What an excellent interview. Alan Hollinghurst is my favourite author. I read "The Stranger's Child" ten years ago, when it was published. I'm currently listening to the audiobook on Audible. James Daniel Wilson's narration is exceptional.
Thanks so much for this great interview, and what a treat to hear him reading from The Stranger's Child, my favourite of his books. I wished he'd gone on for longer! Hollinghurst writes dialogue so beautifully you just want it to carry on and on and on...
in Swimming Pool library, Alan described what it was like to find yourself single, looking for a partner, and over the age of 50... the Gay Community that prides it's self on inclusiveness, ignores the older and wiser of thier group. They veiw them as expired milk. I read this line once and never forgot it.. pardon me if my memory is a little off... Alan hit it on the head when he wrote, "i apply myself to the subtler connoiseurship of the out of season, days without warmth, nights without encounter, the empty pleasure grounds and the violence of the tides.."
Alan, I was just 17 when AIDS hit. by the time i was 26, my entire community of gay friends were all dead from ARC.. When i was 35 i had a conversation with my then 92yo grandmother, i asked her, "what is it like to be 92yo..?" Her reply surprised me, "Well...there are always people to talk with, but none of them were there during my heyday." (age 15 -25) when life was fresh and young. She had outlived all of her friends. she could tell us stories, but there was no one there to give a different perspective on the story. I found myself relating at age 35 very intimately to my 92yo grandmother. She had outlived all of her friends and so had I... That wasn't supposed to happen until i was in my 80's or 90's.. I suddenly had something in common with her. Anyone who didn't live thru AIDS has very little perspective.. I don't think the full story of how AIDS came about has been told. It started in the mid 70's with an experimental hepB vax and AZT developed by fauci and robert gallo. And a drug he and robert gallo developed. Does anyone think it is coincidence that the first people experimented on with hepB were the first people to test positive to HIV..? pubmed shows multiple studies linking hepB vax to the onset of HIV. It was contaminated with SIV. Once they could use the PCR test with a 65% false positive result, they now had a tool to scare those with an innocuous retro-virus that they were going to die if they didn't take the drug they developed.. AZT was proven to cause Kaposi's Sarcoma.. along with a chemo drug Interferon and antibiotic abuse, that collapses the immune system and causes T-cells to plummet. The medical literature shows that retro-viruses do not lay dormant and cause AIDS 10 years later. That is not how they work... Does anyone see coincidences with coved and the Cvax and AIDS and AZT/interferon...? This story has not been told yet.. I hope Allan Hollinghurst will be the one to tell it. I have tons of research on the origins of AIDS/HIV and how coved are related. People didn't die of AIDS, they died from AZT poisoning. and the cov id patients are dying of remdesivire poisoning. And no one talks about it even though medical journals, studies are filled with evidence.
What an excellent interview. Alan Hollinghurst is my favourite author.
I read "The Stranger's Child" ten years ago, when it was published. I'm currently listening to the audiobook on Audible. James Daniel Wilson's narration is exceptional.
Thanks so much for this great interview, and what a treat to hear him reading from The Stranger's Child, my favourite of his books. I wished he'd gone on for longer! Hollinghurst writes dialogue so beautifully you just want it to carry on and on and on...
Absolutely fantastic interview that covers so much ground. Also: thank you so much for the subtitles. A fabulous watch.
What a great interview.
I wish The Folding Star had been talked about in some detail. It's one of my favourites, yet seems to be very much underrated, even by Alan himself.
in Swimming Pool library, Alan described what it was like to find yourself single, looking for a partner, and over the age of 50... the Gay Community that prides it's self on inclusiveness, ignores the older and wiser of thier group. They veiw them as expired milk. I read this line once and never forgot it.. pardon me if my memory is a little off...
Alan hit it on the head when he wrote,
"i apply myself to the subtler connoiseurship of the out of season, days without warmth, nights without encounter, the empty pleasure grounds and the violence of the tides.."
Alan, I was just 17 when AIDS hit. by the time i was 26, my entire community of gay friends were all dead from ARC.. When i was 35 i had a conversation with my then 92yo grandmother, i asked her, "what is it like to be 92yo..?" Her reply surprised me, "Well...there are always people to talk with, but none of them were there during my heyday." (age 15 -25) when life was fresh and young. She had outlived all of her friends. she could tell us stories, but there was no one there to give a different perspective on the story.
I found myself relating at age 35 very intimately to my 92yo grandmother. She had outlived all of her friends and so had I... That wasn't supposed to happen until i was in my 80's or 90's.. I suddenly had something in common with her. Anyone who didn't live thru AIDS has very little perspective.. I don't think the full story of how AIDS came about has been told. It started in the mid 70's with an experimental hepB vax and AZT developed by fauci and robert gallo. And a drug he and robert gallo developed. Does anyone think it is coincidence that the first people experimented on with hepB were the first people to test positive to HIV..? pubmed shows multiple studies linking hepB vax to the onset of HIV. It was contaminated with SIV. Once they could use the PCR test with a 65% false positive result, they now had a tool to scare those with an innocuous retro-virus that they were going to die if they didn't take the drug they developed.. AZT was proven to cause Kaposi's Sarcoma.. along with a chemo drug Interferon and antibiotic abuse, that collapses the immune system and causes T-cells to plummet. The medical literature shows that retro-viruses do not lay dormant and cause AIDS 10 years later. That is not how they work... Does anyone see coincidences with coved and the Cvax and AIDS and AZT/interferon...? This story has not been told yet.. I hope Allan Hollinghurst will be the one to tell it. I have tons of research on the origins of AIDS/HIV and how coved are related. People didn't die of AIDS, they died from AZT poisoning. and the cov id patients are dying of remdesivire poisoning. And no one talks about it even though medical journals, studies are filled with evidence.