Then and Now: How the AIDS Crisis Changed Queer Storytelling

In two new novels, intense friendships—and the romantic possibilities they might hold for the characters—are stirred up by the avenues and alleyways of the cities they’re set in: turn-of-the-millennium Berlin in I Make Envy on Your Disco, and WW1-era Paris in The Titanic Survivors Book Club.

In Berlin, an art advisor finds himself lost in his own indecision over a broken relationship back home in New York; he seeks solace among the city’s eccentrics and club kids who, despite their own doubt and wandering, seem to him to have intuited something essential about their haphazard directions. And in Paris, a bookseller becomes part of a trio of ersatz Titanic survivors who bond over their guilt in street cafés and saloons, until the trio becomes a triangle, intensifying with longing and disappointment.

Timothy Schaffert, the author of The Titanic Survivors Book Club, and Eric Schnall, author I Make Envy on Your Disco, discussed the stories of queer friendship and unrequited love that have inspired their own work.

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Timothy Schaffert: You’ve worked in theater for a number of years, you’ve won a Tony, and you’ve written a novel—you’ve developed a career based on narrative, in a sense. Queer relationships, love, romance, connection—how have those narratives changed in the time that you’ve been telling stories?

Eric Schnall: I love this question. I’ve worked on and off Broadway since 1996, mostly on plays. However, I was fortunate enough to work on two musicals, each of them landmarks. I was the assistant to the producers of Rent for its first three years on Broadway, and two decades later I won the Tony you mentioned as one of the producers of the Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I was also Hedwig’s marketing director, so I was in deep.

Each of those musicals are aggressively queer in the best way, and so different from each other. But they share a few things in common—first of all, they have enormous hearts. And secondly, they have a universality that made them into long-running hits. I think my years on both Rent and Hedwig burrowed into my soul, and showed me you could have queer characters and storytelling that connect with a wide audience because they are just so good, with themes that enabled them to transcend any boxes.

When I began I Make Envy on Your Disco, I was interested in writing from the perspective of a partnered gay man who is maybe on the surface a bit vanilla and uptight, yet somehow winds up in clubs doing ecstasy and engaging in all sorts of complicated behavior while he’s in Berlin. I also wanted to write about many types of friendship, and how those can also be a form of romance when they happen so quickly.

It was so much fun to write the evolution of Sam and Jeremy’s friendship in Disco. I started this book years ago, when even a friendship between a straight guy and a gay man seemed a bit…new. But it’s a sign of times that through cultural and societal shifts, that has become much more common.

TS: I can relate to this passion for portraying friendship, and how closely such friendships can hew to the conventions of romantic entanglement. The very concept of the “romantic friendship” was something better embraced in the nineteenth century, but is maybe finding its way back into the culture now, as people question and challenge gender roles and monogamy and all the constraining social constructs.

Much has already been made of the debt Saltburn owes The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited, but I think the film, like those novels, is just reflecting a very familiar predicament of queer romance, the inexactitude of desire and the potential for mishap. The annihilation of the family is perhaps the film’s satiric gesture toward the demise of twentieth-century modes of conduct.

Much of my new novel hinges on these romantic friendships, and how they shift, and that was the premise of the first novel I ever wrote (but it was never published), and it’s something I’ve navigated in my own life. What are some of your favorite novels and films and plays that explore the romantic potential in queer friendship?

ES: Saltburn was doing A LOT, and you’re so right about it. I didn’t love Saltburn, but I appreciated that it’s so comfortable in the mess of its characters’ wayward desires. It’s funny, because your take on Saltburn brought to mind a recent, and very different, film that I loved, Anatomy of a Fall. The “straight” relationship at its center turns out to be far more complicated, and, in a way, queer. In that—as in most relationships—there is a nuance specific to that one couple, that can’t be put into a box.

As for novels, and I’ll stick to contemporary examples—Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World comes to mind immediately. I read it right after I came out and it blew—and expanded—my mind. Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Conversations with Friends are great explorations of deep friendships and the epic romance that burns within them. And though it now seems polarizing, how can I not bring up A Little Life, which has been so deeply influential, and perhaps the OG of all of these recent novels and stories that explore the romantic potential in queer friendships, and friendships in general.

Working on Broadway, I’ve learned not to question an audience that is connecting to what’s on stage. If it’s not for me, that certainly doesn’t invalidate what is true and exciting for someone else. The same goes for a novel like A Little Life—that book has resonated with millions of people all around the world, and I find that fascinating. And Hanya Yanagihara’s book really did shift the culture a bit.

A few others—Teddy Wayne’s Apartment  and Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named the Stars are filled with deep currents of passion that can exist within—and elucidate—male friendships. Also, as a side note, I was very excited by the exploration of queerness, friendship and outsize passion in Euphoria. How about you, Timothy? What are some of your favorites?

