Gays and ghosts have a natural kinship. Both may elicit fear in unsuspecting passerby. You may feel vaguely unmoored, inexplicably nervous at their presence, particularly if you, yourself, have an unacknowledged kinship. But when you accept the presence and fully see them, you enter into a whole new reality. Ghosts have a cheeky answer to the question of “visibility.” Better, perhaps, to have the power to choose who can see you—a jangle of chains, a nod, a hanky, a flick of the wrist. Ghosts and gays; themselves abandoned by the living, they thrive in abandoned places, cruising around rotting piers or houses in decline. Their memories of their lives before are vague, the barest shading of a time and a place.
In literature, ghosts often represent the agency of the past, imposing itself on a repressive present. They are what remains when an injustice has been buried. In my novel, Waiting on a Friend, most of the ghosts are gay, and they appear to my main character, Renata, because of her patient willingness to see them and meet them where they are. And also, she’s gay. Ghosts are her friends and neighbors who were gone before they could understand what was happening to them. It’s the beginning of the AIDS crisis and the tipping point of downtown gentrification—they’re showing up to protest their own erasure. The more they’re pushed, the louder they get.
