Falsettos, the 1992 Tony Award winning musical about a man leaving his wife and son for a male lover in the early days of AIDS, is back on Broadway, starring Andrew Rannells.
How much did marriage, fatherhood and AIDS mix back then?
Maggie Kneip recently wrote a book about her own related experience.
In ‘Now Everyone Will Know’, Maggie’s self-published memoir, she writes about learning her young husband had full blown AIDS, three weeks after their second child was born. It would kill him nine months later.
It was 1990 and AIDS was known as the “Gay Plague.” Seeking to protect her family from her husband’s “shameful” secret and his disease’s stigma, she kept his cause of death under wraps for a quarter century.
I interviewed Maggie to discern her reasons for writing her poignant story now.
Why tell your story now?
When John fell ill at the dawn of the nineties, the world was scarcely educated about AIDS, a disease largely communicable through gay male sex, and an almost certain death sentence.
I had no idea my husband, a promising young journalist, was unfaithful or anything other than heterosexual. While dating, we’d even had what I thought was a frank conversation about our sexual pasts.
His diagnosis of AIDS was a complete shock. I was immediately tested – as amazing luck would have it, I had not contracted HIV, rendering me and our children safe. Yet, I knew if people knew what killed John, they’d think we had it too. To avoid risking this, my immediate family and kids stopped talking about John.
At that time, dying of AIDS rendered you unmentionable and un-memorialized. You’re dead in people’s conversations and public recollections. It’s like you’ve died twice.
In writing this book I feel I saved John from this. And It finally felt safe to do this, all these years later.
Our kids are grown, and on their own – I no longer have to protect them from stigma. Society’s changed; LGBT is an acronym on most people’s lips. And thanks to medical advances, with early diagnosis and the right treatment, many can now survive AIDS.
Despite all this change in the world, the disease’s stigma is still very much alive. I know many people – many women, actually – because many more women are now affected by AIDS, who let the disease’s stigma keep them from getting tested, and treated.
AIDS still keeps people from talking.
What was the hardest part of writing this book?
Writing it took discipline, fortitude, and drive I never thought I had. I lived, breathed, ate and slept it. If I wasn’t at work, I was in my unwashed, frayed Lanz of Salzburg nightgown, pouring over my keyboard. I lived in a sort of “alternate universe.”
Also hard was self-publishing. To make the best book possible, without the imprimatur, endorsement or vast resources of a publishing house, was an exceptional challenge.
Maybe the hardest part of writing “Now Everyone Will Know, though, was the reaction some family members and others had to it, which, let’s just say, wasn’t totally “thumbs up.”
It’s well known memoirs can be tough on families. For a long time, we had all observed a code of respectful, secretive, silence about what happened to John, to not just protect our family from the disease’s stigma, but to also protect John’s memory from the taint of his closeted homosexuality.
In writing this book, I was plainly breaking that code.
And I think, after all this time, many people expected me to be “over it.” I wasn’t.
What have you learned since writing the book?
That it took telling the truth at last to get over it.
I’ve learned there are many people out there today, in our “changed world,” who now find themselves in compromised situations that render them secretive, and silent. I meet some of these people: they read my book, and they reach out.
I’m so glad the musical Falsettos is being revived and I was able to see it recently. Written by a gay man at around the same time John died, I found it remarkable in its sensitive treatment of family members dealing with sexual fluidity – and AIDS – in the early 90’s. The character of “the wife” is beautifully and honestly portrayed. Towards the close of Act One, she sings a song about “going crazy,” which caused me to laugh and cry at the same time. Her character was me!
I think more and more, you’ll see stories like Falsettos, and like mine, surfacing in movies, books, plays, and more. It’s time.
Here is a link to Maggie’s book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017WFGTDW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1