Alternating between the 1980s and 2015, THE GREAT BELIEVERS is a story of Chicago’s gay community at the height of the AIDS crisis and interlocking stories of love, despair, family, and friendships that echo through the years.

I put off reading this book for a long time because, to be honest, I didn’t like the idea of a straight woman telling this story. And at the beginning, I found it strange that straight woman Fiona was a central, point of view character. But this book is incredible. Makkai did her research, and thoroughly. I kept forgetting these men weren’t real, that I couldn’t look up Richard’s art or Charlie’s newspaper. And stories like Fiona’s do exist and should be told. I know those women, and the lingering trauma is real.

The way the chapters alternated decades kept the fear and devastation of the ‘80s as fresh for the reader as it felt for Fiona even decades later. This book does a masterful job of illustrating generational trauma and how it affects those who experienced it and those around them for their entire lives.

Yale’s chapters were just as hard. It’s a story we’ve all heard before but it never gets less horrible. It also showed that awful way that your life and your world can be crumbling, but you still have to carry on with your life - go to work, pay rent - for what? For how long? Even after your friends are all gone?

The parallels with Nora’s life in WWI are stark. I’ve heard gay men describe the ‘80s as like living through a war, and here that comparison is made explicit, in both the deaths and lasting effects. No one who survived either era ever really got over it.

I’m glad I read this book, even if I say all the time how much I’m over stories of queer pain. THE GREAT BELIEVERS, however, makes clear how much of that pain was born out of our love for each other.