Melancholia and Moralism

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Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics

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DOUGLAS C R I
 \

elancholia and

Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics

DOUGLAS CRIMP
<

In Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp

confronts the conserva-

tive gay politics that replaced the radical

AIDS activism of the late

1 980s and early 1 990s. He shows that the

cumulative losses from AIDS,

including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancho-

lia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with
the
moralistic repudiation of homosexuality
by the wider society.

With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it

became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay

politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights

issues such as
gay marriage and the right to serve in the military.
Journalist Andrew
Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing
the AIDS epidemic over, even
claimed that once those few rights had
been won, the gay rights move-

ment would no longer have a reason to exist.-

Crimp challenges such complacency,

arguing that not only is the AIDS
epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics

has never been greater. AIDS, he

demonstrates, is the repressed,

unconscious force that drives the destructive

moralism of the ne
liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay wri

continued on ba
 >
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Melancholia and Moralism

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The MIT Press Cambridge, .Massa'chusetts London, England
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 Melancholia and Moralism

Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics

DOUGLAS CRIMP
© 2002 Douglas Crimp

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic

or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and

retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Utopia Headline by Graphic Composition. Inc. and was printed and

bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crimp, Douglas.
Melancholia and moralism essays on AIDS and
:

queer politics / Douglas Crimp,

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-262-03295-3 (he. : alk. paper)

1. AIDS (Disease) — Political aspects. 2. Gay men. I. Tide.

RA643.8 .C754 2002

362.1'969792 — dc21 2001044076
for Damien Jack
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 IX Acknowledgments

1 Melancholia and Moralism: An Introduction

27 AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism

43 How To Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic

83 Portraits of People with AIDS

1 09 Good Ole Bad Boys

Randy Shilts’s Miserable

1 1 7 Failure
CONTENTS
129 Mourning and Militancy

151 The Boys in My Bedroom

165 A Day without Gertrude

1 69 Right On, Girlfriend!

195 The Spectacle of Mourning

203 Accommodating Magic

221 Don’t Tell

245 Rosa’s Indulgence

253 De-Moralizing Representations of AIDS

273 Painful Pictures

281 Sex and Sensibility, or Sense and Sexuality

303 Index
* V'

4 .

V
I
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An enterprise covering fourteen years has indebted me to a great many

people, and I can only hope to recall most of the crucial ones here. First

things first: Over dinner one summer evening, Diana Fuss and Phillip

Brian Harper urged me to collect all of my writing on AIDS; without

their perfectly simple idea 1 wouldn’t have conceived the book in this

way. And 1 wouldn’t have so easily found the time to carry it out if Carole
Vance hadn’t goaded me into applying for a Rockefeller Fellowship in

her Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human
Rights and then agreed, after I’d been awarded it, to accommodate my
scheduling conflicts by deferring it for a semester. I was thus able to

spend the calendar year 2000 at the Columbia University School of

Public Health working on the manuscript and participating in a series of

interdisciplinary seminars attended by an ever-shifting group of com-

mitted human rights activists and sex radicals. I enjoyed lively intellec-

tual exchange with the other fellows in residence during my tenure,

Jiemin Bao, Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas, Gail Pheterson, Oliver Phillips,

and Penelope Saunders; I learned much about human rights advocacy
from Columbia faculty members Lynn Freedman and Ali Miller of the

Law and Policy Project; and I continued to learn new ways to think and
talk about sex from Carole Vance — more important, I made a good friend.

My time at Columbia meant a year off from the University of Rochester,

and am grateful to Dean Thomas Leblanc for supporting my leave during
I

a time of transition for my department and graduate program. The De-

partment of Art and Art History and the Program in Visual and Cultural
 \ >

Studies have provided me with a congenial academic environment since

1992; I particularly want to acknowledge three Rochester faculty friends
who've gone on to bigger things: Michael Ann Holly, Trevor Hope, and

Janet Wolff. And thanks to my wonderful, wonderful graduate students. »

Other friends have talked over my ideas with me, read and commented
on my writing, invited me to lecture and thereby pressured hie to do the
thinking and writing in the first place, and commissioned versions of
these essays for previous publication. Here is a partial list of friends and
colleagues who have contributed to this project, by which I mean not

only these essays but also the larger project of AIDS activism and queer
politics: Akira Asada, Thatcher Bailey, David Barr, Nicholas Baume,

Gregg Bordowitz, Christopher Bram, Jean Carlomusto, Rosalyn Deutsche,

Carolyn Dinshaw, Richard Elovich, David Eng, Jonathan Flatley, the late

Teiji Furuhashi, Gregg Gonsalves, John Greyson, Jan Zita Grover, Daniel

Hendrickson, Isaac Julien, Ernie Larsen, Catherine Lord, the late Stuart

Marshall, Loring McAlpin, Kobena Mercer, Richard Meyer, Sherry Mill-

ner, Donald Moffett, Don Moss, Mark Nash, Cindy Patton, Ann Pelli-

grini, Laura Pinsky, Jane Rosett, Eve Sedgwick, Draper Shreeve, Marc
Siegel, Paula Treichler, Keith Vincent, Frank Wagner, Michael Warner,
Simon Watney, and Daniel Wolfe.

Eric Clarke and Damien Jack read the entire manuscript and gave me
great encouragement and valuable feedback. Sometimes it makes all

the difference to have someone who just plain agrees with you about

things that matter —whether prima donnas, sexual politics, or what

you’re writing at the moment: Damien has been a hugely supportive fan
of my work from the day (okay, night) 1 met him; not for that reason

alone 1 dedicate this book to him.

My student and Eastman House film-going pal Matt Reynolds assisted

me with all kinds of details in preparing the manuscript for publication.
Roger Conover, my editor at MIT Press, has been unwavering in his
Acknowledgments

commitment to my work as it moved from art to AIDS and back again.

Judy Feldmann shepherded my essays through production with care
and precision. Willa Cobert pushes me to be honest with myself. Adam
Budak is a sweetheart — how else can I put it?
 f

MELANCHOLIA AND MORALISM;

1 AN INTRODUCTION

Nothing could be more irresponsible than the

immodest self-certainty of one who rests content in

the good sense of a responsibility properly assumed.

— Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility

/
 \ >

At the opening plenary of the thirte.enth International AIDS Confer-

ence, held in Durban during luly 2000, Edwin Cameron, gay, HIV-positive,

and a justice of the High Court of South Africa, gave the first Jonathan
Mann Memorial Lecture. His was perhaps the most impassioned and ,

eloquent statement of what became the centraljheme of the confer-

ence: the glaring inequity whereby the lucky few can afford to buy their

health while the unlucky many die of AIDS. “I exist as a living embodi-
ment of the iniquity of drug availability and access,” Cameron said.

"Amid the poverty of Africa, I stand before you because I am able to pur-
chase health and vigor. I am here because I can afford to pay for life it-

self.” He went on to compare this injustice to the worst inhumanities of

modern times:

It is often a source of puzzled reflection how ordinary Germans could

have tolerated the moral iniquity that was Nazism, or how white South
Africans could have countenanced the evils that apartheid inflicted, to

their benefit, on the majority of their fellows. . . . [But] those of us who

lead affluent lives, well-attended by medical care and treatment, should

not ask how Germans or white South Africans could tolerate living in

proximity to moral evil. We do so ourselves today, in proximity to the im-

pending illness and death of many millions of people with AIDS. This

will happen, unless we change the present. It will happen because avail-
able treatments are denied to those who need them for the sake of aggre-
gating corporate wealth for shareholders who by Africa?! standards are

already unimaginably affluent.^

Introduction
Just three months after Cameron’s speech resounded around the world,
Andrew Sullivan, gay, HIV-positive, and a contributing writer for the

An New York Times Magazine, wrote a short opinion column for the mag-
azine entitled “Pro Pharma.” “Because I have H.I.V.,” he said, “I swallow
Moralism:

around 800 pills of prescription drugs a month. . . . I asked my pharma-

cist the other day to tote up the annual bill (which my insurance merci-
and

fully pays) $15,600, easily

: more than pay separately for housing,
I food,

Melancholia

1 . Edwin Cameron, "The Deafening Silence of AIDS," Health and Human Rights 5, no. 1

( 2000 ).
travel, or clothes.”^ After several paragraphs detailing Americans’ ex-
panding use of pharmaceutical products and their growing complaints
about the price they pay for them, followed by a defense of profit-driven
drug development, Sullivan ended with these lines: “The private sector
is now responsible for more than 70 percent of all the pharmaceutical

research in this country — and that share is growing. Whether we like it

or not, these private entities have our lives in their hands. And we can
either be grown-ups and acknowledge this or be infantile and scape-
goat them. . . . They’re entrepreneurs trying to make money by saving

lives. By and large, they succeed in both. Every morning I wake up and
feel fine. I’m thankful that they do.’’^

Edwin Cameron had presented a stark moral dilemma. How can we tol-
erate a situation in which our lives and prosperity are purchased at the

price of the deaths of many millions of others throughout the world?

Andfew Sullivan resolves that dilemma very simply: This is reality, and
we can either be grown-ups and accept it or we can be infantile and op-
pose it. 1 need hardly say that Sullivan’s view is breathtaking in its flip-

pancy both in its disregard of others’ lives and in taking for granted his

own privilege to “feel fine.’’"* But am also aware that have produced an
1 1

easy effect with my juxtaposition of these two statements: absolute cer-

tainty about the moral superiority of Cameron’s humble, humane atti-

tude as against Sullivan’s callous rationalization of his own entitlement.

In doing so, I worry that I reproduce Sullivan’s own moral certitude and
thus engage in the very moralism that I consider the greatest danger of

Sullivan’s position. Sullivan’s self-assurance about the maturity and righ-

teousness of his opinions is no doubt what allows him to adopt such a

glib tone in the first place, and it is that tone that most determines that

his argument will give offense. But giving offense would also appear to

be just what Sullivan is up to. There can be little question but that he

knew at the time of writing “Pro Pharma” the political stir Cameron’s

2. Andrew Sullivan, "Pro Pharma," New York Times Magazine, October 29, 2000, p. 21.

3. Ibid., p. 22.

4. Sullivan so takes his privilege for granted that he adds as a parenthesis only the note

about having insurance that "mercifully" pays the exorbitant cost of his medications.
 —
\ >

speech had caused. I therefore ass*ume that Sullivan’s intention in writ-

ing his opinion piece was to play the bad boy, to provoke outrage among
all those “politically correct” activists he so loves to castigate for imma-
turity.^ “Grow up,” Sullivan scolds, again and again.

Sullivan’s equation of maturity with his own conservative sexual poli-

tics and infantilism with what he calls liberation politics is'consistently

produced through a narrative about AIDS and gay men.® That narrative
goes like this: Prior to AIDS, gay men were frivolous pleasure-seekers

who shirked the responsibility that comes with normal adulthood

settling down with a mate, raising children, being an upstanding mem-
ber of society. Gay men only wanted to fuck (and take drugs and stay out

5. Why the New York Times Magazine indulges Sullivan's political whims is another
question. "Pro Pharma" followed by several months Sullivan's feature-story paean to

getting juiced on testosterone ("The He Hormone," New York Times Magazine, April

2, 2000). Eventually the Magazine did appear to signal some regret about Sullivan's
shilling for the pharmaceutical companies in its pages. Two pieces published in early

2001 were highly critical of the industry. See Tina Rosenberg, "Look at Brazil," New
York Times Magazine, January 28, 2001 (a report on the viability of generic AIDS med-
ications in stemming the epidemic in developing countries, and on the pharmaceuti-
cal industry's callous opposition to their manufacture and distribution); and Stephen
S. Hall, "Prescription for Profit," New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2001 (an in-

vestigation into how a virtually useless allergy medication was turned into a block-
buster drug). An op-ed piece by Anthony Lewis taking the Tina Rosenberg article as

its point of departure for criticizing the Bush administration ("Bush and AIDS," New
York Times, February 3, 2001, p. A13) led Sullivan to write yet another column exoner-
ating the pharmaceutical industry in the New Republic. Sullivan's "argument" is the

now familiar Republican one that free enterprise will solve all of our problems: "The
reason we have a treatmentfor HIV is notthe angelic brilliance of anyone per se but
Introduction
the free-market system that rewards serious research with serious money Drug
companies, after all, are not designed to cure diseases or please op-ed columnists.

They're designed to satisfy shareholders" (Andrew Sullivan, "Profit of Doom?" New

An
Republic, March 26, 2001, p. 6).

Moralism;
6. Sullivan's arguments against "the liberationists" appear in his Virtually Normal: An
Argument about Homosexuality (New York, Vintage, 1996). Sullivan sometimes calls

himself a liberal, and indeed many of his views are among those that make classical
and
liberalism so problematic. He nevertheless boasted in the pages of the New York

Times of voting in the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush, hardly a stan-

Melancholia dard-bearer for liberalism. On the right-wing politics of the current crop of main-
stream gay journalists, including Sullivan, see-Michael Warner, "Media Gays: A New
Stone Wall," Nation, July 14, 1997, pp. 15-19.
all night and dance), and at that to fuck the way naughty teenage boys
want to fuck — with anyone attractive to them, anytime, anywhere, no
strings attached. Then came AIDS. AIDS made gay men grow up. They
had to find meaning in life beyond the pleasure of the moment. They
had to face the fact that fucking has consequences. They had to deal

with real life, which means growing old and dying. So they became
responsible. And then everyone else accepted gay men. It turns out that

the only reason gay men were shunned was that they were frivolous
pleasure-seekers who shirked responsibility. Thank God for AIDS. AIDS
saved gay men.

For my argument in this book, there is particular significance in the fact

that this narrative structures Sullivan’s notorious New York Times Mag-

azine cover story “When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epi-

demic,” published in November 1996.^ In the opening of that essay,

SuIIi(^an claims that even recognizing the end of AIDS is something
many gay men can’t do, so wedded are we to our infantile rebellious-

ness, recently embodied in AIDS activism. Tie gives proof of just how
extreme such attachments are by writing about “a longtime AIDS advo-
cate” responding to the promising outlook for people with HIV disease

brought about by a new generation of anti- retroviral drugs: “Tt must be

hard to find out you’re positive now,’ he had said darkly, ‘It’s like you re-

ally missed the party.’” That “darkly” suggests Sullivan’s relish of what
he assumes his readers will understand as the perversity that attends

such childish liberation politics as AIDS activism.®

7. Andrew Sullivan, "When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epidemic," New
York Times Magazine, November 10, 1996, pp. 52-62, 76-77, 84.

8. Ibid., p. 55. Itoccursto methatSullivan'sfriend mighthave meant something quite dif-

ferent from the spin Sullivan puts on his remark by inserting "he had said darkly."

Learning that you're HIV-positive after the demise of AIDS activism and the general
sense of urgency about AIDS, even within the gay community in the United States,

could indeed make you feel that you'd missed the party — if by "party" you mean a

system of support and a sense of community based on general agreement that the
epidemic constitutes a crisis.
 >

Here is a portion of the “AIDS=maturity” story that Sullivan tells in

“When Plagues End”:

Before AIDS, gay life — rightly or wrongly — was identified with freedom
from responsibility, rather than with its opposite. Gay liberation was
most commonly understood as liberation from the constraints of tra-

ditional norms, almost a dispensation that permitted homosexuals the

absence of responsibility in return for an acquiescence in second-

class citizenship. This was the Faustian bargain of the pre-AIDS closet:

straights gave homosexuals a certain amount offreedom; in return, ho-

mosexuals gave away their self-respect. But with AIDS, responsibility be-
came a central, imposing feature ofgay life. . . . People who thought they
didn’t care for one anotherfound that they could. Relationships that had no

social support were found to be as strong as any heterosexual marriage.

Men who had long since got used to throwing their own lives away were
confronted with the possibility that they actually did care about them-
selves. . .
.^

Although Sullivan might believe he is telling an uplifting story about gay

men’s commendable progress, in doing so, he represents gay men be-

fore AIDS as the most odious sort of creatures — men who were all too

willing to bargain away self-respect and respect for others to gain a form
of freedom that was no more than freedom from obligation. For those of
us whose prime spanned roughly the years between Stonewall and the
onset of the epidemic (these were the years of my mid-twenties to mid-

thirties; they were also, of course, the years of the greatest growth of the

Introduction
lesbian and gay movement and of the greatest development of lesbian
and gay culture in the United States), it is deeply insulting to read of

An ourselves as having been closeted, accepted second-class citizenship,

cared little for ourselves or one another, had no idea we could form
strong relationships, thrown our lives what be
Moralism:

away.^'’ But this is it is to

recruited as the foil of someone’s moralistic narrative.

and

Melancholia
9. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

10. In the expanded version of "When Plagues End" published as a chapter of his Love
Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
I will return to Sullivan’s notion of this “Faustian bargain,’’ because 1 am
interested in its reappearance as an explanation of how he became in-

fected with HIV. For the moment, however, want I to look at the second
part of his AIDS=maturity narrative, the part about society’s newfound
acceptance of gay men. "AIDS has dramatically altered the psychologi-
cal structure of homophobia,’’ Sullivan writes. “What had once been a
strong fear of homosexual difference, disguising a mostly silent aware-

ness of homosexual humanity, became the opposite. The humanity

slowly trumped the difference. Death, it turned out, was a powerfully
universalizing experience.’’" Amazingly, in Sullivan’s account, it takes

only the recognition that homosexuals die for the homophobe to get in

touch with his suppressed feelings for our humanity. More amazing
still, homophobia was not really hatred at all, just a pretense of hatred.

The fear of difference, in the end, has no psychic reality. It can thus
easily be “trumped’’ by that magical equalizer on which liberalism al-

ways'stakes its bet: the universal.

Sullivan’s reliance on magical thinking to vanquish both homophobia

and AIDS is not, however, a species of optimism; on the contrary, it is

mere wish-fulfillment. The continuing presence of illness and death

from AIDS throughout the world and in our own lives is, for Sullivan, as

it is for much of American society, so repressed that every fact attesting

to that continued presence is denied either reality or significance. More-

over, anyone who protests that the AIDS crisis is far from over incurs
Sullivan’s rebuke. We cling to AIDS as melancholiacs unable to mourn
our losses and get on with the business of living, and living now in the

1998), we learn that it was in fact Sullivan himself who conformed to his description

of pre-AIDS gay men. He was closeted, had little self-respect, had no idea that gay

men could form sustaining relationships. Thus his characterization is a classic case
of projection of a hated portion of himself onto others.

11. Sullivan, "When Plagues End," p. 56.

12. This might explain why Sullivan is so hostile toward, or at the very least uncompre-

hending of, queer theory, which has developed such an acute understanding of the

intractable psychosexual mechanisms of homophobia. Among queer theory's in-

sights about homophobia isthat what appears to be the acceptance of gay men dur-

ing the AIDS epidemic is in fact the acceptance — not to say the welcoming — of the

mass death of gay men; see "The Spectacle of Mourning," this volume.
 \ >
»

world of normal grown-up resporisibjlities and genuine freedom — free-

dom from homophobic disapproval. But my argument would reverse

the charge. It is Sullivan’s view that is melancholic, and his moralism is

its clearest symptom. Sullivan is incapable pf recognizing the intrac;

tability of homophobia because his melanchojia consists precisely in

his identification with the homophobe’s repudiation of him.^^ And his

moralism reproduces that repudiation by projecting it onto other gay

men in whom he disavows seeing himself. But what I am saying here is

not meant to diagnose Sullivan. Rather I am attempting to explain a

widespread psychosocial response to the ongoing crisis of AIDS.

It would not surprise anyone if I claimed that AIDS gave dangerous new
life to moralism in American culture. But that is not exactly my claim.
Although much of my writing about AIDS endeavors to combat moral-
istic responses to the epidemic, especially as those responses have had
murderous consequences, my writing also seeks to understand the

moralism adopted by the very people initially most devastated by AIDS

in the United States: gay men. I am concerned, in other words, with a

particular relation between devastation and self-abasement, between

melancholia and moralism, between the turn away from AIDS and the
turn toward conservative gay politics.

The turn away from AIDS is no simple matter. No one decided one day,

enough of AIDS — and then wrote an essay called “When Plagues End.”
Nor did the turn away from AIDS come about as late as 1996, when Sul-

livan wrote his essay in the New York Times responding to the promise
Introduction
of protease inhibitors.*^ On the one hand, the turn away from AIDS can

13. Freud proposesthat melancholia is the result of identification with and incorporation
An
of the love object who has rejected the melancholiac. The repudiation of the self thus
becomes a part of one's own ego, resulting in a moralistic self-abasement. See Sig-
Moralism;

mund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works (London: The Flogarth Press, 1957), vol. 14, pp. 237-258. See
and
also "Mourning and Militancy," this volume.

14. Whereas many people would locate the origin of the current lack of attention to AIDS
Melancholia in the United States in the widespread changes brought about by the use of second-

generation anti-retroviral medication — protease inhibitors and non-nucleoside ana-

logue reverse transcriptase inhibitors — my essays locate that origin in problems

f
 —

be seen as one response to the epidemic from the moment it was recog-
nized in 1981. Whether as denial that it was really happening, that it was
happening here, that it was happening to people like us, or as denial of

its gravity and scope, the fearsomeness of AIDS always induced this

tendency to disavowal. On the other hand, those who did confront AIDS
as a crisis, often because they had little or no choice to do otherwise,

were often eventually overwhelmed by the enormity and persistence of

the tragedy, and they too sought the ostensible relief of turning away.

But this second turning away is more complicated than the first. The
first entails phobic denial
— “this isn’t happening”; “this can’t affect
me”: ‘T have nothing in common with those people.” The second in-

volves too much loss — “I can no longer bear this.” If, in this latter case,

relief seems possible, who wouldn’t grasp it? The denial in this case is

less of the actuality of AIDS itself than of the overwhelming effects of

cumulative loss. This, too, might be characterized as melancholia.

I have claimed that Andrew Sullivan’s moralistic repudiation of gay men

in the pre-AIDS years is a symptom of melancholia, but I have now ad-
mitted that the denial of loss can produce melancholia too. What are its

symptoms, if not moralism? How do these forms of melancholia differ?

Andrew Sullivan’s proclamation of the end of AIDS was diagnosed as

fetishistic by Phillip Brian Harper in a trenchant critique of “When
Plagues End.” Using the classic psychoanalytic formula for fetishism

“I know very well, but all the same ...” (thus, an avowal that is simulta-

neously a disavowal) — Harper translates Sullivan’s obliviousness to the

millions for whom the development of protease inhibitors clearly can-

already faced by AIDS activists at least five years before these drugs came on the

market. See especially "Mourning and Militancy" in this volume. Sullivan had written
a preliminary version of "When Plagues End" as an op-ed piece in the Tmes a year
earlier ("Fighting the Death Sentence," New York Times, November 21, 1995, p. A21).

During the ensuing year, the media was full of "good news" about a turnaround in the

epidemic, culminating with Time magazine's making AIDS researcher David Ho its

1996 person of the year. Ho was at that time theorizing and clinically testing the pos-

sibility of eliminating HIV entirely from the bodies of people who began combination
therapy immediately following seroconversion. He soon had to admit that his theory
was overly optimistic.
 \

not mean the “plague’s end” as “I know that not all people who have
AIDS are U.S. whites, but in my narrative they are.” Harper explains'

If Sullivan can suggest that “most people in the middle of this plague" ex- ^

perience the development of protease inhibitors as a profound occiir-

rence (indeed as the “end" ofAIDS) while he simultaneously admits that

“the vast majority of H.I.V.-positive people in the world"—^manifest in

the United States principally as blacks and Latinos — will not have access
to the new drugs and, indeed, will likely die, what can this mean but
that, in Sullivan’s conception, “most people in the middle of this plague"

are not non-white or non-U.S. residents? Thus, while it may be strictly

true that, as Sullivan puts it, his words are not “meant to deny" the fact

of continued AIDS-related death, the form that his declaration assumes

does constitute a disavowal — not of death per se but of the significance
of the deaths of those not included in his notion of racial-national nor-
mativity. Those deaths still occur in the scenario that Sullivan sketches

in his article, but they are not assimilable to the narrative about “the end

of AIDS" that he wants to promulgate, meaning that, for Sullivan, they

effectively do not constitute AIDS-related deaths at all}^

Sullivan’s fetishism blinds him also to the fact that he takes his own ex-
perience of the development of protease inhibitors not as the experi-

ence of a privileged subject — white, male, living in the United States,

covered by health insurance — but as a universal subject. Thus Sulli-

van’s liberal universalism is not the enlightened political position he

thinks it is; rather it is a sociopolitical fetish, constituted through the

Introduction
psychic mechanism of disavowal.

An Recognizing Sullivan’s misrecognition of his own subjectivity. Harper

begins his essay by taking his distance from Sullivan: “For quite a while
Moralism:

now, I have strongly suspected that Andrew Sullivan and I inhabit en-

tirely different worlds.”^® Although I know that Harper’s phrasing of his

and

15. Phillip Brain Harper, Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Rela-
Melancholia

tions New York University Press, 1999), pp. 93-94.

16. Ibid., p. 89.

%
differences with Sullivan in this way is deliberately arch, 1 keep getting
hung up on it, because, as fully in accord as 1 am with Harper’s critique,
I cannot feel that my disagreements with Sullivan are the result of our

inhabiting different worlds. Indeed, I sometimes get the claustrophobic

feeling that Andrew Sullivan and I inhabit the very same world.

That world is the world of the well-informed but nevertheless recently

infected gay men who find it hard to explain, even to ourselves, how we
allowed the worst to happen to us. Let me elaborate. What share with I

Sullivan is that my HIV infection occurred not before HIV and AIDS 10

were known to me, nor in ignorance of degrees of risk associated with —

various sexual acts, nor because of a failure to adopt safe sex as a ha- 11

bitual practice. Like Sullivan, I inhabit a gay world that is particularly

well informed about every aspect of HIV, from modes of transmission

to methods of treatment. Also like Sullivan, my being gay is part of

my my private identity, and dealing with AIDS has

public as well as

formed a large part of my recent professional life. have devoted count- I

less hours to thinking, writing, and speaking publicly about AIDS. I

thus share with Sullivan a certain privilege concerning AIDS, a privi-

lege that, say, a young African American or Latino gay man is unlikely

to share. That privilege only increases the shame of having risked

infection.

What do not share with Andrew Sullivan is the explanation of why that
I

risk was taken. Sullivan attributes his HIV infection to his failure to live

up to his ethical ideal of a committed monogamous relationship. Here

is a portion of what he says about his risky behavior in the version of

“When Plagues End” expanded for his book Love Undetectable:

I remember in particular the emotional spasm I felt at the blithe com-

ment of an old and good high school friend of mine, when I told him I

was infected. He asked who had infected me; and I told him that, with-

out remembering any particular incident of unsafe sex, I didn't really

know. The time between my negative test and my positive test was over a
year, I explained. It could have been anyone. “Anyone.?” he asked, in-

credulously. “How many people did you sleep with, for God’s sake?’’
 Too many, God knows. Too many for meaning and dignity to be given to
%
'
every one; too many for love to be present in each. . .

^
I find this passage deeply repulsive. First, I want to respond, What kind
of friend, on learning you’ve become HIV-positive, asks “Who infected
you?” and then chastises you for having too mucfi sex? But more impor-
tant, I want to ask. How many sex partners are too many?,How do you
quantify meaning? dignity? love? One can only assume from what Sulli-
van writes that these qualities redeem sex, but do so only in inverse pro-
portion to the number of sex partners. This is ethics?

Well, of course, it is what passes for ethics in Sullivan’s religion, which

requires indeed that sex be redeemed — by procreation — and that it

take place only within sanctified marriage. This is nothing new. What is

new is that it also provides Sullivan with a ready excuse for his own
“lapse”: “With regard to homosexuality, I inherited no moral or reli-

gious teaching that could guide me to success or failure. ... In over

thirty years of weekly churchgoing, I have never heard a homily that at-

tempted to explain how a gay man should live, or how his sexuality

should be expressed.”^® And yet Sullivan clearly did inherit a sexual

morality, for he is capable of the most standard moralizing statements

about sexual promiscuity, which are at the same time, of course, stan-

dard versions of homophobia. The following phrases and sentences ap-

pear within a few pages of each other in Love Undetectable:

. . . the sexual pathologies which plague homosexuals . . .

Introduction

... it is perhaps not surprising that [homosexuals'] moral and sexual be-

An havior becomes wildly dichotic; that it veers from compulsive activity to

shame and withdrawal; or that it becomes anesthetized by drugs or alco-

hol or fatally distorted by the false, crude ideology of easy prophets.
Moralism:

and

17. Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p. 41.

Melancholia

18. Ibid., p.42.

 —

. . . [gay liberationists] constructed and defended and glorified the abat-

toirs of the epidemic, even when they knew exactly what was going on.
Yes, of course, because their ultimate sympathy lay with those trapped in
this cycle, they were more morally defensible than condemning or obliv-
ious outsiders. But they didn't help matters by a knee-jerk defense of cat-

astrophic self-destruction, dressed up as cutting-edge theory.

There is little doubt that the ideology that human beings are mere social
constructions and that sex is beyond good and evil facilitated a world in

which gay men literally killed each other by the thousands.^^ 12

Sullivan’s diatribe against gay men’s sexual culture — whose “abattoirs” 13

he nevertheless finds enticing enough to continue visiting regularly

merges in these latter passages with attacks on liberation politics and
queer theory. As someone who published “cutting-edge” theoretical de-
fenses of continuing promiscuity in the face of AIDS, 1 can only assume
this venom is meant for me. So for all that I may share Sullivan’s world, 1

clearly share nothing of his worldview.

But 1 return to what we do share: our recent HIV infections. 1 character-

ize Sullivan’s explanation of his infection as symptomatic of melancho-

lia because it entails self-abasement, a self-abasement that in Sullivan’s

case is also a rationalization. Sullivan locates himself within the moral-

izing narrative about gay men and AIDS that 1 outlined above. As some-

one who grew up before AIDS, he considers himself an irrevocably

damaged soul, condemned by his church’s homophobia to live out his

sexual life in the ethical vacuum that was gay life before the epidemic.

He can never attain the responsible adulthood that he sees as the great

gift of AIDS to gay men because he is too fundamentally deformed by

Catholic homophobia ever to attain his ideals. He can only hold up his

ideals for the next generation. “Yes,” Sullivan writes, “I longed for a re-

lationship that could resolve these conflicts, channel sex into love and
commitment and responsibility, but, for whatever reasons, I didn’t find

19. Ibid., pp. 50-53. /

 \ }
i

it. Instead I celebrated and articulated its possibility, and did everything
I could to advance the day when such relationships could become'the

norm.”^“ He presented his case even more pathetically to PBS’s talk-

show host Charlie Rose in 1997: “I sort of feel like it’s too late for me. It’s
^

too late for my generation. The damage has already been done. We have
already struggled for years to overcome the lower*standards that we set

for ourselves when we were seven and eight and nine.” I f^el obliged to

call attention to Sullivan’s sneaky shift in this statement from blaming

homophobia for the damage done to his generation of gay men to simply
blaming his generation ofgay men. But my point is actually an opposite
one: Sullivan resorts to this notion that it’s too late for him in order to

absolve himself of the very responsibilities that he demands of others.

“Grow up,” he insists, “even though I don’t have to, because, you know.

I’m forever damaged.” Sullivan gets to have his seventh and eighth and

ninth birthday cake and eat it too.

Grow up! It’s really not so easy, at least not when growing up means
growing older. Bette Davis was right: “Old age is not for sissies.” I don’t

know if she meant the kind of sissies who adore Bette Davis, but for this

sissy getting older has been damned hard. So Sullivan’s moralizing ad-

monition to gay men to grow up has a peculiar resonance for me. As I

said above. I’m of a generation older than Sullivan, the gay-liberation

generation he so loves to denigrate. Thus it was just as I approached

middle age that the AIDS epidemic became the most determining fact

of gay life in the United States. This meant that much of what had been
most vital in my life — most adventurous, experimental, and exhilarat-

Introduction
ing; most intimate, sustaining, and gratifying: most self-defining and
self-extending — began slowly but surely to disappear. A world, a way of
An life, faded, then vanished. Friends and lovers died, and so did acquain-
tances, public figures, and faces in the crowd that I had grown accus-
Moralism:

tomed to. People whose energies and resources had gone toward the
invention of gay life either succumbed or turned their attention to deal-
and

ing with death. Gay cultural and sexual institutions that had for twenty

Melancholia

20. Ibid., p. 56.

f
years been expanding began to shrink as they came under attack or

came to be too much associated with illness and death. And as all this

happened — this may seem trivial, but for me it wasn’t — my youthful

sexual confidence and sense of desirability waned. The midlife crisis

that is a banal event in every privileged person’s life was overdeter-

mined for me because it occurred in the midst of an epidemic that dev-
astated my world. Facing my own mortality the real content of this —
crisis — was profoundly confusing because I was consumed by it at a

time when the truth of my situation was that was healthy and vigorous 1

while tens of thousands like me were dying. 14

I cannot say precisely what significance this my risk-

confusion had for 15

ing HIV infection. Did I seek unconsciously to resolve the paradox of my

own good health when I “should” have been sick? Did I try to reclaim

the adventure and exhilaration of my younger self? All know for sure 1 is

that feelings of loss pervaded my life. 1 felt overwhelming loss just walk-
ing the streets of New York, the city that since the late 1960s had given

me my sense of being really alive. This was certainly melancholia too,

but unlike the melancholia that produces moralistic abjection, this was

the opposite: my version of melancholia prevented me from acquiesc-

ing in and thus mourning the demise of a culture that had shown me the
ethical alternative to conventional moralism, a culture that taught me
what Thomas Keenan designates in Fables of Responsibility “the only
responsibility worthy of the name,” responsibility that “comes with the
removal of grounds, the withdrawal of the rules or the knowledge on
which we might rely to make our decisions for us. No grounds means no
alibis, no elsewhere to which we might refer the instance of our deci-

sion. . . . It is when we do not know exactly what we should do, when the
effects and conditions of our actions can no longer be calculated, and

21. Further overdetermination: The AIDS crisis also coincided with profound transfor-

mations in New York City, where, for example, previously abandoned or peripheral
neighborhoods that were home to gay sexual culture were reappropriated and gen-
trified by the real-estate industry, thus making them inhospitable to the uses we'd in-

vented for them. /

 V i
4

when we have nowhere else to tujn, not even back onto our ‘self/ that

we encounter something like responsibility.”^^ '

Whereas Andrew Sullivan sees gay men as irresponsible because homo-

% \

phobia prevented the arbiters of morality from providing us with rules

by which to live, thus creating a moral vacuum, fVee this vacuum as the
precondition for the truly ethical way of life that gay men struggled to

create. AIDS didn’t make gay men grow up and become responsible.

AIDS showed anyone willing to pay attention how genuinely ethical the
invention of gay life had been. This doesn’t mean that gay life is not
riven with conflict or that being gay grants anyone automatic ethical

claims. But the removal of grounds that Keenan sees as the beginning of
authentic responsibility has been a condition of being gay in Amer-

ica — simply because the ground rules that are given are ones that dis-
qualify us from the start. I will therefore call this genuine responsibility
queer. And I will suggest that it is identical with, or constitutive of, the

vitality that I felt from my participation in queer life prior to the epi-

demic. Obviously this is not the only place one might experience its ver-

tiginous appeal, but it is where I experienced it. This is also to say that

genuine responsibility can be experienced in the exhilarating disorien-

tation of sex itself. Thus responsibility is not that which would obligate us
to modify or curtail sex, or to justify or redeem it. On the contrary, respon-
sibility may well follow from sex. This has obviously made sex terribly

paradoxical for gay men during an epidemic of a sexually transmitted

deadly disease syndrome. The paradox has meant that we’ve had to live

with an especially heavy burden of conflict, with deep and enduring

Introduction
ambivalence. And we’ve had to discern and resist the easy answers that

moralistic attitudes toward sex would provide to falsely resolve our con-

An flict and ambivalence. And, adding insult to injury, we’ve had to watch
as the U.S. media have given ever more prominent voice to gay spokes-
Moralism;

men who unhesitatingly voice the moralism, gay men who go on Night-
line and Charlie Rose and, with immodest self-certainty, assume their
and

proper responsibility.

Melancholia

22. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics

and Politics (SXanlord: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 1-2.

 o
I tried to capture something of the paradox gay men have faced in the

title of one of the first essays I wrote about AIDS, upping the ante of
“How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” the first safe-sex pamphlet, to “How
to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” That essay was, together with
“AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism,” the first I wrote about
AIDS, and it contained what would become the opening salvo in an on-
going critique of moralistic responses to the epidemic. Much has changed
since then, but then again much has remained the same. I might men- 16

tion, for example, that twenty years into the AIDS epidemic, Jesse —
Helms is still the senator from North Carolina, and he is, if anything, 17

more powerful now than in 1987, when he first succeeded in preventing

the federal funding of safe-sex information directed at gay men. Some-

times the deja vu seems more like a nightmare from which we cannot
awakpn: In February 2001 artist and AIDS activist Donald Moffett felt

compelled to reinstall a public art work he’d initially made in 1990, a

light box photo-text work that said, “Call the White House . . . Tell Bush
we're not all dead yet” — this time in response to George W.’s intention

to close the White House AIDS office within weeks of assuming office.

If the argument contained in the trajectory of these essays is right, how-

ever, there has been a drastic change, but it is a psychic change, a

change in the way we think about AIDS, or rather a change that consists

in our inability to continue thinking about AIDS. Throughout the early

1990s AIDS became an increasingly unbearable and therefore more
deeply repressed topic, AIDS activism became virtually invisible, and
gay politics moved steadily Rightward. I had begun to see this configu-

ration of repression, trouble among activists, and moralistic politics at

the turn of the decade. “Mourning and Militancy,” the title of which that

of this book is meant to echo, was my first attempt to theorize this turn;

23. Bush was unable to follow through on his intention because it caused such an outcry
among gay people and public health advocates. Instead Bush appointed to head the
White House Office of National AIDS Policy a prominent gay Republican, a Catholic

who had been active as an antiabortion fundraiser. See Elizabeth Becker, "Gay Re-
publican Will Run White House AIDS Office," New York Times, April 9, 2001, p. A13.
 Donald Moffett, Call the White House, 1990/2001 (photo; George Kimmerling).

Introduction
it marks a critical juncture in AIDS activism and serves as a theoretical

core of the entire collection.^'*

An

24. Insofar as these essays are intended to contribute to a historical record of debates
Moralism:

about AIDS and queer politics, I have decided against making any substantive
changes to my essays as originally written and published. The change that I would
and
most wish to make is in the opening paragraph of "Mourning and Militancy," where I

criticize Lee Edelman's deconstruction of the AIDS-activist slogan SILENCE=DEATH

Melancholia in "The Plague of Discourse." That essay was my first encounter with Edelman's
work, which I have subsequently grown to admire immensely. Moreover, my opening
paragraph tends to drive a wedge between'academic theory and activist practice
This configuration is also essential to the questions addressed in “Right

On, Girlfriend!” and “Don’t Tell.” “Right On, Girlfriend!” explores the

problems posed for ACT UP’s coalition politics when notions of fixed,

coherent identities came into conflict: it thus takes up forms of moral-

ism that exist within both gay identity politics and traditional Left poli-

tics. “Don’t Tell” analyzes the rhetoric of the Campaign for Military

Service during the gays-in-the-military debates in the early months of

the Clinton presidency, seeing in the portrayal of gay and lesbian mili-

tary personnel as model patriots — politically conservative, healthy,

and chaste — the desire to suppress the increasingly unbearable image

of the sick person with AIDS and the image of anal sex that is so in-

evitably linked, at least in fantasy, to that sickness. The final essay of this
collection, “Sex and Sensibility, or Sense and Sexuality” confronts the
new moralism head-on in the positions of the new crop of mainstream

gay journalists, including Sullivan, and in affiliation with the short-

lived .activist group Sex Panic! ’s attempt to defend gay sexual culture
and rejuvenate HIV prevention efforts.

