Winter 2027 – Thalea Mosbach – Almost Life

What if the only thing you can give is blood? Support? The Blood Sisters did exactly that during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Lesbians lined up to give blood for their gay brothers, because gay men were forbidden from doing the same. Oftentimes abandoned by institutions and their families, those living with AIDS did not have many people to look after them. However, a group of people who did step up were lesbians.

A part of history so overlooked I found myself smiling that this crucial support found its way into Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave in the form of a subplot.

The book’s main plotline focuses on Laure and Erica’s “almost life” together, in which they get a taste of possibility but time and time again, choose to swallow it down, without being able to fully make the taste disappear in their mouths.

This is why I initially picked up the book, as I was excited to explore this concept of an almost life. Novels such as 4321, The Midnight Library, Life After Life, all explore the concept of a life that could have been. However, Millwood Hargrave’s novel does this with a lesbian love story at its core. The protagonists Laure and Erica meet in Paris in the 1970s and they fall in love. They reconnect on several occasions, having new lives, new partners, and problems of their own. They never quite let go of their feelings for one another.

Laure is a Parisian lesbian who is passionate about art and has built a chosen family with her gay friends. She faces antiqueer discrimination typical of the time and is dedicated to fighting for her rights. Meanwhile, Erica is a prospective student who visits Paris from England and does not yet acknowledge her bisexuality. Laure serves as her queer awakening. Erica’s dream of becoming a writer does not work out the way she imagined. Her dream of starting a family, however, does.

If Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe! needed a mascot, it would be Erica.

In Millwood Hargrave’s story, this almost life manifests as a relationship that happens once and leaves open the possibility of it happening again. Within a story that explores the what ifs and roads not taken, the AIDS storyline reads like it only exists to anchor the story in the 1980s.

Mental health struggles. Addiction. Abusive relationships. Postpartum difficulties. The book tackles a number of heavy themes, AIDS being one of them. Merely a background noise in the chaos of life. But it’s a background noise that I want to amplify with this essay.

Michel is only a side character in Almost Life, but his impact on the story quickly made him one of my favourite characters. He has the unfortunate fate of weaving the AIDS storyline into the book and exiting because of it, too.

Over the years, Michel became family for Laure. He helped Erica fit in with Laure’s friend group and later didn’t hold back from telling Laure to stay away from Erica’s abyss of destruction that Laure was about to jump into (again).

Michel hides his diagnosis from his friends, both to protect himself from ostracisation and to protect his chosen family from the certainty of his demise: “I don’t want you to look at me and see death,” he tells Laure.

The almost life Laure and Erica give each other touches their actual lives over and over again. But Michel was also given an almost life. He opened a café for queer people. He built a community safe space and made marginalised queer people visible, while he himself was forced into invisibility by society. His existence suddenly turned into an almost life when he was diagnosed with AIDS.

In contrast to the Blood Sisters’ response — jumping into action to show their solidarity with diagnosed people — Erica did the opposite. Retreating into a conventional life, without the struggles openly queer people face(d), is Erica’s right. So is asking whether AIDS is contagious immediately after Michel’s diagnosis, and so is fleeing the country (again) afterwards, too. But Laure and her close friends stayed with their friend Michel, cared for their friend Michel, and buried their friend Michel.

Not many people during the AIDS crisis afforded diagnosed people this care; lesbians stayed. The “L” in LGBTQ, according to the American Psychological Association, was moved to the front partly because of the solidarity lesbians showed during the AIDS crisis. Before that, the acronym GLBT was more common.

I do not want to erase all the other actors of resistance and the people who cared for those with AIDS, but since lesbian engagement and resistance are less known today, I want to focus on the untold stories. As queer theorist and academic José Esteban Muñoz put it, I want to bring attention to histories that institutional frameworks haven’t examined rigorously enough.

The first documented cases of AIDS were found in the early 1980s in a group of gay men, which them to the virus in the public’s mind. Media outlets spread that assumption. Due to the lack of knowledge on AIDS, many people simply abandoned their family members who suffered from the disease.

Millwood Hargrave evokes these histories through Michel, whose family won’t let him come back home. He only has his friends left to care for him. “You don’t clean or tidy or try to improve me. You let me be, and that is why I love you, little sister.” Laure, unlike the rest of their friend group, refuses to let his illness make him invisible.

Lesbians brought ideas from the feminist and lesbian liberation movements into their support for people with AIDS, thus making it a community struggle where no one was left alone. They stood up to governments, medical organisations, and businesses that ignored marginalised people; they fought for human rights while caring for those with AIDS. Love became political. Love became a fight against discrimination.

By making Michel’s plotline connect to an almost life, Millwood Hargrave experiments with how far she can go with her theme. Why not do the same thing?

What if… What if this fight against discrimination was won? What if society recognised the work lesbians did during the AIDS crisis?

Paris, Aug. 22, 1985

The café was much busier today. Probably because all the people from the blood drives needed a drink afterwards. I could use a drink. Or a cigarette. But, of course, I can’t. Getting people to come donate their blood for people living with AIDS has to be enough, for now. And honestly? It kind of works. Most of these people know that this is a hotspot for the gay community. The owner of this café is my best friend. More like family. I’m so proud of him for creating all this. I hope that because the government and the health institutions are slowly waking up from their trance now, Michel can get the help he needs.

How much has changed since the beginning! The “gay man disease” HAH! Maybe it was luck, or maybe it was fate that one of our protests landed on TV, I don’t know. What I do know is that it kicked off discussions. They recognised our stubbornness as gay and trans people. Finally, they understood the word community. And that we don’t give up so easily. Not like Erica anyways. Fuck their discrimination campaigns; fuck the blind eyes they turn on us! It is time we are seen as a part of society. If we keep on putting pressure on the government, who knows, we might be able to marry by tomorrow.

What a dream world that would be! No(t so much) misogyny. No putting lesbians in a box forgotten in the basement. Excuse me for allowing myself some utopian thinking. How utterly unrealistic of me.

What if… What if lesbians had not stood up for the other side of the spectrum? What if your chosen family reacted like the rest of society?

Paris, Aug. 22, 1985

Thursday! It’s Michel day again. I can’t believe he knew this whole time that it was AIDS. I can’t believe he hid Christophe’s diagnosis from us who had taken turns caring for him. Erica’s question “Is it contagious?” was not as heartless as I first deemed it. I need time to think. He is my best friend and my family. But there’s just not enough knowledge about this virus yet. He wouldn’t want us to share his suffering.

I could send him letters, send him Monet prints, call him. Do it the same way I did before, just… not with him. He’d understand. But he’d be sad, nonetheless. I’m the only one left. The others stopped going. More out of disappointment than fear. To be honest, I’m disappointed too. To withhold information that affects us as well. We went to the doctors with him, we went to the toilet with him, we cared for him. We expected only friendship in return. A family held together by more than just blood, falling apart as if infected by this virus as well. How ironic. Would his father finally speak to Michel again if I told him the situation? Would his mother take him back home if no one else would care for him? I could just follow Erica. Become a tourist myself. He could’ve told me. He should’ve told me! I’m not going to Michel anymore. He has to do it on his own now.

I think we can all agree that the second version of those two almost lives sounds more familiar. What if all the heavy-ringed, short-nailed helping hands had stopped helping? What would be different today? That is the question I asked myself, and honestly, the answer is depressing: Not much, probably.

For the dead, a lot would have been different. The living just chose to forget about the lesbians’ part in all of this. A community that is no community.

And so, the GLBTs come together once a year to discover their similarities and fight for their rights again.

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