The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories

by Allen Barnett

Stories deal with human desire, unrequited love, pregnancy, AIDS, mothers and children, lovers and friends

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Short Stories, Gay, Queer

181 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1990

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read a lot of queer books in college. this is possibly due to the fact that i'm a queer. and so this is one of those queer books. it is one of the better ones.

for some reason or another i gravitated towards those books that seemed to have loads of sex - anonymous and otherwise. maybe it was the sexy covers. maybe it is due to my innately shallow nature. sadly, most of those tales of Gay World Adventures ended up being both tedious and pretentious.

there is pretension in this collection, there's no denying it. and there's the anonymous sex too, of course, yawn. but the stories of The Body and Its Dangers go beyond that, into a place with depth and warmth and sadness and understandable fears and genuine pain and the building of families and real human relationships and lots & lots of compassion. i love compassion in literature! it is not something that i normally gravitate towards, but i really appreciate it when i find it. Barnett paints his characters as flawed, sometimes petty, sometimes ugly on the inside, but always human. he was a humane writer. even better, the collection doesn't always exist within the insular gay community and includes many characters ouside of Gay World. stories about breast cancer and pregnancy! i remember being both surprised and impressed at what felt like Barnett's insistence in painting a whole world rather than simply a slice of one.

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

With remarkable grace, Barnett captured the harsh truth of the AIDS epidemic in this magnificent collection. In one story, two characters walk out of a positive living group meeting and discuss their take on the meeting (a thinly veiled “course in miracles”). How well I remember the offerings of the 1980s and all that grasping at straws.

The author photo in this first edition, published in 1990, is heartbreaking. Allen Barnett is youthful, handsome, clear-eyed, and doomed. He will not live to publish a second book.

A sublime talent nipped in the bud.

[Macartney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barnett's first and only book is breathtaking in its deceptively simple lyricism and unsentimental observations of the dog days of the AIDS era. Never overwrought or ham-fisted, the stories are plainly told in a style that leaves you feeling the author was not their creator but simply their excavator and your tour guide. The pain and tragedy and upheavals of the era are not elements to be glorified or dwelled upon or wailed at, but simply are. The longest story, "The Times As It Knows Us", is truly revelatory. Barnett's death shortly after publication is another theft from the world for which we should all mourn.

[Greg Thorpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took 6 weeks for this book to get to me from the US and it was worth every single minute of that wait. Barnett's stories are about lovers and friends, largely, sex to some degree, but also the terrible encroaching ordinariness of death in epidemic times. AIDS, cancer, young death, abridged lives. Some characters loop around and appear more than once. They are almost hyperreal – the things they notice and remember, the nature of their speech, so authentically daft and insightful and persuasive. Having said that, their speech is sometimes so mannered it reads a bit like a dusty play but after all these are people with no time for small talk. Insight matters most urgently and they share. The finest story is 'The Times As It Knows Us', one of the greatest of all depictions of gay New York life, as good as Larry Kramer's and Ed White's and in some ways better. A tragedy that simmers underneath every story is the author's own death from AIDS aged just 36 and the fact these stories were written and published through his illness is indicative of an astonishing talent. I wish he had lived to write more and I wish he had lived.

PS. It's worth mentioning how hilarious these stories also can be. This made me roar:
‘The pilot forgot to turn off the P.A. system after he told us that we had reached cruising altitude, so the whole plane heard him when he told the copilot, ‘I could sure go for a cup of coffee and a blowjob right now.’ The stewardess started running up the aisle, and the man sitting next to me shouted, ‘Don't forget the cup of coffee!’..."

[Halkon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barnett could write. His prose is tight and compelling and thick with religious imagery. Plot wise, the collection is of mixed quality. Some stories can be skimmed (like the serviceable opener "Snapshot") while others demand attention (like the decent "The Times as it Knows Us"). The real power lies in the front line quality of the stories. With the AIDS crisis, Barnett found his subject. And, before he could fully realise the subject, he met his death. At the edges of this collection, you feel the moments when Barnett could have struck out for more and would have done so if he'd had more time. But, just as his characters rush to experience Rome or one last blow job before their sero-positive status turns to full blown AIDS, so Barnett rushed his work out into the world before he succumbed. Still, even the average stories are tinged with possibility. Towards the end of "Succor", the protagonist, Kerch, stands in front of Caravaggio's "Conversion on the Way to Damascus". For Kerch, this painting reminds him of 'that moment of penetration when your love looks at you, helpless with the knowledge that you have brought him to the edge of something, counting on you to maintain the moment, his security, his safety.' Barnett's penetrating work on gay life and AIDS deserves to be more widely read. For, he brings us to the verge of greatness.

