Love and lust in a foreign land...

...Unsuitable boys

For the narrator, the news revives memories of the AIDS era, when he was growing up: “Disease was the only story anyone ever told about men like me where I was from, and it flattened my life to a morality tale, in which I could be either chaste or condemned.” But he seems to find it hard to escape the morality tale. He remembers getting tested for H.I.V. when he was young, and being given the all-clear, and feeling almost “disappointment. . . . Maybe it was just that I wanted the world to have meaning, and that the meaning I wanted it to have was chastisement.”