But to entirely skip over the impact of HIV & AIDS on gay men who were at their primes in the height of crisis is less plausible than vampires or hellhounds. The author could elide thinking too much about the trauma by skating by it in his thoughts with a “still can’t think too much about it” so the cheerier tone of the book doesn’t wallow.
Without the epidemic and groups like Act Up, it’s unlikely gay marriage would exist now. Acceptance of same sex marriage came DIRECTLY as a result of AIDS activism. A gay man who went clubbing for *most of the 80’s* would think about how many gay men had died. But whenever his unhappiness about seeing people die comes up, he only ever refers to his first love Michael, and Michael’s sister’s family. He would have seen *hundreds* of acquaintances die.
Yet the AIDS epidemic isn’t mentioned, ever. He’s been a gay man the whole time, and the 1980s is one of the cycles of his life when he had friends. Wes is a part-time ghost who lives mostly as a human, but has been around since the Great Depression. My quibble from the first book is bloomed into “well, that’s certainly a choice”. There would still have been plenty to do for plot but they could have been doing it together, which as a reader, I always find more satisfying than characters going it alone for selfish reasons like wanting to be seen as nicer than they are. He starts to unravel this toxic behavior towards the end, but most of the pain in this book would have been avoided by Wes working *with* his found family rather than trying to keep them at arm’s length. Lexi’s injury drives his vengeance rather than being about her, and he never fully makes amends for scaring Evan’s boyfriend. Wes spends this entire book being whiny and selfish and vengeful in turn, yet people seem to think he’s wonderful. His tendency to make everything his “fault” is something that centers his experience at the heart of other people’s problems. But the way he did it was telling Evan that We’s love is conditional, the exact thing he promised it wasn’t in book one. At one point, he tells Evan to keep a secret for him, from Hudson & everyone. He’s all Hudson, all the time, which diminishes my ability to believe in how much he loves his found family. One of the things I like about the series so far is the growing community, but what I don’t like is that when stressed, Wes thinks entirely and only about Hudson or missing Hudson, seemingly forgetting his bff, his sort-of-son, etc. Wes is not as nice as his friends seem to think.
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