Once they start kissing, they will have to keep kissing for at least thirty-two hours, twelve minutes, and ten seconds. That is one second longer than the current world record for the longest-recorded kiss.
The conceit of the book—the stimulating idea that binds everything together—is an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records by breaking the record for longest kiss. As clearly stated, the record at the time is several hours beyond a single day. Take a second to think about what you have done in the past twenty-four hours—including sleeping. Can you imagine doing any single one thing throughout all that time, much less locking lips with someone. It seems inconceivable that any two people could hold a kiss that long. It seems beyond the point of conceivability that those two people listed in the book would someday be representatives of the same gender. The world has changed significantly over where it was toward the end of the 20th century. Baby steps, perhaps, but that is how every animal starts and progress is definitely more stubborn than any mule.
Summary: A chorus of men who died of AIDS observes and yearns to help a cross-section of today’s gay teens who navigate new love, long-term relationships, coming out, self-acceptance, and more in a society that has changed in many ways.
If you look at the page that includes copyright information for the Library of Congress and the ISBN number and all that other fine print stuff that only the most obsessive of readers even bother looking at in a book, you will notice this short paragraph set in typeface several points smaller than the text in the narrative. It is not part of the narrative, true, but it is part of published book and a deceptively significant part relative to the size of the print. The actual reference to the presence of a chorus to found within the larger print of the narrative is such a throwaway as to be easily overlooked: “We crowd ourselves into a mangled chorus.” This is rather surprising since the presence of the chorus is of integral importance to the story and not fully understanding what is going on when it appears without explanation can be somewhat confusing.
You can’t know what it is like for us now—you will always be one step behind.
Be thankful for that.
You can’t know what it was like for us then—you will always be one step ahead.
Be thankful for that, too.
Trust us: There is a nearly perfect balance between the past and the future. As we become the distant past, you become a future few of us would have imagined.
The book actually opens with the introduction of the chorus though, as stated, it is not introduced as such. It might just seem like a narrative quirk in the form of a gimmick, this utilization of the universal “we” as if it is simply a first-person narrative attempting to speak for the world. But that could not be farther from the truth. Much of the book—most of it—is written in simple, straightforward third-person narration—that is, without the self-referential pronoun. But when the chorus comes in it is speaking as collective unified voice, but, as the passage above instructs, a collective with a uniquely shared set of experiences. As such, this is a book that works on two levels, really. There is the purely narrative one seeking to tell an entertaining story to be enjoyed by any reader that picks it up. On a more personal and direct level, however, it is intended to be something of guidebook or handbook for those readers who are part of that unique shared experience.
