When you type in ‘Gary Indiana’, Google gives you ‘Gary, Indiana’, the birthplace of Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. You have to scroll down quite far to get to the writer, actor and social commentator of the same name. Gary Indiana was always a bit of a cult figure, but now he seems to have slipped even further from public consciousness.
As a writer Gary Indiana (born in 1950 as Gary Hoisington) is mainly associated with AIDS-era America. He lost many of his friends to AIDS and writes about the way it ravaged the gay community. AIDS seems to have vanished from our minds. It is to be hoped that COVID-19 will also be something of the past soon and that one day it will be no more than a reference to a certain period.
A big difference between the current virus and HIV is that COVID-19 can hit anyone and HIV was more or less contained within a community.
‘Of course we now know, it was never a priority or intention of the government here to actually cure this disease, but rather to keep it confined to certain despised groups,’ Indiana has his main character say in his novel Gone Tomorrow.
That might very well be true. I certainly remember the narrative of the day: that it was a gay thing, caused by the gay man’s hedonistic life style; it was seen as something at least partly self-inflicted. It may be telling that before AIDS kills one of the characters in Gone Tomorrow (the least unsympathetic of the lot, an Australian guy called Ray), we are treated to a drug-fuelled gay orgy. And while Ray dies the most horrible death, his boyfriend Paul finds solace in sex with other people. Indiana seems keen on confirming the stereotype.
Ray and Paul are based on the filmmakers Michael McLernon and Dieter Schidor, who both died of AIDS shortly after finishing the film Cold in Colombia. Both have worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder whose ghost hovers over the book. Gone Tomorrow is a semi-autobiographical account of the making of Cold in Columbia, and Indiana draws a fascinating picture of the experimental film scene of the 1980s.
Indiana suggests that both Paul and the Fassbinder character were killed instead of having died of AIDS or incident. It doesn’t take much research to work out that the character who feeds them the drugs that end their lives must be based on film editor Petra Mantoudis. You get the feeling that Indiana had some scores to settle with this book. The added plot line certainly makes for good reading.
AIDS brought an end to an era of experimental gay culture and art. Gone Tomorrow is a vivid reminder of this period and its direct aftermath. Diseases come and go, and leave many victims in their wake. (The yearly death toll of HIV is still around 800.000, something that is rarely talked about.) Gary Indiana is the perfect chronicler of an age of uncertainty in which so much was forever changed. Maybe now is the time to rediscover this great writer.
Other books by Gary Indiana