Novelist Looks Back at AIDS in '80s Chicago

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Photo Credit: Susan Aurinko

In the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was still unidentified and misdiagnosed in America, the disease went by several names, such as “GRID” (gay-related immune disorder) and the pragmatic if not particularly PC “Gay Cancer.” In a 1986 public opinion poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times, 50% of people surveyed supported a quarantine of AIDS patients, and 15% of respondents were in favor of tattooing AIDS victims. This public hysteria is hard to fathom today, until you read Rebecca Makkai’s sweeping new novel The Great Believers. With its title taken from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation, Makkai’s third book tells a riveting tale that opens in ’80s Chicago as a group of (mostly) gay men celebrate the life of a friend who recently passed away from the widely misunderstood auto-immune disease. In The Great Believers, Makkai follows this group of friends, who include Yale Tishman, a development director at Northwestern University’s fledgling art gallery and Fiona, the younger sister of the AIDS victim.

But the novel doesn’t stop there. It moves from the high-society art scene of 1920s Paris, to modern times when an older Fiona finds herself in Europe searching for her estranged daughter who joined a cult and hasn’t been heard from in years. These sprawling, divergent storylines take readers from Chicago’s Boystown to modern day France in a sweeping tale that uses a very real public health emergency to tell some of the most heartfelt stories of the people closest to the crisis.

Makkai is a Chicago-based writer whose previous novels include The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower. She will appear at Boswell Book Company in conversation with WUWM’s Mitch Teich at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 28.