If the defense of gay sexual culture and the critique of moralism are cen-

tral to my essays, so too is a theoretical understanding of cultural repre-

sentation as an essential site of political struggle, indeed of the struggle

for life itself. As against the real-world-versus-culture reductionism of

fundamentalisms Right and Left, my position has remained the one I

laid out in “AIDS: Cultural Analysis /Cultural Activism”: “If we recognize

that AIDS exists only in and through its representations, culture, and

politics, then the hope is that we can also recognize the imperative to

know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.” This “cultural

studies” position came to me not in some idle moment of speculation,

or from reading what many would dismiss as “trendy academic theory,”

that I hope the essay itself otherwise contests. Edelman's own deconstruction of that

split with regard to the rhetoric of AIDS activism can be found in "The Mirror and the
Tank: 'AIDS,' Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Activism" (in Homographesis: Essays
in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory[Ne\j\i York: Routledge, 1994], pp. 93-1 17); the es-

say is, among otherthings, Edelman's extremely tactful — and brilliant — rejoinderto
my critique, and one that I find use for in my own later piece "Rosa's Indulgence," in

this volume.
 N >
i

>

but as a lesson learned through- my% participation in ACT UP. In this,

Daniel Harris’s preposterous contentiori that postmodern theory ex-

erted deleterious effects on AIDS activism gets things precisely back-

wards. What makes Harris’s position even more preposterous is his

disdain for what were in fact productive new relations between cultural
theory and activist practice. For example:

For AIDS activists, this deconstructiue skepticism [toward an “objective"

reality of AIDS] manifests itself in the new interest not so much in cir-

cumventing as in manipulating the media, in seizing hold of the actual

apparatus by which various moral interpretations of the disease are con-
veyed to the average consumer. The Media Committee of ACT UP, for ex-

ample, has taken its cue from the White House and gone so far as to

prepare press kits, which it has distributed before several of its demon-
strations. Eager reporters and television crews dutifully plagiarized this

material and ultimately reported what was “sold" to them in advance.^^

To which I can only respond: What could be bad? The fact that ACT UP
was able thoroughly to inform the media about the complex issues at

stake during its demonstrations — against the Food and Drug Adminis-
tration, for example — and that this resulted in better informed media
coverage when the demonstrations occurred is certainly one of ACT
UP’s signal accomplishments. Can anyone living in contemporary Amer-

ican society honestly believe that media representations are extraneous

to “real” politics?^®

Introduction
25. Daniel Harris, "AIDS and Theory; Has Academic Theory Turned AIDS into Meta-
Death?" Lingua Franca, June 1991, p. 18. In attributing the invention of press kits to

the White House, Harris reveals the depth of his ignorance of the media.
An
26. Harris's numerous journalistic writings about gay and AIDS issues generally give
away the fact that he is driven by an embittered disaffection with — or perhaps self-
Moralism:

imposed exclusion from — much of gay life; thus: "In the heart of San Francisco's Cas-
tro district, where I live, the ACT UP logo itself has so much cachet, offers such
and
tangible proof of one's membership in a snugly insular klatch of one's peers, that it has
become the Gucci or Calvin Klein designer label of the 1990s, a clubbish insignia that

Melancholia
announces cliquishness rather than political conviction" ("A Blizzard of Images" la

review of my book AIDS Demo Graphics {Seattie: Bay Press, 1990)1, Nation, Decern-
 ——

This is not to say that I embraced all of ACT HP’s cultural interventions

uncritically. In “Portraits of People with AIDS,” I voice my skepticism

toward the activist demand for positive images of people living with

AIDS, arguing for a more complicated understanding of representation

and its effects. I return to this question in “Accommodating Magic,”
where the activist demand is finally met by the mainstream media in its

reporting about Magic Johnson’s HIV illness — with predictably homo-

phobic results.

But AIDS activism does not speak of representation or make represen- 20

rations with a single voice. In “De-Moralizing Representations of AIDS,” —

I compare Gregg Bordowitz’s feature-length account of his own history 21

as a maker of AIDS-activist videos in Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) to

Voices from the Front (1992) a ,

more conventional AIDS-activist docu-
mentary covering the history of ACT UP. While Bordowitz attempts to

confront his own impending death as a means of reflecting on the toll

that death has taken on the AIDS activist movement. Voices from the
Front fails to acknowledge that toll. Its failure is, I think, a legacy of ac-

tivism’s history of masculinist heroism; in falling prey to this legacy by

mythologizing AIDS activism. Voices from the Front also misrepresents
a strategic shift in activist politics that was another signal contribution

of ACT UP, the insertion of self-deprecating humor into activism as a

means of deflating the heroics. A good example of ACT UP’s style of hu-
mor is Matt Ebert and Ryan Landry’s Marta: Portrait of a Teen Activist,

made at an ACT UP demonstration at the Centers for Disease Control in

Atlanta in 1990. The video wonderfully captures how — far from heroic
terribly awkward, how terribly queer it can feel to engage in activism.

Marta’s perpetual confusion — she can’t decide which placard to carry,

she carries it upside down once she decides, she keeps checking out fel-

low activists to figure out how to position herself properly for a “die-

berSI, 1990, p. 852). "Cachet," "snugly insular klatch," "clubbish," "cliquishness"

the overkill of his language tells a different story than the one Harris seems to think

he's writing. The question here, like the question as to why the New York Times in-

dulges the personal ressentimentol Andrew Sullivan toward a wider gay culture, is.

Why does the Nation publish it? /

 N >
4

in” — is hilariously captured by- Ryan Landry in school-girl drag as

Marta, named after the acronym for Atlanta’s mass-transit system.'

^
Harris’s view of this innovation is that “While it is true that ACT UP has
« \

infused the flagging political momentum of the 1960s with camp and
theatricality, there is a sense in which the intellectual underpinnings of

the organization have made activism not more radically interventionist

but more passively theoretical.”^^ Harris’s complaint demonstrates that

he is oblivious to the fact that ACT UP’s queer antics not only provide an
image of an antiheroic activism but also deconstruct the homophobic
construction whereby “radical activism” is guaranteed by its upright re-

pudiation of “passive theory.” Our ability to see such conventional op-

positions as homophobichas, of course, been a significant contribution

of queer theory. The active/passive binary employed by Harris here is

the subject of a shrewd analysis of the more humorless varieties of

AIDS-activist rhetoric by Lee Edelman, who asks whether “on the one

hand, in our defense of an already beleaguered gay identity, we want to

emulate the widespread heterosexual contempt for the image of a gay

sexuality represented as passive and narcissistic ... or whether, on the
other hand, we want to refuse the ‘choice’ ideologically imposed by
such a binarism — whether we want to deny the incompatibility of pas-
sivity and power, and thereby to undertake the construction of a gay
subjectivity that need not define itself against its own subset of demo-
nized ‘faggots.’”^®

Nearly all of these essays seek to expose homophobic representations

Introduction
and their disastrous consequences for public health during the epi-

demic. These include routine representations of “bad gays”: Randy

An Shilts’s murderously irresponsible Patient Zero in And the Band Played

On (“How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” and “Randy Shilts’s

Moralism:

Miserable Failure”), a figure who returns as the “gay serial killer”

Andrew Cunanan, fantasized by the media as taking revenge for an

and

HIV infection that he never even had (“Sex and Sensibility, or Sense

Melancholia

27. Harris, "AIDS and Theory," p. 18.

28. Edelman, Homographesis, pp. 109-110.

and Sexuality"): and Jonathan Demme’s homosexiialized psychopaths
Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (“Right On,

Girlfriend!”). And then there are the reverse, the good nongays (good

because they’re not gay): Magic Johnson’s representation of himself to

Arsenio Hall as “far from being homosexual” as the basis for his becom-
ing a positive image of someone living with HIV (“Accommodating
Magic”): or the not-so-gay good gays: Demme’s de-homosexualized
positive-image gay man with AIDS in Philadelphia (“De-Moralizing
Representations of AIDS”). And then there are representations that

conceal the sex in the homosexual: Nicholas Nixon’s portrayals of 22

people with AIDS as fleshless and ethereal in phobic defense against —

the possibility that a person with AIDS might still have sex (“Portraits of 23

People with AIDS”): the Names Project quilt’s sanitization of gay lives in
order that gay deaths can be mourned (“The Spectacle of Mourning”):

the chaste gay soldiers in the rhetoric of the Campaign for Military Ser-

vice (“Don’t Tell”): and my own “overlooking” of the homoerotic codes

of Edward Weston’s photographs of his child Neil (“The Boys in My Bed-

room”). Or again the reverse, the picture that refuses to cover up homo-
sexual sex: Rosa von Praunheim’s “narcissistic” representations of his

sexual pleasures counteracting his own moralistic rhetoric in Army of

Lovers (“Rosa’s Indulgence”): and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Helmut and
Brooks as a picture of what is most feared and hated about gay men
(“Painful Pictures”). These last are not homophobic representations:

rather they are representations that show how pictured homosexuality

solicits homophobia.

Finally, there is the question of artists’ representations of AIDS. I first

took up the subject of AIDS as an editor of the cultural journal October,

thinking it would be useful to evaluate the art world’s response to the

epidemic. As I became more immersed in the crisis, 1 expanded my

project to include a much broader range of thought and action engaged
in the struggle against AIDS. What most struck me as I became more
deeply involved were the ways in which the institutions of art marginal-
ized the work of direct political engagement. I thus wrote a polemical

introduction to the special issue of the journal calling for direct action

on the part of the art world. My polemic provoked some indignant reac-
 X >
i

•>

tions. A well-known gay writer called me a Stalinist in the L.A. Weekly.^^

A prominent gay English professor'told a mutual friend that he would

never forgive me for being mean to Liz Taylor (1 had accused her of
mouthing platitudes about art’s universality in a speech she made for an v

Art against AIDS fundraising gala). And a gay critic complained in Art-

forum that I had made him feel bad for liking D^id Wojnarowicz’s art.^°
Writing a retrospective essay on art and AIDS some ten years later, the

same critic, evidently still hung up on my having championed activist

art, quoted the writer who’d called me a Stalinist — by now he was just

calling me an “art-hating activist” — and went on to misquote one of my

most often-cited manifesto-like statements: “We don’t need a cultural

renaissance, we need cultural practices actively participating in the

struggle against AIDS. We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we

need to end it.”^* I unapologetically stand by that statement today.

This is not to say that I don’t regret that my polemical views came off to
some as doctrinaire, uncharitable, and proscriptive. I guess when I first

got caught up in the AIDS maelstrom in the 1980s (remember, this was
when Ronald Reagan was president and wouldn’t even utter the word

AIDS, much less spend any government money on it), I got pretty

damned angry, in part at what seemed to me inadequate or ineffectual

responses. I hope, though, that one result of having these essays all to-

29. "AGAINST NATURE, as has often been true of Dennis [Cooperfs work, was given a

chilly reception; Dennis refers to this as the beginning of the Stalinist period of gay
art. Douglas Crimp, in a speech called 'Art and Activism' ['Good Ole Bad Boys' in this

Introduction
volumel, went out of his way to castigate AGAINST NATURE, and laid out the position

that has become the official gay-politico/ACT Upish line, which stridently rejects the

personal" (Eric Latzky, "He Cried: Novelist Dennis Cooper Hits Home," L.A. Weekly,
An
July 23, 1990, p. 27).

30. David Deitcher, "Ideas and Emotions," ArtforumTJ, 9 (May 1989), pp. 122-127.
Moralism:

31. Deitcher quoted a note by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins on their exhibition
Against Naturewunen for In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer
and
Practice, ed. Nayland Blake, Lawrence Binder, and Amy Scholder (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1995, p. 57). See David Deitcher, "What Does Silence Equal Now?"
Melancholia in Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, ed. Brian Wallis, Marianne
Weems, and Philip Yenawine (New York: New York University Press, 1999); the mis-

quote of my essay appears on page 106.

 I

gether in strict chronological order will show that took these early crit-
1

icisms seriously and tried to make my arguments more nuanced. Just a

year after making my case in “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Ac-

tivism” for “a critical, theoretical, activist alternative to the personal,

elegiac expressions that dominated the art-world response to AIDS,” I

wrote “Portraits of People with AIDS.” While that essay, too, is a polemic

against representations I found counterproductive, in this case I posed

as the alternative a deeply moving elegy in the form of the independent

video Danny by Stashu Kybartas. In thus championing a work of

mourning I was attempting to say that I had not meant to be either pre- 24

or proscriptive about the form or genre of artwork about AIDS.

—
25

Still, I continued — and continue — to be troubled by the fact that the

art world’s most unwavering conviction is the old saw Vita brevis, ars

longa, or “Art lives on forever,” to use Elizabeth Taylor’s words that

caused me to be mean. This conviction generally translates into a repu-
diation of “political art,” politics being far too contingent. “Political art”

doesn 't live on forever; it lives most fully in the moment of its interven-
tion. From my perspective, however — one that I had been elaborating
for a decade prior to writing about AIDS — this contingency of political

investment is the necessary condition of all art, one that traditional ide-

alist notions of art, summed up in a maxim like Vita brevis, ars longa,

work to conceal. As Rosalyn Deutsche has recently stated, “I, like many
artists and critics, avoid the term ‘political art’: Precisely because it as-

serts that other art — indeed art per se or so-called real art — is not po-

litical, ‘political art’ is a powerful political weapon, one that is routinely

deployed to ghettoize art that avows the political. take up this prob-

lem in “Good Ole Bad Boys,” in which I confront the curators of an ex-

hibition conceived as a repudiation of my October polemic.

There is, though, a twofold danger in arguing for art’s avowal of politics,

or to argue for activist art practices as I had: First, it can too easily make

32. '"Every Art Form Has a Political Dimension,"' Chantal Mouffe, interviewed by Rosalyn

Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan, Grey Room 02 (winter 2001),

p. 100.
 X >
4

it appear that there Is such a thing as art that is beyond politics rather

than art that simply disavows its porttics; second, and more important,

it can make it appear that what is political — or activist — and what is

not is self-evident. 1 write about this problem of essentializing activism

in “A Day without Gertrude,” in which 1 argue that the politics of repre-

sentation is rarely so simple as the direct avowaf Of a political position.

Having said that, 1 nevertheless want to end this introduction by stating

a few political positions unequivocally:

/ am not now and never have been a member of the Communist Party,
Stalinist or otherwise (although I did once vote for Angela Davis for Pres-
ident).

I think Elizabeth Taylor is a great movie star; I love her for being such a

good friend to the fabulous Hollywood homos Montgomery Clift, James

Dean, and Rock Hudson; and I consider her a saint for all she’s done in

the fight against AIDS.

I have never suggested that anyone shouldn’t like David Wojnarowicz’s

art; I like it myself

And finally, I don’t hate art; I like it. I’ve spent my entire professional life
thinking about it, and I still like it.

Introduction

An

Moralism:

and

Melancholia

%
K
 t

$
t

AIDS: CULTURAL ANALYSIS/

CULTURAL ACTIVISM

First published as the introduction to October 43

(winter 1987), a special issue on AIDS. This is a

slightly adapted version.

/
 X >
»

“I assert, to begin with, that ‘disease’ does not exist. It is therefore illu-

sory to think that one can ‘develop beliefs’ about it to ‘respond’ to it.

What does exist is not disease but practices.” Thus begins Francois De-
^
laporte’s investigation of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. ‘ It is a state-

ment we may find difficult to swallow, as we witness the ravages of AIDS

in the bodies of our friends, our lovers, and ourselves. But it is never-

theless crucial to our understanding of AIDS because it shatters the

myth so central to liberal views of the epidemic: that there are, on the
one hand, the scientific facts about AIDS, and, on the other hand, igno-
rance or misrepresentation of those facts standing in the way of a ra-

tional response. I will therefore follow Delaporte’s assertion: AIDS does

not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and
respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices. This

assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infec-

tions, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of

illness, suffering, and death. What it does contest is the notion that

there is an underlying reality of AIDS, on which are constructed the rep-

resentations, or the culture, or the politics of AIDS. If we recognize that

AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then the hope is

that we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them,

and wrest control of them.

Within the arts, the scientific explanation and management of AIDS is

largely taken for granted, and it is therefore assumed that cultural pro-

ducers can respond to the epidemic in only two ways: by raising money
for scientific research and service organizations or by creating works
that express the human suffering and loss. In an article for Horizon
entitled “AIDS: The Creative Response,” David Kaufman outlined ex-

Activism
amples of both, including benefits such as “Music for Life,” “Dancing
for Life,” and “Art against AIDS,” together with descriptions of plays, lit-

erature, and paintings that take AIDS as their subject. ^ Regarding these
Analysis/Cultural

1. Frangois Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, I832,trans. Arthur

Goldhammer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), p. 6.

Cultural
2. David Kaufman, "AIDS: The Creative Response," HorizonSO, no. 9 (November 1987),

pp. 13-20.

%
V
latter “creative responses,” Kaufman rehearses the cliches about art’s

“expressing feelings that are not easily articulated,” “shar[ingl experi-

ences and values through catharsis and metaphor,” “demonstrating the

indomitability of the human spirit,” “consciousness raising.” Art is what
survives, endures, transcends; art constitutes our legacy. In this regard,

AIDS is even seen to have a positive value: Kaufman quotes Michael

Denneny of St. Martin’s Press as saying, “We’re on the verge of getting a

literature out of this that will be a renaissance.”^

In July 1987, PBS’s McNeil/ Lehrer Newshour devoted a portion of its 28

program to “AIDS in the Arts.” The segment opened with the shibboleth —
about “homosexuals” being “the lifeblood of show business and the 29

arts” and went on to note the AIDS-related deaths of a number of fa-

mous artists. Such a pretext for a special report on AIDS is highly prob-

lematic, and on a number of counts: First, it reinforces the equation of

AIDS ^nd homosexuality, neglecting even to mention the possibility

that an artist, like anyone else, might contract HIV heterosexually or by

sharing needles when shooting drugs. Second, it suggests that gay

people have a natural inclination toward the arts, the homophobic flip

side of which is that “homosexuals control the arts” (ideas perfectly

parallel with anti-Semitic attitudes that see Jews as, on the one hand,
“making special contributions to culture,” and, on the other, “control-

ling capital”). But most pernicious of all, it implies that gay people “re-

deem” themselves by being artists, and therefore that the deaths of

other gay people are less tragic.'’ The message is that art, because it is

3. Denneny is the editor of Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, a discussion of which
appears in "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," in this volume.

4. Redemption, of course, necessitates a prior sin — the sin of homosexuality, of pro-

miscuity, of drug use — and thus a program such as "AIDS in the Arts" contributes to

the media's distribution of innocence and guilt according to who you are and how you
contracted HIV. Promiscuous gay men and IV drug users are unquestionably guilty in

this construction, but so are all people from poor minority populations. The special at-

tention paid to artists and other celebrities with AIDS is nevertheless contradictory.

While a TV program such as "AIDS in the Arts" virtually beatifies the stricken artist,

for personalities such as Rock Hudson and Liberace the scandal of being found guilty

of homosexuality tarnishes the halo of their celebrity status.

 N >
t

timeless and universal, transcends individual lives, which are time-

%
'
bound and contingent. ^

Entirely absent from the news report — and the Horizon article — was
any mention of activist responses to AIDS by cultural producers. The fo-
cus was instead on the dramatic effect of the epidemic on the art world,
the coping with illness and death. Extended interviews wijth choreogra-
phers Bill T. Jones and his lover Arnie Zane, who had been diagnosed
with AIDS, emphasized the “human face” of the disease in a way that

was far more palatable than is usual in broadcast television, simply be-

cause it allowed the positive self-representation of both a person with

AIDS and a gay relationship. Asked whether he thought “the arts are

particularly hit by AIDS,” Zane replied, “That’s the controversial ques-

tion of this month, right?” but then went on to say, “Of course I do. I am
in the center of this world, the art world. . . . 1 am losing my colleagues.”
Colleen Dewhurst, president of Actors Equity, suggested rather that

“AIDS-related deaths are not more common among artists, only more

visible,” and continued, “Artists are supposed to represent the human

condition . .
.” (a condition that is, of course, assumed to be universal).

“Art lives on forever” — this idealist platitude came from Elizabeth Taylor,
National Chairman of the American Eoundation for AIDS Research, shown
addressing the star-studded crowd at the gala to kick off “Art against

AIDS.” But strangely it was Richard Goldstein, writer for the Village

Voice and a committed activist on the subject of AIDS, who contributed

the broadcast’s most unabashed statement of faith in art’s transcen-

dence of life: “In an ironic sense, I think that AIDS is good for art. It think

it will produce great works that will outlast and transcend the epidemic.”
Activism

It would appear from such a statement that what is at stake is not the

survival of people with AIDS and those who might now be or eventually
Analysis/Cultural

become infected with HIV, but rather the survival, even the flourishing,

of art. For Goldstein, this is surely less a questionof hopelessly confused

priorities, however, than a failure to recognize the alternatives to this

Cultural
desire for transcendence — a failure determined by the intractability of

i
the traditional idealist conception of art, which entirely divorces art

from engagement in lived social life.

Writing in the catalog of “Art against AIDS,” Robert Rosenblum affirms

this limited and limiting view of art and the passivity it entails: “By now,
in the 1980s, we are all disenchanted enough to know that no work of
art, no matter how much it may fortify the spirit or nourish the eye and
mind, has the slightest power to save a life. Only science can do that. But
we also know that art does not exist in an ivory tower, that it is made and
valued by human beings who live and die, and that it can generate a pas- 30

sionate abundance of solidarity, love, intelligence, and most important, —

money.”^ There could hardly be a clearer declaration of the contradic- 31

tions inherent in aesthetic idealism that one that blandly accepts art’s

inability to intervene in the social world and simultaneously praises its

commodity value. To recognize this as contradictory is not, however, to

object to exploiting that commodity value for the purpose of fundrais-

ing for AIDS research and service. Given the failure of government at

every level to provide the funding necessary to combat the epidemic,

such efforts as “Art against AIDS” have been necessary, even crucial to

our survival. I want, nevertheless, to raise three caveats.

1. Scientific research, health care, and education are the responsibility

and purpose of government and not of so-called private initiative, an

ideological term that excuses and perpetuates the state’s irresponsibility.
Therefore, every venture of this nature should make clear that it is neces-
sitated strictly because of criminal negligence on the part ofgovernment.
What we find, however, is the very opposite: "Confronting a man-made
evil like the war in Vietnam, we could assail a government and the

people in charge. But how do we confront a diabolically protean virus

that has been killing first those pariahs of grass-roots America, homo-
sexuals and drug addicts, and has then gone on to kill, with far less

moral discrimination, even women, children, and heterosexual men? We

5. Robert Rosenblum, "Life Versus Death; The Art World in Crisis," in Art against AIDS

(New York: American Foundation for AIDS Research, 1987), p. 32.

 ^

have recourse only to love and to science, which is what Art against AIDS
'
is all about.”

2. Blind faith in science, as if it were entirely neutral and uncontami- ''

^ \

nated by politics, is naive and dangerous. It must be the responsibility of

everyone contributing to fundraisers to know enough about AIDS to de-

termine whether the beneficiary will put the money to the^best possible

use. How many artists and art dealers contributing to ‘Art against AIDS,”

for example, know precisely what kinds of scientific research are sup-
ported by the American Foundation for AIDS Research? How many know
the alternatives to AmFAR's research agenda, alternatives such as the
Community Research Initiative, an effort at testing AIDS treatments ini-

tiated at the community level by people with AIDS themselves? As any-

one involved in the struggle against AIDS knows, we cannot afford to

leave anything up to the “experts.” We must become our own experts.^

3. Raising money is the most passive response of cultural practitioners to

social crisis, a response that perpetuates the idea that art itself has no so-
cial function (aside from being a commodity), that there is no such thing
as an engaged, activist aesthetic practice. It is this third point that I want
to underscore by insisting, against Rosenblurn, that art does have the

power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be recognized, fos-

6. Ibid., p. 28. 1 hope we can assume that Rosenblurn intends his remarks about "pari-
ahs" and "moral discrimination" ironically, although this is hardly what would I call

politically sensitive writing. It could easily be read without irony, since it so faithfully

reproduces what is written in the press virtually every day. And the implication of the

"even women" in the category distinct from "homosexuals" is, once again, that
there's no such thing as a lesbian. But can we expect political sensitivity from some-

Activism one who cannot see that AIDS is political? That science is political? It was science,

after all, that conceptualized AIDS as a gay disease and wasted precious time scru-
tinizing our sex lives, theorizing about killer sperm, and giving megadoses of poppers
to mice at the CDC — all the while taking little notice of the others who were dying of
Analysis/Cultural
AIDS, and thus allowing HIV to be injected into the veins of vast numbers of IV drug

users, as well as of hemophiliacs and other people requiring blood transfusions.

7. 1 do not wish to cast suspicion on AmFAR, but rather to suggest that no organization
can be seen as neutral or objective. See in this regard the exchange of letters on Am-
Cultural
FAR's rejection of the Community Research Initiative's funding applications in the

PWA Coalition Newsline30 (January 1988), pp. 3-7.

 —

tered, and supported in every way possible. We don’t need a cultural re-

naissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle

against AIDS. We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it.

What might such a cultural practice be? One example appeared in No-
vember 1987 in the window on Broadway of New York’s New Museum of
Contemporary Art. Entitled Let the Record Show . . . , it is the collective

work of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which is — I re-

peat what is stated at the beginning of every Monday night meeting

“a nonpartisan group of diverse individuals united in anger and com- 32

mined to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” More precisely, Let the —
Record Show ... is the work of an ad hoc committee within ACT UP 33

that responded to the New Museum’s offer to create the window instal-
lation. The offer was tendered by curator Bill Olander, himself a partic-

ipant in ACT UP. Olander wrote:

I first became aware ofACT UR like many other New Yorkers, when I saw
a poster appear on lower Broadway with the equation; SILENCE=DEATH.
Accompanying these words, sited on a black background, was a pink tri-

angle — the symbol of homosexual persecution during the Nazi period

and, since the 1960 s, the emblem of gay liberation. Eor anyone conver-
sant with this iconography, there was no question that this was a poster
designed to provoke and heighten awareness of the AIDS crisis. To me, it

was more than that: it was among the most significant works of art that
had yet been done which was inspired and produced within the arms of
the crisis.^^

That symbol, made of neon, occupied the curved portion of the New
Museum’s arched window. Below it, in the background and bathed in

soft, even light, was a photomural of the Nuremberg Trials (in addition

to prosecuting Nazi war criminals, those trials established our present-

8. Bill Olander, "The Window on Broadway by ACT UP," in On l//ew (New York: New Mu-
seum of Contemporary Art, 1987), p. I.The logo that Olander describes is not the work
of ACT UP, but of a design collective called the SILENCE=DEATH Project, which lent

the logo to ACT UP.

 ,

>
}

ACT UP (Gran Fury), Let the Record Show . .

. 1 987, installation view. New Museum
Window on Broadway (collection the New Museum, New York).

Activism

Analysis/Cultural

Cultural
day code of medical ethics, involving such things as informed consent
to experimental medical procedures). In front of this giant photo were
six life-size silhouetted photographs of “AIDS criminals” in separate,

boxed-in spaces, and below each one the words by which he or she may
be judged by history, cast — literally — in concrete. As the light went on
in each of these separate boxed spaces, we could see the face and read
the words;

The logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected.

—Jesse Helms, U.S. Senator 34

It is patriotic to have the AIDS test and be negative. 35

— Cory Servaas, Presidential AIDS Commission

We used to hate faggots on an emotional basis. Now we have a good reason.
— anonymous surgeon
AIDS is God’s judgftient of a society that does not live by His rules.

— Jerry Falwell, televangelist

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to

protect common needle users, and on the buttocks to prevent the victim-

ization of other homosexuals.

—William F. Buckley, columnist

And finally, there was a blank slab of concrete, above which was the sil-

houetted photograph of President Reagan. We looked up from this

blank slab and saw, once again, the neon sign: SILENCE=DEATH.

But there was more. Suspended above this rogues’ gallery was an elec-
tronic information display programmed with a running text, portions of
which read as follows:

Let the record show . . . William F. Buckley deflects criticism of the gov-
ernment’s slow response to the epidemic through calculations: ‘At most

three years were lost . . . Those three years have killed approximately
 .

N >
$

15,000 people; if we are talking sq million dead, then the cost of delay is

not heavy. ...” '

^

Let the record show . . The Pentagon spends in one day more than the gov-
eminent spent in the last five years for AIDS research and education. . . .

Let the record show . . . In lane 1986, $47 million was allocated for new
drug trials to include 10,000 people with AIDS. One year later only 1,000
people are currently enrolled. In that time, over 9,000 Americans have

died ofAIDS.

Let the record show . . . In 1986, Dr. Cory Servaas, editor of the Saturday

Evening Post, announced that after working closely with the National
Institutes of Health, she had found a cure for AIDS. At the time, the Na-
tional Institutes of Health officials said that they had never heard of
Dr. Cory Servaas. In 1987, President Reagan appointed Dr. Cory Servaas
to the Presidential AIDS Commission.

Let the record show . . . In October of 1986, $80 million was allocated for
public education about AIDS. 13 months later there is still no national ed-
ucation program. In that time, over 15,000 new cases have been reported.

Let the record show . . . 54% of the people with AIDS in New York City are

black and Hispanic. The incidence ofheterosexually transmitted AIDS is

17 times higher among blacks than whites, 15 times higher among Hispan-

ics than whites. 88% of babies with AIDS are black and Hispanic. 6% of the
US AIDS education budget has been targeted for the minority community.

Activism

And finally:

By Thanksgiving 1981, 244 known dead . . . AIDS ... no word from the
Analysis/Cultural

President.

By Thanksgiving 1982, 1,123 known dead . . . AIDS . . . no word from the

Cultural
President.
The text continues like this, always with no word from the President,
until finally:

By Thanksgiving 1987, 25,644 known dead . . . AIDS . . . President Rea-

gan: “I have asked the Department of Health and Human Services to de-

termine as soon as possible the extent to which the AIDS virus has
penetrated our society."

After each of these bits of information, the sign flashed, “Act Up, Fight

Back, Fight AIDS,” a standard slogan at ACT UP demonstrations. Docu- 36

mentary footage from some of these demonstrations could be seen in —

the videotape Testing the Limits, programmed at the New Museum simul- 37

taneously with the window display. The video about AIDS activism in

New York City is the work of a collective (also called Testing the Limits)

“formed to document emerging forms of activism arising out of people’s

response to government inaction in the global AIDS epidemic.”

The SILENCE=DEATH Project, the group from ACT UP who made Let
the Record Show. . . , and Testing the Limits share important premises
that can teach us much about engaged art practices. Eirst, they are col-
lective endeavors. Second, these practices are employed by their collec-
tives’ members as an essential part of their AIDS activism. This is not to
say that the individuals involved are not artists in the more conven-

tional sense of the word; many of these people work within the precincts
of the traditional art world and its institutions. But involvement in the
AIDS crisis has not left their relation to that world unaltered. After mak-
ing Let the Record Show ... for the New Museum, for example, the
group from ACT UP reconvened and decided to continue their work
(soon adopting the name Gran Eury) Among the general principles dis-
.

cussed at their first meeting, one was unanimously voiced: “We have to

get out of Soho, get out of the art world.”

The New Museum has been more hospitable than most art institutions

to socially and politically committed art practices, and it was very coura-
geous of the museum to offer space to an activist organization rather
 —
f

than to an artist. It is also very useful that the museum has a window on
lower Broadway that is passed by many people who would never se^foot

in an art museum. But if we think about art in relation to the AIDS epi-

demic — in relation, that is, to the communities most

V
drastically af-
\

fected by AIDS, especially poor and minority communities where AIDS

is spreading much faster than elsewhere — we v\TiII realize that no work

made within the confines of the art world as it is currently constituted

will reach these people. Activist art therefore involves questions not

only of the nature of cultural production but also of the location, or the

means of distribution, of that production. Let the Record Show . . . was

made for an art-world location, and it appears to have been made
largely for an art-world audience. By providing information about gov-
ernment inaction and repressive intentions in the context of shocking

statistics, its purpose is to inform — and thereby to mobilize — its pre-

sumably sophisticated audience (an audience presumed, for example,

to be able to recognize a photograph of the Nuremberg Trials) Such in-

formation and mobilization can (contra Rosenblum) save lives; indeed,

until a cure for AIDS is developed, on7y information and mobilization

can save lives.

In New York City, virtually every official campaign of highly visible public
information about AIDS — whether AIDS education for schools, public

service announcements on TV, or posters in the subways — must meet

with the approval of, among others, the immensely powerful and reac-

tionary Cardinal lohn 1. O’Connor. This has resulted in a murderous

regime of silence and disinformation that virtually guarantees the
mounting deaths of sexually active young people — gay and straight

and of IV drug users, their sex partners, and their children, most of them
Activism
from poor, minority populations. Recognizing this, small coalitions of

cultural workers, including a group calling itself the Metropolitan Health

Association and Gran Fury, have taken to the streets and subways to
Analysis/Cultural

mount education campaigns of their own. Employing sophisticated

9. Whether or not the audience was also presumed to be able to see a connection be-
Cultural
tween Let the Record Show ... and the procedures and devices of artists such as

Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger is an open question.

f
i
graphics and explicit information, printed in English and Spanish,

these artists and activists are attempting to get the unambiguous word
out about how safe sex and clean works can protect people from con-
tracting HIV. Even apart from the possibility of arrest, the difficulties

faced by these people are daunting. Their work demands a total reeval-

uation of the nature and purpose of cultural practices in conjunction

with an understanding of the political goals of AIDS activism. It re-

quires, in addition, a comprehensive knowledge of routes of HIV trans-

mission and means of prevention, as well as sensitivity to cultural
specificity — to, say, the street language of Puerto Ricans as opposed to

that of Spanish-speaking immigrants from Central or South America.

Even having adopted new priorities and accumulated new forms of

knowledge, the task of cultural producers working within the struggle
against AIDS will be difficult. The ignorance and confusion enforced by
government and the dominant media; the disenfranchisement and im-
miseration of many of the people thus far hardest hit by AIDS; and the
psychic resistance to confronting sex, disease, and death in a society

where those subjects are largely taboo — all of these conditions must be
faced by anyone doing work on AIDS. Cultural activism is only now be-
ginning: also just beginning is the recognition and support of this work
by art-world institutions.

To date, a majority of cultural producers working in the struggle against

AIDS have used the video medium. There are a number of reasons for

this. Much of the dominant discourse on AIDS has been conveyed

through television, and this discourse has generated a critical counter-

practice in the same medium; video can sustain a fairly complex array
of information: and cable access and the widespread use of VCRs pro-
vide the potential for a large audience for this work.*'’ In October 1987,

the American Film Institute Video Festival included a series entitled

“Only Human: Sex, Gender, and Other Misrepresentations,” organized

10. For a good overview of both commercial television and independent video produc-

tions about AIDS, see Timothy Landers, "Bodies and Anti-Bodies; A Crisis in Repre-

sentation," lndependent^^, no. 1 (January-February 1988), pp. 18-24.

 X >
J

by Bill Horrigan and B. Ruby Rich. Of eight programs in the series, three

were devoted to videotapes about AIDS. Among the more than twenty
X

videos shown, a full range of independent work was represented, in-

cluding tapes made for broadcast TV {AIDS in the Arts), AIDS education v

tapes (5ex, Drugs, and AIDS, made for the New York City School system)',
“art” tapes {News from Home by Tom Kalin ahd Stathis Lagoudakis),
music videos {The ADS Epidemic by John Greyson), documentaries
( Testing the Limits), and critiques of the media {A Plague on You by the

Lesbian and Gay Media Group). The intention of the program was not
to select work on the basis of aesthetic merit but to show something of

the range of representations and counterrepresentations of AIDS. As

B. Ruby Rich stated in the program:

To speak ofsexuality and the body, and not speak ofAIDS, would be, well,

obscene. At the same time, the peculiarly key role being played by the media
in this scenario makes it urgent that counterimages and counterrhetoric
be created and articulated. To this end, we have grouped the AIDS tapes

together in three special programs to allow the dynamic of their interac-

tion to produce its own discourse — and to allow the inveterate viewer to
begin making the aesthetic diagnosis that is quickly becoming every bit

as urgent as (particularly in the absence of) the medical one.^^

My preparation of a special issue of October on AIDS stemmed initially

from encounters with several works of or about media: Simon Watney’s
book Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography, and the Media (Minnesota
University Press, 1987); Stuart Marshall’s video Bright Eyes, made for

Britain’s Channel 4 television: and the documentary about AIDS ac-

tivism in New York City Testing the Limits. My intention was to show,
Activism

through discussion of these works, that there was a critical, theoretical,

activist alternative to the personal, elegiac expressions that appeared to

dominate the art-world response to AIDS. What seemed to me essential
Analysis/Cultural

was a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis. But the full ex-
tent to which this view would have to be expanded became clear only

Cultural
11. B. Ruby Rich, "Only Human: Sex, Gender, and Other Misrepresentations," in 1987
American Film Institute Video Festival, Los Angeles, p. 42.
 f

through further engagement with the issues. AIDS intersects with and
requires a critical rethinking of all of culture: of language and represen-
tation, science and medicine, health and illness, sex and death, the

public and private realms. AIDS is a central issue for gay men, of course,
but also for lesbians. AIDS is an issue for women generally, but espe-

cially for poor and minority women, child-bearing women, and women
working in the health care system. AIDS is an issue for drug users, for

prisoners, and for sex workers. At some point, even “ordinary” hetero-

sexual men will have to learn that AIDS is an issue for them, and not

simply because they might be susceptible to “contagion.” 40

/
 \
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HOW TO HAVE PROMISCUITY

IN AN EPIOEMIC

First published in October 43 (winter 1987),

a special issue on AIDS.

/
 V

—AIDS: Questions and Answers *

%

—AIDS: Get the Facts

—AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance

The sloganeering of AIDS education campaigns suggests that knowl-

edge about AIDS is readily available, easily acquired, and undisputed.

Anyone who has sought to learn the “facts,” however, knows just how
hard it is to get them. Since the beginning of the epidemic, one of the
very few sources of up-to-date information on all aspects of AIDS has

been the gay press, but this is a fact that no education campaign (except
those emanating from gay organizations) will tell you. As Simon Watney
has noted, the British government ban on gay materials coming from
the United States until late in 1986 meant, in effect, that people in the

U.K. were legally prohibited from learning about AIDS during a crucial

period. The ban also meant that the British Department of Health had
to sneak American gay publications into the country in diplomatic
pouches in order to prepare the Thatcher government’s bullying “Don’t
Die of Ignorance” campaign.*

Among information sources, perhaps the most acclaimed is the New

York Native, which has published news about AIDS virtually every week
since 1982. But, although during the early years a number of leading

medical reporters wrote for the newspaper and provided essential in-

formation, the Native’s overall record on AIDS is not so admirable. Like

other tabloids, the Native exploits the conflation of sex, fear, disease,
Epidemic

and death in order to sell newspapers. Banner headlines with grim pre-

an dictions, new theories of “cause” and “cure,” and scandals of scientific

in
infighting combine with soft-core shots of hot male bodies to ensure

that we will rush to plunk down our two dollars for this extremely thin
Promiscuity

publication. One curious aspect of these headlines over the past few

years is that they nearly always refer not to a major news or feature story,
Have

Howto 1. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 13.
but to a short editorial column by the newspaper’s publisher Charles

Ortleb. These weekly diatribes against the likes of Robert Gallo of the

National Cancer Institute and Anthony Fauci of the National Institute

for Allergy and Infectious Diseases might appear to be manifestations

of a healthy skepticism toward establishment science, but Ortleb’s dis-

trust takes an odd form. Rather than performing a political analysis of

the ideology of science, Ortleb merely touts the crackpot theory of the

week, championing whoever is the latest outcast from the world of aca-

demic and government research. Never wanting to concede that estab-

lishment science could be right about the “cause” of AIDS, which is now 44

generally (if indeed skeptically) assumed to be the retrovirus desig- —

nated HIV, Ortleb latches onto any alternative theory: African Swine 45

Fever Virus, Epstein Barr Virus, reactivated syphilis.^ The genuine con-

cern by informed people that a full acceptance of HIV as the cause of

AIDS limits research options, especially regarding possible cofactors, is

magnified and distorted by Ortleb into ad hominem vilification of any-

one who assumes for the moment that HIV is the likely primary causal

agent of AIDS. Among the Native’s maverick heroes in this controversy

about origins is the Berkeley biochemist Peter Duesberg, Vv^ho is so con-

fident that HIV is harmless that he has claimed to be unafraid of inject-

ing it into his veins. When asked by Village Voice reporter Ann Giudici

Fettner what he does think is causing the epidemic, Duesberg replied,

“We don’t have a new disease. It’s a collection of [old] diseases caused by

a lifestyle that was criminal 20 years ago. Combined with bathhouses,

all these infections go with lifestyles which enhance them.”^ As Fettner

notes, this is “a stunning regression to 1982,” when AIDS was presumed

to be a consequence of “the gay lifestyle.”

A scientist pushing “the gay lifestyle” as the cause of AIDS in 1987 might

seem a strange sort of hero for a gay newspaper to be celebrating, but

2. For an overview of theories of the cause of AIDS, see Robert Lederer, "Origin and

Spread of AIDS: Is the West Responsible?" Covert Action 28 (summer 1987), pp. 43-

54; and 29 (winter 1988), pp. 52-65.

