Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise - Softcover

Paul Monette (October 16, 1945 – February 10, 1995) was an American author, poet, and activist best remembered for his essays about gay relationships. Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and went on to graduate from Phillips Academy in 1963 and Yale University in 1967. Conflicted about his sexual identity, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he taught writing and literature at Milton Academy for a number of years before moving to West Hollywood, a neighbourhood in Los Angeles which has a large population of gay men, in 1978 with his romantic partner, lawyer Roger Horwitz. Monette's most acclaimed book, Borrowed Time, chronicles Horwitz's fight against and eventual death from AIDS. His 1992 memoir, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, tells of his life in the closet before coming out, culminating with his meeting Horwitz in 1974.Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award in the nonfiction category.Monette also wrote the novelizations of the 1988 film Midnight Run, the 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre, the 1987 film Predator and 1983 film Scarface. Monette died in Los Angeles, California, where he lived with his partner of five years, Winston Wilde. Monette was survived by his lover, Winston Wilde; his father, Paul Monette Sr., and his brother, Robert Monette who remains the appointed Trustee of the Monette Horwitz Trust. The Monette-Horwitz Trust provides annual awards to individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations who are, through their work, making significant contributions to eradicating homophobia. The Trust acknowledges the accomplishments of organizations and persons working in arenas ranging from academic research and creative expression to activism and community organizing.

Although novelist, memoirist, and poet Monette (Becoming a Man, 1992, etc.) is sometimes vituperative, his language is always sharp in these essays. It is only when he falls away from criticism that his prose thickens and slows down. In ``Puck,'' Monette writes in a seemingly benign way about his dog, but it soon becomes apparent that he is communicating something about himself through his unusually unsentimental relationship with the animal. ``Gert'' describes an elderly lesbian whom Monette befriends, and his admiration for and puzzlement over the elegant manner in which she both reveals and conceals her sexuality. Monette scathingly attacks the Pope in several of these essays, but ``My Priests'' describes the few men of the cloth he actually admires. They include a Catholic priest named Gambone, who left the order after his lover died of AIDS, and Brother Toby, who has organized a lay Catholic community for children with AIDS that sells Christmas trees to raise money. Monette describes his impromptu wedding ceremony, which was officiated by a New Age woman called Ma; Monette skeptically calls her ``the Auntie Mame of gurus,'' but he also respects the ``bluesy sort of comfort'' she brings to her many HIV-positive followers. In ``3275,'' Monette manages to avoid emotionalism even while describing different graves he has known (those of lovers and those of the famous). He constantly--and effectively--undercuts the material's saccharine potential with passages like ``Are you reeling from the mawkishness? Because it gets worse.'' Occasionally this incisiveness is lost. ``A One-Way Fare,'' an examination of the importance of different journeys he has made, drifts off into travelogue about halfway through, and the dissection of insomnia in ``Sleeping Under a Tree'' is less than involving. A mix of the personal and the political with the occasional misstep. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.