Soul searching

Michael McColly has lived in Chicago off and on for 20 years, but he’s never felt at home here.“Maybe it started in my hometown,” says McColly, 49, a native of rural Indiana who teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern and Columbia College. “I didn’t want to fit in there. I wasn’t going to stay and work in the factory. I knew I was going to leave.” He feels alienated from the groups with whom he should feel at ease—in his case, the yoga, GLBT and teaching communities.

That restless spirit surfaces in The After-Death Room, the book McColly wrote about his spiritual, mental and physical journey through AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa and Asia, as well as his ongoing struggle to pursue an activist’s life while dealing with the disease himself. Until McColly was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1996, he’d never he’d never felt forced to confront his sexuality, drug and sex addictions, health and future.

After attending the 2000 World AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, to present a talk on the benefits of yoga in combating HIV, McColly says he became more aware of the dearth of information, resources and advocacy programs for people living with AIDS and HIV. Faced with one of the world’s most affected regions—where there is little to ease suffering—he decided to explore other HIV/AIDS hot zones, armed only with a desire to understand how culturally entrenched ideas about society, sex, gender and morality affect the pandemic.

Traveling through six countries and four continents, he met with sex workers, drug addicts, AIDS charity and religious organizations, and government officials and uncovered startling truths, such as the refusal to treat sick women in India, and a lack of medicinal support for those who treat the afflicted around the world. The AIDS crisis in both Africa and Asia is rage inducing, bleak and overpowering, and McColly’s experiences there were no different.

What makes McColly’s story different from other books about AIDS, or activism, is the personal perspective he brings to bear. Throughout he includes snippets of his sexual encounters with men, the ups and downs of his health, his embarrassment at having to tell HIV-positive people who are dying that he is positive but relatively healthy due to his comparatively huge personal wealth and access to drugs. One night in Vietnam, though desperately tired and suffering from diarrhea, he is forced to stay in a shanty hotel, huddled in bed while throwing shoes at rats.

Even the book’s prologue, wherein McColly lays bare what his life was, what drove him to addiction, and how he turned the corner, is gripping, uncomfortable and honest.

“I didn’t feel I could tell this story without including what had happened to me, what I was going through,” McColly says. “I always tell my students, ‘You try and write your complete sexual history in 20 pages and see how it turns out.’ [The prologue] was the hardest thing I have ever written, but I decided the story couldn’t be told without it.”

McColly’s recounting of urban nightclubs, chicken-salad lunches, and yoga positions sometimes seems self-indulgent and banal—a sign that he’s tried to honestly depict the lives of the people in his book. But if it were not for the personal glimpses into McColly’s own struggle—his inner thoughts, second guessing and even ambivalence about the amount of suffering he witnesses—it would be easy to put this book down and think of something more pleasant, a common response many have when confronted with the daunting scale of the crisis.

“I want people to realize that this epidemic is still out there, happening,” he says. “I needed to tell my story, to deal with my sexuality, to have it not be a secret anymore, to put it all out there.”

The After-Death Room (Soft Skull, $15.95) is out now.