aul Monette's last essays, including "Puck," benefited from his celebrity as National Book Award-winner. They were featured prominently in gay magazines before being collected as Last Watch of the Night (1994). They are also poignant to be shown in their creation. He had always written drafts in longhand, and some of these last works were written on his usual lined pads when he was traveling by ship. He noted in one the difficulty of traveling with so much medicine and even IVs. The essays make up the third book of his non-fiction works, works all too brief to make up the second half of his life story.

He writes of domestic things, of Puck and Buddy, his (and Roger Horwitz's) and Winston Wilde's dogs: "Nights we stay up later than Buddy and Winston, a couple of hours at least. Buddy curls in his basket under the bedroom window.." The setting of this essay is still Kings Road and gives a fullness to its geography in terms equal to those Isherwood achieved when writing of the Hollywood hills and Santa Monica mountains in A Single Man.

In an interview when publishing Afterlife, Monette noted: "We must put more of one another in our books." He included a diversity of LGBT persons by writing of his friendships with lesbians, particularly the enchanting story of Gert Macy. Although she lived a closeted life in the 1930s and 1940s in the New York theater world as the lover of actress Katherine Cornell, she was still a beacon for Monette and Horwitz when they knew her in the mid 1970s. A photo of Macy shows her with Robert Benchley at what seems to be the nightclub at The Martinique Hotel on Broadway in New York City in the late 1930s. She is also shown at what is most likely her bohemian summer cottage on Martha's Vineyard at about the same time. These photographs give an amplitude to the past history of LGBT persons. A sense of time seems to flow through these photographs preserved by Macy's adoring niece, Merloyd Lawrence. Often much is destroyed by family when a single LGBT person dies, but Lawrence's reminiscences and Monette's tribute preserve Macy's heritage. It is one of Monette's final depictions of the generations of LGBT persons and what can be learned from each other. The essay suggests the end of his first novel, when the protagonist asks how the older Madeleine felt about her life. In "Gert," Monette begins the essay: "'Does it go too fast?' I asked her." Writer John Preston included "Gert" in a volume of essays by lesbians about gay men and gay men about lesbians and noted to Monette that "Gert" was "a masterpiece, a memoir so laser sharp in its center that it left me quite speechless when I first read it."

Monette wrote again about Greece and its continuing meaning to him and his work. He also preserved his meditations on the graves of Keats and Shelley and the graves of Horwitz and Stephen Kolzak. In the most intriguing turn of all, "My Priests" is a groping toward a spirituality that was outside the establishment religions he so protested.

He selected poems for an elegant volume, West of Yesterday, East of Summer: New and Selected Poems 1973-1993 (1994), writing an introduction detailing his life in poetry. It publishes the works with the most recent printed first, and that first group of poems includes "Stephen at the FDA." A holograph draft was found among the manuscript pages of Afterlife. Thinking about Kolzak when writing the novel seems to have turned Monette's creative mind back to the protest in Washington, D.C.

Monette had published some of the Carol poems which were not elegies to Roger Horwitz in literary journals. The author Lev Raphael wrote of "Buckley": "At last someone's skewered that Creature . . . as he deserves. I read the poem in a headlong burst, hurtled on by the glorious rage.." Among the newer poems was "Committing to Memory (For Winston)."

Monette titled the proposal for the work he wanted to accomplish next "Seeing in the Dark." This work was to have built on the success of his prior essays. He devised intriguing essays on Audrey Hepburn's work to save the world's children and on Madeleine Follain, a French friend of Horwitz's whom Monette had also met. He noted that he would have his usual activist message: "As if I could write any book any more that didn't contain the requisite vituperations against the Pope, the televangelists and the ever-milling crowd of seamy politicos." But he also wanted to try something new, fables for gays and lesbians, "a story or two worthy of being told around the tribal campfire."

He previewed the only one of these fables he had time to complete by reading from it himself at a GLAAD benefit honoring him shortly before his death. Sanctuary was edited and published posthumously in 1997 by his literary executor, David Groff.

Monette had used the story of Greek warriors to describe his and Horwitz's battle together against AIDS. In the fable he returns to this image, when two female animals, a fox and a hare love same-sex and across species and are fearing attacks: "They embraced with the fervor of a couple of soldiers set to do battle the next day."

Typescript of "Puck"

Gert Macy at the beach

Gert Macy with Robert Benchley

Proofs / printer's copy of "Gert"

Manuscript of "Stephen at the FDA"

Mockup of Sanctuary dust jacket