Book excerpt: It's 1978, and Dale Singleton is becoming alarmed as his friend, Ian Kaysen, is afflicted with a mysterious and seemingly untreatable illness characterized by pneumonia, lesions, and dementia. This novel of the first days of AIDS is viscerally affecting, as it conveys the shocked puzzlement of those troubled by Ian's condition while simultaneously documenting Jamaican society's struggle to accept the dignity of gay love. Dale's world collapses, yet his experience of being gay in a middle-class culture circumscribed by church, family, and compulsory heterosexuality is hauntingly memorable-and familiar. "