4 - AIDS Activism and Looking Back in Tim Murphy and Garth Greenwell

Summary

Tim Murphy’s 2016 novel Christodora, set mainly in New York and spanning the period from 1981 to 2021, takes as its subject the HIV/AIDS crisis and its long-term impact on the city and its residents. In one of the novel’s early scenes Ava Heyman, from the city’s Department of Health, is puzzling over a recent spate of Kaposi’s sarcoma in young gay men while her new intern, Hector Villaneuva, looks on. The novel shows how this rapidly develops into a full-blown epidemic while the Reagan administration and New York’s mayor Ed Koch continue to ignore the issue – refusing to allocate funding for research and treatment, or even acknowledge that the crisis exists. When we next encounter Hector (after several years have passed) he has left the Health Department and is now a dynamic and popular figure in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), campaigning for a co-ordinated national policy, and lobbying the government to provide funding for education about the disease, affordable treatment and more clinical drug trials. In one of Christodora’s pivotal scenes, which takes place at a packed ACT UP meeting, Hector is presenting the latest reports on clinical trials when he spots Ava in the crowd. By this stage she is vilified by Hector’s fellow activists for her department’s inaction, but Hector steps in to her defence, explaining to the crowd that her eagerness to attend the meeting suggests they might be able to work together. This ACT UP scene is the site of convergence with the novel’s other main narrative strand: also at the meeting is Ysabel Mendes, or Issy, a distraught young Latina woman with HIV who stumbles into the event desperate for advice about treatment. Hector takes her under his wing, and she later becomes a prominent activist herself, lobbying Congress for research funding, and successfully changing the definition of AIDS to include women’s symptoms, thereby qualifying them for welfare, treatment and new drug trials. Murphy’s narrative is presented out of sequence, the chapters jumping back and forth through time; Garth Greenwell’s 2016 novel What Belongs to You (the second novel this chapter examines) also contains a number of temporal shifts: events are told from the position of reconstituted memory, as the narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, recalls his experiences in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, where he lived for a number of years, teaching English at an American school.