3. Quoted in Ann Giudici Fettner, "Bad Science Makes Strange Bedfellows," Village

Voice, February 2, 1988, p. 25.

 V >

then anyone who has read the Native regularly will have noted that, for
%

Ortleb too, sex has been the real culprit all along. And, in this, OrtPeb is

not alone among powerful gay journalists. He is joined in this belief not
only by right-wing politicians and ideologues, but by Randy Shilts,

AIDS reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of And the
Band Played On, the best-selling book on AIDS.^ That this book is per-

nicious has already been noted by many people working in the struggle

against AIDS. For anyone suspicious of “mainstream” American cul-

ture, it might seem enough simply to note that the book is a bestseller,

that it has been highly praised throughout the dominant media, or,

even more damning, that the book has been optioned for a TV mini-

series by Esther Shapiro, writer and producer of Dynasty. For some, the
fact that Larry Kramer is said to be vying for the job of scriptwriter of the
series will add to these suspicions (whoever reads the book will note

that, in any case, the adaptation will be an easy task, since it is already

written, effectively, as a miniseries). The fact that Shilts places blame for

the spread of AIDS equally on the Reagan administration, various gov-

ernment agencies, the scientific and medical establishments, and the

gay community, is reason enough for many of us to condemn the book.

And the Band Played On is predicated on a series of oppositions: it is,

first and foremost, a story of heroes and villains, of common sense

against prejudice, of rationality against irrationality; it is also an ac-

count of scientific advance versus political maneuvering, public health
versus civil rights, a safe blood supply versus blood-banking industry
profits, homosexuals versus heterosexuals, hard cold facts versus what
Shilts calls AlDSpeak.
Epidemic

an We might assume we know what is meant by this neologism: AlDSpeak

in
would be, for example, “the AIDS test,” “AIDS victims,” “promiscuity.”
But no, Shilts employs these imprecise, callous, or moralizing terms just
Promiscuity

4. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New
Have

York: St. Martin's Press, 1987). Page numbers for all citations from the book appear in

parentheses in the text.

Howto
as do all his fellow mainstream journalists, without quotation marks,

without apology. For Shilts, AlDSpeak is, instead, a language invented

to cover up the truth. An early indication of what Shilts thinks this lan-

guage is appears in his account of the June 5, 1981, article in the Mor-
bidity and Mortality Weekly Report about cases of Pneumocystis

pneumonia in gay men. Shilts writes:

The report appeared . . , not on page one of the MMWR but in a more in-
conspicuous slot on page two. Any reference to homosexuality was
dropped from the title, and the headline simply read: Pneumocystis 46

pneumonia Los Angeles. —

47

Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the
twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from

the first day of the epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such argu-

ments,paved the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably

lead. (pp. 68 - 69 )

It was a great shock to read this in 1987, after six years of headlines about
“the gay plague” and the railing of moralists about God’s punishment
for sodomy, or, more recently, statements such as “AIDS is no longer just
a gay disease.” Language destined to offend gays and inflame homo-
phobia has been, from the very beginning — in science, in the media,
and in politics — the main language of AIDS discussion, although the

language has been altered at times in order that it would, for example,
offend Haitians and inflame racism, or offend women and inflame sex-
ism. But to Shilts AlDSpeak is not this language guaranteed to offend

and inflame. On the contrary, it is

a new language forged by public health officials, anxious gay politicians,

and the burgeoning ranks of ‘AIDS activists.” The linguistic roots ofAlD-
Speak sprouted not so much from the truth as from what was politically
facile and psychologically reassuring. Semantics was the major denom-
inator of AlDSpeak jargon, because the language went to great lengths

never to offend. /
 X >
i

A new lexicon was evolving. Under the rules ofAIDSpeak, for example,
AIDS victims could not be called victims. Instead, they were to be called

People With AIDS, orPWAs, as if contracting this uniquely brutal disease

^
was not a victimizing experience. “Promiscuous” became “sexually ac-

tive,” because gay politicians declared “promiscuous” to be “judgmental,”

a major cuss word in AIDSpeak. . . .

. . . The new syntax allowed gay political leaders to address and largely

determine public health policy in the coming years, because public

health officials quickly mastered AIDSpeak, and it was a fundamentally
political tongue, (p. 315)

Shilts’s contempt for gay political leaders, AIDS activists, and people
with AIDS, and his delusions about their power to influence public

health policy are deeply revealing of his own politics. But to Shilts, pol-

itics is something alien, something others have, and political speech is

AIDSpeak. Shilts has no politics, only common sense; he speaks only

the “truth," even if the truth is “brutal,” like being “victimized” by AIDS.

As an immediate response to this view, I will state my own political po-

sition: Anything said or done about AIDS that does not give precedence
to the knowledge, the needs, and the demands of people living with
AIDS must be condemned. The passage from And the Band Played On
quoted above — and indeed the entire book — is written in flagrant dis-

regard of these people. Their first principle, that they not be called vic-

tims, is flaunted by Shilts. I will concede that people living with AIDS

are victims in one sense: they have been and continue to be victimized
Epidemic

by all those who will not listen to them, including Randy Shilts. But we
an cannot stop at condemnation. Shilts’s book is too full of useful informa-
in
tion, amassed in part with the help of the Freedom of Information Act,
simply to dismiss it. But while it may be extremely useful, it is also ex-
Promiscuity

tremely dangerous — and thus has to be read very critically.

Have

In piecing together his tale of heroes and villains — which intersperses

to
vignettes about scientists from the Centers for Disease Control in At-
How
lanta, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, and the Pasteur In-
stitute in Paris; doctors with AIDS patients in New York, San Francisco,
and Los Angeles; blood-banking industry executives; various people
with AIDS (always white, usually gay men living in San Francisco); offi-

cials in the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food

and Drug Administration; gay activists and AIDS service organization

volunteers — Shilts always returns to a single complaint. With all the

people getting sick and dying, and with all the scandals of inaction,

stonewalling, and infighting that are arguably the primary cause of

those people’s illness and death, journalists never bothered to investi-

gate. They always bought the government’s lies, never looked behind 48

those lies to get the “truth.” There was, of course, one exception, the —
lonely journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle assigned full-time to 49

the AIDS beat. He is never named, but we know his name is Randy
Shilts, the book’s one unqualified hero, who appears discreetly in sev-

eral of its episodes. Of course, that journalist knows the reason for the

lack of investigative zeal on the part of his fellows; the people who were
dying were gay men, and mainstream American journalists don’t care
what happens to gay men. Those journalists would rather print hysteria-

producing, blame-the-victim stories than uncover the “truth.”

So Shilts would print that truth in And the Band Played On, “Investiga-

tive journalism at its best,” as the flyleaf states. The book is an extremely
detailed, virtually day-by-day account of the epidemic up to the revela-

tion that Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS, the moment, in 1985, when
the American media finally took notice.^ But taking notice of Rock Hud-
son was, in itself, a scandal, because by the time the Rock Hudson story
captured the attention of the media, Shilts notes, “the number of AIDS
cases in the United States had surpassed 12,000 ... of whom 6,079 had

died” (p. 580). Moreover, what constituted a story for the media was
only scandal itself: a famous movie star simultaneously revealed to be

gay and to be dying of AIDS.

5. The fact that Shilts chose this moment as the end point of his narrative suggests that

the book's central purpose is indeed to prove the irresponsibility of all journalists but

Shilts himself, making him the book's true hero.

 How surprised, then, could Shiite have been that, when his own book
was published, the media once again avoided mention of the sixyeafs of
political scandal that contributed so significantly to the scope of the

AIDS epidemic? that they were instead intrigued by an altogether dif-

ferent story, the one they had been printing all along — the dirty little

Story of gay male promiscuity and irresponsibility?

In the press release issued by Shilts’s publisher, St. Martin’s, the media’s

attention was directed to the story that would ensure the book’s success:

PATIENT ZERO: The Man Who Brought AIDS to North America What
remains a mystery for most people is where AIDS came from and how
it spread so rapidly through America. In the most bizarre story of the
epidemic, Shilts also found the man whom the CDC dubbed the “Pa-

tient Zero” of the epidemic. Patient Zero, a French-Canadian airline

steward, was one of the first North Americans diagnosed with AIDS.
Because he traveled through the gay communities of major urban areas,
bespread the AIDS virus throughout the continent. Indeed, studies later

revealed 40 of the first 200 AIDS cases in America were documented

either to have had sex with Patient Zero or have had sex with someone
who did.

The story of Gaetan Dugas, or “Patient Zero,” is woven throughout the

book in over twenty separate episodes, beginning on page 11 and ending

only on page 439, where the young man’s death is recounted. “At one

time,” Shilts writes in a typically portentous tone, “Gaetan had been

what everyman wanted from gay life; by the time he died, he had be-
Epidemic

come what every man feared.” It is interesting indeed that Shilts, a gay
an man who appears not to have wanted from gay life what Gaetan Dugas
in
may or may not have been, should nevertheless assume that what all
gay men want is identical.
Promiscuity

The publisher’s ploy worked, for which they appear to be proud. In-
Have
cluded in the press kit sent to me were Xeroxes of the following news
to
stories and reviews:
How
— New York Times: Canadian Said to Have Had
Key Role in Spread of AIDS

— New York Post: The Man Who Gave Us AIDS

— NY Daily News: The Man Who Flew Too Mach
—Time: The Appalling Saga of Patient Zero

— McClean’s: “Patient Zero" and the AIDS Virus 50

People magazine made “Patient Zero” one of its “25 most intriguing 51

people of ’87,” together with Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Oliver

North, Fawn Hall, Princess Diana, Vincent van Gogh, and Baby Jessica.
Shilts’s success in giving the media the scandalous story that would

overshadow his book’s other “revelations” — and that would ensure that
the blame for AIDS would remain focused on gay men — can be seen
even in the way the story appeared in Germany’s leading liberal weekly

Der Spiegel. Underneath a photograph of cruising gay men at the end of

Christopher Street in New York City, the story’s sensational title reads

“Ich werde sterben, und du auch” (“I’m going to die, and so are you”), a

line the Canadian airline steward is supposed to have uttered to his

bathhouse sex partners as he turned up the lights after an encounter

and pointed to his Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.

Shilts’s painstaking efforts at telling the “true” story of the epidemic’s

early years thus resulted in two media stories: the story of the man who
brought us AIDS, and the story of the man who brought us the story of
the man who brought us AIDS. Gaetan Dugas and Randy Shilts became
overnight media stars. Being fully of the media establishment, Shilts’s

criticism of that establishment is limited to pitting good journalists

against bad. He is apparently oblivious to the economic and ideological

mechanisms that largely determine how AIDS will be constructed in the

media, and he thus contributes to that construction rather than to its

critique. /
 i

>

The criticism most often leveled against Shilts’s book by its gay critics is

that it is a product of internalized homophobia. In this view, ShHts is

seen to identify with the heterosexist society that loathes him for his ho-

mosexuality and through that identification to project his loathing onto v

\ \

the gay community. Thus, “Patient Zero,” the very figure of the homo-
sexual as imagined by heterosexuals — sexuallyVoracious, murderously

irresponsible — is Shilts’s homophobic nightmare of hirnself, a night-

mare that he must constantly deny by making it true only of others.

Shilts therefore offers up the scapegoat for his heterosexual colleagues

in order to prove that he, like them, is horrified by such creatures.

It is true that Shilts’s book reproduces virtually every cliche of homo-

phobia. Like Queen Victoria’s proverbial inability to fathom what les-

bians do in bed, Shilts’s disdain for the sexual habits of gay men extends
even to finding certain of those habits “unimaginable.” In one of his

many fulminations against gay bathhouses, Shilts writes, “Just about

every type of unsafe sex imaginable, and many variations that were

unimaginable, were being practiced with carefree abandonment [sic] at

the facilities” (p. 481).

Shilts’s failure of imagination is in this case merely a trope, a way of say-

ing that certain sexual acts are beyond the pale for most people. But in

resorting to such a trope, Shilts unconsciously identifies with all those

who would rather see gay men die than allow homosexuality to invade

their consciousness.

And the Band Played On is written not only as a chronology of events,

Epidemic

but also as a cleverly plotted series of episodes. Hundreds of narrative

an threads are woven around individual characters described in conven-

in and
tional novelistic fashion. Often Shilts uses people’s regional accents

physiques metonymically to stand for their characters: “Everyone cheered

Promiscuity

enthusiastically when Paul Popham [president of the Gay Men’s Health

Crisis] addressed the crowd in his broad, plainspoken Oregon accent”
Have

(p. 139). A hundred pages earlier, Popham is introduced with the sen-
to
tence, “At the Y, Larry [Kramer] had told Paul that he had such a natu-
How
rally well-defined body that he didn’t need to work out, and Paul responded
 —

with a shy aw-shucks ingenuousness that reminded Larry of Gary Cooper

or Jimmy Stewart” (p. 26). Shilts’s choice of novelistic form allows him
these tricks of omniscient narration. Not only does he tell us what Paul

said and Larry thought, he also reveals his characters’ dreams and
nightmares, and even, in a few cases, what people with AIDS were

thinking and feeling at the moment of death. These aspects of bour-

geois writing would seem to represent a strange choice indeed for the

separation of fact from fiction,'^ but I want to argue that it is precisely

this choice that determines Shilts’s homophobia. For it is my contention

not simply that Shilts has internalized homophobia, but that he has 52

sought to escape the effects of homophobia by employing a particular —

cultural form, one that is thoroughly outmoded but still very much with 53

us in its vulgarized variants. In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes

writes, “Until Ithe 1850s], it was bourgeois ideology itself which gave
the measure of the universal by fulfilling it unchallenged. The bour-
geois writer, sole judge of other people’s woes and without anyone else

to gaze on him, was not torn between his social condition and his intel-

lectual vocation.’’^

“Sole judge of other people’s woes and without anyone else to gaze on
him,” Shilts adopted a no-longer-possible universal point of view

which is, among other things, the heterosexual point of view — and
thus erased his own social condition, that of being a gay man in a ho-
mophobic society. Shilts wrote the story of Gaetan Dugas not because it

needed telling — because, in the journalist’s mind, it was true and fac-

tual — but because it was required by the bourgeois novelistic form that
Shilts used as his shield. The book’s arch-villain has a special function,
that of securing the identity of his polar opposite, the book’s true hero.

6. Shilts writes in his "Notes on Sources": "This book is a work of journalism. There has
been no fictionalization. For purposes of narrative flow, I reconstruct scenes, recount

conversations and occasionally attribute observations to people with such phrases

as 'he thought' or 'she felt.' Such references are drawn from either the research in-

terviews I conducted forthe book orfrom research conducted during my years cov-
ering the AIDS epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle" (p. 607).

7. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. AnneUe Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1967), p. 60.
 i

Shilts created the character of “Patient Zero” to embody everything that

the book purports to expose: irresponsibility, delay, denial, ultimately

murder.” “Patient Zero” stands for all the evil that is “really” the cause of

the epidemic, and Shilts’s portrait of “Patient Zero” stands for Shilts’s v
» \

own heroic act of “exposing” that evil.

If 1 have dwelt for so long on And the Band Played On, it is not only be-

cause its enthusiastic reception demands a response. It is also because

the book demonstrates so clearly that cultural conventions rigidly dic-

tate what can and will be said about AIDS. And these cultural conven-
tions exist everywhere the epidemic is constructed: in newspaper stories

and magazine articles, in television documentaries and fiction films, in

political debate and health-care policy, in scientific research, in art, in

activism, and in sexuality. The way AIDS is understood is in large mea-

sure predetermined by the forms these discourses take. Randy Shilts

provided the viciously homophobic portrait of “Patient Zero” because

his thriller narrative demanded it, and the news media reported that

story and none of the rest because what is news and what is not is dic-

tated by the form the news takes in our society. In a recent op-ed piece

about his recognition that AIDS is now newsworthy, A. M. Rosenthal,

executive editor of the New York Times during the entire five-year pe-
riod when the epidemic was a nonstory for the Times, offered the fol-

lowing reflection on the news-story form: “Journalists call events,

8. 1 say created because, though Gaetan Dugas was a real person, his character — in

both senses of the word — was invented by Shilts. Moreover, contrary to the St. Mar-

tin's press release, Shilts did not "discover" "Patient Zero." The story about how
Epidemic
various early AIDS researchers were able to link a number of early cases of the

syndrome — which was done not to locate the "source" of the epidemic and place

an
blame but simply to verify the transmissibility of a causal agent — was told earlier by

in Ann Giudici Fettner and William A. Check. Dugas is called "Eric" in their account, and

his character is described significantly differently: '"He felt terrible about having

made other people sick,' says IDr. Williaml Darrow [a CDC sociologist!. 'He had come
Promiscuity

down with Kaposi's but no one ever told him it might be infectious. Even at CDC we
didn't know then that it was contagious. It is a general dogma that cancer is not

Have transmissible. Of course, we now know that the underlying immune-system defi-

ciency that allows the cancer to grow is most likely transmissible'" ( The Truth about
to
AIDS [New York; Henry Holt, revised edition, 1985], p. 86). Thanks to Paula Treichler
How
for calling this passage to my attention.
trivial or historic, ‘stories’ because we really are tellers of tales and to us

there is no point in knowing or learning if we can’t run out and tell

somebody. That’s just the way we are; go ask a psychiatrist why.”^

“Patient Zero’’ is a news story while the criminal inaction of the Reagan
administration is not
— “go ask a psychiatrist why.’’ Rock Hudson is a

story, but the thousands of other people with AIDS are not
— “go ask a
psychiatrist why.’’ Heterosexuals with AIDS is a story; homosexuals
with AIDS is not
— “go ask a psychiatrist why.” Shilts laments this situ-

ation. His book contributes nothing to understanding and changing it. 54

Among the heroes of And the Band Played On is Larry Kramer, who 55

shares Shilts’s negative view of gay politics and sexuality. Here is how
Shilts describes the reception of Kramer’s play about AIDS, The Normal
Heart:

April 21 [1985!

PUBLIC THEATER
New York City
A thunderous ovation echoed through the theater. The people rose to

their feet, applauding the cast returning to the stage to take their bows.
Larry Kramer looked to his eighty-five-year-old mother. She had always
wanted him to write for the stage, and Kramer had done that now. True,
The Normal Heart was not your respectable Neil Simon fare, but a virtu-

ally unanimous chorus of reviewers had already proclaimed the play to

be a masterpiece of political drama. Even before the previews were over,

critics from every major news organization in New York City had scoured
their thesauruses for superlatives to describe the play. NBC said it “beats
with passion”: Time magazine scud it was “deeply affecting, tense and
touching”; f/?e New York Daily News called it “an angry, unremitting and
gripping piece of political theater.” One critic said Heart was to the AIDS

epidemic what Arthur Miller’s The Crucible had been to the McCarthy

9. A. M. Rosenthal, "AIDS: Everyone's Business," New York Times, December 29, 1987,

p. A19.
 V

era. New York Magazine’s critic John Simon, who had recently been over-
heard saying that he looked forward to when AIDS had killed all tlfe ho-

mosexuals in New York theater, conceded in an interview that he left the

play weeping, (p. 556)

How is it that for four years the deaths of thousands of gay men could

leave the dominant media entirely unmoved, but Larry^Kramer s play

could make them weep? Shilts offers no explanation, nor is he suspi-

cious of thismomentary change of heart. The Normal Heart is a piece a

clef about the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the AIDS service or-

ganization Kramer helped found and which later expelled him be- —
cause, as the play tells it, he, like Shilts, insisted on speaking the truth.

In one of his many fights with his fellow organizers, Ned Weeks, the

character that represents Kramer, explodes, “Why is anything I’m say-

ing compared to anything but common sense?” (p. 100) Common sense, .

in Kramer’s view, is that gay men should stop having so much sex, that

promiscuity kills. But this common sense is, of course, conventional

moral wisdom: it is not safe sex, but monogamy that is the solution. The
play’s message is therefore not merely reactionary, it is lethal, since

monogamy per se provides no protection whatsoever against a virus

that might already have infected one partner in a relationship.

“1 am sick of guys who can only think with their cocks” (p. 57), says Ned
Weeks, and later, “Being defined by our cocks is literally killing us”

(p. 115). For Kramer, being defined by sex is the legacy of gay politics;

promiscuity and gay politics are one and the same:

Epidemic

Ned [to Emma, the doctor who urges him to tell gay men to stop having

an sex]: Do you realize that you are talking about millions of men who have
singled out promiscuity to be their prmcipal political agenda, the one
in

theyd die before abandoning? (pp. 37-38)

Promiscuity

Have

10. Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New Amer-

ican Library, 1985). Page numbers for citations are given in the text.
Howto
 .

Bruce [the president of GMHC]: . . the entire gay political platform is

fucking, (p. 57)

Ned: . . . the gay leaders who created this sexual liberation philosophy in
the first place have been the death of us. Mickey, why did n’t you guys fight
for the right to get married instead of the right to legitimize promiscuity?

(p. 85)

These lines represent the view of someone who did not participate in
the gay movement, and who has no sense of its history, its complexities, 56

its theory and practice (was he too busy taking advantage of its gains?) .
—
Kramer’s ignorance of and contempt for the gay movement are demon- 57

strated throughout the play:

Ned: Nobody with a brain gets involved in gay politics. It’s filled with the
great imwashed radicals of any counterculture, (p. 37)

Mickey: You know, the battle against the police at Stonewall was won by
transvestites. We all fought like hell. It’s you Brooks Brothers guys who—

Bruce: That’s why I wasn’t at Stonewall. I don’t have anything in common

with those guys, girls, whatever you call them.

Mickey: . . . and . . . how do you feel about lesbians?

Bruce: Not very much. I mean, they’re . . . something else.

Mickey: I wonder what they’re going to think about all this? If past his-
tory is any guide, there’s never been much support by either ha If of us for
the other. Tommy, are you a lesbian? (pp. 54-55)

I want to return to gay politics, and specifically to the role lesbians have
played in the struggle against AIDS, but first it is necessary to explain
why have been quoting
I Kramer’s play as if it were not fictional, as if it

could be unproblematically taken to represent Kramer’s own political

 —
\

views. As I’ve already said, The Normal Heart is a piece a clef, a form

adopted for the very purpose of presenting the author’s experience and
views in dramatic form. But my criticism of the play is not merely that

Kramer’s political views, as voiced by his characters, are reactionary—

though they certainly are — but that the genre employed by Kramer will

dictate a reactionary content of a different kind; because the play is

written within the most traditional conventions of bourgeois theater, its

politics are the politics of bourgeois individualism. Like And the Band
Played On, The Normal Heart is the story of a lonely voice of reason

drowned out by the deafening chorus of unreason. It is a play with a

hero, Kramer himself, for whom the play is an act of vengeance for all

the wrong done him by his ungrateful colleagues at the Gay Men’s

Health Crisis. The Normal Heart is a purely personal not a politi-

cal — drama, a drama of a few heroic individuals in the AIDS move-

ment. From time to time, some of these characters talk “politics”:

Emma: Health is a political issue. Everybody’s entitled to good medical

care. If you’re not getting it, you’ve got to fight for it. Do you know this is

the only industrialized country in the world besides South Africa that

doesn’t guarantee health care for everyone? (p. 36)

But this is, of course, politics in the most restricted sense of the word.

Such a view refuses to see that power relations invade and shape all dis-
course. It ignores the fact that the choice of the bourgeois form of

drama, for example, is a political choice that will have necessary politi-

cal consequences. Among these is the fact that the play s politics

sound very didactic, don’t “work” with the drama. Thus in The Normal
Epidemic

Heart, even these “politics” are mostly pushed to the periphery: they

an become decor. In the New York Shakespeare Festival production of the

in
play, “The walls of the set, made of construction-site plywood, were

whitewashed. Everywhere possible, on this set and upon the theater

simple
Promiscuity

walls too, facts and figures and names were painted, in black,

lettering” (p. 19 ). These were such facts as

Have

to
MAYOR KOCH [of New York City]: $75.000— MAYOR EEINSTEIN [of San
How
Erancisco]: $16,000,000. (Eor public education and community services.)

K
 —

During the first nineteen months of the epidemic, the New York Times
wrote about it a total of seven times. Duritig the first three months of the
Tylenol scare in 1982 the , New York Times wrote about it a total of 54
times, (pp. 20 -21 )

No one would dispute that these facts and figures have political signifi-

cance, that they are part of the political picture of AIDS. But in the con-

text of The Normal Heart, they are absorbed by the personal drama
taking place on the stage, where they have no other function than to

prove Ned Weeks right, to vindicate Ned Weeks’s — Larry Kramer’s — 58

rage. And that rage, the play itself, is very largely directed against other —
gay men. 59

Shilts’s book and Kramer’s play share a curious contradiction: they

blame the lack of response to the epidemic on the misrepresentation of

AIDS as a gay disease even as they themselves treat AIDS almost exclu-

sively as a gay problem. Both display indifference to the other groups

drastically affected by the epidemic, primarily, in the United States, IV

drug users, who remain statistics for the two writers, just as gay men do
for the people the two authors rail against.

The resolution of this contradiction, which is pervasive in AIDS dis-

course, would appear to be simple enough. AIDS is not a gay disease,

but in the United States it affected gay men first and, thus far, has af-

fected us in greater proportion. But AIDS probably did not affect gay
men first, even in the United States. What is now called AIDS was first

seen in middle-class gay men in America, in part because of our access

to medical care. Retrospectively, however, it appears that IV drug users
whether gay or straight — were dying of AIDS in New York City through-
out the ’70s and early ’80s, but a class-based and racist health care

system failed to notice, and an epidemiology equally skewed by class

and racial bias failed to begin to look until 1987." Moreover, AIDS has

11. In October 1987, the New York Times reported that the New York City Department of

Health conducted a study of drug-related deaths from 1982 to 1986, which found an

estimated 2,520 AIDS-related deaths that had not been reported as such. As a result.
 % >
i

never been restricted to gay men in Central Africa, where the syndrome
is a problem of apocalyptic dimensions, but to this day receives almost

no attention in the United States.

What is far more significant than the real facts of HIV transmission iri

various populations throughout the world, hov^ver, is the initial con-

ceptualization of AIDS as a syndrome affecting gay men. No insistence

on the facts will render that discursive construction obsolete, and not
only because of the intractability of homophobia. The idea of AIDS as a
gay disease occasioned two interconnected conditions in the United
States; that AIDS would be an epidemic of stigmatization rooted in ho-

mophobia and that the response to AIDS would depend in very large

measure on the very gay movement Shilts and Kramer decry.

The organization Larry Kramer helped found, the Gay Men’s Health Cri-
sis, is as much a part of the early construction of AIDS as were the first

reports of the effects of the syndrome in the Morbidity and Mortality

Weekly Report. Though it may be true that few of the founders of

GMHC were centrally involved in gay politics, everything they were

able to accomplish — from fundraising and recruiting volunteers to

consulting with openly gay health care professionals and getting edu-

cation out to the gay community — depended on what had already

been achieved by the gay movement. Moreover, the continued life of

GMHC as the largest AIDS service organization in the United States has

"AIDS-related deaths involving intravenous drug users accounted for 53 percent of

all AIDS-related deaths in New York City since the epidemic began, while deaths in-

Epidemic
volving sexually active homosexual and bisexual men accounted for 38 percent."

Even these statistics are based on CDC epidemiology that continues to see the be-

ginning of the epidemic as 1981, following the early reports of illnesses in gay men, in
an

in spite ofwidespread anecdotal reporting of a high rate of deaths throughout the 1970s

from what was known as "junkie pneumonia" and was likely Pneumocystis pneumo-
nia. Moreover, the study was undertaken not through any recognition of the serious-
Promiscuity

ness of the problem posed to poor and minority communities, but, as New York City

Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph was reported as saying, because "the higher

Have numbers . . . showed that the heterosexual 'window' through which AIDS presumably
could jump to people who were not at high risk was much wider that we believed'”
to
(Ronald Sullivan, "AIDS in New York City Killing More Drug Users," New York Times,
How
October 22, 1987, p. 131).

f
V
 —

necessarily aligned it with other, more radical grassroots AIDS organi-

zations both in the gay community and in other communities affected
by the epidemic. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis, whose workforce com-
prises lesbians and heterosexual women as well as gay men (hetero-

sexual men are notably absent from the AIDS movement), is now an
organization that provides services for infants with AIDS, IV drug users

with AIDS, women with AIDS. It is an organization that every day puts
the words gay men in the mouths of people who would otherwise never

speak them. More important, it is an organization that has put the

words gay men in the mouths of nongay people living with the stigma 60

attached to AIDS by those very words. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis is
—
thus a symbol, in its very name, of the fact that the gay movement is at 61

the center of the fight against AIDS. The limitations of this move-
ment — especially insofar as it is riven by race and class differences

are therefore in urgent need of examination.

In doing this, we must never lose sight of the fact that the gay movement
is responsible for virtually every positive achievement in the struggle

against AIDS during the epidemic’s early years. These achievements are

not only those of politically organized response — of fighting repressive

measures; of demanding government funding, scientific research, and

media coverage; of creating service organizations to care for the sick

and to educate the well. They are also the achievements of a sexual
community whose theory and practice of sex made it possible to meet

the epidemic’s most urgent requirement: the development of safe sex

practices. But who counts as a member of this community? Who will be

protected by the knowledge of safe sex? Kramer’s character Mickey was

right in saying that it was transvestites who fought back at Stonewall.

What he did not say was that those “guys in Brooks Brothers suits’’ very
soon hounded transvestites out of the movement initiated by Stone-
wall, because the “gay good citizens’’*^ didn’t want to be associated with
“those guys, girls, whatever you call them.’’ Now, in 1988, what AIDS

12. 1 borrow the phrase from Guy Hocquenghem, who used it to describe a gay move-
ment increasingly devoted to civil rights rather than to the more radical agenda issu-

ing from the New Left of the 1960s.

 X >
*

>

service organizations are providing transvestites with safe sex informa-

tion? Who is educating hustlers? Who is getting safe sex instructjpns,

printed in Spanish, into gay bars in Queens that cater to working-class

Colombian immigrants?'-^ It is these questions that cannot be satisfac-

torily answered by a gay community that is far from inclusive of the vast
majority of people whose homosexual practiceS'place them at risk. It is

also these questions that we must ask even more insistently of AIDS ed-

ucation programs that are now being taken out of the hands of gay
people — AIDS education programs devised by the state, outside of any

existing community, whatever its limitations.

Kramer’s summary dismissal of transvestites in The Normal Heart is

followed by his assumption that lesbians will show no interest in the AIDS
crisis. Not only has Kramer been proven dead wrong, but his assump-
tion is grounded in a failure to recognize the importance of a gay politi-
cal community that has always included both sexes. In spite of the very

real tensions and differences between lesbians and gay men, our com-
mon oppression has taught us the vital necessity of forming a coalition.
And having negotiated and renegotiated this coalition over a period of

two decades has provided much of the groundwork for the coalition

politics necessitated by the shared oppression of ail the radically differ-

ent groups affected by AIDS. But the question Larry Kramer and other
gay men should be asking in any case is not “What are lesbians doing to

help us?” but rather “What are we doing to help lesbians?” Although it is
consistently claimed that lesbians, as a group, are the least vulnerable

to HIV transmission, this would appear to be predicated, once again, on

the failure to understand what lesbians do in bed. As Lee Chiaramonte
Epidemic

wrote in an article entitled “The Very Last Fairy Tale,”

an

in
In order to believe that lesbians are not at risk for AIDS, or that those who
have already been infected are merely incidental victims, I would have to
Promiscuity

Have 13. 1 do not wantto suggest thatthere are no gay community organizations for or includ-

ing transvestites, sex workers, or Latino immigrants, but rather that no organization
to
representing highly marginalized groups hasthe funding orthe powerto reach large
How
numbers of people with sensitive and specific AIDS information.
know and agree with the standards by which we are judged to be saf e.

Meaning I would have to believe we are either sexless or olyinpically

monogamous; that we are not intravenous drug users; that we do not

sleep with men; that we do not engage in sexual activities that could

prove as dangerous as they are titillating. I would also have to believe

that lesbians, unlike straight women, can get seven years’ worth of hon-

est answers from their lovers about forgotten past lives.^^

Chiaramonte goes on to cite a 1983 Journal of Sex Research study in

which it was determined that lesbians have almost twice as much sex as 62

straight women and that their numbers of partners are greater than
—
straight women’s by nearly fifteen to one. In a survey conducted by Pat 63

Califia for the Journal of Homosexuality, over half the lesbians ques-
tioned preferred nonmonogamous relationships. And, in addition to

the risks of HIV infection, which only compound women’s problems

with a sexist health care system, lesbians have, along with gay men,
borne the intensified homophobia that has resulted from AIDS.

Not surprisingly it was a lesbian — Cindy Patton — who wrote one of

the first serious political analyses of the AIDS epidemic and who has
more recently coauthored a safe sex manual for women.*'’ “It is critical,”

says Patton, “that the experience of the gay community in AIDS orga-

nizing be understood: the strategies employed before 1985 or so grew out

of gay liberation and feminist theory.”*^ The most significant of these

strategies was — again — the development of safe sex guidelines, which,

though clearly the achievement of the organized gay community, are

now being reinvented by “experts”:

14. Lee Chiaramonte, "Lesbian Safety and AIDS: The Very Last Fairy Tale," Visibilities],

no. 1 (January-February 1988), p. 5.

15. Ibid., p. 7.

16. Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985);
and Cindy Patton and Janis Kelly, Making It: A Woman's Guide to Sex in the Age of

A/DS(lthaca: Firebrand Books, 1987).

17. Cindy Patton, "Resistance and the Erotic: Reclaiming History, Setting Strategy as We
Face AIDS," Radical America 20, no. 6 (Facing AIDS: A Special Issue), p. 68.
 V >
i

X
At the 1987 lesbian and gay health conference in Los Angeles, many long-
time AIDS activists were surprised by^the extent to which safe sex educa-
tion had become the province of high level professionals. The fact that

safe sex organizing began and is highly successful as a grassroots, com- ^

munity effort seemed to be forgotten. . . . Heterosexuals — and even gay
people only beginning to confront AIDS — express panic about how to

make appropriate and satisfying changes in their sex lives, as if no one

had done this before them. It is a mark of the intransigence of homopho-
bia that few look to the urban gay communities for advice, communities

which have an infrastructure and a track record of highly successful be-

havior change.'^

As Patton insists, gay people invented safe sex. We knew that the alter-

natives — monogamy and abstinence — were unsafe, unsafe in the lat-

ter case because most people do not abstain from sex, and if you only
tell them “just say no,” they will have unsafe sex. We were able to invent
safe sex because we have always known that sex is not, in an epidemic
or not, limited to penetrative sex. Our promiscuity taught us many
things, not only about the pleasures of sex, but about the great multi-

plicity of those pleasures. It is that psychic preparation, that experi-

mentation, that conscious work on our own sexualities that has allowed
many of us to change our sexual behaviors — something that brutal

“behavioral therapies" tried unsuccessfully for over a century to force

us to do — very quickly and very dramatically. It is for this reason that

Shilts’s and Kramer’s attitudes about the formulation of gay politics on
the basis of our sexuality is so perversely distorted, why they insist that

our promiscuity will destroy us when in fact it is our promiscuity that

Epidemic

will save us: “The elaborateness of gay male sexual culture which may
an have once contributed to the spread of AIDS has been rapidly trans-
in
formed into one that inhibits spread of the disease, still promotes sexual
liberation (albeit differently defined), and is as marvelously fringe and
Promiscuity

offensive to middle America as ever.”‘^

Have

to
18. Ibid., p. 69.
How
19. Ibid., p. 72.

4
All those who contend that gay male promiscuity is merely sexual com-
pulsion resulting from fear of intimacy are now faced with very strong

evidence against their prejudices. For if compulsion were so easily over-

come or redirected, it would hardly deserve the name. Gay male promis-
cuity should be seen instead as a positive model of how sexual pleasures
might be pursued by and granted to everyone if those pleasures were

not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalized sexuality.

Indeed, it is the lack of promiscuity and its lessons that suggests that

many straight people will have a much harder time learning “how to 64

have sex in an epidemic” than we did.^“ This assumption follows from

the fact that risk reduction information directed at heterosexuals, even 65

when not clearly anti-sex or based on false morality, is still predicated

on the prevailing myths about sexuality in our society. First among these,
of course, is the myth that monogamous relationships are not only the

norm but ultimately everyone’s deepest desire. Thus the message is of-

ten not about safe sex at all, but about how to find a safe partner.

As Art Ulene, “family physician” to the Today Show put it, “1 think it’s

time to stop talking about ‘safe sex.’ 1 believe we should be talking about
safe partners instead. A safe partner is one who has never been infected
with the AIDS virus. With a safe partner, you don’t have to worry about
getting AIDS yourself — no matter what you do sexually, and no matter

how much protection you use while you do it.”^*

The agenda here is one of maintaining the us/ them dichotomy that was
initially performed by the CDC’s “risk group” classifications
— “Only

gay men and IV drug users get AIDS.” But now that neat classifications

of otherness no longer “protect” the “general population, how does

20. How to Have Sex in an Epidemic is the title of a forty-page pamphlet produced by gay

men, including people with AIDS, as early as 1983. See Patton, "Resistance and the
Erotic," p. 69.

21. Art U^ne, M.D., Safe Sex in a Dangerous World (l^ew York: Vintage Books, 1987),

p.31.

22. In fact there continue to be concerted efforts to deny that everyone is at risk of HIV

infection. The New York Times periodically prints updated epidemiological informa-
 V
i
i

one go about finding a safe partner? One obvious way of answering this
question is to urge HIV antibody testing. If you and your sex paj^tner

both test negative, you can still have unbridled fun.^^ But Dr. Ulene has
an additional solution: "One way to find safer partners — though a bit ^
impractical for most — is to move to a place where the incidence of
AIDS is low. There are two states that have repsrted only four cases of
AIDS since the disease was discovered, while others are crowded with
N

AIDS patients. Although this near-freedom from AIDS cannot be ex-

pected to last forever, the relative differences between states like Ne-

braska and New York are likely to last.”^^ Dr. Ulene then graciously
provides a breakdown of AIDS cases by state.

Most safe sex education materials for heterosexuals, however, presume

that their audience consists of people who feel themselves to be at some
risk, perhaps because they do not limit themselves to a single sex part-

tion editorially presented so as to reassure its readers — clearly presumed to be

middle class, white, and heterosexual — that they have little to worry about. Two re-

cent articles that resurrect old myths to keep AIDS away from heterosexuals are
Michael A. Fumento, "AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?" Commentary, November
1987; and Robert E. Gould, "Reassuring News about AIDS; A Doctor Tells Why You
May Not Be at Risk," Cosmopolitan, January 1988. That such articles are based on
racist and homophobic assumptions goes without saying. The "fragile anus/rugged
vagina" thesis is generally trotted out to explain not only the differences between

rates of infection in gays and straights, but also between blacks and whites, Africans
and Americans (blacks are said to resort to anal sex as a primitive form of birth con-
trol). But Gould's racism takes him a step further. Claiming that only "rough" sex can
result in transmission through the vagina, Gould writes, "Many men in Africa take
their women in a brutal way, so that some heterosexual activity regarded as normal
by them would be closer to rape by our standards and therefore be
Epidemic

likely to cause
vaginal lacerations through which the AIDS virus could gain entry into the blood-
an
stream."
in
23. Cindy Patton tells of similar advice given to gay men by a CDC official at the 1985 In-

ternational AIDS Conference in Atlanta: "He suggested that gay men only have sex
Promiscuity

with men of the same antibody status, as if gay male culture is little more than a giant

dating service. This advice was quickly seen as dehumanizing and not useful be-

cause it did not promote safe sex, but renewed advice of this type is seen as reason-
Have

able within the heterosexual community of late" ("Resistance and the Erotic," p. 69).
to
24. Ulene, Safe Sex, p. 49.
How

i
ner, perhaps because they are unable to move to Nebraska. Still, in most

cases, these safe sex instructions focus almost exclusively on penetra-

tive sex and always make it a woman’s job to get the condom on the

cock. It appears to be a foregone conclusion that there is no use even

trying to get straight men to take this responsibility themselves (the title
of a recent book is How to Persuade Your Lover to Use a Condom . . .

And Why You Should). The one exception is a segment of the video

aired on PBS entitled “AIDS: Changing the Rules," in which Ruben

men directly, though very coyly, about condoms, but
Blades talks to

shows them only how to put one on a banana. Evidently condoms have 66

now become too closely associated with gay men for straight men to talk
straight about them. In addition, they have become too closely associ- 67

ated with AIDS for the banana companies to approve of “Changing the

Rules” ’s choice of props. The following letter was sent by the president
of the International Banana Association to the president of PBS; I cite it

to give some idea of how hilarious — if it weren’t so deadly — the con-

dom debate can be.

