Such Times by Christopher Coe

by Christopher Coe

Dining in a Los Angeles eatery after Dominick's appearance on a popular quiz show, HIV-positive Timothy and Dominick discuss their lives and AIDS and the friends they have lost to it

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Gay Fiction, Gay, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Christopher Coe was born in Pennsylvania in 1953 and raised in Portland, Oregon. As an adult he lived in both New York City and Paris.

As well as a writer, Coe also worked as a photographer and cabaret singer. His first novel, I Look Divine, was published in 1987, his second, Such Times, in 1993.

Coe died of AIDS on 6 September 1994 at his home in Manhattan.

Reviews

[E. Rickert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a five-star heavyweight because of its sprawling scope, and because of its cultural/social importance and total absence in the contemporary canon of literature.

Please understand: I'm never this guy.

Really.

I hate that guy, the one who talks about unknown books in public spaces like they're crime & punishment or the bible ("he was a contemporary of the marquis de sade, and sade read his work OBSESSIVELY, but no one knows him because he, like, had the most normal vanilla life ever"), but this book is just so significant. It's a time capsule of late twentieth century gay life, and it's particularly important in terms of early-ish HIV and AIDS treatment and the attitude toward the disease, the sufferers of it, the medical paradigm that exploited it (re: still exploits it), and the society who treated those men like monsters. It's like a mirror turned on itself again and again and again.

Every gay man--especially those of us who didn't live through the epidemic and came of age to become the truvada whores we all are--absolutely has to read this book.

Is he one of my favorite writers the way Elmore Leonard and Mary Gaitskill are? No. Is this an eternal favorite like ANGELS or UNACCUSTOMED EARTH? Nope. But it is a terribly important book, like an epilogue to FAGGOTS.

I'm not a fan of his writing style, which veers toward pedantic and sanctimonious at times, but Coe's two books are genuine masterpieces in my mind. I love I LOOK DIVINE far more than SUCH TIMES, but the latter is more relevant to recent history and to gay culture forever.

#micdrop

[Dennis Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melancholy and pensive; bittersweet and profound. An eloquent, intimate and moving portrait of men, desire and AIDS. Coe’s stream of consciousness writing style is breathtaking. The circular narrative of past and present brilliantly tells a sweeping story of loss, love, lust and life. Very such times indeed!

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such Times will join the pantheon of books I wish I could read again for the first time. How is this novel not considered a classic? How does it not hold the same prestige in gay literature as The Dancer from the Dance or The City and the Pillar or Maurice?

It is the story of the relationship between Timothy and Jasper, and their deeply personal experience of the AIDS crisis. It reads like Timothy wrote his story by lamplight, just for you, while wearing thick-rimmed glasses and drinking brandy neat. I cannot even explain the beauty of the writing here. Timothy’s devotion to Jasper, and the myriad heartbreaks he suffers at his hands, are rendered so that you’ll reread paragraphs just to feel them again. It’s rife with loss and difficult conversations, but also with warmth and loving companionship. This book isn’t a hot, gay romp under the Italian sun, but it’s one of the most beautiful and affecting novels I’ve ever encountered. And isn’t it pretty to know that even difficult love can still be profound?

RIYL The Normal Heart, loving someone while knowing they will break your heart, bargaining with God

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are passages in this book that I just savor. The vision of the HIV epidemic shows what life was like in the gay community early in the 1990s, before protease inhibitors. Christopher was a brilliant chronicler of life and love, and we lost him way too soon!

[Julien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I’ve read in a while. About gay lovers during aids crisis in the eyes of “the other woman”. Narrative is creatively constructed. Stays away from cliches it could have gone into. About death, about life, about gay culture.
I just know Cristopher Coe would have loved Lana Del Rey.

[John Treat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coe's I LOOK DIVINE was a masterpiece; SUCH TIMES may be as well. The colophon says it is a work of fiction,and so any character's resemblance to a real personage is coincidental, but I refuse to believe that narrator Tim's Jasper is invented. He is too important to be made-up.

People will tell you this is "about" an epidemic, but that is misleading. I have no doubt Coe's own dying informs every page, but it's an 18-year old romance, across the divide of a generation, that he wants you to know about. I did not want this book to end, any more than I want Tim or Jasper (or Dominic, or Tom) to die. But it does end, as Coe writes, with the last time we do anything, just without knowing it.

The novel is also about food and wine, for reasons I will have to think about-- reasons maybe related to its prominent orality and anality, if that's a word. (It needs to be.) Coe might just as well have entitled his book SUCH DINNERS, though lunches figure prominently as well. I wish Coe were alive. I have a lot of questions for him.

[Ian Cann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had much ummming, ahhing and yelling at this book to decide over how to rate this book. On the one hand the prose is exquisitely written with almost Waugh/Hollinghurst levels of brilliance. On the other hand the main three or four characters are to a man an absolute shower of insufferable pricks and on the other hand, hey three hands! But there we are then.

Really, Timothy, Jasper, Dominic and Oliver Ingraham (especially Oliver Ingraham) deserve each other thoroughly and I'd be happy to leave them alone were it not for Coe's beautiful writing and the raging of the dying of his light against the AIDS epidemic. Such times indeed.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, I have to say that I'm abandoning this book a little more than halfway through. Honestly, I spent the last 50 pages not enjoying, but trying to figure out if this author is really this bad, or if he's a genius at creating an utterly vapid, shallow idiot who is telling the story first person. Flashbacks within flashbacks may be very realistic, but they don't make for very good reading. And, also, if the character was that worldly, and had as much sex as you say he did, he wouldn't call a penis a "weenie." I didn't even reach page 200.

[Sarah Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a rough book to read, mainly because you know these men have AIDS and these are their last years and they know it. They shouldn’t be dying. Among a list of risk, sex shouldn’t be one, but it was and is still for so many people. And it makes me sad that so many men killed themselves instead of living. I makes me sad that so many men died of AIDS, but the surviving people chose to label it something else. As if Cancer is more noble a death than AIDS. It’s death and it’s horrible.

Timothy is an intelligent man used to the finer things in life. He doesn’t need to work for living, though he does photography a bit for fun. He’s out with his best friend, Dominic, a man who’s also used to only the finest things in life. He’s not told him his lover has died, nor that he’s sick and if Dominic knows he’s fervently trying to ignore it.

As this day among two friends progresses, we learn of Timothy’s great love, Jasper. Jasper was much older than Jasper when they met, he was also living with another man. Jasper is selfish, yet despite this, in his own way he loves Timothy for the rest of his life, over 17 years. Sure he has a lot of anonymous sex, asks Timothy to leave their Paris vacation spot so his other man can visit. He’s selfish what can you say. But, our Timothy loves him and in the end their lives together is the joy and perfection he cherishes.

The book is written as a stream of conscious, from one thought to the next often times veering from moment to moment. We get thoughts on life so deep and meaningful I had to put the book down and just let it wash over me. Other times the characters were just so arrogant and classist I couldn’t stand them. These aren’t likable people, none of them, but they’re real. It’s a snapshot of gay life in the 80s, of NYC in the 80s, of prevailing thought in the 80s. These men had a lot of sex, much of it without meaning. And it should have been fine. They shouldn’t have died because of it. This is an important book and should never been lost to the future.

[Brendan B]

"Every morning now, when I come to life again, it amazes me to be in the world, that in the day ahead I will be able to witness some event, to hear on the telephone what friends are doing, where they dined the night before, to hear their menu and what they said to each other about someone else. It amazes me that today or tomorrow I can photograph a man or a woman and make them look better than they do; that I can read a book I've always wanted to; that I can go to a movie; that I can peel a sweet mango and cut it into pieces to eat . . . ."

