Pleasure Endures

Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us, freshly reissued by FSGxMCD, is a fictionalized autobiography of a young gay man leaving his abusive home and hitting the road from Florida to New York to New Orleans to San Francisco. The 2001 cult classic is unique among AIDS novels because Westmoreland never weighs down his memories of ’70s hedonism with foreshadowing what was to come. Distance makes Westmoreland neither judgmental nor nostalgic. A rejected title for the novel was How I Got HIV — instead, the answer to that question takes the form of interstitials throughout the narrative, moments where, sure, that could have been the one lover, the one high, the fictional moment of conversion. It seems that he “got HIV” from being so very alive and open to the world. Refusing to draw a causal link between sex, drugs, and death, Westmoreland shows how pleasure can endure even during delirious grief and the righteous slog of caretaking. Why not do a little bump if you have to stay up all night keeping vigil over your dying friend? Shouldn’t you make love with him one last time? The many friends and lovers of Tramps Like Us were not victims even if they were done wrong, nor were they saints, thank god. They were holy. —Natalie Adler