Dear Mr. Christiansen,

In this program, a banana is used as a substitute for a human penis in a

demonstration of how condoms should be used.

I must tell you, Mr. Christiansen, as I have told representatives ofWETA,

that our industry finds such usage of our product to be totally unaccept-

able. The choice of a banana rather than some other inanimate prop
constitutes arbitrary and reckless disregard for the unsavory association

that will be drawn by the public and the damage to our industry that will

result therefrom.

The banana is an important product and deserves to be treated with re-

spect and consideration. It is the most extensively consumed fruit in the

United States, being purchased by over 98 percent of households. It is im-

portant to the economies of many developing Latin American nations.

The banana’s continued image in the minds of consumers as a healthful
 .

and nutritious product is critically important to the industry’s continued

ability to be held in such high regardby the public and to discharge its re-

sponsibilities to its Latin American hosts . . .

\

Mr. Christiansen, I have no alternative but to advise you that we intend

to hold PBS fully responsible for any and all dSfiages sustained by our
industry as a result of the showing of this AIDS program depicting the ba-

nana in the associational context planned. Further, we reserve all legal

rights to protect the industry’s interests from this arbitrary, unnecessary,

and insensitive action.

Yours very truly,

Robert M. Moore

The debate about condoms, and safe sex education generally, is one of
the most alarming in the history of the AIDS epidemic thus far, because
it will certainly result in many more thousands of deaths that could be
avoided. It demonstrates how practices devised at the grassroots level

to meet the needs of people at risk can be demeaned, distorted, and ul-

timately destroyed when those practices are co-opted by state power.

Perhaps no portion of this controversy is as revealing as the October 14,

1987, debate over the Helms amendment.

In presenting his amendment to the Senate, Senator Jesse Helms made

the offhand remark, “Now we had all this mob over here this weekend,
which was itself a disheartening spectacle.” He was referring to the
Epidemic

largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history, in which over half a

an million people, led by people with AIDS and their friends, marched on
in
Washington for lesbian and gay rights. Early in the morning before the
march, the Names Project inaugurated its memorial quilt, whose panels
Promiscuity

with the names of people who had died of AIDS occupied a space on the
Mall equivalent to two football fields. As the three-by-six-foot cloth
Have

to
25. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations of this debate are taken from the Con-
How
gressional Record, October 14, 1987, pp. SI 4202-SI 4220.
panels made by friends, family, and admirers of the dead were carefully

unfurled, 1,920 names were solemnly read to a crowd of weeping spec-

tators. Though representing only a small percentage of the people who
have died in the epidemic, the seemingly endless litany of names, to-

gether with the astonishing size of the quilt, brought home the enormity
of our loss so dramatically as to leave everyone stunned.

But to Helms and his ilk this was just a “mob” enacting a “disheartening
spectacle.” In the following month’s issue of the right-wing Campus Re-
view, a front-page article by Gary Bauer, assistant to President Reagan 68

and spokesperson for the administration’s AIDS policy, was accompa-

nied by a political cartoon entitled “The AIDS Quilt.” It depicts a faggot 69

and a junkie sewing panels bearing the words sodomy and IV drugs.
Bauer’s article explains:

“Safe sex" campaigns are not giving students the full story about AIDS.
Indeed many students are arguably being denied the information that is
most likely to assist them in avoiding the AIDS virus. Many of today’s . . .

education efforts are what could be called “sexually egalitarian." That is,

they refuse to distinguish or even appear to prefer one type ofsexual prac-

tice over another. Yet medical research shows that sodomy is probably the

most efficient method to transfer the AIDS virus as well as other dis-

eases—for obvious reasons. Why is this information censored on so

many campuses? Does it illustrate the growing power of gay rights ac-

tivists who not only want to be tolerated, but want the culture at large to
affirm and support the legitimacy of the gay lifestyle?^^

Three days after the historic march on Washington and the inaugura-
tion of the Names Project, Jesse Helms would seek to ensure that such

affirmation and support would never occur, at least in the context of

AIDS. The senator from North Carolina introduced his amendment to a

Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education bill allocating nearly
a billion dollars for AIDS research and education in fiscal 1988. Amend-

26. Gary Bauer, "AIDS and the College Student," Campus Review, November 1987, pp. 1,12.
 V »
»

ment no. 956 began: “Purpose: To prohibit the use of any funds pro-
vided under this Act to the Centers for Disease Control from beingnised

to provide AIDS education, information, or prevention materials and

activities that promote, encourage, or condone homosexual sexual ac-
tivities or the intravenous use of illegal drugs.” The “need” for the

amendment and the terms of the ensuing deb^e (involving only two

other senators) were established by Helms in his opening^remarks:

About 2 months ago, I received a copy of some AIDS comic books that are

being distributed by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Inc., of New York City,

an organization which has received $674,679 in Federal dollars for so-

called AIDS educa tion and information. These comic books told the story,
in graphic detail, of the sexual encounter of two homosexual men.

The comic books do not encourage and change [sic] any of the perverted
behavior. In fact, the comic book promotes sodomy and the homosexual
lifestyle as an acceptable alterative in American society. . . .1 believe that if

the American people saw these books, they would be on the verge of revolt.

I obtained one copy of this book and I had photostats made for about 15
or 20 Senators. I sent each of the Senators a copy — ifyou will forgive the

expression — in a brown envelope marked "Personal and Confidential,

for Senator’s Eyes Only.” Without exception, the Senators were revolted,
and they suggested to me that President Reagan ought to know what is

being done under the pretense ofAIDS education.

So, about 10 days ago, I went down to the White House and I visited with
Epidemic

the President.

an

in
I said, "Mr. President, I don’t want to ruin your day, but I feel obliged to

hand you this and let you look at what is being distributed under the pre-
Promiscuity

tense of AIDS educational material. . .

.”

Have

The President opened the book, looked at a couple of pages, and shook
to
his head, and hit his desk with his fist.
How

K
Helms goes on to describe, with even greater disdain, the grant appli-
cation with which GMHC sought federal funds (none of which were,
in any case, spent on the production of the safe-sex comics). GMHC’s
proposal involved what any coliege-level psychology student would un-
derstand as prerequisite to the very difficult task of helping people

change their sexual habits. Helms read GMHC’s statement of the prob-

lem; “As gay men have reaffirmed their gay identity through sexual
expression, recommendations to change sexual behavior may be seen
as oppressive. For many, safe sex has been equated with boring, un-
satisfying sex. Meaningful alternatives are often not realized. These 70

perceived barriers must be considered and alternatives to high-risk —

practices promoted in the implementation of AIDS risk-reduction 71

education.”

After reading this thoroughly unextraordinary statement. Helms fumes,

“This Senator is not a goody-goody two-shoes. I have lived a long time.
I have seen a lot of things. I have served 4 years in the Navy. I have been
around the track. But every Christian, religious, moral ethic within me
cries out to do something. It is embarrassing to stand on the Senate
floor and talk about the details of this travesty.”

Throughout the floor debate. Helms continued in this vein:

VJe have got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a per-

verted human being.

Every AIDS case can be traced back to a homosexual act.

[The amendment} will force this coun try to slam the door on the way-
ward, warped sexual revolution which has ravaged this Nation for the

past quarter of a century.^’’

27. Compare Larry Kramer's character Ned Weeks's statement: "You don't know what it's
been like since the sexual revolution hit this country. It's been crazy, gay or straight"
(p.36).
 >

OOO...ILIKZ
'7W/AJK/AJ6. _
TH/»rr

Story

Artwork

by
by
Greg

Donelan

Epidemic

an

in

Promiscuity

Have

to

Three pages from GMHC Safer Sex Comix M, 1986

How

(artwork by Donelan, story by Greg).

/ think we need to do some AIDS testing on a broad level and unless we
get around to that and stop talking about all of this business of civil

rights, and so forth, we will not stop the spread ofAIDS. We used to quar-
antine for typhoid fever and scarlet fever, and it did not ruin the civil lib-

erties of anybody to do that.

There were, all told, two responses on the Senate floor to Helms’s amend-
ment. The first came from Senator Chiles of Florida, who worried about
the amendment’s inclusion of IV drug users among those to whom educa-
tion would effectively be prevented by the legislation — worried because 72

this group includes heterosexuals: “I like to talk about heterosexuals. —

That is getting into my neighborhood. That is getting into where it can 73

be involved with people that I know and love and care about, and that is

where it is getting to children. And again, these children, when you

think about a child as an AIDS victim, there is just no reason in the

world that should happen. And so we have to try to do what we can to

prevent it.”

The ritual hand-wringing sentiments about innocent children with

AIDS pervade the debate, as they pervade the discussion of AIDS every-

where. This unquestioned sentiment must be seen for what it is: a vi-

cious apportioning of degrees of guilt and innocence to people with

AIDS. It reflects, in addition, our society’s extreme devaluation of life

and experience. (The hypocrisy of this distorted set of values does not,
however, translate into funding for such necessities for the welfare of
children as prenatal care, child care, education, and so forth.)

Because Chiles only liked to talk about heterosexuals, it was left to Sen-

ator Weicker of Connecticut to defend safe sex education for gay men.
“It is not easy to stand up in the face of language such as this and oppose

it,” said Weicker, “but I do.” Weicker’s defense was not made any easier

by the fact that he knew what he was talking about: “I know exactly the
material that the Senator from North Carolina is referring to. I have seen
it. I think it is demeaning in every way.” And later, ”... this is as repug-

nant to me as it is to anybody else.” Because Weicker finds innocuous

little drawings of gay male sex as demeaning and repugnant as the
 X >
j

>

North Carolina senator does, he must resort to “science” to oppose

Helms’s “philosophy":^” “We better do exactly what we have been told to

do by those of science and medicine, which is, no. 1, put our money into
research and, no. 2, put our money into education.” “The comic book,” ^
% \

says Weicker, “has nothing to do with the issue at hand.”

But of course the comic book has everything to do with the issue at

hand — because it is precisely the sort of safe sex education material

that has been proven to work, developed by the organization that has
produced the greatest amount of safe sex education material of any in

the country, including, of course, the federal government.

28. In the Senate debate, positions such as Helms's are referred to as philosophical. Thus
Senator Weicker:

This education process has been monkeyed around with long enough by this admin-
istration. This subcommittee over 6 months ago allocated $20 million requested by the

Centers for Disease Control for an educational mailerto be mailed to every household
in the United States. . . . That is yet to be done. It is yet to be done not because of any-

body in the Centers for Disease Control, or not anybody in Secretary [of Health and

Human Servicesl Bowen's office, but because the philosophers in the White House

decided they did not want a mailer to go to every household in the United States. So

the education effort is set back. (Congressional Record, October 14, 1987, p. S14206)

29. As reported in New Science:

George Rutherford of the San Francisco Department of Public Health lastyeartold a

U.S. Congressional Committee investigating AIDS that the spread of the virus dra-

matically slowed in 1983, when public health education programmes directed at gay

men began. The year before, 21 percent of the unexposed gay population had devel-
oped antibodies to HIV, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus over the

previous three months. But in 1983, that figure plummeted to 2 percent. In 1986 it was

Epidemic
0.8 percent, and researchers expectthat it will continue to fall — The campaigns to

promote safe sex among gay men, and educate them about AIDS have been almost
totally successful in less than four years. Such rapid changes in behavior contrast
an

in
sharply with the poor response over the past 25 years from smokers to warnings
about the risks to their health from cigarettes. ('"Safe Sex' Stops the Spread of AIDS,
/VewSc/ence, January 7, 1988, p. 36)
Promiscuity

In a study of the efficacy of various forms of safe sex education materials, commis-
sioned by GMHC and conducted by Dr. Michael Quadland, professor of psychiatry at

Have Mount Sinai School of Medicine, itwas determined that explicit, erotic films are more
effective than other techniques. Dr. Quadland was quoted as saying, "We know that
to
in trying to get people to change risky behavior, stopping smoking, for example, or
How
wearing seatbelts, thatfearis effective. But sex is different. People cannot just give
Given the degree of Senate agreement that gay men’s safe sex education
material was "garbage,” in Helms’s word, it seemed possible to compro-
mise enough on the amendment’s language to please all three partici-

pants in the debate. The amendment was thus reworded to eliminate

any reference to IV drug users, thereby assuaging Senator Chiles’s fears

that someone he knows and cares about — or someone in his neighbor-
hood, or at least someone he doesn’t mind talking about — could be af-

fected. Helms very reluctantly agreed to strike the word condone, but
managed to add directly or indirectly aher promote or encourage and
before homosexual sexual activity. Thus the amendment now reads; 74

“None of the funds made available under this Act to the Centers for Dis- —
ease Control shall be used to provide AIDS education, information, or 75

prevention materials and activities that promote or encourage, directly

or indirectly, homosexual sexual activities.”

After further, very brief debate, during which Weicker continued to op-
pose the amendment, a roll-call vote was taken. Two senators — Weicker
and Moynihan — voted against; ninety- four senators voted for the Helms

amendment, including all other Senate sponsors of the federal gay and

lesbian civil rights bill. Senator Kennedy perhaps voiced the opinion of

his fellow liberal senators when he said, “The current version [the re-

worded amendment] is toothless and it can in good conscience be sup-

ported by the Senate. It may not do any good, but it will not do any

harm.” Under the amendment, as passed, most AIDS organizations

providing education and services to gay men, the group most affected

and, thus far, at highest risk in the epidemic, would no longer qualify for
federal funding. Founded and directed by gay men, the Gay Men’s

sex up" (Gina Kolata, "Erotic Films in AIDS Study Cut Risky Behavior," New York

Times, Novembers, 1987).

30. After the House of Representatives passed the amendment by a vote of 368 to 47, a

full-scale lobbying effort was undertaken by AIDS organizations and gay activists to

defeat itin House-Senate Conference Committee. Ultimately, the amendmentwas re-

tained as written, although indirectly was stricken and the following rider added:

"The language in the bill should not be construed to prohibit descriptions of methods

to reduce the risk of HIV transmission, to limit eligibility for federal funds of a grantee

or potential grantee because of its nonfederally funded activities, nor shall it be con-
strued to limit counseling or referrals to agencies that are notfederally funded."
 X >

Health Crisis is hardly likely to stop “promoting or encouraging, directly

or indirectly, homosexual sexual activity.” Despite the fact that GI^HC

%

is the oldest and largest AIDS service organization in the United States;

despite the fact that it provides direct services to thousands of people ^

living with AIDS, whether gay men or not; despite the fact that GMHC’S
safe sex comics are nothing more scandalous than simple, schemati-
cally depicted scenarios of gay male safe sex; despite the fact that they

have undoubtedly helped save thousands of lives — GMHC

\

is consid-

ered unworthy of federal funding.

When we see how compromised any efforts at responding to AIDS will

be when conducted by the state, we are forced to recognize that pro-

ductive practices concerning AIDS will remain at the grassroots level.

At stake is the cultural specificity and sensitivity of these practices as

well as their ability to take account of psychic resistance to behavioral

changes, especially changes involving behaviors as psychically com-

plex and charged as sexuality and drug use. Government officials,

school board members, public health officers, and Catholic cardinals

insist that AIDS education must be sensitive to “community values.”

But the values they have in mind are those of no existing community af-
fected by AIDS. When “community values” are invoked, it is only for the
purpose of imposing the purported values of those (thus far) unaffected

by AIDS on the people (thus far) most affected. Instead of the specific,

concrete languages of those whose behaviors put them at risk for AIDS,

“community values” require a “universal” language that no one speaks

and many do not understand. “Don’t exchange bodily fluids” is no-

body’s spoken language. “Don’t come in his ass” or “pull out before you
Epidemic

come” is what we say. “If you have mainlined or skinpopped now or in

an the past you may be at risk of getting AIDS. If you have shared needles,
in
cookers, syringes, eyedroppers, water, or cotton with anyone, you are at

risk of getting AIDS.”^^ This is not abstract “community values” talking.

Promiscuity

This is the language of members of the IV drug-using community. It is

therefore essential that the word community be reclaimed by those to

Have

Howto 31. Quoted from a pamphlet issued by ADAPT (Association for Drug Abuse Prevention
and Treatment), Brooklyn, New York.
whom it belongs, and that abstract usages of such terms be vigorously

contested. “Community values” are, in fact, just what we need, but they
must be the values of our actual communities, not those of some ab-
stract, universalized community that does not and cannot exist.

One curious aspect of AIDS education campaigns devised by advertis-

ing agencies contracted by governments is their failure to take into ac-

count any aspect of the psychic but fear. An industry that has used

sexual desire to sell everything from cars to detergents suddenly finds

itself at a loss for how to sell a condom. This paralysis in the face of sex 76

itself on the part of our most sophisticated producers of propaganda is

—
perhaps partially explained by the strictures placed on the industry by 77

the contracting governments — by their notion of “community val-

ues” — but it is also to be explained by advertising’s construction of its

audience as a group only of largely undifferentiated consumers.

In Policing Desire, Watney writes of the British government’s AIDS

propaganda campaign, produced for them by the world’s largest adver-

tising firm, Saatchi and Saatchi: “Advertisements spelled out the word
‘AIDS’ in seasonal gift wrapping paper, together with the accompany-
ing question: ‘How many people will get it for Christmas?’ Another ad-
vert conveys the message that ‘Your next sexual partner could be that
very special person’ — framed inside a heart like a Valentine — with a

supplement beneath which tersely adds, ‘The one that gives you AIDS.’
The official line is clearly anti-sex, and draws on an assumed rhetoric
from previous AIDS commentary concerning ‘promiscuity’ as the sup-
posed ‘cause’ of AIDS.

Similar ploys were used for ads paid for by the Metropolitan Life Insur-

ance Company and posted throughout the New York City subway sys-

tem by the city health department. One is a blow-up of a newspaper

personals section with an appealing notice circled (intended to be ap-

pealing, that is, to a heterosexual woman) and the statement “I got AIDS
through the personals.” The other is a cartoon of a man and woman in

32. Watney, Policing Desire, p. 136.

 —
i

>

bed, each with a thought bubble saying “I hope he [she] doesn’t have
AIDS!” And below: “You can’t live on hope.” ^ ^

“What’s the big secret?” asked the poster that was pasted over the city’s ^

worse-than-useless warnings, “You can protect yourself from AIDS.'’

And, below, carefully designed and worded safe^ex and clean works in-

formation. This was a guerrilla action by an AIDS activist group calling

itself the Metropolitan Health Association (MHA), whose members also
pasted strips printed with the words government inaction over the per-
sonals or hope to work the changes “I got AIDS from government inac-

tion” or “You can’t live on government inaction.” But saving lives is

clearly less important to the city than protecting the transit authority’s

advertising space, so MHA’s “reinformation” was quickly removed.

The city health department’s scare tactics were next directed at

teenagers — and specifically teenagers of color — in a series of public

service announcements made for television. Using a strategy of entice-

ment followed by blunt and brutal admonishment, one of these shows
scenes of heavy petting in cars and alleys over a soundtrack of the pop
song “Boom Boom”: “Let’s go back to my room so we can do it all night
and you can make me feel right.” Suddenly the music cuts out and the
scene changes to a shot of a boy wrapped in a blanket, looking fright-

ened, miserable, and ill. A voiceover warns, “If you have sex with some-
one who has the AIDS virus, you can get it, too. So before you do it, ask

yourself how bad you really want it. Don’t ask for AIDS, don’t get it.” The
final phrase serves as a title for the series: “AIDS: Don’t get it.” The con-

Epidemic
fusion of antecedents for it — both sex and AIDS — is, of course, delib-

erate. With a clever linguistic maneuver, the health department tells

an kids that sex and AIDS are the same thing. But the ability of these public
in
service announcements to shock their intended audience is based not
only on this manipulative language and quick edit from scenes of sexual
Promiscuity

pleasure to the closeup of a face with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on it

Have

33. 1 borrow the term reinformation from Michael Eisenmenger and Diane Neumaier,
to
who coined it to describe cultural practices whose goal is to counter disinformation
How
to which we are all constantly subject.
the media’s standard “face of AIDS.” The real shock comes because im-
ages of sexy teenagers and sounds of a disco beat are usually followed

on TV by Pepsi Cola and a voice telling you to get it. One can only won-
der about the degree of psychic damage that might result from the
public service announcement’s substitution. But AIDS will not be pre-
vented by psychic damage to teenagers caused by ads on TV. It will be
stopped only by respecting and celebrating their pleasure in sex and by
telling them exactly what they need and want to know in order to main-
tain that pleasure.

The ADS epidemic

Is sweeping the nation

Acquired dread of sex

Fear and panic

In the whole population

Acquired dread of sex

This is not a Death in Venice

It’s a cheap, unholy menace

Please ignore the moral message

This is not a Death in Venice

This is the refrain of John Greyson’s music-video parody of Death in

Venice. The plague in Greyson’s version of the tale is ADS, acquired

dread of sex — something you can get from, among other things,
watching TV. Tadzio is a pleasure-loving blond who discovers that

condoms are “his very favorite thing to wear,” and Aschenbach is a

middle-class bigot who, observing the sexy shenanigans of Tadzio and

his boyfriend, succumbs to acquired dread of sex. Made for a thirty-six-

monitor video wall in the Square One shopping mail in Mississauga, a

suburb of Toronto, The ADS Epidemic, like the public service an-

nouncements just described, is directed at adolescents and appropri-

ates a format they’re used to, but in this case the message is both pro-sex
 >

Epidemic

an

in

Promiscuity

Have

to

How

John Greyson, The ADS Epidemic, 1987.

<
and made for the kids most seriously at risk — sexually active gay boys.

The playfulness of Greyson’s tape should not obscure this immensely

important fact: not a single piece of government-sponsored education

about AIDS for young people, in Canada or the United States, has been

targeted at a gay audience, even though governments never tire of em-

phasizing the statistics showing that the overwhelming numbers of re-

ported cases of AIDS occur in gay and bisexual men.

The impulse to counteract the anti-sex messages of the advertising in-

dustry’s public service announcements also informs British filmmaker

Isaac lulien’s This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement. There is no hint of a
didactic message here, but rather an attempt to give voice to the com-
plexities of gay subjectivity and experience at a critical historical mo-
ment. In lulien’s case, the specific experience is that of a black gay man
living in the increasingly racist and homophobic atmosphere of Thatcher’s
Britain. Using footage shot in Venice and London, This Is Notan AIDS
Advertisement is divided into two parts, the first elegiac, lyrical; the

second, building on and repeating images from the first, paced to a

Bronski Beat rock song. Images of gay male sexual desire are coupled
with the song’s refrain, “This is not an AIDS advertisement. Feel no guilt

in your desire.’’

Greyson’s and lulien’s videos signal a new phase in gay men’s responses
to the epidemic. Having learned to support and grieve for our lovers and
friends: having joined the fight against fear, hatred, repression, and in-

action: having adjusted our sex lives so as to protect ourselves and one
another — we are now reclaiming our subjectivities, our communities,
our culture . . . and our promiscuous love of sex.

34. In late 1987, a Helms-style anti-gay clause was inserted in Britain's Local Government
Bill. Clause 28 says, "A local authority shall not (a) promote homosexuality or publish
material for the promotion of homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any main-
tained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship

by the publication of such material or otherwise; and (c) give financial assistance to

any person for either of the purposes referred to in paragraphs (a) and (b) above." Un-
like the Helms Amendment, however, the British bill, though a more sweeping prohi-

bition of pro-gay materials, specifically forbids the use of the bill "to prohibit the doing

of anything for the purpose of treating or preventing the spread of disease."

 .
V

THIS
IS
NOT
AN
AIDS
AO VERT SMENT I

Epidemic

an

in

Promiscuity

Have

Howto

Isaac Julien, This Is Notan AIDS Advertisement, 1 987.

PORTRAITS OF PEOPLE WITH AIDS

First presented at the conference “Representing AIDS:

Crisis and Criticism,” University of Western Ontario,

London, Ontario, November 11-13, 1988,

and published in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence

Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler

(New York: Routledge, 1992).

 X >

>

In the fall of 1988, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an
%
’’

exhibition of Nicholas Nixon’s photographs called “Pictures of People.

Among the people pictured by Nixon are people with AIDS (PWAs),
each portrayed in a series of images taken at intervals of about a week or ''

a month. The photographs form part of a larger work in progress, un-

dertaken by Nixon and his wife Bebe, a science Journalist, to, as they ex-

plain it, “tell the story of AIDS; to show what this disease ^truly is, how it
affects those who have it, their lovers, families and friends, and that it is

both the most devastating and the most important social and medical
issue of our time.’’* These photographs were highly praised by review-
ers, who saw in them an unsentimental, honest, and committed por-
trayal of the effects of this devastating illness. One photography critic

wrote: “Nixon literally and figuratively moves in so close we’re con-

vinced that his subjects hold nothing back. The viewer marvels at the

trust between photographer and subject. Gradually one’s own feelings

about AIDS melt away and one feels both vulnerable and privileged to

share the life and (impending) death of a few individuals.’’^ Andy Grund-
berg, photography critic of the New York Times, concurred: “The result

is overwhelming, since one sees not only the wasting away of the flesh
(in photographs, emaciation has become emblematic of AIDS) but also

the gradual dimming of the subjects’ ability to compose themselves for

the camera. What each series begins as a conventional effort to pose for
a picture ends in a kind of abandon: as the subjects’ self-consciousness

disappears, the camera seems to become invisible, and consequently

there is almost no boundary between the image and ourselves.’’^ In his
catalog introduction for the show, MOMA curator Peter Galassi also

mentions the relationship between Nixon and his sitters: “Any portrait
is a collaboration between subject and photographer. Extended over
time, the relationship can become richer and more intimate. Nixon has
AIDS
said that most of the people with AIDS he has photographed are, per-

with

1. Nick and Bebe Nixon, "AIDS Portrait Project Update," January 1, 1988, quoted in the
People
press release for "People with AIDS: Work in Progress," New York, Zabriskie Gallery,

of
1988 (this exhibition was shown at the same time as the MOMA show).
2. Robert Atkins, "Nicholas Nixon," 7 Days, October 5, 1988.

Portraits

3. Andy Grundberg, "Nicholas Nixon Seeks a Path to the Heart," New York Times, Sep-

tember 11, 1988, p. H37.

 84

85

Nicholas^Nixon, Tom Moran. East Braintree, Massachusetts, September 1987, gelatin silver

print, 711/16x9 11/16" (The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer.

Copy print ©2001 The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Nicholas Nixon, Tom Moran, Boston, October 1987, gelatin silver print, 7 11/16x9 11/16

(The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer. Copy print © 2001 The

Museum of Modern Art, New York).

 V i
t

haps because stripped of so many of their hopes, less masked than oth-

ers, more open to collaboration.”^ And, after explaining that there can

be no representative portrait of a person with AIDS, given the diversity

of those affected, he concludes, “Beside and against this fact is the irre-

ducible fact of the individual, made present to us in body and spirit. The
life and death of Tom Moran [one of Nixon’s subjects] were his own.”^

N
\

I quote this standard mainstream photography criticism to draw atten-

tion to its curious contradictions. All these writers agree that there is a

consensual relationship between photographer and subject that results

in the portraits’ effects on the viewer. But is this relationship one of
growing intimacy? or is it one of the subjects’ gradual tuning out, their

abandonment of a sense of self? And is the result one of according the

subjects the individuality of their lives and deaths? or do their lives and
deaths become, through some process of identification, ours?

For those of us who have paid careful attention to media representa-

tions of AIDS, none of this would appear to matter, because what we see
first and foremost in Nixon’s photographs is their reiteration of what we
have already been told or shown about people with AIDS: that they are
ravaged, disfigured, and debilitated by the syndrome; they are generally

alone, desperate, but resigned to their “inevitable” deaths.

During the time of the MOMA exhibition, a small group from ACT UP,
the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, staged an uncharacteristically

quiet protest of Nixon’s portraits. Sitting on a bench in the gallery where

the photographs of PWAs were hung, a young lesbian held a snapshot of

a smiling middle-aged man. It bore the caption, “This is a picture of my

father taken when he’d been living with AIDS for three years.” Another
AIDS
woman held a photograph of PWA Coalition cofounder David Sum-
with mers, shown speaking into a bank of microphones. Its caption read,

“My friend David Summers living with AIDS.” They and a small support
People

group spoke with museum visitors about pictures of PWAs and handed
of
out a flier that read, in part:

Portraits

4. Peter Galassi, "Introduction," in Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of Peop/e (New York: Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 1988), p. 26.

5. Ibid., p. 27.
MO MORE PICTURES WITHOUT CONTEXT

We believe that the representation of people with

AIDS affects not only how viewers will perceive PWAs

outside the museum, but, ultimately, crucial issues

of AIDS funding, legislation, and education.

In portraying PWAs as people to be pitied or feared,

as people alone and lonely, we believe that this show

perpetuates general misconceptions about AIDS with-
out addressing the realities of those of us living every
day with this crisis as PWAs and people who love

PWAs.

FACT:
Many PWAs now live longer after diagnosis due to
experimental drug treatments, better information
about nutrition and health care, and due to the ef-

forts of PWAs engaged in a continuing battle to de-

fine and save their lives.

FACT:
The majority of AIDS cases in New York City are
among people of color, including women. Typically,

women do not live long after diagnosis because of

lack of access to affordable health care, a primary

care physician, or even basic information about what

to do if you have AIDS.

The PWA is a human being whose health has deteri-

orated not simply due to a virus, but due to govern-
ment inaction, the inaccessibility of affordable health

care, and institutionalized neglect in the forms of

heterosexism, racism, and sexism.

We demand the visibility of PWAs who are vibrant,

angry, loving, sexy, beautiful, acting up and fighting

back.

STOP LOOKING AT US: START LISTENING TO US.

 X >

As against this demand — stop looking at us — the typical liberal posi-

tion has held, from very early in the epidemic, that one of the central

problems of AIDS, one of the things we needed to combat, was bureau-

cratic abstraction. What was needed was to “give AIDS a face,” to "bring ^

AIDS home.” And thus the portrait of the person with AIDS had becom'e

something of a genre long before a famous photographer like Nicholas

Nixon entered the field. In the catalog for an exhibition of another well-

known photographer’s efforts to give AIDS a human

s
face — Rosalind

Solomon’s Portraits in the Time of AIDS — Grey Art Gallery director

Thomas Sokolowski wrote of their perceived necessity: “As our aware-

ness of [AIDS] grew through the accumulation of vast amounts of nu-

merically derived evidence, we still had not seen its face. We could

count it, but not truly describe it. Our picture of AIDS was a totally con-
ceptual one. . .
.”® Sokolowski’s catalog essay is entitled “Looking in a

Mirror,” and it begins with an epigraph quoted from the late George
Whitmore, which reads, “I see lim — and that could be me. It’s a mirror.

It’s not a victim-savior relationship. We’re the same person. We’re just

on different sides of the fence.” With Sokolowski’s appropriation of

these sentences from a man who himself had AIDS, we are confronted

once again — as with the texts written in response to the Nixon photo-
graphs — with a defense mechanism, which denies the difference, the
obvious sense of otherness, shown in the photographs by insisting that
what we really see is ourselves.

A remarkably similar statement begins a CBS Sixty Minutes news-

magazine devoted to AIDS, in which a service organization director
says, “We know the individuals, and they look a lot like you, they look a

lot like me.” The program, narrated by CBS news anchor Dan Rather, is

entitled “AIDS Hits Home.” Resonating with the assertion that PWAs
AIDS
look like you and me, the “home” of the show’s title is intended to stand
with in for other designations: white, middle class, middle American, but
primarily heterosexual. For this program was made in 1986, when, as
People

Paula Treichler has written, “the big news — what the major U.S. news
of

Portraits

6. Thomas Sokolowski, preface to Rosalind Solomon: Portraits in the Time of AIDS (Ne\N
York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, 1988), np.

V
magazines were running cover stories on — was the grave danger of

AIDS to heterosexuals.”^

“AIDS Hits Home” nevertheless consists of a veritable catalog of broad-

cast television’s by-then typical portraits of people with AIDS, for ex-

ample, the generic or collective portraits, portraits of so-called risk

groups: gay men in their tight 501s walking arm in arm in the Castro dis-
trict of San Francisco: impoverished Africans; prostitutes, who appar-

ently always work on streets; and drug addicts, generally shown only
metonymically as an arm with a spike seeking its vein. Also included in

this category of the generically portrayed in “AIDS Hits Home,” how-

ever, are “ordinary” heterosexuals — ordinary in the sense that they are

white and don’t shoot drugs — since they are the ostensible subject of

the show. But the heterosexual in AIDS reportage is not quite you and
me. Since television routinely assumes its audience as heterosexual and
therefore unnecessary to define or explain, it had to invent what we
might call the heterosexual of AIDS. As seen on Sixty Minutes, the het-

erosexual of AIDS appears to inhabit only aerobics classes, discos, and

singles bars, and is understood, like all gay men are understood, as al-

ways ready for, or readying for, sex. In addition, in spite of the propor-

tionately much higher rate of heterosexually transmitted AIDS among

people of color, the heterosexuals portrayed on Sixty Minutes are, with
one exception, white.

“AIDS Hits Home’”s gallery of portraits also includes individuals, of

course. These are the portraits that Dan Rather warns us of in the be-

ginning of the program, when he says, “The images we have found are
brutal and heartbreaking, but if America is to come to terms with this

killer, they must be seen.” For the most part, though, they are not seen,

or only partially seen, for these are portraits of the ashamed and dying.

As they are subjected to callous interviews and voice-overs about the

particularities of their illnesses and their emotions, they are obscured

7. Paula Treichler, "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Sig-

nification," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cam-

bridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 39.
 X >
4

by television’s inventive techniques. Most often they appear, like terror-

ists, drug kingpins, and child molesters, in shadowy silhouette, backlit

with light from their hospital room windows. Sometimes the PWA is

partially revealed, as doctors and nurses manipulate his body while his ^

face remains off-camera, although in some cases, we see only the face,

but in such extreme close-up that we cannot perceive the whole visage.

And in the most technologically dehumanizing instance, the portrait of

\

the PWA is disguised with added pixelation. This is the case of the

feared and loathed bisexual, whose unsuspecting suburbanite wife has

died of AIDS. He is shown — or rather not shown — responding to an
interlocutor who says, “Forgive me asking you this question, it’s not

easy, but do you feel in some way as if you murdered your wife?”

As we continue to move through the Sixty Minutes portrait gallery, we

come eventually to those whose faces can see the light of day. Among
these are a few gay men, but most are women. They are less ashamed,
for they are “innocent.” They or the narrator explain how it is that these

perfectly normal women came to be infected with HIV: one had a

boyfriend who used drugs, another had a brief affair with a bisexual,

and another had a bisexual husband; none of them suspected the sins

of their partners. And finally there are the most innocent of all, the

white, middle-class hemophiliac children. They are so innocent that

they can even be shown being comforted, hugged, and played with.

Among the gay men who dare to show their faces, one is particularly

useful for the purposes of Sixty Minutes, and interestingly he has a

counterpart in an ABC 20/20 segment of a few years earlier. He is the

identical twin whose brother is straight. The double portrait of the sick

gay man and his healthy straight brother makes its moral lesson so clear
AIDS
that it needs no elaboration.®
with

Indeed, the intended messages of “AIDS Hits Home” are so obvious that
People

I don’t want to belabor them, but only to make two further points about
of

Portraits

8. For both Sixty Minutes and 20/20, the ostensible reason for showing the twins is to

discuss an experimental bone marrow transplant therapy, which requires an identi-

cal twin donor. It does not, of course, require that the donor twin be straight.
the program. First, there is the reinforcement of hopelessness. When-
ever a person with AIDS is allowed to utter words of optimism, a voice-
over adds a caveat such as: “Six weeks after she said this, she was dead.”
Following this logic, the program ends with a standard device. Dan
Rather mentions the “little victories and the inevitable defeats,” and
then proceeds to tell us what has happened to each PWA since the tap-
ing of the show. This coda ends with a sequence showing a priest — his

hand on the KS-lesion-covered head of a PWA — administering last

rights. Rather interrupts to say, “Bill died last Sunday,” and the voice of
the priest returns: “Amen.” gO

My second point is that the privacy of the people portrayed is both bru- 91

tally invaded and brutally maintained. Invaded, in the obvious sense

that these people’s difficult personal circumstances have been exploited
for public spectacle, their most private thoughts and emotions exposed.
But at the same time, maintained: The portrayal of these people’s per-

sonal circumstances never includes an articulation of the public di-

mension of the crisis, the social conditions that made AIDS a crisis and
continue to perpetuate it as a crisis. People with AIDS are kept safely
within the boundaries of their private tragedies. No one utters a word
about the politics of AIDS, the mostly deliberate failure of public policy

at every level of government to stem the course of the epidemic, to fund

biomedical research into effective treatments, provide adequate health

care and housing, and conduct massive and ongoing preventive educa-
tion campaigns. Even when the issue of discrimination is raised — in

the case of children expelled from school — this too is presented as a

problem of individual fears, prejudices, and misunderstandings. The
role of broadcast television in creating and maintaining those fears,

prejudices, and misunderstandings is, needless to say, not addressed.

It is, then, not merely faceless statistics that have prevented a sympa-
thetic response to people with AIDS. The media has, from very early in

the epidemic, provided us with faces. Sokolowski acknowledges this

fact in his preface to the Rosalind Solomon catalog:

Popular representations ofAIDS have been devoid of depictions of people

living with AIDS, save for the lurid journalistic images of patients in ex-
 X >
i

tremis, published in the popidcirpress where the subjects are depicted as

decidedly not persons living with AIDS, but as victims. The portraits in

this exhibition have a different focus. They are, by definition, portraits of

individuals with AIDS, not archetypes of some abstract notion of the ^
\ \

syndrome. Rosalind Solomon’s photographs are portraits of the human

condition; vignettes of the intense personal encounters she had with over

seventy-five people over a ten-month period. “I photographed everyone

who would let me, who was HIV-positive, or had ARC, or AIDS. . . . they

talked to me about their lives.”

The resulting seventy-five images that comprise this exhibition provide a

unique portrait gallery of the faces ofAIDS.^

The brute contradiction in this statement, in which “portraits of indi-

viduals with AIDS, not archetypes of some abstract notion” is immedi-

ately conflated with “portraits of the human condition” — as if that were

not an abstract notion — is exacerbated in Sokolowski’s introductory

text, where he applies to the photographs interpretations that read as if

they were contrived as parodies of the art historians formal descrip-

tions and source mongering. In one image, which reminds Sokolowski
of Watteau’s Gilles, we are asked to “contemplate the formal differences
between the haphazard pattern of facial lesions and the thoughtful

placement of buttons fastened to the man’s pullover.”'^ He completes

his analysis of this photograph by comparing it with an “early fifteenth-

century Imago Peitatis of the scourged Christ.” Other photographs sug-
gest to him the medieval Ostentatio Vulneris, the Momento Mori, the

Imago Clipeata, and the image of the Maja or Venus.

Clearly, when viewing Solomon’s photographs most of us will not seek

AIDS
to place them within art historical categories. Nor will we be struck by

with their formal or compositional interest. Rather, many of us will see in

these images, once again, and in spite of Sokolowski’s insistence to the

People

contrary, the very representations we have grown accustomed to in the

of

Portraits

9. Sokolowski, preface to Rosalind Solomon: Portraits in the Time of AIDS.

10. Sokolowski, "Looking in a Mirror," in Rosalind Solomon: Portraits in the Time of

AIDS.
mass media. William Olander, a curator at New York’s New Museum of
Contemporary Art who died of AIDS on March 18, 1989, saw precisely
what 1 saw:

The majority of the sitters are shown alone; many are in the hospital; or

at home, sick, in bed. Oner 90 % are men. Some are photographed with
their parents, or at least their mothers. Only four are shown with male
lovers or friends. For the photographer, “The thing that became very com -
pelling was knowing the people — knowing them as individuals. . . .’’For

the viewer, however, there is little to know other than their illness. The 92

majority of sitters are clearly ravaged by the disease. (No fewer than half —
of those portrayed bear the most visible signs of AIDS — the skin lesions 93

associated with Kaposi’s sarcoma.) Not one is shown in a work environ-

ment; only a fraction are depicted outside. None of the sitters is identi-

fied. They have no identities other than as victims ofAIDS.'^

But giving the person with AIDS an identity as well as a face can also be
a dangerous enterprise, as is clear from the most extended, and the
most vicious, story of a person with AIDS that American television has

thus far presented: the notorious episode of PBS Frontline “AIDS: A Na-
tional Inquiry.” “This is Fabian’s story,” host Judy Woodruff informs us,

“and I must warn you it contains graphic descriptions of sexual behav-

ior.” One curious aspect of this program, given its ruthlessness, is its un-
abashed self-reflexivity. It begins with the TV crew narrating about
itself, apparently roaming the country in search of a good AIDS story:
“When we came to Houston, we didn’t know Fabian Bridges. He was just
one of the faceless victims.” After seeing the show, we might conclude
that Fabian would have been better off if he’d remained so. “AIDS: A Na-
tional Inquiry” is the story of the degradation of a homeless black gay

man with AIDS at the hands of virtually every institution he encoun-

tered, certainly including PBS. Fabian Bridges was first diagnosed with
AIDS in a public hospital in Houston, treated, released, and given a one-
way ticket out of town — to Indianapolis, where his sister and brother-

11. William Olander, '"I Undertook This Project as a Personal Exploration of the Human
Components of an Alarming Situation,' 3 Vignettes (2)," New Observations (Octo-
ber 1988), p. 5 (the quote used as a title is Rosalind Solomon's).
 X >
»

in-law live. They refuse to take him in, because they’re afraid for their

young child, about whom the brother-in-law says, “He doesn’t know
what AIDS is. He doesn’t know what homosexuality is. He’s innocent.”

harassed and humiliated by the ^

Arrested for stealing a bicycle, Fabian is

local police, who are also under the illusion that they might “catch” AIDS
from him. After a prosecutor drops the charge'Vagainst him, Fabian is

once again provided with a one-way ticket out of town, this time to

Cleveland, where his mother lives. But in Indianapolis, a police reporter

picked up the story, and, as the Frontline crew informs us, “It was Kyle
Niederpreun’s story that first led us to Fabian. It was a story about the

alienation and rejection that many AIDS victims suffer” — an alienation

and rejection that the crew seemed all too happy to perpetuate.

