The Michigan Daily - Wt/u#44 e4. - Thursday, November 2, 1995 - 78 LQUGAN IS CoitInued from Page 1 Moving On I hope my story will help anyone who has to face adversity, young people in partlar - especially those who face ch rges like the ones I've had. I also ho to dispel myths about gay people, son of which I have struggled with for most ofmy life. Maybe I can prevent one teenager from being infected with HIV AniMaybeIcangive hopetopeoplewho are! abusive relationships: You can get out'and start over again. You 've got to. "Breaking the Surface" A:}ig focus of Louganis' speech to- niglitwill be coming out, a step which he'very proud he's taken. "I view it as lett go of secrets," he explained. "You bui hesesecrets up tobe these monsters that metimes exist but most of the time don so I talk about the process of com- ing it - or what my experience has beef And for me it's kind of twofold: Cotang out as a gay man and coming out withilIV." Iegnows his experiences can be diffi- :ult~br many to swallow- one of the pubi'sinitial reactionstohistell-allautobi- og y. "There was a lot of concern," he bega',"When the information was first out ther: I'm a gay man living with HIV. I did'tgetitthroughatransfusion.Ididn'tget it though drug products. I didn't get it sleeping with women. I'm a gay man. So that's kind of a double whammy. "I thought ofit that way (then). 'Oh my god, I'm asking people to accept me for who I am, for my sexual orientation - and oh top of it I'm HIV-positive.' It's scary, you know?" Hejaused. "I don't read my press or a lot N'other press (an embarrassed laugh), but I think I'm probably one of the first people who's here and healthy, and not beifig chased into a hospital by the paparazzi. That's scary - stepping out, sayinig 'This is who I am' - because yo'i-te putting yourself up to be judged," he said. AndLouganis would know-afterall, he' been the victim of all sorts of judg- meits since the "20/20"interview and the release of "Breaking the Surface." His decision to conceal his HIV-positive sta- tus after he cut his head has been called right, wrong, fair, unfair, spiteful, mis- guided; it's been debated again and again invariousmediavenues. He's beenjudged all his life. He titled one chapter of his book, "Sissy, Nigger, Retard." But he seems to gain strength by defying judg- meit. Another goal of Louganis' speech is humanization. He talked about a mean- ingful response he received after a speech: "Onegirl brought her boyfriend who was rather homophobic, and who felt sexual orientation was achoice. And afterlisten- ing to me speak it really changed his view on homosexuality and sexual orientation ... which was great. "Anybody who fears something - like; HIV or homosexuality - I encour- agetto get to know somebody who is living with HIV or somebody who is gay, lesian or bisexual," he said with an ur- gent yet still humble tone. "When you humanize it, it's less frightening, less intimidating." Beyond the spotlight In addition to the speaking engage- mets, Louganis is occupied by a wide variety of activities and work. He's been doing fund-raisers for AIDS, and volun- teer dog grooming for an organization calld PAWS - Pets Are Wonderful Suport, which helps people living with HIV and AIDS take care of their pets. Louganis loves dogs, andhas many ofhis own which he breeds and shows. Last fall he began teaching a theater movement clasp at the University of Southern Cali- fornia, drawing on the extensive dance and, acrobatic training from his child- hood He's also very interested in inter- acting with gay and lesbian youth; per- haps his difficult experience growing up gay can serve as something positive and energizing for them. All this activity from a guy who's most comfortable away from the spotlight. "I'd just rather load up the RV, head out with my dogs, find a nice quiet place with no phones or anything, and play," he said. Now that I don't have to hide the fact that I'm both gay and HIV-positive, I have a lot more that I want to say. I just hope I have enough time to make a difer- ence. . Wish me luck. I'll need it. - "Breaking the Surface" Author Wolff captivates with memoirs By Dean lakopoulos Daily Books Editor His first memoir, "This Boy's Life," took Tobias Wolff, one of the country's best fiction authors, into a new genre. That leap to the memoir genre brought Wolff even greater critical acclaim and spawned the movie of the same name starring Robert DiNiro. Now, Wolff has returned once again to the memoir, this time recapturing not a troubled