by hungrily devouring Robert Gliick's classic, Jack the Modernist, and trying to imitate its sentences, its tone. Gliick's books led me to Boone's collection of short narratives, My Walk With Bob, published by Boone's and Gliick's own Black Star Series in 1979, and recently reissued by Ithuriel's Spear. Unlike Century of Clouds, which was impossible to find, My Walk With Bob would occasionally turn up on the "Gay and Lesbian" shelf at Community Thrift on Valencia Street, where I still buy copies whenever I find them for friends- With Jack the Modernist, My Walk With Bob offered me a set of values — even if I couldn't yet identify them — at once literary and social, combining the emotional intimacy of friendship with the intellectual commitment of critical theory, each stimulating and moderating the other's excesses. And as soon as I was able to identify Gliick with the"Bob" of Boone's title, I felt as though I had discovered an important piece of gossip, which drew me deeper into a still unnamable communion.
I
But nothing prepared meforthe revelation of Century of Clouds where the seduction of artifice and the rhetoric of critique yield a rare extravagance, which Boone marshals to create new possibilities of social fact. I found the book unexpectedly one day in 1995 while browsing the shelves of the James Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the then new San Francisco Public Library. The library's copy was for "reference use only," and while I considered smuggling it out of the building — convinced for a moment that I'd be recovering valuable evidence of a historical event otherwise impossible to prove (a thief in recovery, my acquisitiveness still expressed itself in delusional fantasies of "liberating" meaningful objects) — I decided instead to read it there, and I fell into the book as into a dream, my spine hard against the
wall as I slid to thefloorwhere I sat motionless, absorbed. Two hours later I emerged sensing the shape of a world — was it this world? — where writing and desire, friendship and critique, become one another equally and reciprocally to inform a politics. It was one of those life-changing reading experiences when you don't know exactly what's happening to you, but you know that you're never going to be the same. Even now, after having read Century of Clouds countless times, a trace of that experience remains, at once profoundly familiar, and still quite strange, a sign that the book has yet to exhaust its promise. Indeed, its affect keeps irrupting in a gray zone of unclassifiable feeling — that pink opaque between body and brain — just on the other side of codified emotion. 0\ Faithful to the imperatives of Gay Liberation, Century of Clauds arouses social desires and political demands, which can never be cleanly separated insofar as desire and politics penetrate one another at the root. While reading, I feel such pleasure, as well as an insistence that the world wake from its nightmare, and that it actually could, were we only to shake it hard enough. The spirited optimism of Boone's writing tempers the pessimism of its intellect, and that optimism is as infectious as a friend's joy. In Century of Clouds, writing, pleasure, gossip, scandal, and emotion writ large are full of radical possibilities. Friendship becomes the fundamental unit of political engagement, just as politics reveals its erotics, and storytelling communicates the relationship between them. In every one of Boone's sentences — which move so gracefully between perception and idea, ardor and action — you
