Johnson Fenton - Geography of the Heart

What can you say about a book that makes you cry on page three? That it does so again on page four complicates the reviewers job further. Nevertheless, this is not a tearjerker. Johnsons memoir is a moving expansion of the genre.... This profoundly moving, painfully honest book is a remarkable testament to a short life and the enduring love that emerged from it. It deserves the widest possible audience.

Kirkus Reviews

A rare and moving memoir.... Johnson writes masterfully.... The level of compassion, understanding, and love between these two men is a testament to how humans could and should treat each other.... Anyone who reads this work will also feel lucky for having done so.

Library Journal

Poignantly, unflinchingly, and often with graceful humor, GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART.... tell[s] a story of reluctant rebirth; a soul cleansing, if you will, brought on by lifes most wonderful accident: falling in love.

Giselle Messier, The Santa Fe New Mexican

Heartbreaking.... profoundly sad, yet somehow hopeful.... GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART takes the shape and sudden trajectory of a novel.

Bill Roorbach, Newsday

GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART is an extraordinary memoir of coming of age, of love, and finally of terrible loss. That such a story should ultimately be life-affirming is a surprise; that it should read so beautifully is not. Fenton Johnson, as he has demonstrated in Scissors, Paper, Rock, is a beautiful writer and a leading chronicler of the plague we are living through.

Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country

It is wisdom, not rage, that enlightens, and in its wisdom GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART has touched on an important and usually neglected aspect of the AIDS epidemic. Strangely, dare one say it, there is sometimes blessing in the midst of suffering.

Gregory Hancock, Boston Book Review

Fenton Johnson is at the forefront of a new generation of writers who teach us that what matters most is not whom we love but how we love. Like his earlier fiction, this vibrant memoir of a tenderly awakening grand passion moves usand gay literatureto a new (and so really old) territory that refuses all labels, all categories, all ghettos. GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART sets a standard of what we should be writing and reading.

Frank Browning, author of The Culture of Desire

GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART is the most lyrical love story I have read in years. I wept without being depressed. What more can I say?

Bharati Mukherjee, author of Jasmine

Assured and intelligent.... GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART possesses the wisdom and scope of the very best memoirs of its kind.... Johnsons participation in love, in grief, and in remembrance is a gift to all of us....

William OSullivan, The Washington Blade

Unique in the literature of AIDS-related relationships, Fenton Johnsons perspective is that of a man who is HIV-negative, yet committed to a partner who is positive. Presented in clear, unsparing prose, the unfolding of these two very different mentheir personal histories, their too-brief life togetherrenders the universal particular and the particular universal.

Michael Dorris, author of Cloud Chamber

Wrenching.... The graceful control Johnson brings to each element only heightens his books deeply moving impact.

Dennis Harvey, The East Bay Express (Berkeley, CA)

Johnson wisely reveals bit by bit how we love one another.... The deepest reaches of Johnsons emotional life unfold incrementally in that lovely, circuitous, Southern narrative style.... So, too, Johnson teaches us the idiom for expressing one of the more perplexing of human perceptions, the sacred thing, the gift from the dead to the living.

Bob Speziale, Lambda Book Report

Larry Rose
Brasserie Terminus Nord
PARIS 1988

Copyright 1996 by Fenton Johnson

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-00983-4
eISBN: 978-1-4391-2579-3

First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing June 1997

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Cover design by Michael Kaye
Front cover photo Karl Blossfeldt Archiv Ann and
Jrgen Wilde Kln/ARS New York 1996

Printed in the U.S.A.

...of course
loss is the great lesson.
MARY OLIVER, Poppies

In the months following Larrys death, this is what I set out to do: To present some sense of what it meant for two people to be in love in a particular place in time, because I believed that if I could present such a story cleanly and plainly enough it would have the power to move hearts (so much more fixed than mountains). Now, at the end of this particular journey, I can say that it provided me a way back, a means of coming home.

I dedicate my labor on this book to those who gave and continue to give their time and lives to preventing the spread of HIV / AIDS; to those who have helped and are helping persons with the disease; to those who are ill; to those who have died. I thank especially the men and women who in necessary and appropriate exercise of their right to free speech interrupted the remarks of U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Louis Sullivan to the International AIDS Conference in San Francisco in June 1990.

Reading is the unsurpassed interactive act, and serious readers among the least acknowledged and appreciated of revolutionaries. This book is for Larry, who read, and you, who are reading.

Portions of this book have appeared in different form in Mother Jones magazine, The New York Times Magazine, San Francisco Focus, and in the anthologies How We Live Now and In the Company of My Solitude.

The following are among the many friends and colleagues who contributed to or significantly shaped my thinking about this work. Much of what is good originated with them; the faults I claim as my own. For their comments, suggestions, advice, and ideas, I am deeply grateful to Peter Adair, Caroline Colburn Armstrong, Haney Armstrong, Malaga Baldi, Susan Brenneman, Jane Clayton, Douglas Foster, Bill Grose, Rich Hendry, Barry Owen, Jane Rosenman, Jay Schaefer, Louis Schump, and Katherine Seligman. Thanks also to the Headlands Center for the Arts for its support and working space.

I reserve my deepest gratitude for the members of our families, Larrys and mine, who have so generously entrusted me with their stories, and whose love and support enabled us to love each other and ourselves. I single out for special thanks Larrys parents, Fred and Kathy Rose.

From respect for their privacy, I have changed the names of some of the people of our lives.

GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART