Heartlands: A Gay Man's Odyssey Across America

I initially thought that this would be a light and entertaining travelogue with pictures of gay life in various American communities. It is a travelogue, but much more. It becomes a gay man’s search for the meaning of life in the early years of the AIDS crisis.
I don’t usually read personal

memoires, but this book shows how memoire can combine personal experience and reflection in a compelling and illuminating story. The author Darrell Rist slowly reveals more of himself as he explores gay life in many varied American communities. Initially, perhaps, he does not even know why he has begun his journey, suggesting that it is a journalistic attempt to portray his community in a time of crisis. He visits the gay mecca of San Francisco and finds a community divided along lines of class and race, suggesting a sociological perspective that interested me. In the mountain states, he finds loners with a self-serving critique of gay urban life, as well as military members willing to make compromises for their careers. In the desert, he finds visionaries living outside of society and rodeo cowboys and girls who are bitter that the regular rodeo circuit won’t tolerate them. In one experience after another, Rist shows that if one can even speak of a gay community in America, it is a community with so many different issues and perspectives that even when everyone seems to recognize that they live in a homophobic society, they don’t share a sense of a common oppression.
It’s interesting that one of the most touching incidents occurs when Rist helps some illegal Latin migrants in the desert and observes that their fear has shut down their capacity for empathy and intimacy. It becomes clear that Rist is talking about himself and his own fears.
Gradually, Rist tells his own stories of loss, the ways that his friends deal with AIDS, some rising above their medical complications, and some falling into despair. The loss of an intimate friend who was a spark of energy and life seems to lead to Rist’s own sense of despair, and his acknowledgement that he cannot find meaning in other people’s life stories, but he has to find his own sense of meaning. The fact that he shares an alienation from mainstream life with many, perhaps most, gay men does not allow him to accept their answers or accommodations. He continues to search, he finds something like a queer paradise in Hawaii and some individuals living in strange solitary networks in the hostile extremes of Alaska. Toward the end of the book, he fails to connect with a black gay New Yorker, who doesn’t want to live in white gay society because he can never be comfortable there.
Rist describes the specific details of the lives of a wide number of men, and a few women, but he places it in a broad social and naturalistic context. His poetic descriptions of the physical landscapes that he passes through are I think an attempt to link himself and his readers to a more universal world. They sometimes strike me as overdone, but the language does take his personal stories into a place beyond their specific settings.
Rist does find resolution of a kind in the last chapters, although not a resolution that can be simply stated. He calls it redemption and the experience of universal love, but the experience he describes is appropriately complicated. Meaningful life and death in a time of AIDS cannot be simple, but his experience does seem to give Rist some resolution.
As a reader, I felt that this book offered a satisfying insight, not only into the time and place it describes, but also into the larger themes of life and meaning that Rist wants to address. It’s worth taking the time to read it slowly over a period of time, reflecting on the range of experiences and ways of living that Rist finds in America.

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