Frontline finally locates its “AIDS victim” in a cheap hotel room in

Cleveland. “We spent several days with Fabian,” the narrator reports,

“and he agreed to let us tell his story.” Cut to Fabian phoning his mother

in order that her refusal to let him come home can be reenacted for the

video camera. “He said he had no money,” the crew goes on, “so some-

times we bought him meals, and we had his laundry done. One day

Fabian saw a small portable radio he liked, so we bought it for him.” The
narration continues, “He spent time in adult bookstores and movie

houses, and he admitted it was a way he helped support himself.” Then,

in what is surely one of the most degrading invasions of privacy ever
shown on TV, Fabian describes, on camera, one of his tricks, ending

with the confession, “I came inside him . . . accident ... as I was pulling

out, I was coming.” “After Fabian told us he was having unsafe sex, we
faced a dilemma,” the narrator explains. “Should we report him to au-

thorities or keep his story confidential, knowing that he could be infect-

ing others? We decided to tell health officials what we knew.”
AIDS

with At this point begins the story Frontline has really set out to tell, that of

the supposed conflict between individual rights and the public wel-
People

fareF It is a story of the futile attempts of health officials, policemen.

of

Portraits

12. The fascination of the media with the supposed threat of "AIDS carriers" was dra-
matically revealed in the response to Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, which

focused almost exclusively on Shilts's story of the so-called Patient Zero (see "How
and the vice squad to lock Fabian up, protected as he is by troublesome
civil rights. A city council member in Cleveland poses the problem:
“The bottom line is we’ve got a guy on the street here. The guy’s got a
gun and he’s out shootin’ people. . . . What do we say collectively as a
group of people representing this society?” But while the city council
contemplates its draconian options, the disability benefits Fabian had
applied for several months earlier arrive, and after a nasty sequence in-

volving his sadly ill-counseled mother, who has momentarily confis-

cated the money in order to put it aside for Fabian’s funeral, Fabian

takes the money and runs. 94

By now Time magazine has published a story on what it calls this “piti- 95

ful nomad,” and the local media in Houston, where Fabian has reap-
peared, have a sensational story for the evening news. The Frontline

crew finds him, homeless and still supporting himself as a hustler, so,

they report, “We gave him $15 a night for three nights to buy a cheap ho-
tel room. We gave him the money on the condition that he not practice
unsafe sex and that he stay away from the bathhouses.” Pocketing the
generous gift of $45, Fabian continues to hustle, and the vice squad
moves in to enforce an order by the Houston health department, issued
in a letter to Fabian, that he “refrain from exchanging bodily fluids.” But
now the vice squad, too, faces a dilemma. “Catch 22,” one of the officers
says. How do you entrap someone into exchanging bodily fluids with-

out endangering yourself? They decide to get Fabian on a simple solici-

tation charge instead, to “get him to hit on one of us,” as they put it, but
Fabian doesn’t take the bait.

Ultimately a leader of the local gay community decides on his own to try
to help Fabian, and a lawyer from the Houston AIDS Foundation offers

him a home, developments about which the Houston health commis-

to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," this volume). The fascination has clearly not
abated. At the Sixth International Conference on AIDS in San Francisco, June 20-24,
1990, members of the media took part in a panel discussion entitled "AIDS and the
Media: A Hypothetical Case Study." The hypothetical case was that of an American
soldier stationed in the Philippines accused of infecting forty prostitutes. The sol-

dier's "past" had him frequenting prostitutes in Uganda and bathhouses in the Cas-
tro district of San Francisco.
 X >
4

>

sioner blandly remarks, “It would never have occurred to me to turn to

the gay community for help.” But FrontIineha.s now lost its story. As the
narrator admits, “The gay community was protecting him from the lo-

cal press and from us.” There is, nevertheless, the usual coda: “The in- v

evitable happened. Fabian’s AIDS symptoms returned. Just one week

after he moved into his new home, he went bac'k into the hospital. This

time, he stayed just over a month. Fabian died on November 17. His

family had no money to bury him, so after a week he was given a pau-

per’s funeral and buried in a county grave.”

Judy Woodruff had introduced this program by saying, “The film you
are about to see is controversial: that’s because it’s a portrait of a man
with AIDS who continued to be promiscuous. In San Francisco and
other cities, the organized gay community is protesting the film, be-

cause they say it is unfair to persons with AIDS.” This strikes me as a

very ambiguous reason to protest, and I have no doubt that the organ-
ized gay community’s position against the film was articulated more
broadly. How is it unfair to persons with AIDS? What persons with
AIDS? Isn’t the film unfair, first and foremost, to Fabian Bridges? The

true grounds on which I imagine the gay community protested are the
dangerous insinuations of the film: that the public health is endangered
by the free movement within society of people with AIDS, that gay
people with AIDS irresponsibly spread HIV to unsuspecting victims.
They might also have protested the film’s racist presumptions and class
biases, its exploitation not only of Fabian Bridges but of his entire fam-

ily. In addition, it seems hard to imagine a knowledgeable person seeing

the film who would not be appalled at the failure of PBS to inform its au-
dience of the extraordinary misinformation about AIDS conveyed by
virtually every bureaucratic official in the film. And finally imagine the
I

AIDS
gay community protested the film because it is so clear that the film-

with makers were more interested in getting their footage than in the psycho-

logical and physical welfare of their protagonist, that instead of leading

People

him to social service agencies or AIDS service organizations that could

of
have helped him and his family, they lured him with small bribes, made
Portraits him dependent on them, and then betrayed him to various authorities.

A particularly revealing sequence intercut toward the end of the film

f
takes us back to Fabian’s hotel room in Cleveland. “We remembered
something he’d said to us earlier,’’ the narrator says, and Fabian then in-

tones in his affectless voice, “Let me go down in history as being . . . 1

am somebody, you know, somebody that’ll be respected, somebody

who’s appreciated, and somebody who can be related to, because a
whole lot of people just go, they’re not even on the map, they just go.”

Here we have explicitly the terms of the contract between the Frontline
crew and Fabian Bridges. Frontline found in Fabian, indeed, the “alien-

ation and rejection" that many people with AIDS suffer, and offered him
the false means by which our society sometimes pretends to grant tran-

scendence of that condition, a moment of glory in the mass media.

They said to this lonely, ill, and scared young man, in effect, “We’re

gonna make you a star.”

After witnessing this contract, we may wish to reconsider the various

claims made for photographers Nicholas Nixon and Rosalind Solomon

that the difference of their work from ordinary photojournalism’s ex-

ploitation of people with AIDS resides in the pact they have made with
their sitters. “The rather unique situation of Rosalind Solomon’s por-
traits, done in the time of AIDS,” writes Thomas Sokolowski, “is that the

subjects have been asked. The claim for Nixon is made less directly by
his curatorial apologist. When introducing Nixon for a lecture at the

Museum of Modern Art, Peter Galassi said, “Mr. Nixon was born in De-
troit in 1947. It seems to me that’s all you really need to know, and the
part about Detroit isn’t absolutely essential. What is relevant is that

Nixon has been on the planet for about forty years and has been a pho-
tographer for about half of that time. It’s also relevant that for about the

past fifteen years he has worked with a large, old-fashioned view cam-
era which stands on a tripod and makes negatives measuring eight by

ten inches.”*'* The point about the size of Nixon’s equipment, of course,
is that it is so obtrusive that we can never accuse him of catching his

13. Sokolowski, preface to Rosalind Solomon: Portraits in the Time of AIDS.

14. This introduction by Peter Galassi and the following statements by Nicholas Nixon

are transcribed from Nixon's talk atthe Museum of Modern Art, October 11, 1988.
 —
% >
i

subjects unawares; he has to win their confidence. According to a friend

of Nixon quoted in the Boston Globe, “The reason people trust him is

that he has no misgivings about his own motivations or actions.”*^ Or, as

Nixon himself put it in his talk at MOMA, “1 know how cruel 1 am, and v

I’m comfortable with it.”

My initial reaction on seeing both the Nixon and Solomon exhibitions

>

was incredulity. 1 had naively assumed that the critique of this sort of

photography, articulated over and over again during the past decade,
might have had some effect. 1 will cite just one paragraph from a found-
ing text of this criticism as an indication of the lessons not learned. It

comes from Allan Sekula’s “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Doc-

umentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” written in 1976:

“At the heart of [the] fetishistic cultivation and promotion of the artist’s

humanity is a certain disdain for the ‘ordinary’ humanity of those who

have been photographed. They become the ‘other,’ exotic creatures, ob-
jects of contemplation. . . . The most intimate, human-scale relation-

ship to suffer mystification in all this is the specific social engagement

that results in the image; the negotiation between photographer and
subject in the making of a portrait, the seduction, coercion, collabora-

tion, or rip off.”“^

Here is one indication of the photographer’s disdain while negotiating

with his sitter: Showing one of his serial PWA portraits, Nixon explained,

/ started taking his picture in June of ’87, and he was so resistant to the

process — even though he kept saying “Oh no, I love it, I want to do it
”

every other part of him was so resistant that after three times I kind of

kicked him out and said, “When you really want to do this, call me up,
AIDS
you don’t really want to do this.” Then one day in December he called me
with

People

15. Neil Miller, "The Compassionate Eye," Boston Globe Magazine, January 29, 1989,

of p.36.

16. Allan Sekula, "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Pol-
Portraits

itics of Representation)," in Photography against the Gra/n(Halifax: Press of the Nova

Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), p. 59.
up and said, ‘'I’m ready now," and so I went, of course, and this picture

doesn’t kill me, but. I’ll tell you, it’s miles better than anything I’d gotten

from him before. I really felt like hev\/as ready when I saw it. He was par-
alyzed from the waist down. That was part of the challenge, I guess.

An audience member asked Nixon to explain what he meant when he

said the subject was resistant, and he replied, “He wasn’t interested. He
was giving me a blank wall. He was saying, ‘Yes, 1 think this is something
I’m interested in, but I don’t like this process, I don’t like this big camera,

I don’t like it close to me, I don’t like cooperating with you, 1 don’t like 98

the fact that your being here reminds me of my illness, I’m uncomfort- —
able.’ But at the same time he kept on going through the motions. had I 99

to drive forty minutes to his house. I’m not interested in somebody just
going through the motions. Life’s too short.’’

How, then, might this intimate, human-scale relationship that Sekula

cautions us about be constructed differently?

We can perhaps agree that portraits of people with AIDS created by the
media and art photographers alike are demeaning, and that they are
overdetermined by a number of prejudices that precede them about the
majority of the people who have AIDS — about gay men, IV drug users,
people of color, poor people. Not only do journalism’s (and art’s) images
create false stereotypes of people with AIDS, they depend on already
existing false stereotypes about the groups most significantly affected

by AIDS. Much of the PBS discussion with “experts” that followed its

airing of Fabian’s story involved the fear that Fabian would be seen as

the stereotype of the homosexual with AIDS. The reaction of many of us

when we see homosexuality portrayed in the media is to respond by
saying, “That’s not true. We’re not like that” or “I’m not like that” or

“we’re not all like that.” But what are we like? What portrait of a gay per-

son, or of a PWA, would we feel comfortable with? Which one would be

representative? how could it be? and why should it be? One problem of

opposing a stereotype, a stereotype that Fabian Bridges was indeed in-

tended to convey, is that we tacitly side with those who would distance
/

themselves from the image portrayed, we tacitly agree that it is other.

 >

whereas our foremost responsibility in this case is to defend Fabian

Bridges, to acknowledge that he is' one of us. To say that it is unfair to

represent a gay man or a PWA as a hustler is tacitly to collaborate in the

media’s ready condemnation of hustlers, to pretend along with the me-v

dia that prostitution is a moral failing rather than a choice based on eco-
nomic and other factors limiting autonomy. Orf^ take another example,
do we really wish to claim that the photographs by Nicholas Nixon are

untrue? Do we want to find ourselves in the position of denying the hor-

rible suffering of people with AIDS, the fact that very many PWAs be-

come disfigured and helpless, and that they die? Certainly we can say

that these representations do not help us, and that they probably hinder
us, in our struggle, because the best they can do is elicit pity, and pity is

We must continue to demand and create our own coun-

not solidarity.

terimages, images of PWA self-empowerment, of the organized PWA

movement and of the larger AIDS activist movement, as the ACT UP

demonstrators insisted at MOMA. But we must also recognize that

every image of a PWA is a representation, and formulate our activist de-

mands not in relation to the “truth” of the image, but in relation to the

conditions of its construction and to its social effects.

I want to conclude this discussion, therefore, with a work that does not

seek to replace negative images with positive ones, that does not substi-
tute the PWA for the bad, the apparently healthy for the visibly
good ill,

the active for the passive, the exceptional for the ordinary. My interest in

the videotape Danny, made by Stashu Kybartas,^^ does not derive from

its creation of a countertype, but rather from its insistence on a particu-

lar stereotype, one that is referred to among gay men, whether endear-
ingly or deprecatingly, as the clone.

think, setting out deliberately or programmatically to articu-

AIDS
Without, I

with late a critique of media images of PWAs, Da/inynevertheless constitutes

one of the most powerful critiques that exists to date. This is in part be-
People

cause it duplicates, in so many of its features, the stereotypes of PWA

of
portraiture, but at the same time reclaims the portrait for the commu-
Portraits

17. Danny, 1987, is distributed by Video Data Bank, Chicago.

4
nity from which it emerges, the community of gay men, who have thus
far been the population most drastically affected by AIDS in the United
States. Danny accomplishes this through one overriding difference: the
formulation of the relationship between artist and subject not as one of
empathy or identification, but as one of explicit sexual desire, a desire

that simultaneously accounts for Kybartas’s subjective investment in

the project and celebrates Danny’s own sense of gay identity and hard-
won sexual freedom.

A great many of the conventions of media portraits of the PWA appear in lOO

Danny, but their meanings are reinvested or reversed. Danny begins, —

for example, where virtually every other television portrait ends: with 101

the information about the death of the video’s subject, here matter-of-

factly announced in a rolling text before we have even seen an image.

Thus, although the video ends at the second recounting of Danny’s
death, it does not come as a coda to tell us what has happened to the
0

subject after the tape was made. Indeed, as we discern from the apos-
trophizing voice-over, the tape was made as a work of mourning, the
artist’s working through of his loss of a friend in the AIDS movement.
The retrospective voice is reinforced by a refusal of the live video im-

age’s movement. Using videotape that he shot with Danny during their
brief friendship, Kybartas compiled it as a series of stills, which also
serves to make it equivalent to the still photographs taken of Danny
prior to his illness, when he lived in Miami.

The first words uttered by Danny, in his somewhat difficult-to-understand

voice, are the following: “He doesn’t refer to me as his son. Instead of

saying, ‘My son’ll be up to get it,’ ‘The boy’ll be up to get it.’ Whadaya
mean the boy? It makes me feel like Tarzan and the jungle. Me boy.” The
statement remains somewhat opaque until we come to those fragments
of dialogue in which Kybartas queries Danny further about his father.

When Danny talks of his decision to return to his parents’ home in

Steubenville, Ohio, at the moment when he learned he’d have to begin

chemotherapy for his Kaposi’s sarcoma, he mentions the difficulty of
telling his mother, who nevertheless accepted the fact. Kybartas asks,
“Were you worried about your dad?” “Yeah,” says Danny, “I was won-
 >

dering how he was going to take having a gay son, and one with AIDS on
top of it, but she never told him. I have to watch what say aroun^ him,
I

or if anything about AIDS is on television, my mom flicks it off. She

doesn’t want him to hear about it.” v

« \

We are left to imagine Danny’s home life, as his father watches his son

die and never bothers to ask why. Then, in the final conversation be-

tween the two friends before the tape ends, Danny says, “What should I

have done this week was to have contacted the funeral home, because I

would like to feel secure knowing that I could be buried there, instead of

their getting the body and saying, ‘No, we can’t handle that body,’ and

my father saying, ‘Why?’ ‘Because he has AIDS.’ That’s not a time that

he needs to be faced with that, not after my dying.” Kybartas probes,

“Why are you concerned about his reaction to that?” and Danny an-

swers, “Trying to spare his feelings, I guess.” “Why?” Kybartas persists.

“I guess as much as I dislike him, I don’t want to hurt him either.” “Why
not?” Kybartas chides, and the dialogue fades out.

It is this gruesome family scene, so typical — perhaps even stereotypi-

cal — of gay men’s relations with their fathers, that is denied in senti-

mental media stories of gay men going home to die in the caring fold of

the family, something they often do as a last resort when medical insur-
ance has run out or disability benefits won’t cover the rent. In the main-

stream media, though, this scenario tells of the abandonment of gay

men by their friends in the dark and sinful cities they inhabit, and the

return to comfort and normality in some small town in the midwest.

But in Kybartas’s tape it is the small hometown, a steel town near

Pittsburgh, that is dark and sinister, “slowly dying,” as Danny puts it,

whereas the metropolis to which Danny fled to find his sexual freedom
AIDS
is the very opposite of dark, though it may, in conventional moralizing

with terms, be sinful — that, of course, is its appeal.

People

This reversal of mainstream media pieties about hometown USA and

of
the biological family serves to delimit the space of the sexual for gay

Portraits men, for if Danny’s father has not discerned that his son is gay and dy-
ing of AIDS, it is because Danny’s identity as a sexual being must be dis-

avowed. Kybartas articulates this in the tape by saying, “I wanted you to

come and live with us. We’d take care of you. We could go to the gay bars
in Pittsburgh, dance, and watch the go-go boys.”

Danny’s image as a kid who lived for sex is complicated in the video by
another subtle reversal. Mainstream coverage of AIDS is padded with
portentous pictures of medical procedures — IV needles being inserted,

doctors listening through stethoscopes, tinkering in laboratories. Paral-

lel imagery in Danny refers not to Danny’s disease, but to his profession 102

as a medical technician, showing the procedure of the carotid an- —

giogram that he performed. But just because Danny is a full human be- 103

ing with a respectable profession doesn’t mean he’s heroized by Kybartas.

Immediately following Danny’s reminiscence about his job is the “Mi-

ami Vice” sequence, in which Kybartas uses footage from that program’s

credits as Danny talks about shooting cocaine with shared needles back
in 198h before anyone knew the transmission risks. The result is that

still another media myth is interfered with: the one that makes gay men
(always presumed to be white and middle class) and IV drug users (pre-

sumed to be poor people of color) separate “risk groups.”

A standard media device for constructing AIDS as a morality tale uses

before-and-after images of people with AIDS. Stuart Marshall’s Bright

Eyes, made for Britain’s Channel 4 in 1984, performed a brilliant anal-

ysis on the British tabloid Sunday People’s use of PWA Kenny Ramsaur
to that end. In 1983, ABC’s 20/20 also used Kenny Ramsaur to show the
effects of AIDS in one of the earliest and most lurid television news-
magazine stories on the subject, narrated by none other than Giraldo
Rivera. ABC’s camera first shows Ramsaur’s face, horribly swollen and

disfigured: then snapshots of the handsome, healthy Kenny as hedonis-

tic homosexual appear, after which we return to the live image as the
camera pans down to Kenny’s arm to see him pull up his sleeve to reveal

his KS lesions. Kybartas reworks this ploy in Danny. We see snapshots of

a young and healthy hedonist in Miami as Danny talks with relish of his

life, of how he would spend the day on the beach, return home and let
 >

AIDS

with

People
Stashu Kybartas, Danny, 1987.

of

Portraits

«
i
 r

the suntan oil sink in, and then shower. After douching in the shower,
he tells us, he would shave his balls and the side of his cock, put on his

tight 501s, and go out and cruise. Close-ups of Danny putting in his nip-

ple ring are intercut with a close-up of his nipple surrounded by KS le-

sions, taken in Kybartas’s studio in Pittsburgh during Danny’s illness.

And when we move from a second series of early snapshots of Danny to

the video images of his face, shot after he has returned to Steubenville,

it is bloated from chemotherapy. He is nevertheless still fully sexualized.

Kybartas, narrating over the image of the face, laments, “Danny, when 1

look at all these pictures of you, I can see that the chemotherapy caused 104

your appearance to change from week to week. One day when you —
walked into the studio, I thought you looked like a longshoreman who 105

had just been in a fight.'® [pause! The only time I saw you cry was on
Christmas Eve, when your doctor told you that the chemotherapy was
no longer working.”

This movement back and forth from the tough to the tender, from de-
siring to grieving in relation to the entire series of images constitutes the

major text of the tape, and it may be said to encompass something of the
range of gay men’s sexuality as well as our present condition. The theme
is most often elaborated in the revelation of the KS lesions, as time and
again we see stop-motion footage of Danny removing his shirt, or as still
images show fragments of his chest and arms covered with lesions. But,

like scars or tattoos, the lesions are always seen as marking the body as
sexually attractive, a sexiness that is indicated by Kybartas at one point

when he says, “Danny, do you remember the first night we were shoot-

ing the film at my studio? You’d taken off your shirt and we were looking
at all your lesions. Later, as I was rubbing your back and you were telling

me about the problems you were having with relationships and sex,

something happened. It was suddenly very quiet in the studio, and my

heart was beating fast. I don’t know what it was . . . the heat, your body.

The only sound was the steam hissing out of the radiator. . .
.”

18. The sexual attractiveness of the gay clone was constructed through stylistic refer-

ence to cliched hypermasculine professions such as the cowboy, policeman, sailor,

and, indeed, the longshoreman.

 >

After seeing Danny, it me that there is a deeper explanation

occurred to

for portrayals of PWAs, and especiaily of gay men with AIDS, as desper-

ately ill, as either grotesquely disfigured or as having wasted to fleshless,

ethereal bodies. These are not images that are intended to overcome ^
our fear of disease and death, as is sometimes claimed. Nor are they
meant only to reinforce the status of the PWA as. victim or pariah, as we
often charge. Rather, they are, precisely, phobic images, images of the
\

terror at imagining the person with AIDS as still sexual. In the Frontline

special the Houston public health commissioner says, with patent fear

and loathing, “Fabian was only diagnosed last April. He might live an-

other two years, and furthermore this person is in remission now. He’s

not demonstrating any signs of illness!” The unwillingness to show

PWAs as active, as in control of their lives, as acting up and fighting

back, is the fear that they might also still be sexual, or as ludy Woodruff
said of Fabian Bridges, that “he was a man with AIDS who continued to

be promiscuous.”

The comfortable fantasy that AIDS would spell the end of gay promis-
cuity, or perhaps of gay sex altogether, has pervaded American and
Western European culture for almost a decade now. But we will fail

to understand its pervasiveness and its representational effects if we

think it only occupies the minds of the likes of lesse Helms and Patrick
Buchanan. I want to end, therefore, with a quotation that will bring this

phobic fantasy closer to home in the context of cultural studies. In an

interview published in the German art magazine Kunstforum, lean
Baudrillard appears sanguine about William Burroughs’s (and Laurie

Anderson’s) dictum that “language is a virus”:

Language, particularly in all areas of information, is used in a more and

AIDS
more formulaic way, and thereby gets sicker and sicker from its own for-
with mulas. One should no longer speak of sickness, however, but of virality,

which is a form of mutation. . . . Perhaps the new pathology of virality is

People

the last remedy against the total disintegration of language and of the
of
body. I don’t know, for example, whether a stock market crash such as
Portraits that of 1987 should be understood as a terrorist process of economy or as

a form of viral catharsis of the economic system. Possibly, though, it is

like AIDS, if we understand AIDS as a remedy against total sexual liber-

ation, which is sometimes more dangerous than an epidemic, because

the latter always ends. Thus AIDS could be understood as a counterforce

against the total elimination of structure and the total unfolding of sex-

uality.^^

19. "Virtuelle Katastrophen" (interview with Jean Baudrillard by Florian Rotzer), Kunst-
forum, J a nu a ry-February 1990, p. 266. Thanks to Flans Flaacke for bringing this inter-

view to my attention.
106

107

/
V
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V
%

• ^

4 \

\
 $

f
V
A.
4

GOOD OLE BAD BOYS

First presented at “AIDS, Art, and Activism:

A Conference on the Culture ofAIDS,"

Ohio State University, Columbus,

March 10-12, 1989.

/
 > i
»

>

I want here to address art’s — a,nd art criticism’s — most vilified posi-

tion, the position that is referred to as “politically correct.” I feol well

qualified to discuss this position, because I am — or more accurately

October, the journal of which 1 am an editor, is — so often thought to v

demand it. The most virulent expression of this opinion occurred in a

profile of October editor Rosalind Krauss pul^shed in the trade jour-

nal Avenue Magazine (the avenue in question is Madison), where an

unnamed art critic was quoted as saying of the October editors,

“They’re all Stalinists, and I hope they die.” More recently, more indi-

rectly, and explicitly regarding the issue of October on AIDS that I ed-

ited, Gary Indiana wrote in the Village Voice concerning a new East

Village queer zine called Comrade /Sister!: “It carries none of the dead-
ening spiritual influence of various middle-aged, late-blooming gay
leaders who feel they’ve been put in charge of homosexuality. There is

no polemical ax grinding in the background, no prevailing sense of ‘cor-

rectness.’ It is a nice reminder that every generation provides a fresh
batch of sexually diverse people all by itself, eager to do their own and
each other’s things without the slightest theoretical training from the

senior staff of October.”

I guess Indiana’s venom was motivated in this instance by his associa-

tion, as contributor to the catalog, with the exhibition Against Nature,

organized by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins and mounted in

early 1988 at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Apparently I was
cast as this exhibition’s opponent, since, rumor has it. Against Nature

was conceived from the beginning as a rebuttal of the “politically cor-

rect” demands made in the AIDS issue of October.^ And, as John

Greyson wrote in the catalog for AIDS: The Artists' Response, Against

Nature vjas “certainly not politically correct.”

Boys

1 . This rumor is hinted at in John Greyson's contribution to the show's catalog, "Parma
Bad Violets: A Video Script," in Against Nature: A Show by Homosexual Men, ed. Dennis

Ole Cooper and Richard Hawkins (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,

1988), pp. 11-12.

Good

f
 r

;
«
%

But what is meant by the rubric “politically correct”? Or more accu-

rately, since^l have never heard anyone use the term except as an accu-
sation of someone else’s demand for it, what is meant by the statement,
“I refuse to be politically correct”? What, for example, did John Greyson

mean when he wrote that Against Nature was “certainly not politically

correct”? Let me give you the whole sentence: “The curators sought
work that referenced AIDS from Ian] ironic, campy perspective — work
that was biting, irreverent, self-consciously decorative, elegiac, impo-
lite, bad boy, certainly not politically correct.”^ Let’s leave aside the fact

that most of the work in the show hardly lived up to the provocation 110

Greyson attributed to it, that the main problem with the art was that it
—
tended toward the tame and academic. But let’s look instead at the cu- 111

rators’ wish to be incorrect, for although their wish cannot always be

discerned in the work exhibited, it can be seen in certain details of the

show’s apparatus. Take, for example, the exhibition’s subtitle: “A show

by homosexual men.” Throughout the catalog, the word homosexual is
consistently used, rarely the word gay. I take this to be an example of re-

fusing to be politically correct, since the correct term is now generally

understood to be gay. Why else did gay men and lesbians wage a pro-
longed battle with the New York Times to substitute gay for homosex-
ual, a battle that was partially won only in 1988? Using homosexual men

in the subtitle of this show would be roughly equivalent to a show by

black men referring to themselves as Negro men, or a show by people
with AIDS referring to themselves as AIDS victims.

I think I can locate the very passage from the AIDS issue of October in

which the perceived demand for the politically correct term appears. It

comes from Simon Watney’s essay “The Spectacle of AIDS”: “The very

notion of a ‘homosexual body’ only exposes the more or less desperate

ambition to confine mobile desire in the semblance of a stable object,

calibrated by its sexual aim, regarded as a ‘wrong choice.’ The ‘homo-

2. John Greyson, "Parma Violets for Wayland Flowers," in AIDS: The Artists' Response,
ed. Jan Zita Grover (Columbus: Hoyt L. Sherman Gallery, Ohio State University, 1989),
 —
> >
4

sexual body’ would thus evidence a fictive collectivity of perverse sex-

ual performances, denied any psychic reality and pushed out beyond
the furthest margins of the social. This, after all, is what the category of
‘the homosexual’ (which we cannot continue to employ) was invented v
« \

to do in the first place.

When Watney insists that we cannot continue to use the term homosex-
ual, he does so in the course of an argument that shows very precisely
how that term is being used against us with renewed vehemence in the

face of AIDS. His argument made within the context of a history of re-
is

sisting the medicalizing terminology in the work of, among many oth-

ers, Jeffrey Weeks and Michel Foucault, and also in Stuart Marshall’s

videotape Bright Eyes, one of the first important videos about AIDS,

which provides a sustained analysis of the origins, the history, and the
present murderous deployment of the term.^ Why then has it returned

in the subtitle of Against Nature'? Is it because the show’s literary con-

ceit, evidenced in the title appropriated from J.-K. Huysmans’s symbol-

ist novel, returns us to the historical moment when the pathologizing

term homosexual came into use in the literature of sexology? Unfortu-

nately, it is difficult to say, because, unlike Watney or Weeks or Foucault

or Marshall, the curators of Against Nature make no arguments for their

positions, and we are therefore left to surmise that to call the exhibition

“a show by homosexual men” is merely a means of registering the re-

fusal to be politically correct.^ Even to have used terms like queer or fag

3. Simon Watney, "The Spectacle of AIDS," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Ac-

tivism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 79 (italics in original).

4. See Martha Gever, "Pictures of Sickness: Stuart Marshall's Bright Eyes," in AIDS:

Cultural Analysis, pp. 109-126.

5. The show's curators include the following statement in the catalog, which I quote in

its entirety:

We constructed Against Nature along personal lines. Who are we? We're gay male
Boys artists obsessed with the ways in which sexual desire informs, distances and em-
powers the recent history of art made by guys like us. We're thinking of, say (a little
Bad
self-aggrandizement here?], Kenneth Anger, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Marc
Ole
Almond, Denton Welch . .
.
just to start. These artists share at least two concerns

a finely-tuned irreverence for the cultural and moral standards imposed by and for
Good

heterosexuals, and a reverence and desire for, mixed with anxiety about the male
 f

would have been understood to be in a politically viable line of appro-

priations of terms of oppression by the oppressed themselves, to say

“Yeah, we’re faggots, so what?” Homosexual, however, has a very differ-

ent resonance, because, as Watney argued, it is the term of a confining

essentialism. It has always been deployed to claim that there is an es-

sential homosexual character or identity, which resides in our inherent

sickness.

John Greyson wrote of Against Nature that its strength is that it sparked
a significant debate, but I’m not so sure. The curators resolutely refused 112

a public discussion of the exhibition, just as they refused to stake out a —

clear position in the catalog. Although the director of LACE, the head of 113

the Critical Studies Program at the California Institute of the Arts, John

Greyson himself, and many others in the L.A. art community pleaded
for a public discussion of the show, the curators refused to hold one.
And thus we will probably never know why homosexual instead of gay,

why “a show by homosexual men” instead of a show dealing with all the

populations disporportionately affected by AIDS, for it was a show

about AIDS that the curators were asked by LACE to organize.*^

For this latter omission I can suggest an answer, an answer that con-
cerns the local contours of the epidemic. Los Angeles recently sur-

passed San Francisco among U.S. cities for absolute numbers of people

diagnosed with AIDS, with nearly 6,000 cases as of the end of 1988. Of
these, 89 percent are among gay and bisexual men. The curators re-

frained from providing this information, however, information that

might have partially explained why, in L.A., one might want to focus an

body, their own, friends', strangers', stars'. It's a limiting esthetic, maybe, but the re-

sults speak for themselves. We suspect that the works in this show do too. This cat-

alogue is a component of Against Nature, and not its tracing. ("About Against

Nature," in Against Nature, p. 4)

6. In her introduction to the catalog, LACE's director hints atthe institution's worries: "At
first we were concerned that this show could possibly be antithetical to our original
intent to promote AIDS activism in an all-encompassing context. However, the Exhi-
bition Committee was willing to take a chance based on our confidence and trust in

the curators' knowledge of and commitmentto both AIDS activism and gay activism"
(Joy Silverman, "Introduction/Acknowledgments," in Against Nature, p. 3).
 —
X >
4

exhibition about AIDS on the aesthetic responses of gay men, presum-

ably because such an explanation might have made them appearxto be

trying to be politically correct.

Now, wantI to consider some of the confusions that result from this ex-

ample of refusing to be politically correct. Fir^f, the most general and

dangerous confusion, that of designating as authoritarian — even Stal-

inist — arguments or artworks that are in fact made as resistance to au-

thority. Let’s stay with our example. To say that you are refusing to be
politically correct is to hold up your refusal as an assertion of freedom
in the face of a demand, seen as rigid, proscriptive, authoritarian. The
demand in this case is the one made by Simon Watney that we not con-

tinue to employ the term homosexual. But Watney urges us to do this

not in order to exercise his authority over us, but in solidarity with us as

he joins us in our acts of resistance. For homosexual is the term de-

ployed by all those authorities — medical, scientific, governmental

who use it to deny us our self-identifications, our rights, our pleasures,

and now our very lives, and against whom we therefore struggle.

A second, related problem resulting from the refusal to be politically

correct is that of confusing genuine authority, the authority of persua-

sive argument, with authoritarianism. What is generally characterized

as a demand to be politically correct is nothing other than a political ar-

gument, one that identifies itself as such and one that is authoritative.

This is just the opposite of authoritarian, which involves the arbitrary

exercise of power, and which usually pretends to be apolitical. The au-
thoritative argument that is repudiated in the refusal to be politically

correct is, in fact, made as resistance to this arbitrary exercise of power.

One can, as we’ve seen, make an authoritative argument against using

the term homosexual, but those in power will nevertheless exercise

their authority arbitrarily in the face of that argument and continue to

Boys
use homosexual — witness the New York Times in the twenty years fol-
lowing the Stonewall rebellion.
Bad

Ole

What happens, then, when Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins also
Good

choose to use the term? Are they resisting authority or are they acceding
 ^

to authority? And when they do this, are they not themselves exercising

power — albeit limited power? Were the artists in Against Nature asked
if they wanted to be referred to as “homosexual men” or were they arbi-

trarily subjected to the label by the power of the show’s curators?

Finally, in this case at least, 1 think the claim of a refusal to be politically

correct is merely a deceitful way of carrying on the art world’s business-

as-usual, of pretending to be bad when what you’re really doing is being

good. The confusion of the authoritative argument with authoritarian-
ism results in acceding to the status quo of relations of power. In the Oc- 114

TOBER AIDS issue I did not wish to make a proscriptive argument for —
what art dealing with AIDS should be. Rather I wanted to show how 115

confining was the standard art-world view of how artists might address

AIDS: first through participation in charity auctions, thereby contribut-

ing to the volunteerism that the Reagan and Bush administrations pre-
tend is the solution to the government’s own refusal to do anything to
0
fight the epidemic, and second through conventional representations
of loss that would “outlast” and “transcend” the epidemic. 1 argued that

the exclusive attention to these kinds of responses — determined by tra-

ditional conceptions of art as universal and timeless (and as worth a lot

of money) — masked another possibility, the possibility of art practices

directly engaged in the struggle to end the epidemic. 1 did not specify
what these should be, but I gave a few examples of existing practices.
Happily, such practices have proliferated since I made the argument,

but the institutions of real power in the art world are very slow to recog-

nize them. When, for example, the Museum of Modern Art last year

mounted the exhibition Committed to Print, showing activist art in the

print medium since the 1960s, there was not one example of AIDS activist

work; when asked about this omission by a Village Voice writer, the
show’s curator claimed that none of any interest existed. Evidently she

had never seen a poster with a pink triangle that said “Silence=Death.”

And when, this year, MOMA did mount an exhibition including AIDS as
a subject — Nicholas Nixon’s Pictures of People — it was so offensive to

7. Deborah Wye, Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American
Printed Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988).
 X >
i

people with AIDS and AIDS activists that ACT UP staged a protest. In
*

the meantime, the charity auctions continue, as AMFAR has gone on

the road with Art against AIDS.

The point of all this is simply to say that the position against which I ar-

gued remains the dominant position, against which we must still struggle,
both with our work and with our arguments. But we must also be pre-

pared, when our work and our arguments are persuasive, to be accused

of demanding political correctness.

Gregg Bordowitz said in our conversation published in the catalog for

AIDS: The Artists’ Response, “What I contest is the dominant art world’s
view that you can make anything except overtly politicized art. There’s

still this idea that you can do anything in the art world except make an

overt statement. Didacticism is the only vulgar thing you can do in the

art world! And that’s what I’ve been interested in since art school — that

No-no. . .
.’’®
How many times have we heard that political art is always
bad art, that it is merely propaganda? This is the most sacred art-

world dogma of all, and it is one to which Dennis Cooper and Richard
Hawkins, in their stance against political correctness, cling. Their greatest

fear seems to be that what they do might be dismissed as propaganda.

Bordowitz has also made the statement that serves as the perfect re-

joinder to the timidity of their position. When he once referred to him-

self during a lecture as a propagandist, someone in the audience asked

whether that didn’t open him to the charge of trying to convert others to
homosexuality. “If I thought a representation could make someone gay,’’

he responded, “that’s the kind of representation I’d be making.’’ These

are not the words of an abject homosexual, these are the words of a
fierce faggot. I leave it to you to decide whether they are politically correct.

8. "Art and Activism: A Conversation between Douglas Crimp and Gregg Bordowitz," in
Boys

AIDS: The Artists' Response, p. 9.

Bad

Ole

Good
 f

f
V
A 4

randy shilts's
B MISERABLE FAILURE

First presented at the panel discussion "And the

Band Played On: History as Mini-Series?” as part of

the Ethics and Evidence in Gay and Lesbian Studies

series at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies,

City University of New York, April 13, 1989, and

published, with a postscript, in A Queer World:

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,

ed. Martin Dubernian (New York: New York

University Press, 1997).

/
 X >
*

During the first week of April 1989, a young Dutchman on his way to the

National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference and AIDS Forum m San
Francisco was detained at the airport in Minneapolis-St. Paul when
customs officials discovered he had AIDS. He was then incarcerated on^

the basis of a law barring entry to foreigners'with contagious diseases; a

category in which AIDS is now included. The Immigration and Natural-

ization Service ruled against a waiver for the Dutchman, stating, The

risk of harm by an AIDS-infected alien in the absence of humanitarian

reasons for the temporary admission of aliens far outweighs the privi-

lege of an alien to enter the United States to participate in a confer-

ence.”' I know how ludicrous this is, and how dangerous are
think we all

its consequences. With one of the highest number of cases of AIDS of

any country in the world, the United States is nevertheless one of only a

very few countries that, against the recommendations of the World

Health Organization, has enacted such a law. The law is based on a

whole series of myths — that AIDS is contagious, that people with AIDS

are ruthless, deliberate spreaders of disease, and that, in any case,

people need not routinely take precautions against becoming infected

or infecting others with HIV. These extremely pervasive myths result,

directly, not only in bad laws, but in bad policy, discrimination, and vi-

olence, and, indirectly, in the deaths of thousands of people who are not
being properly treated or educated.