childhood, but a troubling war. "In Pharaoh's Army," a National Book Award finalist, recounts Wolff's experiences in Vietnam. But those looking for vivid descriptions of battle will not find such scenes in this book. Wolff, who learned to speak Viet- namese as a member of the Special Forces, served as an adviser to a Viet- namese battalion in the Mekong Delta, and spent much of his tour on the outskirts of the battle. Instead, read- ers get not only a memoir of war, but a remarkable picture of a young man trying to find a place in the world. Above all, "In Pharaoh's Army," like "This Boy's Life," is a coming-of- age story, the tale of a young man's search for maturity and meaning in a chaotic world. Wolff's memoirs read much like his fiction. They are captivatingly written and possess a perfect blend of detail and observation, emotion and restraint. As a Newsweek reviewer proclaimed last year, "Wolff writes with such spare, whistling prose that you'd follow him anywhere, even into battle." Wolff admitted his roots in fiction writing help him greatly in crafting his memoirs. "I tend to remember things in terms of stories ... but in writing these memories I had to take them beyond the level of mere anecdote and find out what was underlying them, what was at stake in them so to speak." Wolff said that in some ways the . . process of writing memoirs isn't as tedious as fiction, because there are certain facts that aren't negotiable in recalling actual experience. But he doesn't feel that makes the memoir genre any easier to write. "A memoir has to have a pattern or form that emerges from experience," he says. "It's like sculpting ... knocking chunks of the essential form of memory." The "sculpting" process, Wolff said, was easier to do some 20 years after the events than it would have been to write the book immediately after his war ex- perience. Wolff's book avoids the po- tential pitfalls of self-pity and self-in- dulgence that plague so many memoirs written today. Wolff explained that the number of years that elapsed between Tobias Wolff is an experienced and engaging writer. his tour of duty and writing the book was essential to the success of "In A glossy 'Gc America's gi By Matthew Benz Daily Arts Writer Politics, by its very nature, seems to be a beast that seeks to be unknown. That both Rolling Stone and the New Yorker consistently devote pages to politics points to the differing defini- tions that may be applied to it. Perhaps this is because politics is less an entity than a process: An ill-defined means of effecting change. It is some- thing that can be more readily discerned by looking for the effects that it has on other, more concrete realities than by seeking to observe it directly - in the same way that astrophysicists detect an otherwise invisible black hole by the force that it exerts on observable bodies nearby. Rolling Stone and the New Yorker's coverage of poli- tics also points to ®®. Americans' fas- The Magaz cination with po- litical processes - a fascinationt that has been steadily increas- ing since perhaps the 1992 elec- tion. Or so goes the thinking of John F. Kennedy Jr., editor-in-chief of the new magazine George. "Whether it's violence in the movies or free speech on the Internet, culture drives politics. The public arena is not a hothouse sealed off from the general climate. It partakes of it, changes it and is changed by it." With this in mind, Kennedy and the rest of the staff at George have set out to make their maga- zine one of politics with a twist. "[W]e will define politics extrava- gantly, from elected officials to media moguls to movie stars to ordinary citi- zens. And we will cover it exuberantly, showing the unexpected, meaningful and whimsical ways that it affects your daily life." For "Politics," writes Kennedy, "has migrated into the realm of popular culture, and folks can't turn away." What George's "Inaugural issue" has to offer folks is a mammoth affair - 280 pages - that seems to go in several directions at once. Following Dick Lugar through New Hampshire, author Mark Leyner reveals an insidi- ousness that develops in such stan- dard campaign trail activities as speak- ing on radio and television shows and giving speeches to associations of business persons. He does so not in an alarming tone but in a style that is absurd and, by article's end, elucidat- ing. Aware of his own inexperience, Leyner nonetheless writes with com- petence and humor. As he makes known on the contribu- tors' page, "I mangled a cliche with one