Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End

The creation of an identity for those whose nature is denied by society is the problem at the heart of Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End. Shot over three and a half years, right up to the author's death from AIDS in 1995, it's largely a talking-heads memoir featuring interviews with Monette and his family and friends. Although conventional in form, Monette is subversive in content and triumphant in spirit, demonstrating how a person of courage and genius can transform plague, prejudice, grief, and illness into a testament to the human spirit.

"Paul wrote because he wanted to be a writer," recalls one speaker. "He didn't at first have anything to say." That's not quite true, as the film points out: Monette was reluctant to defy the strictures of society and write about who he really was. That wouldn't happen until the early '70s, when his novel Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll established him as a gay writer. But it wasn't until his long-time companion died, in the '80s, that he began to write about what most deeply afflicted him: the scourges of AIDS and homophobia.

His last books, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, the National Book Award-winning Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, and the posthumous Sanctuary: A Tale of a Life in the Woods, recorded for today and posterity the ordeals and triumphs of the gay struggle for freedom and vindication. The extent of his success and those of his fellow gay artists and filmmakers will depend in part on whether the current love affair with things gay is an exploitative fluke or an expansion of awareness. At the Coolidge Corner.

-- Peter Keough