The March 1989 issue of Esquire carries an article by Randy Shilts that,

while very largely a piece of self-puffery, purports to be about some-

thing more significant; the supposedly incomprehensible fact that al-

though his book And the Band Played On made him a media celebrity,

it nevertheless failed to affect the way AIDS is perceived by the popu-

lace, reported in the media, and dealt with at the levels of policy and
Failure

funding. As Shilts put it, “Never before have I succeeded so well; never

before have I failed so miserably.”^ He goes on to regale us with stories

Miserable

of his success interwoven with examples of his failure. The principal

failure is the scandal of the National Institutes of Health’s stonewalling

Shilts's

1. "Alien with AIDS Is Ordered Freed," New York Times, April 8, 1989, p. A9.
Randy

2. Randy Shilts, "Talking AIDS to Death," Esquire, March 1989, p. 124.

 >

about the hopelessly stalled development of drug treatments and the

media’s inability to see a story in this scandal. At the international AIDS
conference in Stockholm, Shilts provided the hot tip of this story to his

fellow journalists, since he himself was too busy with his book promo-
tion tour to cover it. “One reporter responded to my tip,” Shilts writes,

“with the question: ‘But who’s going to play you in the miniseries?’”-^

“Clinical trials were not sexy,” Shilts complains. “Clinical trials were
boring.”'*

A second anecdote concerns Shilts’s appearance on the Morton Downey Jr. 118

show, where, in spite of assurances that this was an issue Downey was —
not going to play games with because his brother had AIDS, he never- 119

theless — hardly surprisingly — turned the show into a referendum on

quarantine and fueled the flames of his audience’s homophobia. Shilts
gives his astute analysis of this situation: “For Morton Downey Jr., talk-

ing about AIDS was not an act of conscience: it was a ratings ploy.”'^

Story three is about a Palm Springs fundraiser with various movie stars
and socialites, where Shilts would receive an award for his valiant fight

against AIDS. When receiving the award, Shilts launched into the series
of AIDS jokes he’d been telling on the lecture circuit. These are all about
Shilts’s clever repartee with the yahoos who call in to talk shows with
their absurd questions about how you “catch” AIDS. But this time, when
he told the one about the woman who called in and asked, “What if a gay
waiter took my salad back into the kitchen and ejaculated into my salad
dressing?” a silence fell over the audience. Shilts explains, “Fears that
I dismissed as laughable were the genuine concerns of my audience, I

realized.

The stories that Shilts tells reduce basically to two: the story of irrational
fears of AIDS and loathing of those who have it and the media’s sense of

3. Ibid., p. 128.

4. Ibid., p. 126.

5. Ibid., p. 128.
/

6. Ibid., p. 130.
 V >

the fascination of its audience with “sexy” stories about AIDS. What

Shilts is thus describing are reactions to AIDS that I think we must rec-
X

ognize as unconscious, and therefore extremely intractable, incapable

of being rectified by what Shilts calls “the truth,” or objective reporting.
^ \

of the facts.

I want to suggest here that it is only by taking account of reactions to

AIDS that operate at the level of the unconscious and by unpacking

Shilts’s unproblematized notion of “the truth” or of “objectivity” that we

can understand why And the Band Played On is so deeply flawed.

Many people have written about why Shilts’s book is, by his own admis-
sion, a miserable failure, or have addressed criticisms directly to Shilts

when they encountered him on his celebrity tour. Needless to say, this is

an aspect of being a celebrity that Shilts fails to report in his Esquire ar-

ticle. In spite of Shilts’s own sense of failure, he arrogantly dismisses the

questions raised by his critics. He still appears to feel that he has written
the perfect book, the book that really tells the true story of the epi-

demic’s first five years.

Let me give you just one example, taken from the transcripts of Shilts s
book-promotion appearance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in

London. Shilts was asked in some detail about his book’s most widely

criticized passages, those dealing with the story of Patient Zero, in an

exchange with the writer Adam Mars-lones.

‘At what stage did you decide to give [the Patient Zero story] so much
prominence?” Mars-Jones asked.

Failure

‘‘Well, [don’t think it is that prominent in the book . . . ,

but I thought it

was a fascinating story. ... I think it represents very good investigative

Miserable

journalism.”

Shilts's

‘‘There are passages describing how [Patient Zero] would have sex with

people in bathhouses, then turn the lights on and say, ‘I’m going to die
Randy

and so are you.’”

%
 "Which he did! At the time he was doing that, I was hearing about it"

"But those were rumors."

"No, it wasn’t rumors, I talked to people he did this to 1 mean, he was

doing it quite a bit. The fact is it all happened. The facts are not disputed."

"William Darrow of the CDC does repudiate them."

"No, he does not. The fact is that William Darrow saw every word that 120

was written about him and about the study [the 1982 CDC cluster study —
involving the so-called Patient Zero}, and he approved every word of it. 121

Now we’re getting into very fine points of argument, and they’re not very
substantial.’'^

This exchange refers, in part, to a review of And the Band Played On that
had just been published by Duncan Campbell in the New Statesman.^
Campbell reports a telephone conversation with Darrow in which Dar-
row explained that the CDC cluster study, which sought to determine
whether AIDS was caused by sexual transmission of an infectious agent,
was based on speculation that the duration between infection and on-
set of symptoms was nine to eleven months. Having later learned, as all

of us, including Shilts, did, that the period probably averages about

eight years, Darrow claimed that he made it very clear to Shilts that the
Patient Zero story was nonsense. He furthermore said that he pleaded

with Shilts not to publish the name of Patient Zero, Gaeton Dugas, fear-

ing that Dugas’s family would suffer (and indeed the family later faced

death threats).

Shilts canceled an interview with Campbell when he learned what the

New Statesman review would entail, and later attacked Campbell in an
interview with the gay newspaper Coming Up, complaining that this

7. See Tim Kingston, "Controversy Follows Shilts and 'Zero' to London," Coming Up,
April 1988, p. 11.
^

8. Duncan Campbell, "An End to the Silence," New Statesman, March 4, 1988, pp. 22-23.
 .

X >
«

“typical crap get from certain segments of the gay press. ... I
was the I

go way back on working on this [epidemic] — and to get it from Qamp-

who just came out of his comfortable closet a year ago. ... I think
bell,

he has ideological reasons. He’s out front, he says it makes gay people^

look bad. The fact is Patient Zero did exist.'. . . It’s a brilliant book, stt-

perb. . . . [The review is] more snide than Th&Bay Area Reporter. It’s a

nasty, vindictive attack. It’s the only place I’ve gotten a bad review; the

mainstream press loved my book.’’^

Indeed, the mainstream press did love Shilts’s book. What Shilts does

not say, but what he nevertheless makes clear, is that he returns their

love. Ultimately he dismisses the Campbell review by saying that the

New Statesman (a British equivalent to the Nation in the United States)

is insignificant, a marginal publication. Shilts’s book is in every way a

product of his identification with the dominant media and their claim
to objectivity. It is this claim that allows Shilts, along
with the New York

Times, for example, to disregard the demands of people with AIDS that

they not be called AIDS victims. Not to do so would be to give in to

a

special interest group, a group with an ideological bias. Other

groups

with ideological biases meriting Shilts’s disdain, for which there is

ample evidence in And the Band Played On, are gay community leaders
and AIDS activists.

“Personally, I’m not an ideological person,” Shilts said at the ICA. “I

you can be a journalist and really have a political ideology,

don’t think

because you tend to see the fallacies in all ideologies. Speaking from

this dangerously naive or cynically disingenuous ideological position

that calls itself “objective,” Shilts explains that “the whole problem of

AIDS from the start was that liberals were trying to be sweet and not
Failure

tell the whole story, and conservatives did not want to tell the whole

story, and I felt what I wanted to do was get the whole story out. At some
Miserable

point I just have to say, I think my work has integrity. I think my work is
honest.”
Shilts's

9. Quoted in Kingston, "Controversy Follow Shilts," p. 1 1

Randy
 r

Shilts’s defense of the Patient Zero story hinges entirely upon this naive
notion of truth, on the fact, simply, that the story actually happened.

But truth is never unproblematic, never a simple matter of empirical

facts; it is always selective, always a particular construction, and always
exists within a specific context. By the time the narrative of And the
Band Played On ends, officially 6,079 people had died of AIDS in the

United States. Shilts might have selected any one of those people’s sto-
ries to tell. Among the very few he did select was that of Gaeton Dugas,
which makes his story about one six-thousandth of the “truth.”

122

Shilts selected Dugas’s story, as he said at the ICA, because it was “fasci- —
nating.” But what does it mean in the context of AIDS to be fascinated'^. 123

What are the unconscious mechanisms that would account for this very
selective will to truth? Is this not precisely what Shilts means when he
says of the media that they are interested in sexy stories? Is this not, in

fact, the recounting of a story that we already know? the story of Ty-

phoid "Mary? the story of the murderously irresponsible, sexually vora-

cious gay man? Is this not the story of Fabian Bridges, as told on the

1986 PBS Fronf/me special “AIDS: A National Inquiry,” in which a black

homeless gay man with AIDS, who was forced to support himself by

hustling, was bribed by the PBS crew in order to get their story and then
reported to the authorities? Is it not the story of the bisexual deliberately

infecting “innocent women” in the Midnight Caller episode of Decem-

ber 13, 1988, whose producers defended themselves against the protests
of the San Francisco gay community by citing the Patient Zero story as
proof that such things really do happen?”* Is it not the story of Rock

Hudson, as it was recounted before a jury who would award his ex-lover
millions of dollars in damages? Is it not the story of prostitutes and

junkies as the media portrays them every day? Is it not ultimately the

story of all people with AIDS as they haunt the imaginations of those

10. "Mr. DiLello notedthatRandy Shilts, in his acclaimed book about AIDS, 'And the Band
Played On,' wrote about Gaetan Dugas, the man who may have brought AIDS to San
Francisco and who continued to have a multitude of sexual partners even after learn-

ing that he was ill" (Stephen Farber, "AIDS Groups Protest Series Episode," New York
Times, Decembers, 1988, p. C24).
 —
N >
i

>

whose fear and loathing Shilts is so unable to comprehend? Is it not, fi-

nally, in the eyes of the INS, the story of Hans Paul Verhoef, the Dutch-
man they feared would spread AIDS at the Lesbian and Gay Health
Conference?

The problem with the Patient Zero story is not^whether or not it is true.

We now know, in any case, that it is not, at least insofar as we know that
Gaeton Dugas had sex with the other men in the GDC cluster study af-
ter they had already been infected. Nor is it merely the problem that this

story was selected by Shilts’s publishers as the story that would sell the

book, and that they therefore gave it pride of place in their publicity and

had it serialized in California Magazine.^^ The real problem with Patient

Zero is that he already existed as a phobic fantasy in the minds of Shilts’s

readers before Shilts ever wrote the story. And, thanks in part to And the
Band Played On, that fantasy still haunts us — as it still haunts Shilts

today. “I had written a book to change the world,” Shilts says in Es-

quire}^ What he forgot was that this is a world in which people’s

fantasies about homosexuality include gay waiters running into the

kitchen to ejaculate in the salad dressing, or of gay foreigners attending

health conferences with no other purpose than to infect their fellow

conferees with a deadly virus. Patient Zero is just such a fantasy, and it

matters not one whit whether his story is true or not.

o
1 99 6 Postscript: History as Musical Comedy?

The question posed to this CLAGS panel, "And the Band Played On:
History as Mini-Series?” arose, no doubt, for two reasons, first, because
Failure

And the Band Played On had been widely acclaimed as the definitive

history of the epidemic up to 1985, and second, because the rights to

Miserable

And the Band Played On had been purchased by Esther Shapiro, pro-

ducer of the popular nighttime television soap opera Dynasty. Shilts’s

Shilts's

11. October 1987 issue.

Randy

12. Shilts, "Talking AIDS to Death," p. 124.

book faithfully adopted the episodic form of the television series, itself

a derivative of the Victorian serialized novel. Each of the stories Shilts’s

book recounts is interwoven with many others, and each passage of its
telling leaves off at just the point where something especially dramatic
is portended. Television’s series format, in which each segment ends
with the demand that we “tune in next time,” is scrupulously followed

by Shilts, keeping us in a constant state of suspenseful excitement.

When And the Band Played On finally made it to the television screen,

however, it was not a mini-series but an HBO special movie in yet an- 124

other TV format, the docudrama. Perhaps this pseudo-documentary —

formula seemed to the team of scriptwriters a more appropriate form of 125

historical reporting. In any case, the fact that the film was still made af-

ter such a long delay, and that it met with great success, is testimony to

the durability of Shilts’s version of events of the early years of the AIDS
epidemic. My undergraduate students often cite the HBO film as their

most important source of information about AIDS.

The HBO movie greatly reduces the dramatis personae of Shilts’s book,
and it revolves around a single hero, Don Francis, an honorable and
dedicated CDC epidemiologist. Patient Zero is still there, but less

prominent and less sensationally portrayed than he is in the book. His

function now is that of the reluctant but finally cooperative, if arrogant,

participant in the CDC’s cluster study (the accuracy and relevance of

whose findings are left uncontested in the film), just one of many mo-
ments in the story of a heroic scientist as he relentlessly pursues the
truth about AIDS against the obstacles thrown in his way by tightfisted
government bureaucrats, other scientists with more ego than integrity,

profiteering blood-bank executives, and gay activists who care only

about preserving their overheated sex lives. Shilts acted as a consultant

for the film.

At about the same time that And the Band Played On aired on national

television, another version of the Patient Zero story appeared on movie

screens to provide an off-beat but eloquent critique of Shilts’s account.

Zero Patience, independent Canadian filmmaker John Greyson’s wacky

 X >

musical comedy, stars a ghost named Zero and a Toronto Natural

History Museum taxidermist named Dick. The only living being who
can see and hear Zero, Dick is the Victorian orientalist and explorer
Sir Richard Francis Burton, famous for his translation of The Thou-^
sand and One Nights. As the narrator explains. Burton’s unfortunate
encounter with the Fountain of Youth in 1892 extended his lifespan in-

definitely. Now engaged in constructing a “Hall of Contagion” at the

\

museum. Burton seizes on the story of “the man who brought AIDS to

North America” as the crowning set piece of his exhibit. Zero’s story is to

be presented as a spectacular music video funded by a pharmaceutical

company called Gilbert and Sullivan.

In preparing his video. Burton edits his filmed interviews in such a way
as to distort his interlocutors’ words, thus making them conform to his

preconceived idea of Zero as a sexually insatiable gay “serial killer.”

Faced with Zero’s mother’s adamant refusal to be interviewed. Burton

cajoles, “Think about how it could help someone else, another young

man, another mother.” Burton’s camera surreptitiously records Madame

Zero’s reply: “That’s just what the journalist said. Ever so smoothly, and
I believed him. Well, he made it sound like Zero was the devil, bringing

his boyfriends home, flaunting his life style under our noses. Zero never
did that, not once.” The beleaguered woman’s words reappear in the ed-
ited tape: “. . . Zero was the devil, bringing his boyfriends home, flaunt-
.”
ing his life style under our noses. . .

“Sometimes the facts have to be rearranged to get at the real truth,” ar-

gues Burton when Zero confronts him. But, contrary perhaps to our ex-

pectations, Greyson’s critique of Shilts does not consist of this charge of

Failure
rearranging and misrepresenting the facts. Unquestionably, Greyson

does intend to clear Zero’s name. He makes his protagonist sexy, charm-
ing, and adorable, and never more so than at the moment when, having
Miserable

learned the truth about the GDC cluster study from none other than

“Miss HIV,” he proclaims with a broad grin, “I’m innocent. Tm not the
Shilts's

first, but I’m still the best.” Not only do we, the film’s viewers, fall in love

with Zero, but so does Burton, who decides in the end to refashion his
Randy

exhibit to clear Zero’s name. Recording a new narration for his video, he

s
 t

says, “Patient Zero should be proclaimed a hero of the epidemic. Through

his cooperation in the 1982 cluster study, he helped prove that AIDS was
sexually transmitted. Thus Zero should be lauded as the slut who in-

spired safer sex.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Zero responds. “This has nothing to do with me,
with what 1 was, with what 1 want. . . . This is just another of your lies.”

What Zero really desires. Burton cannot give him: Zero wants his life

back.

126

The point is that whatever spin Burton puts on the events, it’s never —
Zero’s story, it’s Burton’s. This is the real thrust of Greyson’s critique of 127

Shilts, for unlike Shilts, Greyson makes us aware at every moment that

his film is, after all, only a story. Not for nothing is the fate of Scheherazade
the film’s framing conceit: “Tell a story, save a life, just like Scheherazade,”
sings Zero in the opening Esther Williams-style water ballet. What
might seem wildly eccentric in Zero Patience is in fact strategic. That
the story’s protagonists are a ghost and a nineteenth-century figure still

alive in the present; that their story is told through musical numbers
that include a pair of singing assholes, a song-and-dance performance
whose characters are animals from the natural history museum’s diora-
mas suddenly sprung to life, and an HIV virus portrayed by Michael

Callen in drag and singing falsetto in a Busby Berkeley— style routine

seen through a microscope — what could more fully alert us to the arti-

fice, the invention of this version of the Patient Zero story?

While every storytelling is a construction relying on the codes of its cho-

sen genre, certain genres seek to obscure their conventions, to natural-
ize them, in order to pose as direct, transparent accounts of the facts, to

provide what might be called a truth-effect. This is the case of most

mainstream journalism and documentary filmmaking, but surely it is

less germane to so-called creative nonfiction and TV docudrama. The

latter fuses documentary and dramatic techniques to tell a story indis-

tinguishable from fiction film, except that it is supposedly “a true story.”

The former derives its conventions from bourgeois fiction. Neverthe-

less, regarding the “creative” qualities of And the Band Played On, Shilts
 >
i

John Greyson, Zero Patience, 1993 (photo: Rafy).

writes, “There has been no fictionalization. For purposes of narrative

flow, I reconstruct scenes, recount conversations and occasionally at-

tribute observations to people with such phrases as ‘he thought’ or ‘she

felt.’”'^ Thus, for Shilts, conventions meant to produce a truth-effect,

even those clearly adopted from fiction, are mistaken for truth itself. His
own labor to construct that “truth” is disavowed, and his only defense

reinforces the disavowal: “The fact is, it all happened.” “It was a fasci-

nating story.”

Zero Patience, too, tells a sexy story, but one that “happened” only

through John Greyson’s vivid imagination, political consciousness, and

deft manipulation of filmic conventions. But our fascination with this

Failure story does not return us to one we already know. This story asks us to

question what we think we know, how we come to know, what and how
Miserable
else we might know. For Shilts, history is the story of what actually hap-

pened. For Greyson, history is what we make by telling a story.

Shilts's

13. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 607.

Shilts adopted the novelistic form for his biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Cas-
Randy

tro Street{]%2), and used it consistently right through Conduct Unbecoming {]223).
 $

MOURNING AND MILITANCY

First presented at the “Gay Men in Criticism" session

of the English Institute, Harvard University,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 24-27, 1989,

and published in October 5J (winter 1989).

/
 In a contribution to a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on

“Displacing Homophobia,” Lee Edelman applies the lessons of D^errid-

X

ian deconstruction to the AIDS activist movement slogan SILENCE^

DEATH. Claiming that our slogan calls for a discourse of facts mar-^

shaled against a demagogic rhetoric, Edelman concludes that the equa-

tion unknowingly produces the literal as a figure, and thereby betrays

its ideological entanglement in the binary logic of Western discourse.
\

Precisely because the defensive appeal to literality in a slogan like Si-

lence=Death must produce the literal as a figure of the need and desire

for the shelter of certain knowledge, such a discourse is always necessar-

ily a dangerously contaminated defense — contaminated by the Derridian

logic of metaphor so that its attempt to achieve a fiatural or literal dis-

course beyond rhetoricity must reproduce the suspect ideology of reified

(and threatened) identity marking the reactionary medical and political

discourse it would counteract. The discursive logic of Silence-Death thus
contributes to the ideologically motivated confusion of the literal and
the figural, the proper and the improper, the inside arid the outside, and
in the process it recalls the biology of the human immunodeficiency
virus as it attacks the mechanism whereby the body is able . . . to distin-

guish between “Self and Not-Self.’’^

I do not think Edelman’s deconstruction of the “text” of SILENCE=

DEATH is necessarily wrong, but he seems to have very little sense of

how the emblem functions for the movement. First, it is precisely as a

figure that it does its work: as a striking image appearing on posters,

placards, buttons, stickers, and T-shirts, its appeal is primarily graphic,

and hardly therefore to be assimilated to a privileging of the logos. Sec-

ond, it desires not a discourse of facts but direct action, the organized,

militant enunciation of demands within a discursive field of contested

facts. And finally, a question of address: for whom is this application of

intended other than those within the academy who
Militancy

literary theory will

and

1 . Lee Edelman, "The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS," South

Mourning Atlantic QuarterlySS, no. 1 (winter 1989), pp. 313-314.

 f

find it, simply, interesting?^ SILENCE=DEATH was produced and is em-

ployed for collective political struggle, and it entails altogether different

problems for the community of AIDS activists. Taking our symbol liter-

ally holds for us a danger that goes unnoticed in Edelman’s textual anal-

ysis: We ourselves are silent precisely on the subject of death, on how

deeply it affects us.

1, too, will have something to say about the distinction between self and

not-self, about the confusion of the inside and the outside, but 1 am im-
my community of AIDS activists. Writing
pelled to do this for us, for 130

about mourning and militancy is for me both necessary and difficult, —

for have seen that mourning troubles us; by “us” mean gay men con-
I I 131

fronting AIDS. It should go without saying that it is not only gay men

who confront AIDS, but because we face specific and often unique dif-

ficulties, and because I have some familiarity with them, address them I

here exclusively. This essay is written for my fellow activists and friends,
who have also informed it with their actions, their suggestions and en-

couragement — and in this 1 include many women as well. The con-

flicts I address are also my own, which might account for certain of the

essay’s shortcomings.

1 will begin then with an anecdote about my own ambivalent mourning,

though not of an AIDS death. In 1977, while was visiting my family in
I

Idaho, my father died unexpectedly. He and had had a strained and in- I

creasingly distant relationship, and was unable to feel or express my

I

grief over his death. After the funeral returned to New York for the I

opening of an exhibition I’d organized and resumed my usual life. But

within a few weeks a symptom erupted which to this day leaves a scar
near my nose: my left tear duct became badly infected, and the result-

2. For a retrospective corrective to this statement, see footnote 24 to the introduction of

this volume. For a different critique of the slogan SILENCE=DEATH, see Stuart Mar-

shall, "The Contemporary Use of Gay History; The Third Reich," in How Do I Look?
Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 65-102.

See also Douglas Crimp, with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1990).
 X >
4

ing abscess grew to a golf-ball sized swelling that closed

*
my left eye and
completely disfiguredmy face. When the abscess finally hurst, the foul-
X

smelling pus oozed down my cheek like poison tears. have never since I

doubted the force of the unconscious. Nor can I doubt that mourning isv,
a psychic process that must be honored. For many AIDS activists, ho\V-

ever, mourning is not respected; it is suspect:«'‘“J look at faces at count-

less memorial services and cannot comprehend why the connection

isn’t made between these deaths and going out to fight so that more of

these deaths, including possibly one’s own, can be staved off. Huge
numbers regularly show up in cities for Candlelight Marches, all duly

recorded for the television cameras. Where are these same numbers
when it comes to joining political organizations ... or plugging in to the

incipient civil disobedience movement represented in ACT UP?” These

sentences are taken from a recent essay by Larry Kramer,^ against
whose sense of the quietism represented by AIDS candlelight marches I

want to juxtapose the words of the organizer of this year’s candlelight

vigil on Christopher Street, addressed from the speaker’s platform to the

assembled mourners: “Look around!” he said, “This is the gay commu-
nity, not ACT UP!

The presumption in this exhortation that no AIDS activists would be

found among the mourners — whose ritual expression of grief is at the

same time taken to be truer to the needs of the gay community — con-

fidently inverts Kramer’s rhetorical incomprehension, an incompre-

hension also expressed as antipathy: “I do not mean to diminish these
sad rituals,” Kramer writes, “though indeed I personally find them
slightly ghoulish.”^

Public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force,

but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indul-

Militancy

3. Larry Kramer, "Report from the Holocaust," in Reports from the Holocaust: The Mak-
and
ing of an AIDS Activist{\^e\N York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 264-265.

4. The remark of Red Maloney was the subject of a letter written by Naphtali Offen to

Mourning
0<7fwee/c4 (July 17, 1989), p. 6.

5. Kramer, "Report from the Holocaust," p. 264.

 —

gent, sentimental, defeatist — a perspective only reinforced, as Kramer

implies, by media constructions of us as hapless victims. “Don’t mourn,
organize!” — the last words of labor movement martyr loe Hill — is still

a rallying cry, at least in New Age variant,

its “Turn your grief to anger,”
which assumes not so much that mourning can be forgone as that the
psychic process can simply be converted.^ This move from prohibition

to transformation only appears, however, to include a psychic compo-

nent in activism’s response, for ultimately both rallying cries depend on
a definite answer to the question posed by Reich to Freud: “Where does
the misery come from?” Activist antagonism to mourning hinges, in 132

part, on how AIDS is interpreted, or rather, where the emphasis is laid,

—
on whether the crisis is seen to be a natural, accidental catastrophe — a 133

disease syndrome that has simply struck at this time and in this place
or as the result of gross political negligence or mendacity — an epi-

demic that was allowed to happen.

But leaving aside, only for the moment, the larger political question, 1

want to attend to the internal opposition of activism and mourning.

That the two are incompatible is clear enough in Freud’s description of

the work of mourning, which he calls “absorbing.” “Profound mourn-

ing,” Freud writes in “Mourning and Melancholia,” involves a “turning

away from every active effort that is not connected with thoughts of the

dead. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription in the ego

is the expression of an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves

nothing over for other purposes or other /nferesfs.”^ Although Freud’s

6. Joe Hill's statement is also quoted by Michael Bronski in an essay thattakes up some
of the issues discussed here; see his "Death and the Erotic Imagination," in Taking

Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, ed. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London;
Serpent's Tail in association with the ICA, 1989), pp. 219-228. The pop psychological/

metaphysical notions of New Age — such asthe

"healers" repulsive idea
particularly

that people choose illness to give meaning — are considered by Allan

to their lives

Berube in "Caught in the Storm: AIDS and the Meaning of Natural Disaster," Outlook

1, no. 3 (fall 1988), pp. 8-19.

7. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in John Rickman, ed., A General Se-
lection from the Works of Sigmund Freud {New \ork\ Anchor Books, 1989), pp. 125-126

(emphasis added).
 X i
4

account of this process is well known, want I to repeat it here in order to

underscore its exclusive character: ‘ ^

X

The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists,,^
requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attach-

ments to this object. Against this demand a struggle of course arises — it

maybe universally observed that man never willingly abandons a libido-

\

position, not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him. This

struggle can be so intense that a turning away from reality ensues, the

object being clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-

psychosis. The normal outcome is that deference for reality gains the day.
Nevertheless its behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now carried
through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy,
while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind.

Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the

object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the li-

bido from it accomplished.^

In an important paper about mourning in the time of AIDS, which turns

on a reading of Walt Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” poems, Michael Moon ar-
gues that Freud’s view of mourning presents a difficulty for gay people,
insofar as it promises a return to a normalcy that we were never granted
in the first place: “As lesbians and gay men,” Moon writes, “most of us

are familiar with the experience of having been categorically excluded

from ‘normalcy’ at critical junctures in our lives. Having been through
as much as most of us have in both our personal and collective struggles
to get our own needs recognized, acknowledged, accepted, sometimes

fulfilled, the Freudian model of mourning may well look fundamentally

normalizing and consequently privative, diminishing the process and
foreclosing its possible meaning rather than enriching it or making it

more accessible to understanding.”^

Militancy

and
8. Ibid., p. 126.

9. Michael Moon, "Memorial Rags," paper presented in a session entitled "AIDS and
Mourning

the Profession" at the 1988 MLA convention, manuscript. Thanks to Michael Moon
for making this paper available to me.
 Probably no gay man or lesbian can have an untroubled response to

Freud, but we must nevertheless take care to maintain a crucial distinc-

tion: the ambition to normalize, to adapt, belongs not to Freud but to

his later “egocentric” revisionists, to whom gay people owe a good por-
tion of our oppression. This is not to say that there is no vision of nor-
malcy in Freud, only that there is also no such thing as ever fully

achieving it, for anyone. Freud does refer to mourning as a “grave de-

parture from the normal attitude to life,”'” but what that normal attitude
is in this context can be learned easily enough by reading his character-
ization of the state to which we return after the work of mourning is ac- 134

complished: very simply, “deference for reality gains the day,” and “the —
ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”" 135

So rather than looking beyond “Mourning and Melancholia” for other

possibilities — Moon proposes fetishism, but a fetishism rescued from
Freud’s 1927 account by making it a conscious means of extending our
homoerotic relations, even with the dead — 1 want to stay with Freud’s
earlier text, to read it in relation to the conflicts many of us now experi-
ence. First, two preliminary caveats: “Mourning and Melancholia” is

not a theory of mourning as such, but of pathological mourning, that is,

of melancholia. Moon is therefore right when he says that Freud’s view

of mourning only repeats conventional wisdom; it purports to do no
more than describe mourning’s dynamic process. Second, Freud can

tell us very little about our grieving rituals, our memorial services and
candlelight marches. Of our communal mourning, perhaps only the
Names Project quilt displays something of the psychic work of mourn-
ing, insofar as each individual panel symbolizes — through its incorpo-
ration of mementos associated with the lost object — the activity of
hyper-cathecting and detaching the hopes and memories associated

with the loved one. But as against this often shared activity, mourning,
for Freud, is a solitary undertaking. And our trouble begins here, for, from
the outset, there is already a social interdiction of our private efforts. In

the opening pages of Policing Desire, Simon Watney recounts a funeral

10. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 125. /

11. Ibid., pp. 126,127.

 >

service similar to those many of us have experienced, an event that made

him decide “then and there” that he would write his book on AID6:

[ Bruno’s] funeral took place in an ancient Norman church on the out-y

skirts of London. No mention was made ofAIDS. Bruno had died, bravely,

of an unspecified disease. In the congregation bf some forty

people there

were two other gay men besides myself, both of whom had been his lover.
They had been far closer to Bruno than anyone else present, except his

parents. Yet their grief had to be contained within the cofifines of manly

acceptability.The irony of the difference between the suffocating life of

the suburbs where we found ourselves, and the knowledge of the world in

which Bruno had actually lived, as a magnificently affirmative and life-

enhancing gay man, was all but unbearable.^^

Because Watney’s anecdote is meant to explain his determination to

write a polemic, it also suggests what has happened to mourning. It is

not only that at this moment of society’s demand for hypocrisy the three
gay men had to conceal their grief, but also that their fond memories of
Bruno as a gay man are thereby associated with the social opprobrium
that attaches to them. When these memories are then recalled, hyper-

cathexis may well be met with a defense, a need to preserve Brunos

world intact against the contempt in which it is commonly held. “My

friend was not called Bruno, ”
Watney adds. His father asked me not to
use his real name. And so the anonymity is complete. The garrulous

babble of commentary on AIDS constructs yet another ‘victim.’ It is this

babble which is my subject matter, the cacophony of voices which

sounds through every institution of our society on the subject of AIDS.

Thus one of our foremost international AIDS activists became engaged

in the struggle: no further memories of Bruno are invoked. It is probably

no exaggeration to say that each of us has a story like this, that during the
AIDS crisis there is an all but inevitable connection between the mem-
Militancy

and

12. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis:
Mourning
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 7.

13. Ibid., p. 8.

K
 —

ories and hopes associated with our lost friends and the daily assaults

on our consciousness. Seldom has a society so savaged people during

their hour of loss. “We look upon any interference with [mourning] as
inadvisable or even harmful,” warns Freud. But for anyone living daily
with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our bereavement is as

ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times}^ The violence

we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost
as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and out-
right murder. Because this violence also desecrates the memories of our
dead, we rise in anger to vindicate them. For many of us, mourning be- 136

comes militancy. Freud does not say what might happen if mourning is —
interfered with, but insofar as our conscious defenses direct us toward 137

social action, they already show the deference to reality that Freud at-

tributes to mourning’s accomplishment. Nevertheless we have to ask

just how, against what odds, and with what unconscious effects this has
been achieved.

The activist impulse may be reinforced by a second conflict within the

process of mourning. “Reality,” Freud explains, “passes its verdict

14. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 125.

15. The New York Times's reporting of AIDS issues — or rather its failure to report them
accurately or at all — is probably the most persistent scandal of the AIDS epidemic.
Larry Kramer gave a detailed accounting of the scandal on a panel discussion of

AIDS in the print media organized by the PEN American Center in New York City on
May 11, 1989. In the summer of 1989, the Times ran an editorial that both typified its

position throughout the history of the epidemic and reached new heights of callous-
ness. Implicitly claiming once again that its presumed readers had little to worry
about, since "the disease is still very largely confined to specific risk groups," the
writer went on to say, cheerily, "Once all susceptible members [of these groups] are
infected, the numbers of new victims will decline." The newspaper's simple writing
off of the lives of gay men, IV drug users, their sex partners and children — a mere
200,000-400,000 people already estimated to be HIV-infected in New York City
alone — triggered an ACT UP demonstration, which was in turn thwarted by perhaps
the largest police presence at any AIDS activist demonstration to date. ACT UP stick-

ers saying "Buy Your Lies Here. The New York Times Reports Half the Truth about

AIDS" still adorn newsstands in New York City, while the coin slots of 77mes vending
machines are covered with stickers that read "The New York Times MDS Reporting
is OUT OF ORDER." The Times editorial is reproduced as part of a Gran Fury project
entitled "Control" in Artforumll, no. 2 (October 1989), p. 167.
 .

> >
I

that the object no longer exists-^— upon each single one of the memories
and hopes through which the libido was attached to the lost object, and

the ego, confronted as it were with the decision whether it will share this

fate, is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfactions in beings

alive to sever its attachment to the non-existent object.”^® But this con-

frontation with reality is especially fraught fo^gay men mourning now,

since our decision whether we will share this fate is^so unsure. For

people with AIDS, the HIV-infected, and those at significant risk whose

sero-status is unknown to them, narcissistic satisfactions in still being

alive today can persuade us, will undoubtedly persuade us in our un-

conscious, to relinquish our attachments. But how are we to dissociate

our narcissistic satisfactions in being alive from our fight to stay alive?
And, insofar as we identifywith those who have died, how can our sat-

isfactions in being alive escape guilt at having survived?*^

Upholding the memories of our lost friends and lovers and resolving

that we ourselves shall live would seem to impose the same demand: re-
sist! Mourning feels too much like capitulation. But we must
recognize

that our memories and our resolve also entail the more painful feelings

16. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," pp. 136-137.

17. The decision notto share the fate ofthe lost object, as well as guilt at having survived,

are certainly problems of mourning for everyone. Clearly insofar as any death brings

us face to face with our own mortality, identification with the lost object is something

we all feel. Thus this difficulty of mourning is certainly not gay men's alone. only wish I

to emphasize its exacerbation for gay men to the extent that we are directly
and im-

mediately implicated in the particular cause of these deaths, and implicated, as well,

through the specific nature of our deepest pleasures in life — our gay sexuality. Si-

mon Watney has urged that this very implication be taken as the reason for forming

consensus among gay men about AIDS activism; "I believe that the single, central

factor of greatest significance for all gay men should be the recognition thatthe cur-
rent HIV antibody status of everyone who had unprotected sex in the long years be-

fore the virus was discovered is a matter of sheer coincidence. . . Every gay man
who had the good fortune to remain uninfected in the decade or so before the emer-
Militancy

gence of safer sex should meditate most profoundly on the whim of fate that spared
him, but not others. Those of us who chance to be seronegative have an absolute and
and
unconditional responsibilityionhe welfare of seropositive gay men" (Simon Watney,
'"The Possibilities of Permutation': Pleasure, Proliferation, and the Politics of Gay
Mourning
Identity in the Age of AIDS," in Fluid Exhanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS. Crisis,

ed. James Miller [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 19921).

%
of survivor’s guilt, often exacerbated by our secret wishes, during our

lovers’ and friends’ protracted illnesses, that they would just die and let

us get on with our lives.

We can then partially revise our sense — and Freud’s — of the incom-

patibility between mourning and activism and say that, for many gay
men dealing with AIDS deaths, militancy might arise from conscious

conflicts within mourning itself, the consequence, on the one hand, of

“inadvisable and even harmful interference” with grief and, on the

other, of the impossibility of deciding whether the mourner will share 138

the fate of the mourned. But because mourning is a psychic process, —

conscious reactions to external interference cannot tell the whole story. 139

What is far more difficult to determine is how these reactions are influ-
enced by already existing unconscious strife. Only by recognizing the
role of the unconscious, however, will we be able to understand the

relationship between the external obstacles to our grief and our own
antagonism to mourning. But I want to be clear: It is because our impa-
tience with mourning is burdensome for the movement that I am seek-
ing to understand it. I have no interest in proposing a “psychogenesis”
of AIDS activism. The social and political barbarism we daily encounter
requires no explanation whatsoever for our militancy. On the contrary,

what may require an explanation, as Larry Kramer’s plaint suggested, is

the quietism.

At the weekly ACT UP meetings in New York, regularly attended by about

400 people, I am struck by the fact that only a handful are of my gener-
ation, the Stonewall generation. The vast majority are post-Stonewall,

born hardly earlier than the gay liberation movement itself, and their

losses differ in one significant respect from ours. Last year one of these
young men said something to me that said it all. A group of us had seen
an early ’70s film at the Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festival and
went out for drinks afterwards. The young man was very excited about
what seemed me a pretty ordinary sex scene in the film, but then he
to

said, “I’d give anything to know what cum tastes like, somebody else’s

that is.” That broke my heart, for two reasons: for him because he didn’t
/
know, for me because do. I
 s >
4

Freud tells us that mourning is the reaction not only to the death of a

loved person, but also “to the loss of some abstraction which has^taken

the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal. . . Can we be

allowed to include, in this “civilized” list, the ideal of perverse sexual^

pleasure itself rather than one stemming from its sublimation? Along-

side the dismal toll of death, what many of u^^have lost is a culture of

sexual possibility: back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses,

and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes. 'Sex was every-
where for us, and everything we wanted to venture: golden showers and

water sports, cocksucking and rimming, fucking and fist fucking. Now
our untamed impulses are either proscribed once again or shielded
from us by latex. Even Crisco, the lube we used because it was edible, is

now forbidden because it breaks down the rubber. Sex toys are no

longer added enhancements: they’re safer substitutes.

For those who have obeyed civilization’s law of compulsory genital het-
erosexuality, the options we’ve lost might seem abstract enough. Not
widely acknowledged until the advent of the AIDS crisis, our sex lives

are now publicly scrutinized with fascination and envy, only partially

masked by feigned incredulity (William Dannemeyer, for example, en-

tered into the Congressional Record of ]une 26, 1989 the list of pleasures

I just enumerated). To say that we miss uninhibited and unprotected

sex as we miss our lovers and friends will hardly solicit solidarity, even
tolerance. But tolerance is, as Pier Paolo Pasolini said, “always and purely
nominal,” merely “a more refined form of condemnation.”^^ AIDS has
further proved his point. Our pleasures were never tolerated anyway;

we took them. And now we must mourn them too.

When, in mourning our ideal, we meet with the same opprobrium as

when mourning our dead, we incur a different order of psychic distress,

since the memories of our pleasures are already fraught with ambiva-

The abject repudiation of their sexual pasts by many gay men tes-
Militancy

lence.

and

18. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 125.

Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (Manches-

Mourning

19. Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Gennariello," in

ter: Carcanet New Press, 1983), pp. 21-22,

f
tifies to that ambivalence, even as the widespread adoption of safe sex
practices vouches for our ability to work through it. Perhaps we may
even think of safe sex as the substitute libido-position that beckoned to

us as we mourned our lost sexual ideal. But here, 1 think, the difference

between generations of gay men makes itself felt most sharply. For men
now in their twenties, our sexual ideal is mostly just that — an ideal, the

cum never swallowed. Embracing safe sex is for them an act of defiance,
and its promotion is perhaps the AIDS activist movement’s least inhib-

ited stance. But for many men of the Stonewall generation, who have
also been the gay population thus far hardest hit by AIDS, safe sex may 140

seem less like defiance than resignation, less like accomplished mourn- —
ing than melancholia. I don’t want to suggest that there is anything 141

pathological about this disposition, but it does comprise many features

of melancholia as Freud describes it, especially if considered in the con-

text of its causes.