"I've not seen all the images. I haven't seen enough. Even without resources, without prospects, lacking health, lacking money, perhaps even unloved and unloving, there is still a world to grasp. If I cannot grasp it, it is there to be beheld. I will do so. I will apprehend."

Such Times was no light read. It deals head on with the disquieting aspects of illness and vividly depicts a world in which queer people are seen as "dirty" simply for being immunocompromised. While the writing was challenging and the narrative structure a bit tedious, I think this book will definitely stick with me for a long time.

[Maggie Bahnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It infuriates me that this book has a mere sentence summary on this app because it is a masterpiece and is deserving of much more!

I came across this at powerHouse Books in Brooklyn, which has its own imprint, Archway Editions, that republished Such Times 2025 (it was originally published in 1993, shortly before Coe’s death). This edition has an added Introduction, written by one of Coe’s dear friends, and that, stand-alone, is one of the more beautiful things i’ve read.

I definitely wouldn’t have come across it if I hadn’t visited the bookstore but excited to recommend this to others and keep reading Archway Editions! I think their most well known is Molly, which i’m going to try and read next :)

[Dev · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that deals in impossibles: the impossibility of reconciling what could have been with what happened; facing finality and trying to keep living regardless. Coe’s tone emanates such warmth and friendliness — casual, yet carefully plotted upon a quick reread of any given section.

The narrator himself is complex, verbose and hoping he isn’t, catty and occasionally arrogant, but still so human in his thoughts and feelings as he tries to define his life and that of his long-term partner. I think this could have been trimmed down just a touch, but it is ultimately a very beautiful and compelling look at gay life before and during AIDS.

[Giu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐

While it was beautifully written and offered an interesting look into the AIDS pandemic, the characters, including the protagonist, felt irrational and pretentious. I couldn’t understand many of their decisions or views because of that. I have no clue about the gay scene in America during that period, but the constant “honey” and “sweetheart” and whatnot got really tiresome after a while. I assume those guys were earlier versions of the type of gay man who annoys me today as well 🤷🏼‍♂️

[Jessica Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

i found this book on a stoop in the west village and the the first 50 pages did not have me and then all of a sudden it had me and i couldnt stop reading awesome prose but the ending was a little lackluster

[Harry Rey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly one of the unsung masterpieces of gay literature. Coe paints a harrowing yet intimate and stunningly touching tale of loss and love amid hidden tragedy of the Aids epidemic. I'll always be touched by this book and its poignant scenes. It's like a gay Catcher in the Rye.

[Caitlyn Rosen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sprawling and so devastating. Had to keep putting it down cause it made me so sad but it was truly a stunning read

[Sabrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

einfach vergessen, dass es vor covid schon eine pandemie gab

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"'After what may have been a reasonable amount of rumination, Jasper said that getting the virus was a piece of bad luck. He said it was nothing more than that. I think otherwise.'

"Jasper, Timothy and Dominic created enchanted lives. Timothy has adored Jasper; Jasper and Dominic have enjoyed other men. Each has relished his beauty and lived in the moment. Now one is dead, and another, though ill, is fighting to live, while all around a whole generation is redefined by a virus.

"Timothy is happy to have loved, but now wonders if his love was without expectation, not rigorous enough and if, for the same reason, 'in the last decade, more than a million men and women have died, many from loving without demand.'

"Written with a rare beauty that defies sentimentality, Such Times is an examination of the intricacies of the heart and the elegiac tribute to a time of lost joys." From the jacket of the 1993 Penguin edition of the novel.

I've read this novel at least three times, though the last time was probably eight years ago. I will read it again, though I don't know when, because although this is probably the finest English language novel about AIDS it is not an AIDS novel.

