Ground Zero

Ground Zero (1988) is a non-fiction essay collection by Aruban-American author Andrew Holleran. The essays reflect on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, particularly its effect on young gay men living in Lower Manhattan. The book was among the earliest nominees for the Lambda Literary Award honoring LGBTQ+ literature.

Many of the essays express a theme of lost innocence, serving as elegies for a time before the AIDS epidemic tore through gay communities. Holleran misses the days when the only danger on New York's Fire Island was the risk of losing "your heart, your mind, your contact lenses." In the essay "Snobs at Sea," Holleran rails at nature for creating a disease that causes so much havoc: "It still seems against nature, a violation of the hierarchy of things, that a microbe could destroy a man who could stop on a summer evening and talk about friends, Rome, Christmas, while the city he loved went past us. It still seems a scandal that an item scientists do not even define as living—a microbe that can't paint angels, trumpets, clouds, or gods upon a ceiling—can devour a creature who can. It still seems a reproach that a virus can return us from the twentieth century to the Stone Age."

Elsewhere, Holleran depicts the gay community as a ghost of its former self. In "Trust," he describes the dance floor at Track's where gay men practice the rituals of their former selves without actually engaging in sexual activity. He describes a sweatshirt with the slogan "CHOOSE LIFE" emblazoned on it as if AIDS has forced the gay community into an untenable binary where it is forced to choose between sex and life.



The centerpieces of the collection, "Notes on Promiscuity" and "Notes on Celibacy," are both composed of a list of provocative or humorous aphorisms. Holleran opens "Notes on Promiscuity" writing, "If a young man is promiscuous, we say he is sowing his oats; if a young woman is promiscuous, we say she is a slut; if a homosexual of any age is promiscuous, we say he is a neurotic example of low self-esteem." This pressure gay people feel from society to be celibate was intensified by the AIDS epidemic. Public health officials, mystified by the strange, new disease, had little advice to offer the gay community aside from a directive to stop having sex. This is reflective, Holleran writes, of a broader attitude toward AIDS that sought to sweep it under the rug rather than deploy significant financial resources toward solving the crisis.

Holleran is understandably angry at the public’s dismissive attitude toward the AIDS crisis, marked by a tendency among mainstream commentators to snicker at victims as if they are part of a dirty joke. In "The Absence of Anger," he criticizes evangelical, conservative politician and commentator Pat Buchanan: "The high-pitched giggle Pat Buchanan broke into whenever interviewing a homosexual on Crossfire—the blush, the expression of a nine-year-old boy telling a dirty joke that inevitably suffused his face, the near falsetto of his voice when homosexuality was the subject of the program—only typifies the way legions of people like him view homosexuals: as an off-color joke."

According to Holleran, because of mainstream America's refusal to address the AIDS epidemic, it became incumbent upon members of the gay community to organize themselves. Gay men who previously showed no appetite for politics or leadership had these roles thrust upon them by their community's dire circumstances. Holleran writes about the creation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power or ACT UP, a grassroots organization created in 1987 to advocate on behalf of people with AIDS. Although Holleran is largely elegiac in his tone, he is heartened by recent efforts from the gay community to organize and push public health officials to action.



Suffused with sadness and survivor's guilt, Ground Zero is a powerful firsthand account of a community thrown into havoc by AIDS.