“The occasions giving rise to melancholia,” Freud writes, “for the most

part extend beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all

those situations of being wounded, hurt, neglected, out of favor, or dis-

appointed, which can . . . reinforce an already existing ambivalence.”^"

Although Freud’s theory concerns an object relationship, if we trans-

pose these situations to the social sphere, they describe very perfectly

the condition of gay men during the AIDS crisis, as regards both our re-

jection and our self-doubt. In Freud’s analysis, melancholia differs from

mourning in a single feature: “a fall in self-esteem”:^* “In grief the world

becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself [which be-

comes poor and empty]. And this lowering of self-esteem, Freud in-

sists, is “predominantly moral”;^^ it is a “dissatisfaction with the self on

moral grounds. “The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, in-

capable of any effort, and morally despicable: he reproaches himself.

20. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 132.

21. Ibid., p. 125.

22. Ibid., p. 127.

23. Ibid., p. 128.

/
24. Ibid., p. 129.
 .

X >
«

N
vilifies himself, and expects to be cast out and chastised. “In his ex-

acerbation of self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dis-

honest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide

the weaknesses ofhis own nature. . . Moreover, the melancholiac “does

not realize that any change has taken place in him, but extends his self-

criticism back over the past and declares that hg was never any better.”^^

This moralizing self-abasement is only too familiar to us m the response

of certain gay men to AIDS — too familiar especially because the media

have been so happy to give them voice as our spokesmen. Randy Shilts

comes readily to mind, and though I’ve dealt with him elsewhere,^® it is

worth mentioning in this context that he was chosen as our representa-

tive to address the closing ceremonies of the Fifth International AIDS

Conference in Montreal, where he obliged his hosts with an attack on

the militancy of international AIDS activists attending the conference.

But there is a recent example that is even more groveling: the book After
the Ball, an aptly titled sequel to Shilts’s And the Band Played On, whose
authority it cites approvingly, and whose “Patient Zero” continues here
to play his unhappy role. This flyleaf-described “gay manifesto for the

nineties,” published by Doubleday, is the dirty work of two Harvard-

trained social scientists, one of whom now designs aptitude tests for

people with high IQs, while the other is a Madison Avenue PR consul-
tant whose specialty is creating “positive images” for what the two of
“
them call ‘silent majority’ gays.” Informed by the latest trends in socio-

biology, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen have devised a program to

eradicate homophobia — which they prefer to call homo-hatred so as to

deny its unconscious force. Their proposal centers on a media cam-

paign whose basis is the denial of difference. “A good beginning would

be to take a long look at Coors beer . . commercials,” they suggest.^^

Militancy
25. Ibid., p. 127.

26. Ibid., p. 128.

and
27. Ibid., pp. 127-128.

28. See "Howto Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," this volume.

Mourning

29. Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, /After f/7e Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear
and Hatred of Gays in the '90s (Hew York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 154.
 —

But copying Coors ads does not stop with creating “positive” images.

We have to “clean up our act," they say, and live up to those images.^”
This means purging our community of “‘fringe’ gay groups” — drag
queens, radical fairies, pederasts, bull dykes, and other assorted scum.

Clearly we can take this book seriously only as a symptom of malaise

in its excoriation of gay culture, it bears every distinguishing character-
istic of melancholia Freud specifies. Moreover, its accusations are also
“
self-accusations: We, the authors, are every bit as guilty of a lot of the
nastiness we describe as are other gays,” the Harvard boys confess. 142

“This makes us not less qualified to inveigh against such evils but, if —
anything, even more so.”^* The authors’ indictments of gay men are ut- 143

terly predictable: We lie, deny reality, have no moral standards; we are

narcissistic, self-indulgent, self-destructive, unable to love or even form
lasting friendships; we flaunt it in public, abuse alcohol and drugs; and
our community leaders and intellectuals are fascists.^^ pjgj-g ^

sample statements:

When we first delved into the gay urban demimonde, we assumed that
they held, if not our values, a least some values. We were quickly dis-
abused of this notion.

As the works of many studen ts of sociopathic personality assert, a sur-

prisingly high percentage of pathological liars are, in fact, gay.

The gay bar is the arena of sexual competition, and it brings out all that
is most loathsome in human nature. Here, stripped of the facade of wit

and cheer, gays stand nakedly revealed as single-minded, selfish sexual

predators.^^

30. "Cleaning Up Our Act" is actually a subheading of the book's final chapter, which
concludes with "A Self-Policing Code."

31. Kirk and Madsen, After the Ball, p. 278.

32. These accusations appear in chapter 6: "The State of Our Community: Gay Pride
Goeth before a Fall."
/

33. Kirk and Madsen, Afterthe Ball, pp. 292, 283, 313.
 —
V >
i

Therefore, “straights hate gays not just for what their myths and lies say

we are, but also for what we really are . This is the only line in the book

with which 1 agree; and it is a statement that, if taken seriously, means

that no sociological account of homophobia will explain or counteract^

it. Kirk and Madsen’s reliance on homophobic myths to describe what

we really are demonstrates, in any case, not tl>ejr understanding of ho-

mophobia, but their complete identification with it.

Although melancholia, too, depends on the psychic process of identifi-

cation and introjection, I will not press the point. No matter how ex-

treme the self-hatred, I am loath for obvious reasons to accuse gay men
of any pathological condition. I only want to draw an analogy between

pathological mourning and the sorry need of some gay men to look on

our imperfectly liberated past as immature and immoral. But I will not

resist a final word from Freud on melancholia, taken this time from

“The Ego and the Id’’: “What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as

it were, a pure culture of the death-instinct.

ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was founded in March of
1987 in response to a speech at New York’s Gay and Lesbian Community
Center by Larry Kramer. In his inimitable manner of combining incom-
prehension and harangue, Kramer chided, “I sometimes think we have

a death wish. I think we must want to die. I have never been able to un-

derstand why for six long years we have sat back and let ourselves liter-

ally be knocked off man by man — without fighting back. I have heard

of denial, but this is more than denial: this is a death wish.’’^®

Nearly two years later, in a mean-spirited, divisive attack on AIDS ac-

tivism published by the Nation, Darrell Yates Rist accused ACT UP

entirely falsely — of ignoring any gay issue but AIDS. After recalling a

visit to San Lrancisco’s Tenderloin district, in which he encountered teen-

Militancy

age gay runaways and hustlers, Rist continued, “I had just spent a night

and

34. Ibid., p. 276.

Mourning
35. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the /d(New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), p. 43.

36. Kramer, "Report from the Holocaust," p. 1.28.

 t

among those abandoned adolescents when, at a dinner in the Castro, I

listened to the other guests talk about nothing but AIDS, the dead, the

dying — which to their minds included every gay man in the city: fash-

ionable hysteria. ‘This,’ one of the them actually said, ‘is the only thing

worth fighting for.’ Not long before. I’d heard Larry Kramer, playwright
and AIDS activist, say something like that too, and had felt, in that suf-

focating moment, that finally we’d all gone suicidal, that we’d die of our
own death wish.”^^ It is between these two allegations of a death-

wish— one because we were not yet AIDS activists, the other because

we now — want frame

are that I to the remainder of my discussion. 144

It might appear from what I’ve outlined so far that gay men’s responses 145

to the enormous losses suffered in the AIDS epidemic are predictable.

This is far from the case, and is only the result of my schematic reading
of “Mourning and Melancholia’’ against what I know of our experiences.
I have accounted for neither the full depth and variety of our conflicts
nor the multiplicity of their possible outcomes. What I offer to rectify

this inadequacy is simply a list, to which anyone might add, of the prob-
lems we face.

Most people dying of AIDS are very young, and those of us coping with
these deaths, ourselves also young, have confronted great loss entirely

unprepared. The numbers of deaths are unthinkable: Lovers, friends,

acquaintances, and community members have fallen ill and died. Many
have lost upwards of a hundred people. Apart from the deaths, we con-
tend with the gruesome illness itself, acting as caretakers, often for very

extended periods, making innumerable hospital visits, providing emo-

tional support, negotiating our wholly inadequate and inhuman health
care and social welfare systems, keeping abreast of experimental treat-

ment therapies. Some of us have learned as much or more than most

doctors about the complex medicine of AIDS. Added to the caretaking

37. Darrell Yates Rist, "The Deadly Costs of an Obsession," Nation, February 13, 1989,

p. 181. For the response of ACT UP, among others, see the issues of March 20 and May
1, 1989. For an impassioned discussion of the entire debate, see also Watney, '"The
Possibilities of Permutation.'"
 X.

X >
i

>

and loss of others is often the need to monitor and make treatment de-

cisions about our own HIV illness, or face anxiety about our own health
status.^"

Through the turmoil imposed by illness and death, the rest of society of-
fers little support or even acknowledgment. P.n the contrary, we are

blamed, belittled, excluded, derided. We are discriminated against, lose

our housing and jobs, denied medical and life insurance. Every public

agency whose job it is to combat the epidemic has been slow to act,

failed entirely, or been deliberately counterproductive. We have there-

fore had to provide our own centers for support, care, and education

and even to fund and conduct our own treatment research. We have had
to rebuild our devastated community and culture, reconstruct our sex-
ual relationships, reinvent our sexual pleasure. Despite great achieve-

ments in so short a time and under such adversity, the dominant media

still pictures us only as wasting deathbed victims: we have therefore had

to wage a war of representation, too.

Frustration, anger, rage, and outrage, anxiety, fear, and terror, shame
and guilt, sadness and despair — it is not surprising that we feel these

things: what is surprising is that we often don’t. For those who feel only

a deadening numbness or constant depression, militant rage may well

be unimaginable, as again it might be for those who are paralyzed with

fear, filled with remorse, or overcome with guilt. To decry these re-

sponses — our own form of moralism — is to deny the extent of the vio-

lence we have all endured: even more important, it is to deny a

fundamental fact of psychic life: violence is also self-inflicted.

The most contested theoretical concept in the later work of Freud is the
drive to death, the drive that competes with the life instincts and com-

Militancy

38. It seems to me particularly telling that throughout the epidemic the dominant media

has routinely featured stories about anxieties provoked by AIDS — the anxieties of
and
health-care workers and cops exposed to needle sticks, of parents whose children

attend schools with a child who has been infected with HIV, of straight women who
Mourning

once upon a time had a bisexual lover . . . but I have never once seen a story about

the millions of gay men who have constantly lived with these anxieties since 1981.

K
prises both aggression and self-aggression. It was over this concept that

Reich broke with Freud, insisting that with the death drive Freud defin-

itively side-stepped the social causes of human misery. But, against

Reich’s objection, and that of other early proponents of a political psy-

choanalysis, Jacqueline Rose argues that it is oufy through the concept

of the death drive that we can understand the relationship between psy-
chic and social life, as we seek to determine “where to locate the vio-

lence. As opposed to Darrell Yates Rist’s pop-psychology assertion

that activists have a death wish, I want to suggest on the contrary that

we do not acknowledge the death drive. That is, we disavow the knowl- 146

edge that our misery comes from within as well as without, that it is the —
result of psychic as well as of social conflict — or rather, as Rose writes, 147

our misery “is not something that can be located on the inside or the

outside, in the psychic or the social . . . ,

but rather something that ap-

pears as the effect of the dichotomy itself. By making all violence

external, pushing it to the outside and objectifying it in “enemy” insti-

tutions and individuals, we deny its psychic articulation, deny that we

are effected, as well as affected, by it.

Perhaps an example will clarify my point. The issue of HIV antibody

testing has been a central concern for AIDS activists from the moment
the movement was formed. We have insisted, against every attempt to

implement mandatory or confidential testing, on the absolute right of

voluntary anonymous testing. At the International AIDS Conference in

Montreal in June of 1989, Stephen Joseph, health commissioner of New

York City, called for confidential testing with mandatory contact trac-

ing, based on the fact that immune-system monitoring and early treat-

ment intervention for those who are HIV-positive could now prolong

and perhaps save their lives. We immediately raised all the proper ob-

jections to his cynical proposal: that only if anonymity is guaranteed

will people get tested, that New York has too few testing sites to accom-

39. Jacqueline Rose, "Where Does the Misery Come From?" in Feminism and Psycho-
analysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1989), p. 28.
/

40. Ibid.
 >

modate the people wishing to be tested as it is, and that the services

necessary to care for people who test positive cannot even accommo-

date the current caseload. Agreeing that testing, counseling, monitor-

ing, and early treatment intervention are indeed crucial, we demanded^

instead an increase in the number of anonymous testing sites and a sys-
tem of neighborhood walk-in HIV clinics for ntonitoring and treatment.
We were entirely confident of the validity of our protests and demands.
We know the history of Stephen Joseph’s provocations, we know the city
government’s dismal failure to provide health care for its huge infected
population, and we know not only the advantages of early intervention

but also exactly what the treatment options are.

But with all this secure knowledge, we forget one thing: our own am-
bivalence about being tested, or, if seropositive, about making difficult

treatment decisions. For all the hours of floor discussion about de-

manding wide availability of testing and treatment, we do not always

avail ourselves of them, and we seldom discuss our anxiety and indeci-
sion. Very shortly after Joseph’s announcement in Montreal and our

successful mobilization against his plan,"*^ Mark Harrington, a member

of ACT HP’s Treatment and Data Committee, made an announcement
at a Monday-night meeting: “I personally know three people in this

41. 1 do not wish to claim that the "right" decision is to be tested. AIDS activists insist

quite properly only on choice, and on the viability of that choice through universally

available health care. But problems of HIV testing are not only sociopolitical;they are

also psychic. In "AIDS and Needless Deaths: How Early Treatment Is Ignored," Paul

Harding Douglas and Laura Pinsky enumerate a series of barriers to early interven-
tion in HIV disease, including lack of advocacy, lack of media coverage, lack of ser-
vices, and, crucially, "The Symbolic Meaning of Early Intervention forthe Individual."

This final section of their paper provides a much-needed analysis of psychic resis-

tance to taking the HIV antibody test. I wish to thank Paul Douglas and Laura Pinsky

for making their paper available to me.

42. The successes of the AIDS activist movement are, unfortunately, never secure. In the
Militancy

late fall of 1989, during the transition from Ed Koch's mayoralty to that of David Dink-
ins, Stephen Joseph resigned his position as health commissioner. But not without a
and
parting insult to those of us who had opposed his policies all along: Once again, and

now with the full support of the New York City Board of Health, Joseph asked the state
health department to collect the namesof people who test positive to HIV and to trace
Mourning

and contact their sex partners and those with whom they shared needles.
group who recently came down with PCP [Pneumocystis carinii pneu-
monia]/’ he said. “We have to realize that activism is not a prophylaxis

against opportunistic infections; it may be synergistic with aerosolized

pentamidine (a drug used prophylactically against PCP) but ,

it won’t on

its own prevent you from getting AIDS.’’

By referring to Freud’s concept of the death drive, I am not saying any-

thing so simple as that a drive to death directly prevents us from pro-

tecting ourselves against illness. Rather I am saying that by ignoring the

death drive, that is, by making all violence external, we fail to confront 148

ourselves, to acknowledge our ambivalence, to comprehend that our —

misery is also self-inflicted. To return to my example: It is not only New 149

York City’s collapsing health-care system and its sinister health commis-
sioner that affect our fate. Unconscious conflict can mean that we may
make decisions — or fail to make them — whose results may be deadly
too. And the rage we direct against Stephen Joseph, justified as it is, may
function as the very mechanism of our disavowal, whereby we convince

ourselves that we are making all the decisions we need to make.

Again I want to be very clear: The fact that our militancy may be a means
of dangerous denial in no way suggests that activism is unwarranted.
There is no question but that we must fight the unspeakable violence we
incur from the society in which we find ourselves. But if we understand
that violence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very psy-

chic mechanisms that make us part of this society, then we may also be
able to recognize — along with our rage — our terror, our guilt, and our
profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourn-
ing and militancy.

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 r

THE BOYS ll\i MY BEDROOM

First presented at the panel discussion

“Postniodernisn and Its Discontents,” Whitney

Museum ofAmerican Art, New York, Novembers,

1989, and published in Art in America, February

1990. This is a revised version first published in The

Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove,

MicliNe Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New

York: Routledge, 1993).

/
 >

In 1983, I was asked to contribute to the catalog of an exhibition about

the postmodernist strategy of appropriation organized by the Institute

of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia —^a museum now placed on pro-

bation by the National Endowment for the Arts.* I chose as a negative^

example — an example, that is, of old-fashioned modernist appropria-

tion — the photography of Robert Mapplethojipe. Here is part of what I

wrote;

Mapplethorpe’s photographs, whether portraits, nudes or still lifes (and

it is not coincidental that they fall so neatly into these traditional artis-

tic genres), appropriate the stylistics of prewar studio photography. Their

compositions, poses, lighting, and even their subjects fmondain personaT

ities, glacial nudes, tulips) rec^/ZVanity Fair andVogue at that historical

juncture when such artists as Edward Steichen and Man Ray contributed

to those publications their intimate knowledge of international art pho-

tography. Mapplethorpe’s abstraction and fetishizatiofj of objects thus

refer, through the mediation of the fashion industry, to Edward Weston,
while his abstraction of the subject refers to the neoclassical pretenses of

George Platt Lynes.^

In contrast to Mapplethorpe’s conventional borrowings, I posed the

work of Sherrie Levine:

When Levine wished to make reference to Edward Weston and to the

photographic variant of the neoclassical nude, she did so by simply repho-

tographing Weston’s pictures of his young son Neil — no combinations,
no transformations, no additions, no synthesis. . . . In such an undis-

guised theft of already existing images, Levine lays no claim to conven-

1. As punishment for having organized Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment\j\i\th

funding approved by the National Endowment for the Arts, the ICA was subjected,
Bedroom

through an amendment to a 1989 congressional appropriations measure, to a five-

year probationary period during which its activities would be specially scrutinized by
My
the NEA.
in
2. Douglas Crimp, "Appropriating Appropriation," in Image Scavengers: Photography
Boys

(Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1982), p. 30.

The
Sherrie Levine, Untitled (After Edward Weston), 1981
 \ >

Robert Mapplethorpe, Michael Reed, 1987

(© The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. Used with permission).

Bedroom

My
in

Boys

The

4
 t

Robert Mapplethorpe, Torso, 1985

(©The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. Used with permission).

 >

tional notions of artistic creativity. She makes use of the images, but not
to constitute a style of her own. Her appropriations have only functional

value for the particular historical discourses into which they are inserted.

In the case of the Weston nudes, that discourse is the very one in whicl\

Mapplethorpe’s photographs naively participate. In this respect, Levine’s

appropriation reflects on the strategy of appwpriation itself— the ap-
propriation by Weston of classical sculptural style; the^ appropriation by
\

Mapplethorpe of Weston’s style; the appropriation by the institutions of

high art of both Weston and Mapplethorpe, indeed of photography in

general; and finally, photography as a tool of appropriation.^

For several years I had hanging in my bedroom Levine’s series of Wes-

ton’s young male nudes. On a number of occasions, a certain kind of

visitor to my bedroom would ask me, “Who’s the kid in the photo-

graphs?” generally with the implication that I was into child pornogra-

phy. Wanting to counter that implication, but unable easily to explain

what those photographs meant to me, or at least what 1 thought they

meant to me, 1 usually told a little white lie, saying only that they were

photographs by a famous photographer of his son. I was thereby able to

establish a credible reason for having the pictures without having to ex-

plain postmodernism to someone 1 figured — given the nature of these

encounters — wouldn’t be particularly interested anyway.

But some time later 1 was forced to recognize that these questions were

not so naive as I’d assumed. The men in my bedroom were perfectly

able to read — in Weston’s posing, framing, and lighting the young Neil

so as to render his body a classical sculpture — the long-established

codes of homoeroticism. And in making the leap from those codes to

the codes of kiddie porn, they were stating no more than what was en-
acted, in the fall of 1989, as the law governing federal funding of art in

the United States. That law — proposed by right-wing senator Jesse

Bedroom

Helms in response to certain of Mapplethorpe’s photographs — directly

My equated homoeroticism with obscenity and with the sexual exploita-

in

Boys

3. Ibid., p. 30.

The
tion of children/ Of course, all of us know that neither Weston’s nor

Mapplethorpe’s photographs would be declared obscene under the

supreme court’s Miller v. California ruling, to which the appropriations
bill pretended to defer; but we also know that NEA grant applications do
not come before a court of law/ For those considering whether to fund

arts projects, it is the equation itself that would matter. As Jesse Helms
himself so aptly said of his victory: ‘“Old Helms will win every time’ on
cutting Federal Money for art projects with homosexual themes.”® And
indeed he will. As I hope everyone remembers, in 1987, when gay men
still constituted over 70 percent of all reported cases of AIDS in the 156

United States, 94 senators voted for the Helms amendment to prevent —

safe sex information directed at us from being funded by Congress.^ 157

Given these assaults on our sexuality and indeed on our lives, what are
we to say now of the ways we first theorized postmodernism? To stay

with the parochial debate with which I began, what does the strategy of

4. The compromise language of the notorious Helms amendment to the NEA/NEH ap-
propriations bill read:

None of the funds authorized to be appropriated for the National Endowment for the
Arts orthe National Endowment for the Humanities may be used to promote, dissem-

inate, or produce materials which in the judgment of the National Endowment for the
Arts or National Endowmentforthe Humanities may be considered obscene, includ-

ing but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual ex-
ploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a
whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. (Congres-
sional Record — House, October 2, 1989, p. H6407)

5. Moreover, in flagrant disregard of their own inclusion of the M/7/e/'language,the new

law declared a Sense of the Congress, clearly referring to photographs by Mapple-
thorpe and Andres Serrano, "that recently works have been funded which are with-
out artistic value but which are criticized as pornographic and shocking by any

standards" (Congressional Record — House, October 2, 1989. p. H6407). For an illumi-

nating discussion of Mlller 'm relation to the Right's attack on the NEA, see Carole S.

Vance, "Misunderstanding Obscenity," ArtinAmericalS, no. 5 (May 1990), pp. 39-45.

6. Maureen Dowd, "Jesse Helms Takes No-Lose Position on Art," New York 7/mes, July
28, 1989,p.Al.

7. See my discussion ofthis other notorious Helms amendmentin "Howto Have Promis-
cuity in an Epidemic," this volume.
/
 >

appropriation matter now? My answer is that we only now know how it

might really matter. '
- ^

In October of 1989, the third annual conference of the Lesbian and Gay^
Studies Center at Yale began with violence unleashed on the partici-

pants by the Yale and New Haven police forjcps.** The trouble started

with the arrest of Bill Dobbs, a lawyer and member of Art Positive, a

group within New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)
that was formed in response to the Helms amendment. Dobbs was pre-

sumed to be responsible for putting up a series of what the police

claimed were obscene posters around the sites of the conference. The

11x17 xerox posters — showing various images of and texts about sex ap-

propriated from such sources as old sex education manuals, sexology

texts, and pulp novels, and accompanied by the words “Sex Is” or “Just

Sex” —were produced by the anonymous San Francisco collective Boy

with Arms Akimbo, also formed to fight the Helms amendment. The
collective’s goal was to get as many people as possible involved in plac-

ing in public places imagery showing various cultural constructions of

sexuality. Four thousand of the “Sex Is” posters were wheatpasted

around San Francisco, and they also appeared in Sacramento, on vari-

ous Bay Area college campuses, in Boston, New York, Tel Aviv, and

Paris, as well as, of course. New Haven. For the month prior to the Yale

lesbian and gay conference, the “Sex Is” xeroxes were shown in the

city-sponsored San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, situated across

from San Francisco City Hall, in an exhibition entitled “What’s Wrong

with This Picture? Artists Respond to Censorship.”

But it is precisely the censorial intent of the Helms amendment, to

which Boy with Arms Akimbo’s pictures were intended to call attention

at the Yale conference, that was effaced in the reporting of the events of

that weekend. While charges against others arrested in the fracas were
Bedroom

quickly dropped, those against Dobbs were not. And Yale president

My
in
8. The conference, entitled "Outside/Inside," was held on the weekend of October 27-
Boys

29, 1989. The police-instigated violence occurred on Friday evening, October 27.

The
Benno Schmidt adopted an uncompromising stance. Rather than apol-

ogize for the homophobic actions of his police, he sought to exonerate

them through an “impartial” investigation, conducted as usual by the

police themselves, to adjudicate the obscenity call and to consider pos-

sible police misconduct.^ Moreover, Schmidt was quoted in the New

Haven Register as saying that he thought at least one of the posters
would be considered obscene using the supreme court’s definition. The
court’s caveat regarding “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific

value” was simply disregarded by this so-called expert in First Amend-

ment law, since the serious political value of Boy with Arms Akimbo’s 158

posters — that they constitute a form of political speech about Helms’s —

equation of homoeroticism with obscenity — was never even admitted 159

as an issue.

9. On NovemberSO, the NewYork 77mesreportedthat"chargesagainstMr. Dobbs were

eventually dropped," and that "two Yale police officers will be disciplined for using

'poorjudgment.'" Thus, forthe violence many of us protesting the intial arrests expe-
rienced atthe hands of both Yale and New Haven police, the officers' disciplining will

consist of a reprimand for one and three days without pay forthe other. This accords

perfectly with a number of recent cases in which the police have investigated their

own abuses, as well as with a general failure to take attacks against gay men and
lesbians seriously.

10. 1 wrote an open letter of protest to President Schmidt, the text of which I reproduce
here:

As the keynote speakerforthe third annual conference sponsored by the Lesbian and
Gay Studies Center at Yale last weekend, I am writing you to express my outrage at

the homophobic violence unleashed against us on Friday evening, violence initiated

by the Yale police and escalated by the New Haven police. In addition, I write to
protest the Yale administration's wholly inadequate response to this violence. When
we gathered for that response on Saturday morning, we were treated to a series of
insults: first, that you did not consider homophobic violence against us as requiring
your presence; second, thatthe very people who suffered or witnessed this violence

were told that "the facts were not yet known"; and finally, that the violence itself

could not even be named. We were told merely that Yale University supports freedom
of expression — a vague and easy claim — and that an impartial investigation would
take place.

Gay men and lesbians have very little reason to have faith in "impartiality" in these
matters, especially after having experienced the atmosphere at Yale. Throughout the

weekend, conference members were subjected to homophobic remarks wherever

we went. My own speech Saturday night was deliberately disrupted by students
 N >
t

Boy with Arms Akimbo is only one example of how the postmodernist

strategy of appropriation has been transformed through its shift from a

grounding in art-world discourse to a grounding in movement politics.

« %

squealing their cartires outside the Whitney Humanities Center. Since apparently no

one in an official capacity at Yale attended my speech^-l want to reconstruct for you
some of my opening remarks.

Participants in the Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference this past Weekend included
some ofthe most distinguished and committed gay and lesbian scholars and activists

working today. Among them were members ofthe international community of people

fighting against the AIDS epidemic, including people living with AIDS. It is my opinion
that until all of us are satisfied with Yale University's support of our work, including

substantial financial commitments to the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, we
should no longer lend credibility to Yale's pretense of upholding free expression by
our presence at Yale. The University's claim to respect free speech will remain hol-

low until you, as president, issue an unambiguous public statement condemning all

forms of homophobia — named as such. This condemnation must also extend to la-

beling representations of our sexualities as obscene. Moreover, we expect a state-

ment of positive support for all forms of expression by gay men and lesbians of our

sexualities.

I was deeply impressed and moved by the Yale students and faculty who organized

and participated in the Lesbian and Gay Studies conference. They deserve all the

credit for the success ofthe conference — success in the face ofthe university's var-

iously expressed contempt for us. In the past you have belittled the strong presence

at Yale of a gay and lesbian community by catering to, ratherthan countering, homo-

phobic charges and fears. In light of that injury, and of the added insults of this past

weekend, it is now imperative that your gay and lesbian scholars be given not only

protection in a clearly homophobic environment, but every encouragement to carry

on with their courageous work. This is not to be accomplished by your occasional

chats with an openly gay professor, but rather by meeting directly with the full gay
constituency at Yale to hear their grievances and to follow their guidance, and by tak-
ing a strong public position.

The international community of lesbian and gay scholars and activists will not let this

matter rest until the demands issued at the conference are met to the letter.

After a version of the present essay appeared in Art in America, Benno Schmidt

Bedroom
wrote a letter to the editor, to which I was given the chance to reply. After seeing my
response, Schmidt withdrew his letter, claiming that it had not been meant for publi-

cation. I include here the text of my letter, from which some of the contents of
My
in Schmidt's letter may be inferred:

Boys

Benno Schmidt's letter only reiterates his uncompromising stance regarding homo-
The
phobic actions at Yale during the third annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference
Within the AIDS activist movement, and especially within ACT UP New
York, a certain savvy about this narrow aspect of postmodernist theory
has been especially enabling. The graphic work of the Silence=Death
Project, Gran Fury, and many others, the video activism of DIVA TV (for

Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) grows very directly out of

propositions of postmodernist theory. Assaults on authorship have led to

last October. He confirms my charge that he sought to exonerate his police force by
ordering them to investigate themselves (if he could not anticipate the conclusions,
1 Rf1
he must be ignorant of the usual results of self-investigations by police
try). Schmidt's order was in flagrant disregard of the demand by
in this

the conferees that

coun-
—
"the university panel reviewing the actions of the Yale police include significant rep- i6l

resentation of the university's lesbian, gay and bisexual community." Moreover,

Schmidt fails to mention that, even underthe biased circumstances of the investiga-

tion, two police officers were disciplined for infractions of procedures and serious

errors of judgment. Schmidt also withholds the information that a Yale graduate stu-

dent has officially challenged the accuracy of the police investigation and that the
Yale Police Advisory Board has commenced an independent investigation.
What Schmidt refers to as the "views of the conference organizers" are in fact only

the views of five Yale faculty members (all of them male) — explicitly so stated: "the

'we' of this letter should be understood only to include the undersigned faculty mem-
bers." A very different position is held by other conference organizers, especially

graduate students, who did the bulk of the work. Schmidt appears to be indifferentto
their views. And what of the views of those of us subjected to the police violence? Not
a single one of the demands drawn up by conference goers in response to the actions

of the Yale and New Haven police has been met.

If Schmidt thinks "judgments in the area of obscenity are notoriously subtle and dif-

ficult to make," why was he so easily able to assert the probable obscenity of "at least

one of the posters," as was reported in the press?

It seems odd, too, that postering in a university building where conference sessions
would take place the following day, and this at 8:30 in the evening, should seem to

Schmidt an obvious security threat. Ratherthe police action is to be explained by the

remarks ofthe Yale law professor who phoned the policeto complain about what she
called "gay and lesbian crap" — this from the police transcript of the phone call.

Benno Schmidt's attitude toward gays and lesbians at Yale was made clear in 1987,

when he wrote a letter to Yale alumni reassuring them that Yale was not nearly as gay
a place as they might have read in the press. In other words, gays and lesbians are

for him a public relations problem. When, as keynote speaker of the conference, I

wrote Schmidt a letter abhorring the homophobia variously expressed against us, in-

cluding the disruption of my own speech by students squealing their cartires outside
the lecture hall, I received no response. Only now that I've written in a more public fo-

rum does the president have the "courtesy" to reply.

 X >
i

X
anonymous and collective production. Assaults on originality have given
rise to dictums like “if it works, use it”; “if it’s not yours, steal it.” Assaults

on the institutional confinement of art Have resulted in seeking means

of reaching affected and marginalized communities more directly."

^ \

But finally, 1 want to say something about what j^as excluded from post-
modernist theory, which made it considerably less enabling — ex-

cluded not only from the aesthetic theory I’ve been addre'ssing, but also

from more global theories. My own blindness in the Mapplethorpe/

Levine comparison is symptomatic of a far greater blindness. My failure

to take account of what those men in my bedroom insisted on seeing
was a failure of theory generally to consider what we are now only be-
ginning to be able to consider — what, in fact, was being variously con-
sidered at the Yale lesbian and gay studies conference: the dangerous,

even murderous, ways in which homophobia structures every aspect of

our culture. Sadly, it has taken the horror of AIDS and the virulent back-

lash against gays and lesbians that AIDS has unleashed to teach us the

gravity of this theoretical omission. What must be done now — if only

as a way to begin rectifying our oversight — is to name homophobia,

the very thing that Yale’s President Schmidt so adamantly refused to do,

the very thing that the entire membership of Congress refuses to do.

Returning once again to the comparison with which I began, but this

time taking into consideration what the boys in my bedroom saw, the

photographs by Mapplethorpe and Levine no longer seem definitional

of postmodernism through their opposition. Appropriating Weston’s

photographs of Neil, Levine claimed them as her own. Seen thus in the
possession of a woman, the nude pictures of the young boy no longer
appear, through their deployment of a classical vocabulary, as universal

aesthetic expression. Because Levine has “taken” the photographs, we

recognize the contingency of gender in looking at them. Another conse-
Bedroom

quence of that contingency is made explicit by Mapplethorpe. Appro-

My priating Weston’s style, Mapplethorpe puts in the place of Weston’s child

in

Boys

11. See Douglas Crimp, with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics {Seanle: Bay Press,
The
1990).

I
 t

the fully sexualized adult male body. Gazing at that body, we can no
longer overlook its eroticism. That is to say, we must abandon the for-
malism that attended only to the artworks style. In both cases, then, we
learn to experience Weston’s modernist photographs not as universal

images, but as images of the universal constituted by disavowing gen-

der and sexuality: and it is such deconstructions of modernism’s claims

to universality — as well as its formalism — that qualify as postmod-
ernist practices.

What made Boy with Arms Akimbo’s posters a provocation to the Yale 162

police and its president was perhaps after all not their imputed obscen- —
ity, but rather their variety, their proliferation of different ways of 163

showing Sex Is . . . Just Sex. Or rather, as Jesse Helms has made clear,

difference, in our culture, is obscenity. And it is this with which post-

modern theory must contend.

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A DAY WITHOUT GERTRUDE

First presented at the panel discussion “Art, Activism,

and AIDS: Into the Second Decade," held in

conjunction with A Day without Art, Soho Photo

Gallery, New York, November 30, 1990.

/
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In the introduction to AIDS: Cultural Analysis /Cultural Activism, I

wrote that “my intention was to show . . . that there was a critical, theo-
%

retical, activist alternative to the personal, elegiac expressions that ap-

peared to dominate the art-world response to AIDS. What seemed to

me essential was a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis,”
I took some flak for that statement, because it ^as interpreted as saying

that personal expressions of loss are unacceptable, that on7y activist re-

sponses are legitimate. That was not what I meant, and for several rea-

sons. The first is, as I tried to make clear in writing an essay about the

activist hostility to mourning, that I think our sense of personal loss

must be honored absolutely. And if this includes artistic expressions of

mourning, then they are to be honored, too. The second is that I think it

is dangerous to essentialize activism, to presume to know in advance

what constitutes activism and what does not.

Having said that, I think what I wrote in 1987 is still true of the art world

generally. Even though a certain amount of attention has recently been

paid to activist practices, that attention is limited — limited mostly to

the collective Gran Fury, which the art world seems to have designated

as the AIDS activist cultural group that can represent activist practice

tout court. But what Td like to recall, and to speak about briefly, is the

second sentence of my original statement: “What seemed to me essen-

tial was a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis.” It isn’t

merely a question of the accommodation of certain aesthetic practices

by the institutions of art — a videotape by DIVA TV shown here, a per-

formance by Gang there. Rather

^ it is crucial that art institutions recog-

nize that representation is not restricted to discrete symbolic gestures,

events, or works, but rather that everything they do functions as repre-

sentation. It is not a matter of occasionally allowing a political repre-

sentation of the AIDS crisis: rather, institutions constantly make political

representations, directly or indirectly, of the crisis.

Gertrude

“A Day without Art” is an example of what I mean. A Day without Art is

without

itself a vast representation, and it can be read as such. A Day without Art

Day

A 1. DIVA TV (for Damned Interferring Video Activist Television) and Gang were two ac-

tivist art collectives formed from within ACT UP New York.

 r

y
t
f

has become somewhat more complex in this, its second year, taking on
a more activist cast than it did last year — by providing education, rais-

ing money for service organizations, providing forums for discussions

of AIDS activism and spaces for exhibitions of AIDS activist art. But it

still signifies mostly in two ways: first, by showing that the art world has
borne heavy losses to the epidemic that it wishes to mourn, and second,
by being willing to set aside one day to draw attention to the devasta-

tion, if not always to the political mendacity that bears much of the

blame for this devastation. It still seems necessary to interpret this

sense of loss as a privileged one, that is, that the loss of artists’ lives is 166

somehow greater than the loss of other lives. This is what I mean by the —
fact that A Day without Art is itself a representation, and in this sense, a 167

regrettable one.

But more important, what A Day without Art represents, in its very
name, is that the art world is willing in various ways to participate in the

struggle against AIDS for one day each year. If art institutions were to

recognize what I called a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to

crisis, it seems obvious that they would consider 364 more days a year

during which they might act as if they knew a crisis existed. If, for ex-

ample, an museum is willing to display AIDS information on A Day

art

without Art, why not display that information every day of the year?

Here’s another way of posing this question: Last year, the Metropolitan

Museum’s participation in A Day without Art involved removing for the

day Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, a gesture that seemed

particularly obscure to many people. If we were to ask the museum to

remove that picture until the end of the AIDS crisis, what do you sup-
pose their response would be? Something, I suppose, on the order of
“What purpose would such deprivation serve?’’ And our answer would
have to be: “The same purpose as removing it for one day, only with a

permanence more commensurate with the losses that we are actually

experiencing.’’ My real problem with the Met’s gesture, which is being

repeated this year with other paintings, is that it is meaningless, or if

not meaningless, then meaningful only in ways that art institutions un-

derstand representation generally — that is, as hermetic, necessary to

interpret.
I’ll make a stab at interpreting the Met’s gesture from last yeaf’s Day
without Art: It is meant to signify ^esbian invisibility — not just lesbian
X
invisibility generally, but the invisibility of lesbians in the AIDS epi-

demic. And my suggestion for how the Met might make their represen-
%

tation more meaningful is that they replace Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude

Stein with a text about the refusal of the Centers for Disease Control to

include lesbian transmission in its epidemiology, and to explain further

that this refusal regarding lesbians might stand symbolically for the

CDC’s wider refusal to include the diseases that HIV-infected women

get among the diseases that determine the definition of AIDS. In other

words, what I would ask of art institutions is that they consider the con-

crete representational politics of AIDS. For the CDC, too, is involved in

representational practices, in this case representational practices that

systematically undercount the number of women with AIDS in the

United States.

ACT UP will demonstrate at the CDC this week to try to force them to

change their epidemiology to include women. ACT UP, too, is fighting a

war of representation. ACT UP’s understanding of representation is the

understanding I had in mind when I said that we needed a vastly ex-

panded view of culture in relation to crisis. And I still think the art world

needs to pay heed to this expanded view.

 f

RIGHT ON. GIRLFRIEND!

First presented as a Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

Symposium Lecture at the University of California,

Irvine, April lo, 1991, and published in Social Text

33 (1992).

/
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4

At Vito Russo’s memorial service in December of 1990, the first sp'eaker

was New York’s mayor David Dinkins. It had been reported in the gay

press that Dinkins paid a hospital visit a- few days before Vito died, and
that Vito had mustered the strength to sit up and say, “In 1776, Edmund
Burke of the British Parliament said about the slavery clause, ‘A politi-

cian owes the people not only his industry buj^his judgment, and if he

sacrifices his judgment to their opinions, he betrays them.”’^ Those of

US who are queer and / or AIDS activists knew very well what Vito was al-
luding to, because Mayor Dinkins had by then already sacrificed what
we took to be his judgment when we voted for him. He failed to make a

public issue of the rising tide of violence against gays and lesbians, re-

fusing to march with us in Staten Island to protest the homophobically

motivated murder of a disabled gay man, and unwilling to press for la-

beling as bias-related the murder of a gay Latino in a Jackson Heights

cruising area.^ He appointed Woodrow Myers health commissioner

over the vehement objections of AIDS activists; he canceled New York’s

pilot needle-exchange program, initiated by Myers’s predecessor but
opposed by the city’s conservative black leadership: he allowed thou-

sands of homeless people infected with HIV to remain in warehouse

shelters, where they are vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, especially

to the terrifying new epidemic of multi-drug-resistent strains of tuber-

culosis: and he drastically cut funding for health services even as the

city’s health-care system faced collapse from underfinancing. Still,

when Dinkins eulogized Vito Russo, he quoted what Vito had said to

him in the hospital and, with no apparent sense of irony, professed that
he would always remember it.

