Plays Well with Others.

In his groundbreaking first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus affected the voice of a 99-year-old Southern woman. This time out, the 49-year-old writer has assumed a personality closer to his own: a gay writer who has survived the AIDS epidemic and is charged with caring for his dying friends. With Plays Well With Others, Gurganus has re-created the AIDS novel as farce and come up with an essential account of the emotional fallout of the plague.

Gurganus has also staged his literary coming-out, as far as many of his fans are concerned. "I've never avoided the question of my sexuality," Gurganus says from his native North Carolina, "but now that I've written a book with gay characters, everyone is acting like I've officially announced that I'm gay."

Set in 1980s Manhattan at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, Gurganus's sex-charged story follows the erotic and artistic transformation of young Hartley Mims Jr., a Southern-fried liberal who comes to the Big Apple looking for culture and brilliant friends. His circle includes Robert, a stunning playboy who's composing a symphonic paean to the Titanic, and Alabama, a disillusioned debutante whose art reflects her rage. Hartley falls in love with both of his pals and discovers the strength of fraternity when many of his friends contract HIV and begin dying.

I wanted to write about how community gets us through crisis and about how holy friendship is," Gurganus says. "Whatever gay people may lack in terms of creating monogamous relationships, we make up for in having intense friendships. I especially wanted to acknowledge the powerful love between straight women and gay men. Those relationships need to be praised, but you never read anything about them."

Gurganus's tribute to gay friendship is occasionally overcome by Hartley's self-absorbed reminiscences about his childhood in North Carolina (despite the author's contention that his writing is "never overtly autobiographical"), but this affected narration punches up the story's hugely funny satire. In one scene dozens of dildos spill out of a bag and bounce through a crowded subway car; in another, Hartley's dotty, aged father attempts to locate his misplaced Buick with the television remote.

The death of Gurganus's own parents--and of many of his gay friends due to complications from AIDS--was the impetus for this story. "These deaths released me to reconsider all the people I'd loved," he says. "I became very good at writing eulogies last year and discovered that the best ones were the funny ones, where I could remember the person who died with humor and could catalog their faults without being insulting. This book sort of flowed from that."

With an odd blend of cool compassion and gallows humor, Plays Well With Others depicts the '80s as a decade marked by the gay community's great artistic expression and enormous loss. "We're all hungry for a novel or novelist that will admit how complicated our emotional lives are today," Gurganus says. "Unfortunately, young gay people read fiction looking for a key to their identity. Novels are not the place to look for that--they're books that are traditionally about people in terrible trouble."

Gurganus transforms Hartley Mims from gay gadfly to full-time caretaker, thus turning the "terrible trouble" of the AIDS epidemic into a celebration of gay fortitude and a commemoration of lost youth. "I lived through this period in New York that went from being a time of great artistic exhilaration to a time of the greatest mourning imaginable," Gurganus says. "This is one of those experiences that cries out to be written down, to be saved."