choose to act in solidarity with PWAs. But it’s not because my aunt told me stories. I was close with her my whole life, and I could feel the toll those years took on her, even if she didn’t want to talk about it.

My personal experience of AIDS is also being born in the 80s. AIDS was the first thing I knew about sex. It was the first thing I knew about being gay. It’s my history, and it needs to be recognized as such. It’s also my present. This loss has shaped every queer person I’ve ever learned from. There is still shame and grief around testing positive, and I’ve known people who found solace, after, in 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 feel the truth of that fact.

SS: It was very moving to see you represent the process by which friendships were lost when people in common died of AIDS—an eerie loss in life that mirrored the loss of death. As someone who is haunted by the living, more than the dead, I wonder how you decided to intersect a ghost story into a literary novel?

NA: Ghosts seemed like the natural way for me to tell this story. The initial premise was, and remained, a grieving woman who sees ghosts cannot see the one she most wants to appear. Ghosts are a normal part of city ecology for Renata. They’re just the people who were here before. Typically, ghosts show up in literature when something that has been repressed escapes and becomes everyone’s problem. In this case, the problem belongs to the living: hatred of city life and homophobia.

Even though I wrote a ghost story, living people are Renata’s real problem. Even though she’s got good politics and generally has the right read on things—which is, as far as I’m concerned, that you have to get along with different people—grief can turn anyone selfish. Her mind is on her loss, and she doesn’t always realize she’s prioritizing some of her own grieving delusions over her living friends, even when her friends tell her so, point blank. I knew that I wanted a narrator who made mistakes, owns up to it, and tries to make it right—maybe that’s a little bit of wish fulfillment on my part. But I find fiction interesting when characters make choices and face consequences. Renata is the protagonist of this novel, but she’s not the center of the world, or even her group of friends.

SS: For your day job you are an editor at a revolutionary magazine, LUX—named for Rosa Luxembourg. How does the team make decisions regarding impact? What is your criteria for journalism in an effective synchronicity with today’s radical movements?

When I queried agents, I used the phrase “dyke about town” to describe Renata.

NA: Thank you for asking about Lux. Our tagline is “We want it all,” and indeed, we take a maximalist approach to what matters. Because we define feminism, as bell hooks once said, as “the struggle to end sexist oppression,” we have to show up everywhere the struggle is most potent. Reproductive justice, prison abolition, trans liberation—anywhere 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 carry out those strategies on their home turf. Our reporting tends international, even though most of our readers are in the U.S., because the U.S. has a lot to learn from organizing around the world.

It’s hard sometimes 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 provide each other with abortion care in repressive countries. We also planned a double issue around fascism when we had a feeling Trump would be re-elected—not because he is a singular example or the worst of all the bad guys, but because he’s part of a trend we want to track.

We have a small editorial collective that tries to publish a mix of known names and emerging voices and keep the balance from skewing too white, American, straight, and cis. We’re proud of how beautiful and ornamented our glossy magazine is. One of our strategies is to make a gorgeous yet accessible magazine, as if there were a Teen Vogue (RIP) for adults. Not everyone who picks up a Lux is going to have hard left politics, and we hope we can move some people with every issue. Overall, I would say we have a big tent approach, because again, there isn’t one way to end sexist oppression. We, as feminists on the left, have everything to do, which means that each of us, as individuals, have to do something.

SS: 36 years ago I published People in Trouble, like Waiting on a Friend, a novel with a lesbian protagonist who sits in the context of gay men’s suffering and heroism. Then in 1995, I did it again with Rat Bohemia. For all the subsequent decades, whenever men are central to my books, I get praise and get a lot of “you’re so smart,” “you’re such a good writer.” But whenever I write a novel about lesbians, where minor male characters are not seen the way men see themselves, I get ghosted and dismissed and denied conversation about the work. It’s a constant ricochet from access to social death and back again. Similarly, Waiting on a Friend has been treated with respect by the publishing industry, you have a great publisher and legendary editor.  Are you concerned about what could happen to future work, if you focus only on adult lesbians and our experiences of the world?

NA: I couldn’t write Waiting on a Friend without People in Trouble or Rat Bohemia, so let’s start there. These are novels about bohemian communities of friends and lovers and artistic collaborators, which is a big part of what interests me about AIDS activism. But all your novels about downtown dykes Marlowing around, hearts bruised by their exes and broken by their families, inspired my protagonist, Renata.

When I queried agents, I used the phrase “dyke about town” to describe Renata. I thought the phrase did a lot of work in a short amount of space to give people the idea of how she was self-fashioning. (I think I came by the phrase honestly, but who knows if I read it somewhere and metabolized it into my regular lexicon. I googled it later and saw it was the title of a column in the Seattle Gay News, which I probably didn’t know but also shows that if an idea’s good, more than one person might come up with it.)

Anyway, this phrase survived my query letter, made it into my agent’s submission letter to editors, and ended up in my editor’s copy on the back of the book. I’m grateful they championed the dyke agenda! I’m still shocked that Penguin Random House is down with the casual use of the word, especially in this conservative climate. I know that “sapphic” reads are big right now, but I think that’s mostly in genre fiction, and I’m suspicious that calling these books “sapphic” is a way to avoid saying lesbian. Though in good faith, it may just be a way of being more inclusive.

But to answer your question directly: The book I’m writing now is about two lesbians with a history, and so far, there aren’t any men in it. So we will see how much we all love sapphic literature when it’s time to bring that into the world. And if Waiting on a Friend does well enough, let’s see if they let me write a sequel about lesbian infighting over women and AIDS.

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Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler is available from Random House.