[Sam Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous collection of short stories with a twist in the last one that elevated this collection from fine to immaculate. It’s a tragedy Barnett never got to publish anything else; probably one of the greater short story writers of a generation lost to a senseless disease proliferate by a malicious apathy. My heart aches for the pain that must have motivated these stories to have been written.

P.S. If anyone ever wants to see a perfect 1-page, stand-alone-story, the prologue for “The Times as it Knows Us” approaches something like the platonic ideal!

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

“LIKE A TOURIST IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY”

In a previous review for Goodreads in 2022, I asked the following question: “Why isn’t Allen Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories currently in print?” At that time, both the 1990 hardcover edition and the 1991 paperback edition of Barnett’s stories of gay life in the 1980s had been out of print for many years. Allen Barnett was lost to AIDS on August 14, 1991 at the age of thirty-six. Wonderfully, my question was recently answered. On December 1, 2023, World AIDS Day, the Library of Homosexual Congress at Rebel Satori Press reissued The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories. Robert Giard’s magnificent photograph of Allen Barnett is prominently displayed on the front cover. This new edition includes an introduction by Christopher Bram, an interview with Allen Barnett by Philip Gambone, and Ron Caldwell’s eulogy for Allen Barnett delivered on September 19, 1991.

I’ve now read Allen Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories for the fourth time. After each reading, I’ve always found it hard to remember much about “Snapshot,” “The Body and Its Seasons,” “Philosturgy, Now Obscure,” and “The Body and Its Dangers.” This is not to minimize the beauty and the artistry and the impact of these four stories. But the other two of Barnett’s six stories, “The Times as It Knows Us” and “Succor,” both hit me hard. They pack a wallop and stay with me for a long time after reading them.

“The Times as It Knows Us,” more of a novella than a short story, masterfully depicts the tangled relationships among a group of gay men sharing a house in the Pines on Fire Island for the summer during the middle of the AIDS epidemic. It personally resonates with me. I spent the summer of 1981 in the Pines. I still remember as if it were yesterday the Saturday morning of July the Fourth when my housemates and I passed around the previous day’s issue of the Times that contained the article, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” We didn’t know what to say; we just looked at each other. Clark, the narrator of “The Times as It Knows Us,” mentions this article but he gets the date wrong. One of the men in our house suffered from amoebiasis and someone else was recovering from hepatitis. Was this a foretelling of what was down the road? Early in 1982, my boyfriend and I were shocked to learn that the man who often rode with us from Philadelphia to Fire Island had died. “The Times as It Knows Us” is a story that is difficult to revisit.

“Succor,” which immediately follows “The Times as It Knows Us,” is my favorite from the collection. I love this story. Kerch Slattery, who is seropositive, had used a spare room in his apartment in New York City to care for men dying of AIDS. He burns out and goes to Rome, where he had lived when he was younger. Barnett drenches the reader in lush descriptions of Rome and jolts the reader with Kerch’s flashbacks to his life in New York City. Kerch’s anger battles with his sense of humor. He describes the AIDS Quilt as “a moveable wake, panel upon panel of fabrics, stitched together like a foldable, dry-cleanable cemetery.” To confront AIDS and stay sane, you have to choose words that tell it like it is and that help you maintain your distance in order to preserve your sanity. Kerch says, “It was as if the only way to rationalize the confusion of the world was to control the language used to describe it.” At the end of the story, Kerch decides to leave Rome and go to places he has never seen. Kerch is the embodiment of a wise observation that Clark makes in “The Times as It Knows Us”: “You let go of people, the living and the dead, and return to yourself, to your own resources, like a tourist in a foreign country.”

The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories is an indisputable classic of queer literature.

[Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few really strong stories set during the AIDS crisis. Last story, from the POV of a lesbian parent, feels forced.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some really lovely moments in The Body and Its Dangers, and Other Stories but there's so much sadness and death here that's it's hard to find the few moments of joy that are here. This book was written during the time when AIDS was killing so many people in the 80s and early 90s so Barnett focused much of his work on that crisis in the gay male community. I read he himself died from the disease. He's a great writer and it's unfortunate that he passed before he could publish more of his work. On a totally unrelated note, I know someone by this same name (although both the first and last names are spelled slightly differently) who's also gay (I believe) and when I first saw this book, I thought for a moment that it had been written by the guy I knew. Weird.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this on the advice, via and interview I read, of Dale Peck. There were several used copies at the Strand. Once I returned home I found that the author's obituary had been clipped from the paper and slid between the pages.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

The problems of the world come down to this: All that we can imagine is more than we want to know.

[W. Stephen Breedlove]

BEARING WITNESS

Why isn’t Allen Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories currently in print? As literature, Barnett’s stories are immortal.

Out of the six wrenching stories in The Body and Its Dangers, two will stay with me forever. The first story is “The Times as It Knows Us.” This story about a group of friends in various stages of illness who share a house in the Fire Island Pines personally resonates with me. I was fortunate to spend the summer of 1981 in the Pines. I still remember as if it were yesterday the Saturday morning of July 4 when my housemates and I passed around the previous day’s issue of the New York Times that contained the infamous article, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” Clark, the narrator of “The Times as It Knows Us,” mentions this article but he gets the date wrong.

My summer on Fire Island seems, in retrospect, innocent and idyllic comparted to the nightmare that Clark and his friends experience in the story several years later, although, one of the men in our house suffered from severe amoebiasis and a couple of the others were recovering from hepatitis. Was this a foretelling of what was down the road? Early in 1982, my boyfriend and I were shocked to learn that the man who often rode with us from Philadelphia to Fire Island had died from the new mysterious disease. “The Times as It Knows Us” is a masterpiece that indelibly describes the bravery with which gay men confronted the deadly virus. It is also a story that is difficult to revisit.

The second story that destroys me every time I read it is “Succor,” which immediately follows “The Times as It Knows Us.” Kerch Slattery (where did Barnett get this perfect name for his narrator?), who had used a spare room in his apartment in New York City to care for men dying of AIDS, burns out and goes to Rome, where he had lived when he was younger. I was drenched in the lush descriptions of Rome and jolted by Kerch’s flashbacks to his life in New York City. Kerch’s anger battles with his sense of humor. He describes the AIDS Quilt as “a moveable wake, panel upon panel of fabrics, stitched together like a foldable, dry-cleanable cemetery.” At the end of the story, Kerch, who is seropositive, decides to leave Rome and go to places he has never seen. Kerch is the embodiment of a wise observation that Clark makes in “The Times as It Knows Us”: “You let go of people, the living and the dead, and return to yourself, to your own resources, like a tourist in a foreign country.”

With his magnificent and unsettling stories, Allen Barnett unforgettably bears witness to his own experience of AIDS. The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories is an indisputable classic of queer literature. Allen Barnett died of AIDS on August 14, 1991 at the age of 36.

Again, I ask, why isn’t this book currently in print?

[Ken · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried reading this book but had to stop after only three stories. I was so bored. I hate give up on a book but I just couldn't force myself to keep reading. The book is well-written but the author's style just wasn't my cup of tea.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbly written short stories about people facing the AIDS epidemic. This book was posthumously published as the author, himself, died of the disease. He was a wonderful writer and every story was almost like a mini-novel.

[Leah Ghradella · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a collection of stories: some may break your heart; all are poetic, impassioned, angry, loving, sad and so well done.

[David]

“Give sorrow occasion and let it go, or your heart will imprison you in constant February, a chain-link fence around frozen soil, where your dead will stack in towers past the point of grieving. Let your tears fall for the dead, and as one who is suffering begin the lament…do not neglect his burial. Think of him, the one you loved, on his knees, on his elbows, his face turned up to look back in yours, his mouth dark in his dark beard. He was smiling because of you.”
- “The Times as It Knows Us”

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

touching, well written