The Great Believers

In keeping with The Great Believers’ interest in chosen family, Yale spends much of the novel seeking a symbol of family, safety, and connection to space: home. On the night after Nico’s funeral, Yale fixates on a house he admires in his neighborhood, musing that if he memorizes the real estate agent’s number, this won’t “just be the night they didn’t go to Nico’s funeral, the night Yale felt so horrifically alone; it would be the night he found their house” (21). He imagines buying the house with Charlie and spending time in the house with his chosen family of friends. For Yale, this house symbolizes an escape from the despair and aloneness he feels around Nico’s death. This house is a safe space where he can protect his chosen family, where he won’t feel “so horrifically alone.”

When Yale breaks up with Charlie—and fears that he has been infected with AIDS—his deepest fear is dying without the support of his chosen family around him. Yale’s search for a safe living space—moving from Terrence’s apartment to Richard’s friends hotel to Cecily’s apartment to the Sharps’s apartment—simultaneously embodies his deep sense of homelessness and wide-spanning friend network. Near the end of the novel, however, Yale seems to re-commune with his sense of home, sitting beside Charlie in the hospital where he himself will die of AIDS.