Take Me to Paris Johnny by John Foster (Text Classics 2016)As one writer of an American AIDS memoir has put it, there was a sense in which, as he recorded the decay of his own body, the book was 'closing in on me'. 'The death of the author' now had a grim, personal significance. In Australia, two other important memoirs published at this time make interesting comparison with Take Me to Paris, Johnny. Eric Michaels's Unbecoming: An AIDS diary (1990) is his own account of the last year of his life, the diary ending just a fortnight before his death in 1988. Michaels envisaged its being published and nominated the title, Unbecoming, which grimly suggests the process of decomposition he was experiencing, as well as the stigma attached to the disease and its sufferers. On the cover is a painting by the American painter Hugh Steers of someone giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a naked man in a dirty bathroom. Steers himself died of AIDS in 1995. The diary begins with Michaels recognising the Kaposi sarcoma cancers on his skin, the first real symptom of AIDS he encountered. The book is deliberately confronting, and is introduced by a photograph of Michaels taken two months before his death, naked from the waist up, his mouth open as if in an angry scream, his face, tongue, and body covered in lesions. 'What a nasty, nasty disease this is,' he writes, 'relentless in its strategies, and always a step ahead of you, winning against any minor attitudinal or medical successes one tries to claim.'

Michaels, described in Simon Watney's Introduction as a 'gritty, stubborn, difficult man', was an American anthropologist who came to Australia in 1982 to research the impact of television on remote Central Australian Aboriginal communities. In 1987 he took up a lectureship at Griffith University. However, like Juan in Take Me to Paris, Johnny, he was battling the Immigration Department about his residency status. According to Paul Foss, 'Hounded by Immigration to the very end, he found himself quarantined in hospital under direst threat of expulsion from the country.' This bureaucratic cruelty haunted his last days.

On the other hand, you wouldn't realise, judging by its first cover, that Timothy Conigrave's Holding the Man (1995) had anything to do with AIDS. It carries a romantically blurred image of two young men loosely embracing, with David Marr's tribute, 'A fine, tender and sexy book', under the title. Although the blurb on the back cover makes passing reference to HIV, it sums up the book as being 'as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving; a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay'. Not that Conigrave avoids the harsh and painful reality of AIDS at this time, but it is always in the context of a gay love story, his fifteen-year relationship with John Caleo, whom he had met at Xavier College, Melbourne. Conigrave, who was trained in theatre and had some experience as a playwright, writes the story like a novel, with plenty of imagined dialogue. Holding the Man has been a publishing phenomenon, and in 2006 made the transition to the stage, playing here and abroad, and in 2015 to the screen in a successful film, directed by Neil Armfield.

Holding the Man (Pengin, 1995)Conigrave knew nothing of this, having died a few months before Holding the Man was published in 1995. A month or two before his death, the Melbourne Theatre Company staged Tony Krushner's celebrated American response to AIDS, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, a seven-hour long juggernaut, actually comprising two plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. This was two years after the Los Angeles première of the complete play. Although Angels in America confronts the horror of AIDS, particularly represented in the alienated, Satanic figure of Roy Cohn, it is also determinedly optimistic in its belief that American values can transcend it. The New York Times reviewer Frank Rich hailed it as a 'true American work in its insistence on embracing all possibilities in art and life'.

It would have been possible for Conigrave to have seen Angels in America before he died. I think he would have approved of its daring flights of fancy. Indeed, near the end of Holding the Man an angel does make a guest appearance. Conigrave may also have read John Foster's Take Me to Paris, Johnny, a book written in a very different style from his own memoir, yet he would have appreciated that it, too, was rescuing a gay love story from the tragedy of AIDS.

This need for a positive dimension influenced the presentation of the first edition of Take Me to Paris, Johnny, its cover featuring a subtitle, 'A life accomplished in the era of AIDS' (though it did not appear on the title page). This is a reference to Juan's sad lament that 'I have accomplished nothing', to which John replied, 'with a grace that is breathtaking' (Robert Dessaix's words), 'There has been us.' The blurb sees the book as describing 'the possibilities of joy, compassion and solidarity in the face of tragedy'. I remember John agonising about both the title and the cover, and I think it was the publisher who wanted 'A life accomplished in the era of AIDS' on the cover. Ten years later, this kind of explanation was not deemed necessary, and Black Inc.'s 2003 edition discarded it, though it saddled the book with a cover design which implied that this was a travel book about Paris.

Although not enjoying the popular success of Holding the Man, from the beginning Take Me to Paris, Johnny had its admirers. Dessaix hailed it as 'a superb literary accomplishment' which 'confronts the reader with what it means to be human'. Peter Craven saw it as bearing comparison with David Malouf's acclaimed Johnno: 'Indeed, in its sustained elegance, its relative freedom of form and its easy command of dialogue and anecdote as well as its absolute credibility, it can sometimes seem superior.' For Dennis Altman it bore witness to 'the complexity of relationships in a world of growing interconnections and the simultaneous strength and fragility of love'.

Foster's memoir has also has been noticed abroad. In America, the Australian-born Ross Chambers wrote extensively about both Take Me to Paris, Johnny and Michaels's Unbecoming in Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (2004). In 2009, Take Me to Paris, Johnny won a place in the American-published Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read in an article by the English writer Rob Beeston.

Juan Céspedes’s gravestone (photograph by W.H. Chong)Within a year of the publication of Take Me to Paris, Johnny, John Foster had died. Writing the memoir had consumed much of his time and energy in the years after Juan's death on Good Friday, 1987. He had earlier declined to have the AIDS test, not wanting to burden Juan with any pointless sense of guilt should the test have proved positive. Indeed, when, later, he did take the test, he still nursed a small hope that he might escape that diagnosis. It was not to be. Given that his immediate outlook was now at best uncertain, the need to tell the story of Juan became his primary concern. For John it was important to 'accomplish' the book, as if to assuage Juan's desolate sense of failure.

It was necessary to go back to the beginning of it all, to make the trip to Cuba to meet Juan's mother, in preparation for which he learnt some Spanish. As he relates in the book, he came bearing a copy of my book Australia: A Cultural History, a symbolic gesture because of its dedication 'To John and Juan'.

Writing was never easy for John, yet he wrote so well, and when he was struggling with the first draft, he was greatly concerned that his family and straight friends might be offended, perhaps even shocked, by its depiction of gay life. There was the further problem that in writing about Juan he could not help also writing about himself, and he was not, by nature, given to self-disclosure. As a historian he was not used to foregrounding himself in the narrative. Having read the first draft, the publisher encouraged him to put more of himself into the text. John made a few conciliatory amendments but held back from revealing much more of his own story. It was, after all, Juan's book. This element of quiet reserve gives the memoir much of its distinctive character, yet in telling Juan's story we are also seeing John through Juan's eyes. As Dessaix points out, as a first-person narrative it is 'brimming over with details of daily life – meals, smells, dress, telephone calls, precisely described locations'.

If, however, it remains true that 'Foster manages to keep his distance from the reader', a careful reading of Take Me to Paris, Johnny tells us much about John, his personality and preoccupations. Its very tone – the subtle balance of formality and intimacy, of rationality and passion – conveys a real sense of the man, the historian, the teacher, the lover.

Take Me to Paris, Johnny survives as more than just a superbly crafted memoir – it is also a living expression of the spirit of John Foster.