Sweetheart

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

Zero McNoo, the witty, passionate young man of McGehee’s earlier novel
Boys Like Us, returns in Sweetheart and, with him, the slightly madcap,
always delightful apprehensions of gay male life in late–1980s and
early–1990s Toronto. Tender in its characterizations and poignant in
its confrontation of death by AIDS and social ignorance, Sweetheart adds
to the growing list of Canadian books that treat queer experiences not
as furtive and marginal, but as part of a thriving community that must
be accepted on its own terms. At one point in the book, Zero’s gay
uncle confesses that “gaiety is the greatest mask of sorrow.” Yet,
as McGehee’s story makes us aware, that need not be the case.

Zero and his lover, Jeff, are both HIV-positive. So are numerous of
their friends. The sorrowful reality, however, is not blanketed over,
but is challenged by a carnival-like acceptance of death’s
inevitability that empowers the characters to live for the present. In
one especially memorable scene, Zero, who is back for a visit to his
home town of Little Rock, Arkansas, mixes a handful of a dead friend’s
ashes into a bucket of warm mud that his wise old mammy, Stellrita,
eases her tired feet in every night out on the front porch.
Stellrita’s response, “Ou, that feels good . . . [t]hat’s fixin’
me up real good,” emblematizes Sweetheart’s depiction of the dead as
having lived proud lives that continue to enrich the life of the
community.

Zero’s story is given in a whirlwind of gay-speak; self-consciously
mannered and precocious, the style occasionally becomes cloying when the
need for more reflection than dialogue can provide seems necessary. The
utter camp that pervades much of the novel—well-placed references to
Auntie Mame, Judy Garland, and other icons reinforce the
sensibility—tie this book to the Christopher Street gang of writers
whose style and outlook have had such an impact on Anglo-American gay
fiction. The drawback of this literary heritage is that McGehee’s
distinctive contribution to gay fiction occasionally seems somewhat
drowned out, and Toronto’s gay community is often dangerously close to
becoming a surrogate Greenwich Village.