Life is Not a Rehearsal.

by David Brudnoy (Doubleday, $22.95)

Unless you're from Boston, David Brudnoy is not a household name. But in Beantown and environs e is a famous radio, television, newspaper, and magazine personality. He reached some kind of pinnacle of notoriety two years ago when, at age 54, he announced on his radio talk show on WBZ (whose powerful signal beams to 38 states) that he is a gay man with AIDS.

Spoken by a libertarian conservative who writes for National Review, who opposes "special rights" for racial minorities or gays, and who built his career on being pugnaciously non-PC, Brudnoy's revelation was hot news. But Brudnoy did not go public by choice. Like Rock Hudson (only luckier), he was forced "out" when his two-month death-defying ordeal in Massachusetts General Hospital in 1994 threatened to become public knowledge. Brudnoy not only survived but also was back on the air in a matter of months, gained 55 pounds over his hospital low of 125, and plunged into writing Life Is Not a Rehearsal.

This is another self-confessional memoir in which interest pivots on that moment when the closet door swings open after a lifetime of sexual claustrophobia. To fully work, these tomes require brilliant writing (as in Paul Monette), great passion (as in the Rev. Mel White), or originality (as in The Best Little Boy in the World). Brudnoy's account falls short of those standards. Though he's reputedly blessed with acerbic wit and intelligence, his personality does not come through in the writing. The prose is too often monochromatic, perhaps due to overzealous editing.

Yet Life is Not a Rehearsal carries its own fascination. Here is a man who has miraculously escaped death looking back at his life through the unique lens of, someone with a stay of execution. From that perspective Brudnoy tells his story without self-pity and with unsparing honesty. This very private individual spills his guts in prodigious detail. We come to wonder whether he is being too hard on himself and if any of it is disingenuous.

The picture we get is of a charming egotist, raised in a fairly well-to-do Jewish family in Minneapolis. Acculturated to be the good, obedient kid needing attention and approval, Brudnoy also reveals his darker side, with its streak of cruelty and willfulness. The combination was both his muse and albatross.

He recounts college days at Yale and, later, Harvard, establishing strong intellectual (and liberal) credentials while secretly lusting after schoolmates. He runs through a series of short-term lovers before going off in the '60s to teach at the all-black Texas Southern University, where he flirts temporarily with becoming an academic civil rights activist. But a casual visit to a bookshop leads him to a book by Ayn Rand, and Brudnoy takes a sudden (and lamely explained) radical right-angle turn that casts him as a conservative for life.

His sexuality relegated to a series of pickups, Brudnoy returns to the Boston area, where he establishes a reputation as an outspoken, erudite young conservative. This makes him an attractive TV panel guest, and soon his career focus shifts to broadcast. Simultaneously Brudnoy takes up psychedelics, spending the '70s in a semi-fogged state under the influence of mescaline, LSD, and alcohol. His career flourishes anyway (even though at a faculty party he nearly topples off a sixth-floor ledge).

Brudnoy dries out in the '80s, going on to broadcast glory that culminates in his very popular late-evening show on WBZ, which began in 1986. Two years later he is devastated when he tests positive for HIV. Claiming privacy as motivation, Brudnoy contrives a complex plan to keep it secret. Six years of denial later, his body finally fails him, and he is carted off to the hospital, where he lapses into a nine-day coma. These are the strongest passages, chronicling the loyalty of a small band of friends Brudnoy calls the Gang of Five, the personal struggle of the cadaverlike Brudnoy as he learns to walk again, and, ultimately, the triumphant outing event that brings him an unprecedented dose of the attention he loves.

In the epilogue Brudnoy tells us he is a changed man, softer, more understanding. Missing, though, is any kind of gay consciousness. Brudnoy says his mistake lay in self-denial about being sick. But for thousands of people, to be identified as a person with AIDS is also to incur the age-old stigma society imposes on homosexuality. He fails to make the connection between life choices that include drugs, hedonism, and the closet (he told his parents about his sexual orientation only hours before the public announcement) and the toll prejudice takes on so many gays and lesbians. Perhaps the next stage in this man's evolving saga will be to claim them as brothers and sisters.