down in the mid-nineties. Marr writes letters to friends containing passages that are verbatim transcripts of actual letters Delany wrote at the time; some of the originals are collected in his 1984: Selected Letters (Voyant, 2000). As such, the novel has great value as a gay history of the passage between the seventies and nineties in New York, as well as portrayals of the complex and changing attitudes towards AIDS by sexually active gay men over those years. All three editions conclude with the article "Risk Factors for Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Among Male Homosexuals," by Kingsley, Kaslo, and Renaldo et alia, as published in the Lancet, Saturday, 14 February 1987, which statistically supports the theory that AIDS cannot be transmitted orally. This supports both the plot of the book and why Delany himself remained HIV-negative. Allusions/references to other works Delany said that the novel was inspired by his outrage at an article on AIDS by Harold Brodkey that appeared in The New Yorker in the June 21, 1993 issue. (Brodkey's series of articles about dying of AIDS was reprinted in revised form as a book, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (Henry Holt and Company, 1996)). The article entitled "To My Readers" begins, "I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do. I have not been exposed since the nineteen-seventies, which is to say that my experiences, my adventures with homosexuality took place largely in the nineteen-sixties, and back then I relied on time and abstinence to indicate my degree of freedom from infection and to protect others and myself." Once past its "Proem," Delany's novel opens with similar statements, but placed in the negative: "I do not have AIDS. I'm surprised that I don't . . ." As critic Reed Woodhouse (in Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945—1995, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), wrote, "What one hears in Delany's sentence is the sound of the gauntlet being thrown down, for he wants to completely reverse the story Brodkey tells: the story, that is, of an 'innocent victim' who may have played around a little but very long ago and certainly not doing those things. John Marr, by contrast, is presented as a 'guilty victor', so to speak, in that he has done all those things (though not, it is true, unprotected anal intercourse) and has yet survived." The character of Timothy Hasler is