Napoleon Seyfarth (1953–2000)

Essentially a memoir, but with some fictional elements included to overcome the basic limitations of the genre (the problem that the autobiographer can only write about what has already been experienced), this is a light and ironical account of growing up gay in bourgeois south-western Germany in the 1960s and 70s, and of the West Berlin leather scene in the 1980s. Seyfarth writes from the point of view of someone who is HIV-positive and has embraced illness and impending death without any regrets or recriminations. He is happy to mock his own idiocies and those he saw in others, but he doesn't want to go back and do things differently. Life is what it is, and the things that matter are love and pleasure and suffering. On his gravestone it says "Finis porci farciminis initium" — the pig's end is the beginning of the sausage.… (altro)