Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, critics usually considered Michael Cunningham to be just another of the growing number of novelists chronicling the experience of gay Americans in the age of AIDS. These novelists included David Leavitt, Edmund White, Robert Ferro, Stephen McCauley, Lev Raphael, Paul Monette, and Armistead Maupin, all writers who challenged the rhetoric of American family values by illustrating that the idea of "family" had grown beyond the traditional nuclear unit of married heterosexual parents and their children. Cunningham's early fiction was a part of this revisionist project. Additionally, Cunningham was involved in activist politics ranging from publishing confrontational pieces in The New York Times and Mother Jones to participating in radical political demonstrations arguing for more government funding for AIDS research, organized by the gay activist group ACT UP. He chained himself to a White House gate and later was arrested for...