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"Edward Albee: A Singular Journey"
The first biography of the man who wrote "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is politer than it needs to be.
By Steve Vineberg
[08/24/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
If he really loved you ...
My friends tell me I shouldn't let my boyfriend go to Alaska without me. Am I being naive by trusting him?
By Garrison Keillor
[08/24/99]

Book Bag
What children know
The editor of the Threepenny Review selects her five favorite novels about childhood.
By Wendy Lesser
[08/23/99]

Ivory Tower
Make black the night
Was planning a march against violence against women an inherently racist undertaking?
By Tanya Shaffer
[08/23/99]

Reviews
"The Boy on the Green Bicycle"
A writer remembers the horror of her brother's death when she was 9 -- and the pain and growth that came of it.
By John Freeman
[08/23/99]

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So it is even more isolating than usual to be singled out by gene or circumstance as special: The hermetic effect on your already-solitary life is fearsome. But if you are lucky enough to discover that this "special you" has special company, relief may be profound. Almost every gay man in my almost-Stonewall generation can recall the moment of thrilling surprise when he learned there was at least one other fellow whose compass needle pointed south. And it was nearly as world-changing when I met, more than 20 years ago, my first fellow diabetic.

It's amazing to me now that it took so long. I was practically 30, an insulin-dependent diabetic since age 8. "Janey" and I worked at a small but nervy weekly newspaper; I was an editor and restaurant reviewer, she was a critic of contemporary dance. I don't recall the mechanism of disclosure, the way we each came out of our diabetic closets. Had I asked her to join me in a review meal (I ate out almost every night) that she perceived as threatening to her diet? Did she invite me to join her at a performance that would require a supper that, too early or too late, would upset the delicate balance of meals and insulin dosage that enabled me to eat any type of food that could be eaten, sculpting my limitation into my life's work? (Diabetic readers will understand that we met before the invention of the portable blood-glucose monitor, back when we had to be guesswork magicians and annoyingly self-aware to figure out our diets and our timing.)

Balance, I have learned from more than four decades of hands-on experience, is the secret word in the mouth of that diabetic duck -- a word that, in a clinical context, I have never heard a single physician say.

A week or so after Janey and I compared our diabetic stories, furies and fears, our colleague "Laura" the photographer said "Me, too" and hiked up her already-short skirt to show us the bruises on her thighs -- proud blue badges of daily insulin injections. Three of us! And Laura had a daughter, something Janey found heartening, because she was at the age to think along those lines.

At that time, I thought I already knew everything there was to know about diabetes. The name actually applies to two different conditions: the severe type we three had, which occurs when the body produces little or no insulin, and the more common "adult onset" kind, which can often be controlled without insulin. For years I had studied my type on the sly; my need to protect myself from the casual authority of random doctors probably had something to do with my first -- aborted -- career as a science whiz. Yet I hadn't realized that bearing a child could give the mother a type of temporary diabetes, or that being diabetic made childbearing itself both difficult and risky. (It is wonderful to know that diabetic pregnancy, though still a demanding course, is much more manageable now.)

And I just remembered something else about Janey: She had once been a restaurant critic, too. We agreed that something in our life-or-death focus on food had led us to fasten on the compensatory (and thus heightened) pleasure of eating and transform it -- to the manipulated pleasure of language, of opinion, of something we could almost completely control. We were savvy enough to say that being diabetic didn't determine our careers, but the condition seemed to sensitize and poise us in remarkably similar ways. Or so we thought, in that first spurt of shared coincidence.

Next page | Coming out as a diabetic