We have already reached a time, thank goodness, of a generation come to sexual maturity after HIV/AIDS ceased to be a defining part of being gay. Of course there is more than one generation of gay men who have come of age post the height of the epidemic and who learnt to live with it. The reaction of younger gay men was from the start was often bewildering to those of the 'Stonewall' generation. But, even if AIDS had never happened, the generation of Stonewall was going to be challenged by those for whom their stories were as irrelevant as those of the gay men of the 40s and 50s were to them. But for that Stonewall generation HIV/AIDS came just at the point where they would have had to admit that middle age was encroaching on them and their world was no longer 'the' world. Christopher Coe's brilliance in 'Such Times' is to build a story not simply about AIDS, but about getting older, relationships and love, commitment, love and who loves who, who is giving and who is taking.

Literature is not created by medical emergencies - WWI resulted in novels, poems, plays and much else that burnt itself into our cultural psyche:

"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro Patria mori."

Yet more died, more quickly, in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919 then in the war. There are no poems or novels about the Spanish flu, there is none from the Medieval Black death and I doubt anything written about the recent COVID pandemic will be read in five years time. HIV/AIDS has produced an awful lot of writing. A great deal of it was well meant but was artistically meretricious. 'Such Times' is the exception because it is grounded in something more than death because death, while monstrous, is inevitable and even the most heartfelt cri de coeur against systems and politicians is ultimately only polemic. 'Such Times' is about people and choices and what they mean and seeing beyond the epidemic into what was really important and that makes 'Such Times' a great novel, not a great AIDS novel, a great and important novel that will be always be read.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it’s fair to say that we are all guilty of focusing on the statistics that are shared on the news while easily forgetting about the people behind them and the way their lives are detrimentally impacted. For the first 3/4 of the novel, while HIV and AIDS is still a major theme, it does not seem to be the focus. Rather Coe draws us into the everyday troubles of love, grief and career. It is toward the end of the novel where AIDS takes centre stage and the obvious tragedies that ensues. This is only worsened by the personal side of the novel as we can easily draw parallels between Coe and his protagonist. These parallels further deepen the fact that Coe is drawing our attention to the very real people that were, and who still are, effected by this virus.

[W. Stephen Breedlove · Rating 5 out of 5]

“STOUTHEARTED MEN”

“There may have been a day this year when I thought of him as dead right off, the first time he came to mind. Most days I think of him as though he is alive.” These are the opening sentences of Christopher Coe’s Such Times. Timothy, the narrator, silently thinks of Jasper, his lover of eighteen years, who has died of AIDS, while he has drinks with Dominic, his friend of twenty years, before they go out to dinner. Timothy tells us that it is the summer of 1992. He travels back and forth in time while telling the stories of his relationships with Jasper and Dominic.

Such Times could almost be considered a quasi-sequel to George Whitmore’s The Confessions of Danny Slocum, but it is set in a much more elegant and wealthy milieu than Whitmore’s novel, although the characters in both novels do frequent some of the same places, such as bars, baths, and piers. Timothy refers to Julius’ as “the oldest fag bar in New York,” where “not one man was good-looking enough even to talk to.” Julius’ is the setting for the touching last scene in Danny Slocum between the two unpretentious main characters. The highly witty and ultra-sophisticated men in Coe’s novel would give Whitmore’s characters a serious run for their money, both literally and figuratively. They also confront something that Whitmore’s big city gay men of the 1970s could never have imagined: AIDS.

In part six, the story turns deadly (pun intended) serious. Timothy has the virus, but he doesn’t tell Dominic, who also has the virus. Timothy never tells Dominic that Jasper has died. Timothy knows that it is possible that Dominic and Jasper could have given each other the virus. Timothy could or could not have been infected by Jasper, but he has had an affair with a man in Paris so that if he becomes infected, he won’t have to blame Jasper. Timothy has done a lot of research on AIDS. When he explains the virus to Jasper, he knows what he is talking about. He says to Jasper, “It’s too simple to think of it as the virus.” “There isn’t just one virus.” “What you have . . . is your virus.” Timothy gives us an unflinching account of how each of the three men in this tangled triangle deals with his own virus.

