Rebecca Makkai is a Chicago author whose new novel, The Great Believers, is set during the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s. Albert Williams, a Chicago Reader contributor since 1985, has a long history as a gay activist and journalist. He served as editor of two Chicago LGBTQ newspapers in the 1980s, GayLife (1981-’85) and Windy City Times (1987). On the first hot day of spring of 2018, they sat down together at the Chicago Diner in the heart of Chicago’s Boystown to talk about The Great Believers and Chicago’s LGBTQ history, both real and imagined. The book’s narrative skips back and forth in time between 1985 and 2015, focusing on two people: Yale, a gay man who works as a development officer in the Chicago art world, and Fiona, the sister of one of Yale’s friends who has died of AIDS complications. Over the course of the story, Yale and Fiona wrestle with the emotional and medical impact of the AIDS crisis on the lives of themselves and their friends and loved ones, including Yale’s partner, Charlie, publisher of a fictitious Chicago gay newspaper in the 1980s.

He starts off fairly nonpolitical. He’s an art guy. He’s partnered with someone who’s quite political, and he has friends who are quite political, but he stays out of it. People ask him to come to protests, meetings, and he generally doesn’t unless he’s dragged along. By the end, as his life is falling apart, he has this political awakening. He feels that he has nothing to lose and feels like he’s fighting for his life.

By a densely populated novel, you mean there are a lot of characters. It’s an ensemble piece, not a star vehicle.

That was very much on my mind. On the one hand, I felt some, but not all, of the weight of writing nonfiction. I’m not writing nonfiction. Someone out there needs to write the comprehensive nonfiction history of AIDS in cities that were not New York or San Francisco. Someone needs to write a book about Chicago. A full-on scholarly thing, you know what I mean? This is not that book.

There is a scene of a car.

I’d love to claim that as a seven-year-old I was going to all these places and I just remembered them now. My parents just took me around, you know, barhopping. [Both laugh]

Book release party Tue 6/26, 7 PM, Women and Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-769-9299, womenandchildrenfirst.com.  F