LAST YEAR, editor Tom Cardamone with his new imprint the Library of Homosexual Congress at Rebel Satori Press reissued gay writer Allen Barnett’s classic collection of short stories, The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories. Barnett died in August of 1991 of AIDS-related causes, just a year after his collection was published. He was only 36 years old, but in his short lifetime he had become a tireless gay activist, an AIDS educator, and a promising writer.
Barnett originally came to New York to be an actor. During the 1980s, he was part of the gay scene as an activist helping to found GLAAD (orig. the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and was an educator at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). In 1979, he was accepted into Columbia University’s prestigious MFA Writing Program, where he studied with Elizabeth Hardwick, Daniel Halpern, and Manuel Puig. He published his first short story “Succor” in Christopher Street in 1986. Herbert Breslin had forwarded his stories to Michael Denneny, the famous gay senior editor at St. Martin’s Press. Soon after Barnett’s “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” appeared in The New Yorker in 1990, St. Martin’s published The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories. The book won a Ferro-Grumley Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in 1991.
In 1987, I first met my husband Howard Frey, who invited me to Fire Island that summer. It was my first time at the Pines. Arriving in jeans and carrying a duffle bag, I looked up, and suddenly in front of the Pavilion appeared this suntanned man, shirtless, slender, wearing cutoff jeans. He had the smoothest skin I had ever seen. His body was lean and not overdeveloped like all the steroid-muscle guys who reigned supreme. His ears were elfish and his face intelligent, his head a perfect oval and covered with short hair. He sported the faint stubble of a pale red beard. It was a queer look that was years before its time, as the style back then was still long hair and beards coming off of the 1970s.
I was so intrigued by this blue-eyed man with a lovely, speculative smile. Howard greeted him as “Allen.” He was affable but took one look at my heavy clothing and said something to the effect that I needed to lose all the clothes and lighten my load. Later I would learn that Allen was especially candid and opinionated about everything. He was also an empathetic listener, curious and kind.
We followed Allen to the Chase Bank’s floating boat, which only visited the Pines Harbor at certain times of the week. Later that day, Howard told me that he and Allen had been involved romantically for about a year or two, but they had drifted apart as the relationship had become complicated by a third person. He told me Allen was a writer of fiction and a graduate of Columbia University’s Writing Program. That afternoon, Allen dropped by our house and we chatted briefly. Apparently he routinely spent his summers on Fire Island holed up and writing. His career was taking off, he said. I told him I was a poet and a physical therapist.
From then on, Howard, Allen, and I would get together periodically on the Upper West Side, where we all lived. Allen would haunt Shakespeare & Company Bookstore at its old location in the low West 80s on Broadway. We often crossed paths there, but our conversations were rather short. Still, I was impressed by his reading interests and he would often be on a hunt for some unique book, classical, contemporary, or otherwise.
Allen lived on West 104th Street off of Broadway in a tough neighborhood with lots of drug dealers and the rough-and-tumble of street life. The U.S. Post Office was just across the street. He had us to dinner at his walk-up and cooked a wonderful pasta dish, which he admitted was about the only thing he knew how to do well. He told me he’d lived in Rome his sophomore and junior years at college.
Slowly, he was more forthcoming about his past and he would dread his mother’s visits to New York. They had an intense love-hate relationship, and he would be stressed out for weeks. Allen was pretty much always broke and admitted to a childhood of abject poverty and total dysfunction. He grew up in Joliet, Illinois, with his two brothers and four sisters, “practically in the middle of a cornfield,” he liked to say. But that didn’t stop him from always ordering the most expensive item on the menu at restaurants. He cobbled together a living while dedicating himself to political causes and the service of others. In addition to his work at glaad and GMHC, he would hand out condoms in the gay baths.
As noted, he often displayed an angry and strongly opinionated nature. He was critical of GMHC and frequently disagreed with their decisions, and had a difficult relation with glaad. He held a fascinating part-time work position by way of his friend Herbert Breslin, who was Luciano Pavarotti’s manager. Allen would answer Pavarotti’s fan mail as well as that of a few other Breslin clients. Once or twice he read us some of the letters and his amusing replies. They were always skillfully written with just the right amount of tact and cheekiness. He was tough, a person who was self-invented. He’d lived for a short time in an orphanage and had suffered there a heavy dose of Catholicism. I think perhaps this was the cause of his Jacobin spirit when it came to all things religious or intellectually pretentious. Deep down, he was a rebel. Allen was not cruel, though many people were his enemies and said so.
When Allen contracted AIDS, he suffered terribly from neuropathy and KS, which had spread to most of his body internally and externally. He asked me to do some massage or physical therapy in his apartment to help alleviate the pain. I was amazed at the transformation of his home into a medical supply room with IV poles and bags of medical solutions and syringes, a hospital bed, a wheelchair, and much more. I admired his tenacity. I was of little help in the end, and I think he realized it. He showed me his new furniture, a long-desired rug and a stunning couch and other coveted items. He had run up his credit cards to the max to buy them, as did so many of my other friends facing death.
A week or so later, we heard he had died. Howard and I went to his memorial service at Saint John the Divine. It’s the first time I was given a red ribbon pin for AIDS awareness. I went home and wrote a poem for Allen titled “Stations of the Cross,” which was included in my first published collection of poems, A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992.
Walter Holland is the author of four books of poetry and one novel, The March.
