Jesse Monteagudo: Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and reader who lives in South Florida with his life-partner. Write him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online. This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VIII Issue 39). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online.
Books about the AIDS epidemic have fallen into disfavor, even in the gay community. We do not want to be reminded that AIDS is still part of our lives; that a large percentage of our community lives with HIV; and that every day more gay and bisexual men - especially racial minorities and the young - test positive.
Thus any new book, though disturbing, is a necessary reminder of how far we have gone and how far we still have to go in the war against this epidemic. Ann Silversides, a Toronto-based journalist and broadcaster, has written about AIDS since the 1980's. “AIDS Activist: Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community” differs from most AIDS books in that it deals with the epidemic in Canada, a country which resembles the United States in many ways but which differs from us in so many other ways. And it is a biography of Michael Lynch (1944-1991), who is relatively unknown in the United States but who was at the forefront of the AIDS struggle in Canada during the first decade of the epidemic.
In many ways, Lynch is the perfect subject to use as the vehicle for a study of AIDS in Canada during the 1980's. American by birth, though a naturalized Canadian, Lynch freely moved between his two countries, providing a vital link between the US and Canadian gay and AIDS movements.
Lynch was on Fire Island on July 1981, when New York's gay community first heard about AIDS from the New York Times, and in Washington, D.C. on October 1987, where he viewed the Quilt and took part in an AIDS demonstration in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. As a regular contributor to the Toronto gay liberation journal “The Body Politic,” Lynch was one of the first people to write about AIDS, in Canada or elsewhere. He was a founder of the AIDS Committee of Toronto (1983) and AIDS Action Now! (1987) and was the driving force behind the AIDS Memorial in Toronto (1988).
Lynch also fought to maintain the gains that lesbians and gay men won in the 1970's, now threatened by an AIDS-inspired backlash, to urge development and dissemination of AIDS medications, and to educate both the gay community and the public at large about this deadly epidemic. Through it all, Lynch was waging his own war against the virus, a war that he fought valiantly but to which he finally succumbed on July 9, 1991. He was 46.
But there was more to Michael Lynch than his AIDS activism. As a professor at St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto, Lynch was an openly gay academic at a time when most gay professionals remained in their closets. He even taught a gay studies course in 1974, long before such courses became fashionable. At the time of his death, Lynch was doing research on a history of gay New York in the mid-19th century, another sad might-have-been from another great talent that was taken from us too soon by this epidemic.
Lynch was also a poet, best-known for his 1989 AIDS elegies “These Waves of Dying Friends.” Like many gay men of his day, Lynch was briefly married, during which time he fathered a son. Unlike most gay men in the 1970's, and long before “gay fathers” became commonplace, Michael helped his ex-wife raise young Stefan Lynch, even taking him to Fire Island where the sight of a small child upset some of the other vacationing gay men. Here again Lynch was ahead of his time.
“AIDS Activist: Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community” is an effective combination of biography and history. Though Ann Silversides originally wanted to write a conventional history of Canadian AIDS activism, she wisely changed her focus to Canadian AIDS activism as practiced by its most notable champion.
The historian was fortunate that Lynch kept an extensive series of diaries dating back to the 1970's, which allowed Lynch to “speak” to us in his own words. Silversides also interviewed Lynch's former wife, Gail; her son, Stefan; as well as assorted loves, friends, co-workers and fellow activists. Some of those activists, alas, died soon before this book was published. Ed Jackson, an old friend and colleague, contributed a Foreword that gave the book a sorely-needed personal touch.
AIDS histories do not make pleasant reading, especially a book about the first decade of the epidemic when no effective treatments or medications existed and when AIDS casualties followed AIDS casualties incessantly. Silversides doesn't help matters much by writing her book in a dry, journalistic style; by concentrating on the post-1981, AIDS years; and by stressing Lynch's public life at the expense of his presumably more enjoyable, private life.
For all of these reasons, I did not enjoy reading “AIDS Activist.” This does not mean that I do not appreciate Silversides's achievement, her capable account of a period in our history that we'd rather not talk about and of a talented and committed figure who is now sadly forgotten. Thanks to Michael Lynch, people living with AIDS live longer, AIDS education is more widely disseminated, and the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities have preserved most of our hard-won gains. And thanks to Ann Silversides, Michael Lynch's achievements, and the achievements of others like him, can no longer be ignored.
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