One crisp Thursday evening in Los Angeles in 1980, a young gay male, living on the streets as a prostitute, is beaten nearly to death by a gang of Neo-Nazi skinhead punks. At a decisive moment during the fray, the leader of the punks and the young victim lock eyes. Twenty-five years later, that moment uncoils across a table at a coffee shop when both men, now employees of the Museum of Tolerance, meet to discuss a class they are to teach and they recognize each other.
The true story of these events flickered briefly across the media during 2005. The story rose and then died like all media tales as a surprising outcome to what the world saw as yet another act of violence among the blind and the frightened.
Novelist and drama instructor Davida Wills Hurwin saw the incident as a moment in human experience that stands out clear and pure as a silver bell; one that needed to be rung again and more loudly. She met with Matthew Boger and Timothy Zaal and told their stories. The result is Freaks and Revelations.
Freaks and Revelations retells the story in fiction, starting 15 years before the 1980 event. Told separately from the point of view of the two young men, the tales flows from the first pages like two rivers rushing towards a confluence, each event in these young men's lives descending through rapids that carry them decisively into each other's paths. The tales descend not just as random flotsam on some bigger flow, but as young men who build lives and communities and world views that shape their course and their ideas and create their experiences.
The choice to tell their stories in fiction was a result in part of the creative process Hurwin went through to develop this book. But in greater part it was a result of two things. First, that it is difficult to convey the immensity of human experience through nonfiction narratives. The greatest nonfiction as we know it now is drawn together with fictional tissue - some measure of the decision-maker, the actor, the victim - that we might understand the impulse and flow of events, rather than just see the milestones.
Second, the truth is victim not just to memory but to the fears and emotional strata of the players, especially young ones, and even more so, those who have lived through trauma. Our world view, our ability to build and retain a context is not only evolving in youth, but creates a false and narrow narrative for our actions. Trauma adds a layer of misdirection and encapsulation that is impossible to breach without the tools of fiction.
The telling is as gritty as their days and nights, as dark and as light as their hopes and dreams. Although Scholastic is a young adult book publisher, this story is told without the circumspect and moral overtones of most YA fiction. Sex, drugs, and violence take their proper place in these young men's stories. Hurwin has reached inside these characters and their times to let us live two lives in full surround - in taste and smell and sound.
Although the opportunity for moral heavy-handedness lurks through the entire tale, Hurwin lets the characters and events speak for themselves. The result is one of the most compelling books that frames tolerance in many years. This book rises to the category of books like The Diary of Anne Frank and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, books that immerse us in lives that help us see our experience in a broader, more accepting context. Freaks and Revelations does the only justice a book can do to that Los Angeles night in 1980.
Matthew and Timothy continue to work side-by-side at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. They now call themselves friends. Their road since their encounter 25 years after Matthew's beating has been rocky. But their example is a shining one. It is a privilege to read their story in Freaks and Revelations.
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