Thomas Mallon’s New York Diaries covers and uncovers his halcyon days as a newbie writer and out gay man in Manhattan in the 80s&90s. He is fresh from Yale and about to be tenured at Vassar as a lit professor but also hustling to get his book published and writing book reviews for extra cash enough to afford an apartment which just happens to be located in the romantic shadow of the Chrysler Building, and also within walking distance of gay bars, potential boyfriends, casual lovers, and life partners- or not- as he confides in his diary one night after a dating frenzy “Yes, at the moment New York is my only boyfriend.”
His second book ‘A Book of One’s Own’ ( ellipsised- ABOOO) is his study of famous diarists, covering everybody from Samuel Pepys, architect of the form, to the luminous journals of Virgina Woolf, and even the disturbing chronicles of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Mallon follows Pepys’ instruction of keeping regular journals of daily unfiltered entries, the people, places and events of the day, public or private, profound or ridiculous, from the bedchamber to the chambers of government, performing arts ( onstage and backstage), family matters, friends, lovers and other strangers.
He is up front about being a gay neoconservative, although he admits it’s tricky since he’s left leaning on occasion and is a fully out, proud gay man, who, even with his GOP credentials isn’t intimidated at expressing his emotions. or being self-effacing, vain and accepting of his own dualities and contradictions. He can also be brutally frank about other people and not above taking some cheap shots, personal, political and certainly among the vaulted worlds of academia and publishing.
Meanwhile, he is habitually out with friends, ex- lovers, ex-Yalies and soon to be ex-colleagues, but his social life doesn’t hinder being his being a work-a-day writer. After ABOOO he publishes ‘Stolen Words’ about plagiarists and then a slate of novels- including ‘Rockets and Rodeos’, ‘Henry and Clara’ (the couple in the box at Ford’s the night of Lincoln’s assassination) and the very well received space odyssey ‘Aurora 7’.
Meanwhile, new boys in town just wanna have fun, and Mallon is game, but that spirit was complicated in the 80s as New York during those years of living dangerously just trying to find safe love and safer sex.
He is a latent club-kid and is frank about his hook-ups but most consequentially Mallon was dealing with a long distance relationship with his lover Thomas Curley. Tom is also a writer, now teaching in Paris and their strained phone calls are intimately dodgy about hiding things going on in both of their lives. By the early 80s New York emerged as an epicenter of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Mallon continuing a long distance relationship and wondering if they are headed toward breaking up. Eventually, Curley confides he has been diagnosed unofficially with HIV/AIDS, but his symptoms were obviously textbook. When he returns to the US, Mallon is by Tommy’s side through the final stages of the disease, the diary entries are a moving portrait of his lover and witness to the unity of the gay New Yorkers of despair, fear, loss and compassion.
Despite his despair, Mallon continues his entries, sometimes with an inpatient, sousey tone. And often dropping names and events without any backstory (for readers) but over the course of the book you get to know the important ones.
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Even with his busy career and coping with a lot of personal issues, Mallon remains close to his family, visits often and is there in any crisis. He also is in continues relationship’s with the Curley family after Thomas’ death. Mallon dives back into the dating pool, pushing away thoughts that he probably has been exposed to the virus and decides not to get tested until there are more effective drugs to treat HIV/AIDS diagnosis.
Mallon thought he too was facing an inevitable AIDS diagnosis, even though the facts of transmission, exposure, and gestation all being still determined medically in 1983 HIV test was just becoming available. Writing as much as possible, keeping up his morning long distance runs and in the evening, meeting friends at the bar and attending concerts, ballet, theater.
He remains engaged in national politics and very engaged in politics officially a neocon Republican, but he couldn’t bring himself to pull the lever for Reagan or Mondale, admires Regan but doesn’t hold back knocking him or admitting to crying when Nixon died. He also was neocon enough to ghost-write VP Dan Quayle’s autobiography.
Mallon also reminiscences about the 50s & 60s in his diaries, uncharacteristic for him, musing both speciously and myopically, when “America was still on the way up, and not as it seems now, a collection of quarrelsome tribes…there is no sense of common purpose in the land- and that’s a pretty dangerous thing for a country founded on abstractions.”
Still there’s enough positive energy to pursue love, boyfriends and other strangers. for life for one night stands and new boyfriends. There’s Charley, another Thomas (S). semi-serious, and a lot of one night stands and barely skirting falling in love with the internationally suave Carl, a smoldering charmer who disarms Thomas with his casualness over Mallon’s celebrity.
Three hundred pages in we start to hear about his new boyfriend Bill, a graphic artist and high end Tiffany window designer. It’s working out emotionally, sexually, socially. Mallon’s friends are wondering how soon he will sabotage what is turning into a joyous relationship. How soon he will do the post-sex ‘bunker in.’
Mallon has not gotten an HIV test, and doesn’t want to know until there are effective drugs, and his psychiatrist agrees with his decision. Meanwhile, it is true love between Billy and Thomas though Billy’s HIV + status and Mallon’s – status seems to be a gulf even though they know how to be safe. But Mallon writes “….we got into our periodic discussions about our fairly non-existent sex life- …that it hardly matters against all the rest we have- including the physical affection that seems more intimate to me than sex ever did. The truth is I never felt less sexy and less sexual – or more happy or more vital.”
They are semi living together and they travel frequently on each other’s work related assignments. Mallon is working on multiple books projects, magazine articles, still teaching at Vasar but, finally retires after he accepts a lead editor at GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) Magazine.
Even though have the time you don’t know the full stories of the hot-house environs Mallon refers to in his diaries in the world of publishing houses and magazines, it makes for a lot of snarky remarks and ripe drama and heady farce as he inevitably has to suffer fools gladly.
In one entry Mallon admits he can be ‘performative’ with his diary entries. His relationship with Billy is achingly intimate about the complex emotions, doubts, insecurities navigating articulating what so many gay men were going through in what is a cold reality of the AIDS crisis. “How many ghosts can a room fill up with in only 21 months? …. I have the impulse to write down how nobody reading this book should ever think I didn’t feel alive. Here I was, a joyful, sorrowful, excited, amazed, and …always fully alive. If anything happens to me, remember that.” And that indeed, is the very heart of it. Pepys would approve.
After the decade chronicled in these diaries Mallon’s novel ‘Fellow Travelers’ was adapted into the hit Showtime series. The story dramatizes the 50s Lavender Scare purges of homosexuals in government jobs and the 80s AIDS epidemic impact on GLBTQ America
