Wilson, in effect, takes back from McGehee the printed portrait of their relationship, retelling their story from David's/Wilson's point of view. Unfortunately, Wilson lacked his late partner's skill as a novelist. David's self-righteous, at times deeply self-pitying, tone tarnishes the brightness of McGehee's comic world, reducing to flat, mechanical exchanges the witty banter that characterizes Boys Like Us and Sweetheart, and rendering wooden and one-dimensional McGehee's vibrant, whimsical characters. Labor of Love fails precisely because Wilson lacks McGehee's screwball sensibility.

Sponsor Message.

If David's "labor of love" is to care for Zero in his last days and then distribute Zero's ashes as his lover would have wanted, Wilson's was to attempt to complete McGehee's projected trilogy. Wilson's novel remains valuable as a fictionalized portrait of McGehee's last days, and as evidence of the peculiar opportunity for creative collaboration that came with the AIDS epidemic as gay men cared not only for the bodies of their friends and lovers, but struggled to preserve their body of creative work as well.

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Since the 1960s, Canadian gay and lesbian writers have produced a vibrant body of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.

Canadian human rights activist Douglas Wilson is also remembered as the life partner of American-Canadian writer/performer Peter McGehee; together they married activism with art and entertainment.