The novel could have concluded effectively at the end of part seven, where Timothy says to the world and to himself, “Honey doll, sugar puss, you bunghole out of hell, straight from hell, I will not die for you today.” But Coe doesn’t stop there. In part eight, Timothy and Dominic finally go out to dinner, where they were headed in the first part of the novel, and in an unforgettable scene in a piano bar, Dominic gets up and sings “Stouthearted Men.” In part nine, Timothy pays his final tribute to Jasper: “Tea with honey was the last thing I gave to the man who was my life . . . I am still owing.”

Who will tell Timothy’s story? Who will memorialize him in the style with which he remembers Dominic and Jasper?

Such Times packs a double whammy: the author was lost to AIDS and the novel is about men lost, or going to be lost, to AIDS. This is almost too much to bear.

[Timothy Juhl · Rating 4 out of 5]

For several years now, I've kept a framed passage from 'Such Times' that I have read a hundred times and glance at almost every day. It begins, 'There will always be one final everything--the last word, of course, the last breath; there will be one last check you write, one last nap, one last artichoke', and it ends, 'You will lick one last stamp. You won't know it when you do.'

Even writing this now, I realize the odd significance that even these words I'm writing might hold. Or might not.

'Such Times' was published in 1993 and as I read it, I determined the book to be timeless. Not in the eternal sense. While it's well-written, moving at times, I doubt it will ever be considered among the works of great literature. What I mean by timeless, is this story exists in a driftless moment of time, a time that, in 2016, feels so completely alien and other-worldly, it feels unbelieveable. It's a detailed account of a time when thousands of gay men were dying horrible deaths, a time of fear and sorrow, of overwhelming grief within a community. A time I remember all too well as a gay man over the age of 45.

There are words written in this story that are ancient, forgotten mostly now, and only remembered by the survivors of that time with the startling clarity of a harsh slap. Words for diseases, infections, medications, words that once seemed to be everywhere at once, and the frightened gay man or the infected gay man knew these words as well as he knew his name.

I know there are many books written from this era, more sad stories of men who died when the epidemic was new, not understood, before a single pill could hold the virus in check seemingly forever. I own a great many of these books, unread for the past two decades. Would they read as timeless as Coe's book? I don't know.

I'm not sure I care to ever find out.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best novels I've read in a very long time, and one which I will certainly revisit. It has a depth and complexity that is enormously satisfying and a structure that is a thing of beauty. It is not easy, but it rewards the effort with much to think about.

As any novel set among gay men in the New York of the last quarter of the 20th Century, Aids is prominent, but I think it's a mistake to lump this in with other Aids novels. HIV is as omnipresent as it was in our lives at the time, but to me it's much more about what love, devotion, and beauty mean than simply destruction by a virus.

Timothy's rather precocious narration can be difficult. It's odd sentence structure and obscure overly-latinate vocabulary act as speed bumps. I think this is quite deliberate: a rather brilliant device that demands a reader savour rather than devour.

[Rosemary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and accomplished story of loss and acceptance, and not only in relation to AIDS. Timothy never had as much of Jasper as he wanted, because somebody else had a prior claim - and contrary to what the blurb may suggest, it wasn't Timothy's friend Dominic. But Timothy had as much as Jasper could give, and this is the story of the life he made with that.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This melancholy romance, penned about 25 years ago by a gay man dying of AIDS, has its touching moments but overall, it would probably hold little interest for a straight readership or those living a mundane life outside glamorous New York. Timothy, a photographer, is looking back as the end approaches at early mid-life. He recounts his strange 20-year open relationship with Jasper, a man twice his age, who in turn spent half of his time with a third man, older still, an antiques dealer in lower Manhattan. Many readers may find it strange that Jasper can split his commitment between young Timothy and older Oliver Ingraham. But, come to think of it, it's really not so strange -- many married men manage to have a wife as well as a girlfriend or boyfriend on the side, sometimes for decades. Like them, Jasper simply compartmentalizes his life, keeping the other two men strictly apart until the final days of his life.
Giving us that set-up, Coe takes us through a seemingly endless series of dinner dates and fleeting vacations abroad, mostly in Paris. A precocious young queen, Timothy is introduced by Jasper to New York's finest restaurants. Chapter after chapter, Timothy comments snobbishly on the cuisine and the cocktails. Snippets of his repartee with Jasper seldom rise about mutual dishing. With the onset of AIDS, their sex life fades to nothing. Yet, somehow, the bonds endure. Although he insists he doesn't care, Timothy repeatedly obsesses about whether his HIV came from Jasper or an occasional trick. Only in the last chapters, in the final summing up after Jasper's death, do we finally get inside Timothy's head and get an inkling of his crushing grief.