TS: My brain was permanently warped in high school by these thick paperbacks you’d buy in the grocery-store checkout lane, and I was particularly drawn to those that had men behaving badly, and that bad behavior often had a spark of the erotic. (This might partly explain why I so enjoyed Saltburn.) Celebrity by Thomas Thompson was a particularly grisly example of a whole subgenre of beautiful-young-men-bonded-by-a-terrible-crime, and yet somehow they made a TV miniseries of it.

Peter Straub did it much better with Ghost Story, a book that fascinated me to the point that I spent time trying to write a fictionalization of the making of the film adaptation, with a Fred Astaire-type as my main character. (It’s buried somewhere in my computer.) But there are much gentler examples that I came to love—one of the books shared by the characters in The Titanic Survivors Book Club is A Room With a View, which isn’t overtly queer, but I fell in love with all the men in it, and I was certain they were all in love with each other.

The Last Picture Show, and the stunning film version, are both central to my imagination (and it was the inspiration for that novel I mentioned earlier, my first one that went unpublished, which never was on a computer; the typed manuscript is just in a box somewhere). And I have to celebrate a few of my students who are geniuses at portraying intense female friendships: emily danforth, with The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Plain Bad Heroines; and DeMisty Bellinger, with New to Liberty, and the next book out from Zero Street Fiction, All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere.

You and I are the same age—when we were in high school, and even in college, there weren’t many portraits of queer people falling in love… We so often had to read between the lines for the stories we were longing for. What were the narratives from your youth that shaped your sense of love and connection?

ES: Well, you just named one of them—A Room With a View. You’re so right; it’s not queer, yet it’s deeply homoerotic. And the Merchant Ivory film—everyone and everything in it was just gorgeous. And when I was younger I had a weakness for all things British, including the men. Speaking of, there are a few British novels—The Swimming Pool Library, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, and, of course, Forester’s Maurice, all of which ignited something in me.

Now, I’m going to jump from books to TV and film. And for some reason, I’m thinking about my college days, and my early twenties, when there was a revolution in queer storytelling, when I was basically living at the Angelika. Gregg Araki’s The Living End, Paris is Burning, Todd Haynes’ Poison, Heavenly Creatures, Swoon—even the films of Hal Hartley felt a bit queer. And Sandra Bernhard was really formative—my parents took me to see Without You I’m Nothing at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village when I was eighteen, and it was a total revelation.

What Sandra Bernhard was doing was prescient and gave birth to so many artists, Justin Vivian Bond, John Cameron Mitchell, the list goes on and on. I find Sandra Bernhard’s work deeply romantic, because she’s so passionate, so worshipful of people of every sex, and of our pop culture icons. In that sense, she gave birth to a new and deeply queer sensibility. I also have to mention My So-Called Life and The Real World, both of which broke me open. Ricky! Jordan Catalano! Norm!

Looking back, I felt like Claire Danes was somehow channeling my inner gay boy. I have to also mention Almodovar and Antonio Banderas, and all that they stirred in me. I owned the VHS tape of Law of Desire and “watched” the kissing scene, ahem, many times.  I also think we can’t overstate how much Madonna added to (and, yes, appropriated from) queer culture. She quite literally changed the narrative, and forever influenced the way the world digested sex in all its forms.

Timothy, we grew up during the AIDS crisis, and I was born and raised in Manhattan, so while AIDS was all around me, there was still so much sex and possibility in the air. Believe me, New York is a very intense, exciting, and sometimes threatening place to be raised, as you can imagine!

There was so much sex in the air, and many contradictory messages and stories being thrown my way when I was a teenager in the eighties. How do you think AIDS impacted queer storytelling and changed the way romance and desire was portrayed in art, in books?

TS: Any love stories of the time were inevitably tragedies, it seemed. And our allies became a major part of the story—Clarissa in The Hours; Denzel Washington in Philadelphia. In terms of the larger culture, it seems those allies helped usher our stories into the mainstream to some degree… The Hours won the Pulitzer; Philadelphia was nominated for Oscars.

Perhaps that all had to happen before publishers and producers could build up the nerve for the stories that focused on love and commitment and sex among queer people. I don’t know… the AIDS crisis was so profoundly devastating, I think writers are still trying to find the right words for it.

My last question of the day: What even constitutes “romance” in fiction? The word has been batted about in reviews of The Titanic Survivors Book Club, and while the characters are preoccupied with their infatuations, any romance is thwarted. But perhaps the book is romantic nonetheless.

ES: Being thwarted, being preoccupied with infatuations, it’s all part of romance, I’d say. And, as queer people, our cultural—and literal—narratives have just been more complicated, oftentimes more inward-based. Queer romance to me is less about the “romance novel” as we know it and more about all of the feelings, sometimes contradictory, sometimes as big as the moon, that arise when we find someone attractive in any way.

In I Make Envy on Your Disco, I wanted to explore those contradictions in Sam. They don’t fight against each other so much as coexist within him, almost without comment.  And Timothy, for the record, I think you are a deeply romantic writer!

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The Titanic Survivors Book Club by Timothy Schaffert is available via Doubleday.

Eric Schnall’s I Make Envy on Your Disco is available from University of Nebraska Press.