`Becoming A Man’ Author Dies

Paul Monette, whose autobiography “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story” won the 1992 National Book Award for non-fiction, died at home on Friday at 7:30 p.m. He was 49 and lived in West Hollywood, Calif.

Elisabeth Nonas, a close friend, said the cause was complications from AIDS.

For many people, Monette’s memoir of suppressing and then celebrating his homosexuality, and a previous book about nursing a lover who died of AIDS humanized the tragedy of the disease and the torment of denying one’s homosexuality, but it also brought to life the rich relationships that some homosexual men enjoy.

When he won the National Book Award, Monette said that writing the autobiography “literally kept me alive” after he contracted AIDS, but he also said he feared it would be his last published work.

Monette was born in Lawrence, Mass., on Oct. 16, 1945. In “Becoming a Man,” he described growing up in a middle-class world in which he became obsessed with his homosexual yearnings but had to suppress them: “Never lost my temper, never raised my voice. A bland insipid smile glazed my face instead, twin to the sexless vanilla of my body.”

Monette publicly acknowledged his homosexuality in 1974, when he met Roger Horwitz, a lawyer, and the two moved to Los Angeles. They lived together for 10 years while Monette wrote what he described as “glib and silly little novels,” many with homosexual protagonists, including “Taking Care of Mrs. Carrol” and “The Gold Diggers.”

But his life and career changed when Horwitz died of AIDS in 1985, an experience Monette chronicled in the best-selling and critically acclaimed “Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir” (1988).

After “Borrowed Time,” Monette wrote several novels, all dealing with the devastating effects of AIDS on homosexual men.

But “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story” was by far Monette’s most ambitious and praised work.

In a review in The New York Times, Wendy Martin wrote: “Fiercely committed to bequeathing a map of his psychic terrain, to spare others the pain of his solitary journey, his fine memoir is affirmative and ultimately celebratory.”