[T.B. Caine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Trigger Warnings: suicide, fatphobia, racism (it only happens once that I saw, but there might be more), miscarriages

oof wow this book was absolutely crushing.


'That's so corny,' I snapped.
'Sometimes things are,' Abigail said
(page, 277)



This book bounces around a timeline (and I'm still not sure if it helps or hurts the story) from the years Jasper and Tim spent together all the way towards the end when Tim is taking care of Dominic as he is now dying too. There are moments where the writing feels a bit repetitive, but I think that is there more to help remind you of what was going on in the relationship at that point in time. I don't think I've been as invested in a romance as I have during this. Even though there are times where I just want to tell Tim to leave Jasper since he is not showing love back, but that is slightly redeemed towards the end.

I have to agree with another of the reviews here, this was written so well I have to believe that it is at least partially inspired by Coe's own life. Some elements feel so personal and deep that I almost want to say this is partially a memoir.

??? No idea what else to say honestly. I'm still shook, and sad, and I'll probably cry about this book later tonight.

[Halkon · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his New York Times obituary from 1994, Coe's worth is summed up in three lines: "Wrote Gay Novels". In "Such Times", Coe displays talent which extend beyond chronicling gay life and sex in the late twentieth century (which he does with aplomb). The novel follows Timothy, mourning the death of his lover Jasper to AIDS. This novel is about the loss of a lover, the way grief unmakes us, the negotiation of relationships, the make up of the virus, the joys of unexpected human contact, the threat of impending death. By the end, the reader is left with unprecedented insight to a community wiped out by a remorseless disease and an apathetic government.

There are few good novels which deal with AIDS during a period when there was little or no treatment for the disease. Coe's ranks among the finest. We owe him.

[Brian Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so excited to find a copy of Christopher Coe's Such Times on a recent visit to the Used Book Superstore in Burlington, Massachusetts. (I also picked up Flesh & Blood from Michael Cunningham and The Dreyfus Affair from Peter Lefcourt, both of which I am also excited to jump into.) Back to Coe, this author has been on my radar ever since I read his wonderfully humorous story in the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. Now, Such Times is not a humorous story, it is quite a sad one about love and loss during the height of the AIDS epidemic. It’s impossible to read about the author and not consider this novel to be at least semi-autographical, and tragic to read what Coe and his friends succumbed to. These were not your average men, they lived with a certain class and elegance, with exquisite taste for food and cocktails. Although indulging in these luxuries could not prevent their deaths, it was nice to read how these men did not let their diseases keep them from their luxuries.

“There will always be one final everything; the last word, of course, the last breath; there will be one last check you write, one last nap, one last artichoke.”

[Anthony Holliday · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was at times devastating and at other times extremely resonant about gay relationships but was fully beautiful. often times books written about/set in the AIDS epidemic are written by people outside the community so it was refreshing to read from an author who has the lived experience. I will definitely be reading Christopher Coe's other books.

[Sarah Rigg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a Gay & Lesbian Lit class my senior year of college and it inspired me to read a bunch more that wasn't on the syllabus, including this one.

[Richard C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virtuoso writing- luminous. In awe.