of his co-workers. I said, 'I guess over the next few weeks, Lugar's go- ing to have to be doing a lot of i !orge from cilen boy fleshpounding.' It was at this moment that they realized I wasn't the typical political correspondent." In "It's the Media, Stupid," Demo- cratic political correspondent Paul Begala articulates with ease the rela- tionship between the press and politi- cians. Rush Limbaugh's verbal at- tacks on the "liberal media elite" are, by Begala's reckoning, misguided. "Ideology has very little effect on the news," he writes. "It is instead tech- nological, institutional and competi- tive pressures that distort what we see, hear and read." Like a quality New York Times guest op-ed piece, the article offers pleasure in its com- pact form - it's one page in length - and in its precise, tightly woven prose. John Kennedy Jr.'s interview re Column with George Wallace, by con- trast, is disap- pointingly for- mulaic Kennedy lobs familiar- sounding ques- tions about his subject's segregationist past, and Wallace dismisses them expediently, in half-unanswered form (Wallace, to be fair, has Parkinson's disease and difficulty in both hearing and speak- ing). What one is left with is a conver- sation that chips away at the surface of a man but that never truly climbs under his skin in any revealing man- ner. Thanks to photographs by Herb Ritts, the interview takes on an almost fash- ionably serious and somber look. In general, the layout of George is appeal- ing, though the manner in which the paragraph-length segues that precede certain articles fail to end with any punctuation is initially vexing. Curious also is the recent phenom- enon that manifests itself in the pages of George. Titles of articles and tradition- ally capitalized items being left in all lower-case letters. Even the banner ("George" obstensibly refers to George Washington) on the cover of the maga- zine seems to strain against capitaliza- tion. Perhaps this fashionable trend has been borrowed from the world of elec- tronic communication, where so many names and addresses are exclusively lower-case. As Kennedy himself notes with an air of pride in the editor's letter, "George will be the first feature maga- zine to be launched simultaneously on newsstands and on the World Wide Web [http://www.georgemag.com]." Whether or not Kennedy's sense of the American people and politics is accurate remains to be seen. What does seem clear is that George knows the readers it seeks and how to appeal to them. Pharaoh's Army." "There's a tendency to paint our- selves as either hero or victim, always the virtuous one among the pagans. A certain distance in time allows us to relax that defensiveness a bit and to see things more truly," he said. One of the most compelling ele- ments of "In Pharaoh's Army" is the fact that Wolff's compulsion for go- ing to war was based on a desire for experience. Wolff noted that he had been thinking of himself as a writer since he was 15 or 16. "It was impor- tant to me to look at myself in that way, because it gave me a way of looking at the world and a way of looking at my relationship to the world that was indispensable to me." That viewpoint, coupled with a cer- tain amount of youthful naivete led Wolff to Vietnam, driven by a desire to be like the hero of his youth, Ernest Hemingway. He writes that he looked to Hemingway "for guidance in all things," and marched to war seeking what he thought every great writer must have, a wealth of experience. Now, older and wiser, Wolff sees that his quest to fill his life with "ex- perience" that he could use in his writing was largely unnecessary. While his experience did help his writing, Wolff explained that he real- izes many great writers - Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor and Saul Bellow for example - did not have the kind of experiences Hemingway had, but instead relied on "hard work and study and application to their art." "The responsibility of a writer is to develop a consciousness. What you want to do, is not set up this bank account of 'experience,' but to de- velop your consciousness so you can tell the stories that you want to tet, that need to be told, in a forceN way," Wolff said. Tobias Wolff brings together experi- ence and years of developing a con- sciousness to make both his memoirs and his fiction stories powerful and enveloping. Motor Town Juke Boys "White Folks Havin' Fun" Tapes and CD's Exclusively Available at Schoolkids Records E. 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