1. Arnie Kantrowitz, "Milestones: Vito Russo," 0utweekl2 (November 21, 1990), p. 37.

2. Several months later, however, Dinkins took a courageous stand against anti-gay and
lesbian prejudice by marching with the Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization (IGLO) in

New York's St. Patrick's Day parade. He did this in order to broker a compromise be-
tween IGLO and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the parade organizers who had re-

fused IGLO's application to participate. The result was that Dinkins was subjected to

Girlfriend!
torrents of abuse from the crowd and a cold shoulderfrom Cardinal O'Connor, which
led the mayor to compare his experience to civil rights marches in the South in the

1960s. See Duncan Osborne, "The Cardinal, the Mayor and the Balance of Power,"
On,

Outweek^l (April 3, 1990), pp. 30-37.

Right
 f

As soon as he had delivered his short speech, the mayor and his en-

tourage left the memorial service, accompanied by a small chorus of

boos. The next speaker was Vito’s old friend Arnie Kantrowitz, who be-
gan by saying that just in case we thought we had learned something
new about Vito — that he was a student of American history — we
should know that the lines he’d quoted to Dinkins came from the movie
version of the Broadway musical 1776. Our laughter at Arnie’s remark
brought back the Vito we knew and loved, the fierce activist who was
very funny and very queer, a very funny queer who knew and loved
movies, who knew better than anybody how badly the movies treated 170

queers, but still loved them. Those qualities were captured yet again in —
another of Arnie’s remarks. Reminiscing about Vito’s pleasure in show- 171

ing movies at home to his friends and about his unashamed worship of
Judy Garland, Arnie summed up Vito’s brand of gay militancy (or per-

haps I should say, his gay brand of militancy): “In Vito’s house,’’ Arnie
quipped, “either you respected Judy ... or you left.’’

A very different chord was struck later in the service by Larry Kramer.
“The Vito who was my friend was different from the one I’ve heard
about today,’’ the Hollywood screenwriter said. “Since I hate old movies,
I wasn’t in his home-screening crowd. ’’^ Kramer went on to ask, rhetor-

ically, “Who killed Vito?’’ And his answer? “As sure as any virus killed

him, we killed him. Everyone in this room killed him. Twenty-five mil-
lion people outside this room killed him. Vito was killed by twenty-five
million gay men and lesbians who for ten long years of this plague have
refused to get our act together. Can’t you see that?’’

The “can’t you see that?” was the refrain of Kramer’s speech, which went
on to name names — mostly those of closeted gay men and lesbians in
the entertainment industry. The last names mentioned were those as-

sociated with an AIDS fundraiser: “There’s going to be a benefit screen-

ing of a movie called Silence of the Lambs. The villain is a gay man who
mass-murders people. AmFAR is holding the benefit. Thanks a lot,

3. Larry Kramer, "Who Killed Vito Russo?" OutweekQQ (February 20, 1990), p. 26.
 V
X i
i

>

Mathilde Krim [Mathilde Krim is, as is well known, the chairperson of

the American Foundation for AIDS Researchl. Thanks a lot, Arthur

Krim, for financing the film [Arthur Krim, Mathilde’s husband, is the

founder of Orion Pictures]. Thanks a lot, Jodie Foster, for starring in it^

[Jodie Foster is . . . well, we know who Jodie'Foster is . . .1

Some other people at the memorial service disagreed with Larry about

who killed Vito. As several hundred of Vito’s friends and admirers ar-

rived at the service, we were handed a xeroxed flier signed “Three

Anonymous Queers,” which began;

On the same night last month, Vito Russo died from AIDS and Jesse

Helms was reelected to another six years of power. ... I believe with all

my heart that Jesse Helms killed Vito Russo. And I believe without ques-
tion that when I was queer-bashed, Helms was as responsible for my in-
juries as if he had inflicted the wounds with his own hands. I fully

imagine in a meeting with Helms, he would have the blood and flesh of
dead dykes and fags dripping from his hands and mouth. And I hate him
and I believe he is a threat to my very existence and I have every right to
defend myself against him with any amount offorce I choose.

The flier closed with two questions: “If I am ever brave enough to mur-
der Jesse Helms, will you hand me the gun to carry out the deed? Will

you hide me from the law once it is done?”

Most queers will recognize, in these two rhetorical answers to the ques-

tion, Who killed Vito? positions taken on debates in contemporary

queer politics, debates about “outing” and “bashing back.” My interest
here is not so much to take sides in these debates as to describe both the
political conjuncture within which they take place and some of the cul-
tural interventions within them. I also want to attend to their relevance

for AIDS activism, the movement that to some degree brought them to
Girlfriend!

the fore and in which they are sometimes played out. It is not coinci-

dental that they surfaced at Vito Russo’s memorial service, for in many
On,

ways Vito was the quintessential gay activist turned AIDS activist.
Right
 /

Vito’s death was more than a personal loss to his friends and admirers.
It was also a great symbolic loss to ACT UP. The Three Anonymous
Queers put it this way: “Vito is dead and everything remains the same. 1

thought 1 might go to sleep the night after his death and wake up to find
the city burned to the ground.” Such a fantasy, which recalls sponta-

neous riots in the wake of murdered civil rights leaders of the 1960s,

arises, I think, not only because Vito was a cherished leader, but be-

cause he held out hope in a very particular way, hope that he voiced in
his famous Albany speech from ACT NOW’s Nine Days of Protest in the

spring of 1988.'’ The speech began: “A friend of mine has a half-fare tran- 172

sit card which he uses on busses and subways. The other day when he —
showed his card, the token attendant asked what his disability was. He 173

said, T have AIDS,’ and the attendant said, ‘No you don’t. If you had
AIDS, you’d be home, dying.’ I’m here to speak out today as a PWA who
is not dying from, but for the last three years quite successfully living

with, AIDS.” Vito ended the speech by saying, “After we kick the shit out
of this'disease, I intend to be alive to kick the shit out of this system, so

that this will never happen again.”

Vito’s death painfully demonstrated to many AIDS activists that the

rhetoric of hope we invented and depended on — a rhetoric of “living

with AIDS,” in which “AIDS is not a death sentence,” but rather “a

chronic manageable illness” — that rhetoric was becoming difficult to

sustain. I don’t want to minimize the possibility that anyone’s death

might result in such a loss of hope for someone, and, moreover, within
a two-week period of Vito’s death, four other highly visible members of
ACT UP New York also died, a cumulative loss for us that was all but un-
bearable. But 1 think many of us had a special investment in Vito’s sur-

vival, not only because he was so beloved, but because, as a long-term

survivor, as a resolute believer in his own survival, and as a highly vis-

ible and articulate fighter for his and others’ survival, he fully embodied
that hope.

4. See Douglas Crimp, with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay Press,
1990), pp. 53-69.
 % i
4

Vito’s death coincided with the waning not only of our optimism but

also of a period of limited but concrete successes for the AIDS activist

movement. During that period — rouglily, the first two and a half years

after the founding of ACT UP in the spring of 1987 —we had succeeded^
in focusing greater public attention on AIDS, in shifting the discussion

of AIDS from one dominated by a punitive mosalism to one directed to-

ward combating a public health emergency, and in affecting policy in

concrete ways, particularly drug development policy.

During the past two years, however, we have experienced only disap-
pointments and setbacks. We have seen almost no new drugs to combat
AIDS, whether antivirals or treatments for, or prophylaxes against, op-

portunistic infections (OIs). The results of ddl and ddC studies have
been less than encouraging, and the few potentially effective treat-

ments for OIs are either held up in the FDA’s approval process or, when
granted marketing approval, subject to record-breaking price gouging.

We have had to return to other battles we had thought were behind us,

such as the call for mandatory testing of health-care professionals in the

wake of hysteria caused by the possible transmission of HIV from a den-
tist to his patients: after having worked tirelessly to get the voices of

people with AIDS heard, the media and Congress finally listened sym-

pathetically to one, that of Kimberly Bergalis, who in fact spoke not as a

person with AIDS (“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she protested), but as
the “victim” of people with AIDS (“My life has been taken away”).^ We
have seen the leveling off or shrinking of spending on AIDS at local,

state, and federal levels, a particularly disheartening example of which

was the passage, with great fanfare, of the Ryan White Emergency CARE
bill providing disaster relief to the hardest hit cities, and then, at budget

time, the failure to provide most of the funding for it. At the same time,

case loads continue to spiral upwards, new HIV infections continue to

multiply, and the epidemic becomes more entrenched in populations

already burdened with other poverty-related problems, populations

with no primary health care, no health insurance, often no housing.

Girlfriend!

On,

Right

5. Quoted in the New York Times, September 27, 1991, p. A12.

 f

Perhaps even more demoralizing than the cumulative effects of these

setbacks, we are faced with a new kind of indifference, an indifference

that has been called the “normalization of AIDS.” If, for the first eight

years of the epidemic — the term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — in-

difference took the form of callously ignoring the crisis, under George
Bush, AIDS has been “normalized” as just one item on a long list of sup-
posedly intractable social problems. How often do we hear the list re-

cited? — poverty, crime, drugs, homelessness, and AIDS. AIDS is no

longer an emergency. It’s merely a permanent disaster. One effect of this
normalization process is the growing credence granted the claim that 174

AIDS has received a disproportionate amount of federal funding for —

medical research. This claim overlooks the fact that AIDS is a new dis- 175

ease syndrome, that it primarily threatens the lives of the young, that it

is not merely an illness but a bewildering array of illnesses, and, most

important, that it is an epidemic still out of control. The saddest irony is

that, now that our optimism has turned to grim realism, our old rheto-
0
ric is appropriated to abet the process of normalization and defunding.
Hence our ambivalence at Magic Johnson’s powerful example of “living
with HIV,” since we now know that, particularly among people of color,
Johnson’s ability to “fight the virus,” as he puts it, will be exceptional,
and that the sense that AIDS is already manageable will only relax ef-
forts to make it so.

This is a very sketchy background against which new tactics have been
embraced by queers. More important, it is the background against
which AIDS activism is being painfully transformed. The interrelation
between the two — queer activism and AIDS activism — is complex,
shifting, sometimes divisive. As a means of analyzing the transforma-
tions and the divisions, I want to return to Larry Kramer’s finger-
pointing at Vito Russo’s memorial service.

Before coming to Jodie Foster and The Silence of the Lambs, a short

archeology of “outing.”® All queers have extensive experience with the

6. For a detailed account of outing, including historical background and analysis of the

contemporary debates as well as an appendix of essential articles from the media,

 X >
»

closet, no matter how much of a sissy or tom boy we were as children, no

matter how early we declared our sexual preferences, no matter how de-
termined we are to be openly gay or lesbian. The closet is not a function

of homosexuality in our culture, but of compulsory and presumptive ^

heterosexuality. I may be publicly identified as gay, but in order for that

identity to be acknowledged, I have to declare k.on each new occasion.

By “occasion,” I mean something as simple as asking a cab driver to take
me to a bar like the Spike, or kissing my friend Jeff good-bye on a

crowded subway when he gets off two stops before me on our way home
from the gym. Fearing for my safety, I might choose not to kiss Jeff,

thereby hiding behind our fellow riders’ presumption that we’re straight.^

As part of our experience with the closet, which was for most of us the
only safe place to be as adolescents, we also know what it’s like to keep

the closet door firmly shut by pretending not only to be heterosexual

but also to be homophobic — since in many circumstances the mark of

one’s heterosexuality is the open expression of hatred toward queers.

Thus most of us have the experience, usually from our youth, of op-

pressing other queers in order to elude that same oppression. Eve Sedg-
wick writes in Epistemology of the Closet that “it is entirely within the

experience of gay people to find that a homophobic figure in power has

... a disproportionate likelihood of being gay and closeted.”® I’m not so

sure. I don’t think there is much likelihood at all that Jesse Helms, Car-

dinal O’Connor, and Patrick Buchanan, for example, are gay and clos-

eted. We do have experience with homophobia dictated by the closet,

but that experience is as much of ourselves as of others. And it is often

the projection of that experience that makes us suspicious of the homo-

phobic figure in power.

see Larry Gross, The Contested Closet: The Politics and Ethics of duf/ng (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

7. It's not that Jeff and I are so butch as to be unreadable as gay; indeed many people
Girlfriend! might presume that we are gay, but our not behaving "overtly" allows them to act

precisely as if the operative presumption is that everyone is straight unless openly

On,
declaring themselves notto be.

8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the C/osef (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
Right

versity of California Press, 1990), p. 81.

 r
—

Such suspicions, enhanced by rumors, have sometimes led us to im-

pugn the heterosexuality of our oppressors. A celebrated case is that of

former New York City mayor Ed Koch. A confirmed bachelor, Koch re-

quired a former beauty queen for a “beard” to win his first mayoral pri-

mary, since the opposition’s slogan was "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.”

The “homo” won the election, and thereby gained control of the city

that would soon have the highest number of AIDS cases of any city in

the world. During the time when attention to AIDS implied attention to
a gay disease, Koch paid no attention, and many interpreted his need to

dissociate himself as a form of self-defense, the defense of his closet. 176

The spectacular conclusion, some years later, was Koch’s open admis- —
sion on a radio talk show of his heferosexuality, which, after many years 177

of insisting that his sexuality was nobody’s business, made the front

page of New York Newsday. For ACT UP’s Target City Hall demon-
stration in March 1989, an affinity group pasted that Newsday cover to

placards. Its banner headline — “KOCH: I'M HETEROSEXUAL” — an-

0
swered with “Yeah, and I’m Carmen Miranda.” The Newsday headline
also inspired a tongue-twister chant for the day: “Why’s New York AIDS
care ineffectual? Ask Ed Koch, the heterosexual.” Target City Hall was
an outing with a queer sense of humor.

The tendency to suspect a closeted homosexual behind a lack of com-

mitment to fighting AIDS migrated, in the figure of Michelangelo Sig-
norile, from ACT UP to Outweek, New York’s short-lived gay and lesbian
weekly. In charge of ACT UP’s media committee during Target City Hall

and later Outweekfs features editor, Signorile also wrote a column called
“Gossip Watch,” a queer variation on media watches that restricted its

purview to gossip columns. Using the blunt instruments of all-caps,

four-letter-word invective and the AIDS crisis as an excuse for righteous
indignation, Signorile’s “Gossip Watch” chastised gossip columnists

often themselves closeted homosexuals — for, among other things, in-

venting beards for closeted celebrities who had done nothing publicly
about the AIDS crisis.

This circumscribed context of what came to be called outing has impor-

tant bearing on the ensuing debate. Signorile appeared initially to want
 V >
4

to say something about the privileged position of gossip in our culture’s

management of the open secret. Outing is not (at least not at first) the

revelation of that secret, but the revelation that the secret was no secret

at all. That was the scandal of Outweek’s Malcolm Forbes cover story, for^

which Time and Newsweek — not Outweek — invented the term “out-

ing.”'^ The dominant media heaped its fear ancTUiathing upon Signorile,

Outweek, and queers generally, not because Forbes’s homosexuality

had been revealed, but because their own complicity in concealing it had
been revealed. Forbes was not “outed,” the media’s homophobia was.

From the moment “outing” was named, however, the straight media set

the terms of debate, and we queers foolishly accepted those terms by

seeking to justify an act of which we had not been guilty. We resorted

then to our two, mutually contradictory excuses: that our oppressors

are disproportionately likely to be gay and closeted and that we need
them as role models. In adopting our paradoxical defense, we ignored
the ways in which both of these positions are turned against us, espe-

cially in the context of AIDS. AIDS has often resulted in a peculiarly

public and unarguable means of outing. Day after day, as we read the

obituary section of the New York Times, we are faced with incontro-

vertible proof — in their survival by “long-time companions” (a term

invented by the Times ) — of the homosexuality of artists, actors, and

dancers: of fashion designers, models, and interior decorators: of doc-

tors, lawyers, and stockbrokers. The tragic irony is that it has taken AIDS
to prove our Stonewall slogan: “We are everywhere.”*"

But the two most notorious outings by AIDS should give us pause about
the benefits of such revelations. Responses to the deaths of Rock Hud-
son and Roy Cohn have a perverse symmetry. Hudson was locked in

9. William Henry III, "Forcing Gays Out of the Closet," Time, January 29, 1990, p. 67;

David Gelman, "'Outing': An Unexpected Assault on Sexual Privacy," Newsweek,

Girlfriend! April 30, 1990, p. 66.

10. This was not always the case. It took intense pressure from queers and AIDS activists

On, to force the Timesto list surviving lovers of gay men. Even now, the 77mesonly men-
tions a "companion" in the course of an obituary story, not as one of the survivors,
Right

who are still limited to blood relatives andJegal spouses.

 .

Hollywood’s ’50s closet, hiding from, among other things, a McCarthy-

ism that equated commies and queers. Cohn was the closeted Mc-
Carthyite. Hudson personified decency to a majority of Americans, and
his homosexuality was seen as a betrayal. He became “the hunk who
lived a lie.’’" Roy Cohn came belatedly to represent indecency to most
Americans: his homosexuality was seen as fidelity to his very being. He
was the McCarthyite queer, the evil homosexual who lied about every-
thing.'2 The revelation of the secret — the secret that was, of course, no
secret in either case — became in both cases the revelation that homo-
sexuals are liars and traitors. Nothing new about that. 178

In this scenario, who is the oppressor and who the role model? As 1 read 179

the homophobic press accounts, Hudson is the oppressor — guilty of

oppressing himself and all the innocent fans who believed him — and
Cohn the role model — absolutely faithful to the truth of homosexuality
in his duplicity and cowardice. Our outing fantasy — that the revelation

of homosexuality would have a transformative effect on homophobic

discourse — was only a fantasy after all, and a dangerous one at that. As
Sedgwick counsels in Epistemology of the Closet:

We have too much cause to know how limited a leverage any individual
revelation can exercise over collectively scaled and institutionally em-

n. See Richard Meyer, "Rock Hudson's Body," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay The-
ories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 259-288.

12. See, e.g., Robert Sherrill, "King Cohn," Nation, May 21, 1988, pp. 719-725. Beginning
with the sentence, "Cohn was a particularly nasty homosexual," Sherrill recounts
stories of Cohn's extreme promiscuity and his supposed relations with other duplici-
tous right-wing homosexuals, then ends his account with the following paragraph;

Typically disloyal, Cohn gave no support to homosexuals who were trying to win
public acceptance. He called them "fags," did all he could to make their lives miser-
able, lectured against them, berated politicians for any display of tolerance toward
homosexuals and urged laws to restrict their freedom. To his death he denied that he
was homosexual, but the Dorian Gray scene of his dying of AIDS said it all: "Roy . .

lay in bed, unheeding, his flesh cracking open, sores on his body, his faculties wan-
ing" and with a one-inch "slit-like wound above (hisl anus."

The final quotations, indicative for Sherrill not of disease but of homosexuality (or per-

haps the two are not to be differentiated), are uncredited, but are taken from one of
the two books under review in the article. Citizen Cohn by Nicholas von Hoffman.
 > >
i

bodied oppressions. Acknowledgynent of this disproportion does not mean

that the consequences of such acts as coming out can be circumscribed
within predetermined boundaries, as if between “personal” and “politi-

cal” realms, nor does it require us to deny how disproportionately power- ^

fuland disruptive such acts can be. But the brute incommensurability has

nonetheless to be acknowledged. In the theatricc^ljiisplay of an already in-

stitutionalized ignorance no transformative potential is to be looked for.^^

N
\

Signorile’s initial impulse was perhaps, then, more productive: not to

“out” supposedly closeted gay men and lesbians, but to “out” enforcers

of the closet, not to reveal the “secret” of homosexuality, but to reveal

the “secret” of homophobia. For it is only the latter that is truly a secret,

and a truly dirty secret. As for the former, the speculation about the sex-

uality of celebrities, gossip is a privileged activity for queers, too.

Which brings us to Jodie Foster . . . and The Silence of the Lambs. Larry
Kramer, who claimed in his speech that Vito Russo “was the only person
who agreed with me unequivocally on everything I said and did,”

added, after his thank-you to Jodie Foster for starring in Silence: “Vito
would really have screamed about that one.” But Vito can speak for

himself. In his introduction to The Celluloid Closet, entitled “On the

Closet Mentality,” Vito wrote.

The public should ... be aware of the sexuality of gay actors just as it is

aware of the heterosexuality of the majority. Ido not believe that such a

discussion is nobody’s business, nor do I believe that it is one of a sexual

and therefore private nature. Discussing such things in a book without

the knowledge or consent of the people in question is, alas, immoral and
libelous. It is immoral because unless people by their own choice come
out of the closet, the announcement is valueless; it is libelous because

such information has been known to destroy people’s lives. Some of us

will change that in time.^"^
Girlfriend!

On,
13. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 78.

14. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York; Harper &
Right

Row, 1987), p. xi.

 The last sentence is characteristic of Vito, of his fighting spirit, his opti-

mism, and his understanding of what needed changing. Among the

things we need to change is the fact that calling someone homosexual
is, to this day, considered by our legal system to be libelous per se. Ma-
licious intent does not have to be proved.

One thing Vito would surely have disagreed with Larry about is who to

blame for his own death. Vito pointed his finger at queers only to tell us
how much he loved us and to praise our courage. As for The Silence of
the Lambs, Vito would have been the best equipped among us to show 180

just how careless Jonathan Demme was in his characterization of serial —

killer Buffalo Bill, a.k.a. Jame Gumb, with his miniature poodle named 181

Precious, his chiffon scarves, his made-up face, his nipple ring, and his
murdered boyfriend. Maybe these features don’t have to add up to a ho-
mophobic stereotype within the complex alignments of sexuality and
pathology represented in The Silence of the Lambs, but they most cer-
tainly'do within the history of their deployment by Hollywood, the his-
tory Vito Russo wrote.

Up to a point, Demme was careful about his portrayals in Silence — of

both Clarice Starling and the men around her. Feminist approval of the
film derives, I think, not only from the strength and intelligence of Fos-
ter’s character Clarice, but also from her independence from an array of

alternately annoying or sinister patriarchal figures, although just how

independent is a matter of contention. But Clarice does reject every

attempt to put the make on her; her commitment is to the captured

woman. Demme ultimately failed, though, to follow through on his

film’s antipatriarchal logic. He let patriarchy off the hook by homosexu-

alizing the psychopaths — Buffalo Bill, obviously, but Hannibal Lecter

as well, whose disturbing appeal can hardly be divorced from his camp,
effete intelligence. What straight man would get off a line like “Oh, Sen-
ator, . . . love your suit!’’? Demme’s homophobia is thus a matter not
only of underwriting the tradition of Hollywood’s stereotyping of gay

men as psychopathic killers, but also of his displacement of the most

horrifying consequences of patriarchy onto men who are far from
straight.
 i

In Thomas Harris’s novel, Jame Gumb is not homosexual — the' boy-

friend he murdered was not his,T)ut Hannibal Teeter’s patients. On the

%

contrary, Gumb is explicitly referred to in the book as a fag basher.^^ He

was refused the sex change operation he applied for at lohns Hopkins

not only because he failed the requisite psychological tests, but also be-

cause he had a police record for two assaults pn gay men. One has to

wonder why Demme decided to leave out this information in a film that
N

Otherwise follows the novel very precisely. Would the fact that the killer

was a homophobe have brought yet another murderous consequence of

patriarchy too close to home?

The displacement of patriarchy’s most serious consequences can also

be seen in the film’s illustration of another mode of feminist analysis,

one that moves beyond positive-versus-negative images to the enforce-

ment of sexual difference through psychic processes provoked in the

spectator by cinematic codes. Laura Mulvey might well have written the

climactic scene. Deprived of agency by being the object rather than

the subject of vision, Clarice Starling is stalked by the voyeuristic gaze of

the spectator, who, unseen in the darkness, just like the serial killer, sees

her through infrared glasses worn by lame Gumb. There is no question

where spectatorial identification ought to lie, and how it ought to be

gendered: what the killer male’s gaze sees is all the camera shows, and

the image of the woman is trapped by the cinematic apparatus, repre-

sented in the prosthetic device the killer wears. But something unex-

15. In the novel, Dr. Danielson of Johns Hopkins reports to Jack Crawford: "The Harris-

burg police were after [Gumb] for two assaults on homosexual men. The last one
nearly died" (Thomas Harris, The Silence of the /.am/js [New York: St. Martin's, 1989],

And Crawford reports to Clarice Starling about Gumb: "He's a fag-basher"

p. 312).

(p. 322). This is notto say that Harris's portrayal of Gumb isfree of homophobic stereo-
typing. Most of the details of Gumb's characterization in the film are taken directly

from the novel. Demme added one (the nipple ring) and omitted one (Gumb's obses-

sion with his mother). But it is importantto add that stereotyping functions differently

Girlfriend! in the two mediums and that their respective histories of homophobic portrayals dif-

fer even more significantly.

On, 16. 1 have in mind, of course, Mulvey's classic and often reprinted essay "Visual Pleasure

and Narrative Cinema" (1975), now in her essay collection. Visual and Other Plea-
Right

sures (E\oommqXon and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 14-26.

«
 . .

Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) with his poodle Precious in The Silence of the Lambs, 1 991
0

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) cornered in The Silence of the Lambs, 1991
 N >
i

pected happens. The tension of the scene is broken, not by Cfarice’s

gunshots, but by an often -remarked male spectator’s shout in the dark:

“Shoot the fucking faggot!” Homophobia breaks the power of cinema,

“proper” interpellation fails, and only then is Clarice restored to agency.
» \

The film is thus perhaps feminist, though insufficiently, and certainly

homophobic, quite sufficiently. Acknowledging these two different po-

sitions should not be impossible; although they are interdependent in

the film’s mapping of them, they do not have to be mutually exclusive in
our reading of the film. What makes the debate about The Silence of the
Lambs troubling, however, is its polarization along gender lines. Women,
including lesbians, have tended to defend the film, while gay men usu-
ally decry it. And Jodie Foster gets caught in the middle. As B. Ruby Rich,
an “out” lesbian, put it in the Village Voice, “Male and female desires,
fears, and pleasures in the cinema have rarely coincided, so it should

come as no surprise that dyke and faggot reactions to this movie are
likely to diverge as well.”^^ For gay men, Foster lends her prestige to the

film’s homophobic portrayal; for women, including lesbians, she lends

her skill to a feminist one. For gay men, Foster is a closeted oppressor;

for lesbians, she’s a role model.

The division is a double one, for it entails, on the one hand, the identity

of Foster and, on the other, the conception of identity itself. Castigating

Foster as oppressor both presumes her (closeted) lesbian identity and

presumes that identity precedes and determines political enactment.

Praising Foster as role model, by contrast, accepts her feminism as itself

constitutive of her identity. Rich insists, “I’m not willing to give up the
immense satisfactions of a heroine with whom women can identify. Not
willing to reduce all the intricate components of this movie down to the
pass/fail score of one character. Please excuse me if my attention is fo-

17. B. Ruby Rich, contribution to "Writers on the /.am/j; Sorting Out the Sexual Politics of

Girlfriend!
a Controversial Film," Village Voice, March 5, 1991, p. 59. This series of short pieces

on the film was partially in response to questions raised about the film's homophobic
stereotyping and the threat of "outing" Jodie Foster by Michelangelo Signorile in
On,

Outweek.
Right

«
 r

cused not on the killer, but on the women he kills.” And her defense
concludes, “Guess I’m just a girl.” Which is to say that in this debate.

Rich’s identification, her politics, emphasizes gender identity over sex-

ual identity. As we know from her writing, in debates within feminism.
Rich is perfectly capable of reversing the emphasis. Rich’s identity is not
fixed, does not determine her political identifications: rather her politi-

cal identification momentarily fixes her identity: “Guess I’m just a girl.”

But where is the lesbian in this picture? Hasn’t she again been rendered

invisible? And what, if not outing, will make her visible?

184

Videomaker lean Carlomusto’s video L 7s for fhe Way Von Look provides —
one answer. In the central section of the tape, nine women, speaking 185

singly or in groups, tell the story of an evening at the Lower East Side
performance space PS 122 when lesbian comedian Reno was perform-
ing. What made the occasion worth talking about was that someone
special was in the audience. First Zoe tells us that halfway through

Reno’s 'performance, Nancy leaned over to say, “Fran Liebowitz is over

there . . . we’re both, you know, we both kinda have a thing for

Fran. . .
.” Nancy then says she had more fun watching Fran laughing at
Reno than she did laughing at Reno herself, after which Cynthia, sitting

with her friend Bea, describes a commotion on the stairway as the au-
dience was leaving. “Finally,” Cynthia says, “the crowd parted a little bit

and . . .
,” cut back to Nancy midsentence, "... and all I see is this giant

hair. It’s almost like it could’ve been hair on a stick passing by, this plat-

inum huge thing on this little black spandex.” In case we haven’t yet fig-
ured out what the commotion is about, Zoe adds another clue: “I turned
around, and I saw her breasts, 1 saw this cleavage, I saw this endow-
ment, and, oh my God, I saw the hair, and it was . . . Dolly Parton.” It

turns out that Hilery was there, too, and though Emily, Polly, and Gerri
weren’t, the news has traveled, and, after joking around about it, they
decide to say they were there, and that Dolly had a crew cut like Nancy’s,

and that she was making out with Fran.

This sequence of L Is for the Way You Look (which was initially titled

The Invisible Woman) is, as Carlomusto told me, not really about Dolly
 ,

Jean Carlomusto, L Is for the Way You Look, 1 991

Parton; it’s about gossip. Dolly Parton may be the subject of the gossip,

but the subjectivity represented in the video is that of the lesbians who
gossip among themselves about Dolly. What matters is their visibility.

Dolly is the absence around which a representation of lesbianism is

constituted. But this is no simple structuralist lesson about representa-

tion founded on absence: rather it is meant to tell us something about

the identifications we make and the communities we form through
these identifications.

I don’t mean to suggest that the focus of gossip on Dolly Parton doesn’t

matter at all. Of course it matters that Dolly’s lesbianism has long been

rumored and that her attendance at a lesbian performance in the com-

pany of another well-known closeted lesbian seems to confirm the rumors.
But the emphasis on signifiers of Dolly’s feminine masquerade — huge
hair, huge cleavage, tiny spandex miniskirt — by a group of women
whose masquerade differs so significantly from hers implicates their

identifications and their desire in difference. None of the lesbians vis-

ible in L Is for the Way You Looklooks femme like Dolly; compared with
her absent image, they are in fact a pretty butch bunch.
Girlfriend!

Identification is, of course, identification with an other, which means

On,

that identity is never identical to itself. This alienation of identity from

Right

the self it constructs, which is a constant replay of a primary psychic

 186

187

self-alienation, does not mean simply that any proclamation of identity

will be only partial, that it will be exceeded by other aspects of identity,
but rather that identity is always a relation, never simply a positivity. As
Teresa'de Lauretis put it so concisely in her essay on lesbian spectator-
ship in Sheila McLaughlin’s She Must Be Seeing Things, “It takes two

women, not one, to make a lesbian. And if identity is relational, then

perhaps we can begin to rethink identity politics as a politics of rela-

tional identities, of identities formed through political identifications

that constantly remake those identities. As Zoe says in L Is for the Way
You Look, “We decided to milk this for all it was worth, in terms of a fe-

male bonding experience.”

Again in Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick writes:

/ take the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immernorially associated in

European thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all

women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission of neces-

sary news as with the refinemen t of necessary skills for making, testing,

and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds

of people there are to be found in one’s world. . . . I don’t assume that all

18. Teresa de Lauretis, "Film and the Visible," in How Do t Look? Queer Film and Video,
ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 232.
 V >

X
gay men or all women are very skilled at the nonce-taxonomic work rep-
resented by gossip, but it does make sense to suppose that our distinctive
needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation.^^

The most fundamental need gossip has served for queers is that of the

construction — and reconstruction — of our i4entities. Most of us can

remember the first time we heard someone called a queer, or a fag or a

dyke, and — that someone not being ourselves — nevertheless re-

sponding, within, “So that’s what I am.” Because the name-calling is

most often a derogation, our identifications are also self-derogations.

We painstakingly emerge from these self-derogations through new
identifications, a process that often depends on gossip among our-
selves: “Really, he'sgay? S/ie’sadyke?” “Jodie’s a dyke? Thenmaybel’m
fabulous, too.” From this, we go on to deduce the role-model defense.
“If little tomboys growing up today knew about Jodie, they’d be spared

the self-derogation.” But the deduction misses two crucial points: first,

what Sedgwick means by “an already institutionalized ignorance,” and

second, our conception of identity.

Little tomboys won’t be told about an openly lesbian actress, whose ca-

reer will in any case probably be cut short the moment she comes out.

As Vito Russo famously quipped about coming out, “The truth will set

you free . . . but first it will make you miserable.” The eradication of the

homophobia that constructs the celebrity’s closet does not depend on

the individual celebrity’s avowal, the limitations of which we have seen
again and again: Did the exemplary midshipman’s confession of his ho-

mosexuality change the rules at Annapolis or the Pentagon? Did the

Olympic medal winner’s founding of the Gay Olympics persuade the
U.S. Olympics committee or the Supreme Court to let us use that rubric?

No, the eradication of homophobia — of this already institutionalized

ignorance — depends on our collective political struggle, on our iden-

tity politics.
Girlfriend!

Identity politics has most often been understood, and is now deni-
On,

grated, as essentialist (denigrated in certain quarters, in fact, as essen-

Right

19. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 23,

 r
—

f/a7/yessentialist: this is what Diana Fuss recognizes as the essentialism

of anti-essentialism).2“ We were gay, and on our gayness, we built a po-
litical movement. But is this really what happened? Wasn’t it an emerg-
ing political movement that enabled the enunciation of a gay — rather

than homosexual or homophile — identity? And wasn’t that political

movement formed through identifications with other political move-

ments — Black Power and feminism, most particularly? Remember, the

Gay Liberation Front, named in identification with Third World libera-

tion struggles, came apart over two issues: whether to support the Black
Panthers and whether women would have an equal voice. It was our in- 188

ability to form alliances with those movements identifications with —

which secured our own identities, as well as our inability to acknowl- 189

edge those very same differences of race and gender within our own
ranks, that caused the gay and lesbian movements to shift, on the one
hand, to an essentialist separatism and, on the other, to a liberal politics

of minority rights. The AIDS crisis brought us face to face with the con-
sequences of both our separatism and our liberalism. And it is in this

new political conjuncture that the word queer has been reclaimed to
designate new political identities.

The setbacks for the AIDS activist movement that I mentioned above
avoided one of the most difficult of them: troubles within the move-
ment itself. Our political unity has been badly shaken by our constantly
increasing knowledge of both the breadth and depth of the crisis

breadth, in the sense of the many different kinds of people affected by

HIV disease; depth, in the sense of the extent of social change that will
be required to improve all these different people’s chances of survival. It

is impossible here to describe fully either the scope of the crisis or the

factionalism it has caused. But consider just this: whereas at first the

structure of ACT UP in New York consisted of six committees — Ac-

tions, Coordinating, Fundraising, Issues, Media, and Outreach — by
1991, when our internal difficulties emerged most damagingly, we had
fourteen committees, twenty-one working groups, and ten caucuses

forty-five different subgroups in all. Apart from a few remaining com-

20. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York:

Routledge, 1989). •
 V
}

mittees that are still essentially organizational and several working

groups centered on actions-iri-pcogress, these various committees,

working groups, and caucuses are oriented mostly toward either spe-
cific issues — Addicts Rights, Alternative and Holistic Treatment, Insur-

ance and Access, Healthcare Action, Medicaid Task Force, Needle

Exchange, Pediatric Caucus, Police Violence, Pfjson Issues, PWA Hous-
ing, Treatment and Data, YELL (Youth Education Life Line) — or identi-

ties — Asian and Pacific Islanders, Black AIDS Mobilization, Foreign

Nationals, Latina/o AIDS Activists, Lesbian Caucus, PISD (People with
Immune System Disorders), and Women’s Action.

This level of specialization does not, in and of itself, necessarily result in

factionalism; it merely suggests something of the complexity of issues

raised by the epidemic and of the make-up of the AIDS activist move-
ment. But conflict does exist, and much of it concerns competing iden-
tities and contradictory identifications across identities. There are

conflicts between men and women, between lesbians and straight

women, between white people and people of color, between those who
are HIV-positive or have AIDS and those who are HIV-negative. There

are also conflicts between those who think we should devote all our en-

ergies to militant direct action and those who favor meeting with gov-
ernment officials and pharmaceutical company executives as well;

between those who want to concentrate on a narrowly defined AIDS

agenda and those who feel we must confront the wider systemic ills that
AIDS exacerbates; between those who see ACT UP as the vanguard in

the struggle against AIDS and those who see direct action as only one of

many forms of AIDS activism, which also includes advocacy, fundrais-

ing, legal action, and providing services. Negotiating these conflicts is

painful and perilous; it has even resulted in splits or dissolutions of ACT

UP chapters in some cities.

These conflicts are not new to ACT UP, but their intensity is. Earlier in

our history, they were mitigated by a queer hegemony. Most of us were

Girlfriend!

gay and lesbian, and ACT UP meant for us not only fighting AIDS, but
On,

fighting AIDS as queers, fighting homophobia, and rejuvenating a

Right

moribund gay activism. In New York, we met at the Lesbian and Gay
Community Services Center; you had to confront your homophobia
just to cross the threshold. Our meetings and actions, our fact sheets

and chants, our T-shirts and placards, our videos and even our ac-

ronyms — everything about us was queer. We camped a lot, laughed a

lot, kissed each other, partied together. ACT UP fundraisers at night-
clubs were the hot ticket in queer social life.

But that hegemony didn’t last. Attacks on queers escalated, both offi-

cially, with the congressional assault on government support of our cul-

ture, and unofficially, on the streets. As queers became more and more 190

visible, more and more of us were getting bashed. Overburdened by the —

battles AIDS required us to take on, ACT UP couldn’t fight the homo- 191

phobia anymore. That, too, was a full-time struggle, a struggle taken on

by the newly formed Queer Nation. I don’t want to oversimplify this cap-

sule history. Queer Nation didn’t take either the queers or the queerness
out of ACT UP. But it made possible, at least symbolically, a shift of our

attention to the non-queer, or the more-than-queer, problems of AIDS.

It was then that new political identifications began to be made, as 1 said,

across identities. I have already mentioned a number of identities-in-

conflict in ACT UP: men and women, whites and people of color, and so
forth. In spite of the linguistic necessity of specifying identities with
positive terms, I want to make clear that am not speaking of identity as
I

nonrelational. Because of the complexities of the movement, there is no

predicting what identifications will be made and which side of an argu-
ment anyone might take. A white, middle-class, HIV-negative lesbian

might form an identification with a poor black mother with AIDS, and
through that identification might be inclined to work on pediatric

health care issues; or, outraged by attention to the needs of babies at the

expense of the needs of the women who bear them, she might decide to
fight against clinical trials whose sole purpose is to examine the effects

of an antiviral drug on perinatal transmission and thus ignores effects

on the mother’s body. She might form an identification with a gay male
friend with AIDS and work for faster testing of new treatments for op-
portunistic infections, but then, through her understanding that her

friend would be able to afford such treatments while others would not.
 V >
I

she might shift her attention to health-care access issues. An HIV-

positive gay Latino might fight homophobia in the Latin community
and racism in ACT UP; he might speak Spanish at Latina/o AIDS Ac-
tivist meetings and English everywhere else.

Political identifications remaking identities are^pf course, productive of

collective political struggle, but only if they result in a broadening of al-

liances rather than an exacerbation of antagonisms. And the latter

seems often to result when, from within a development toward a poli-

tics of alliance based on relational identities, old antagonisms based on

fixed identities reemerge. Activist politics then faces the impasse of

ranking oppressions, moralism, and self-righteousness. This is the cur-

rent plight of AIDS activism, but it is not the whole story.

During the time that ACT UP’s internal antagonisms began to tear us apart,
we nevertheless won a crucial victory. Arrested for taking to the streets

of New York to distribute — openly and illegally — clean IV needles to

injecting drug users, a group of ACT UP queers stood trial, eloquently

argued a necessity defense, and won a landmark ruling that called into

question the state’s laws against possession of hypodermic needles and

eventually forced Mayor Dinkins to relent on his opposition to needle

exchange. AIDS activists are still — I’m sorry and angry to have to

say — mostly a bunch of queers. But what does queer mean now? Who,
for example, were those queers in the court room, on trial for attempt-

ing to save the lives of drug addicts? They were perhaps queers whose
sexual practices resulted in HIV infection, or placed them at high risk of
infection, or made them members of gay communities devastated by
the epidemic, and for any of these reasons brought them to AIDS ac-

tivism. But once engaged in the struggle to end the crisis, these queers’

identities were no longer the same. It’s not that “queer” doesn’t any

longer encompass their sexual practices; it does, but it also entails a re-

lation between those practices and other circumstances that make very
Girlfriend!

different people vulnerable both to HIV infection and to the stigma,

discrimination, and neglect that have characterized the societal and

On,

governmental response to the constituencies most affected by the AIDS

Right

epidemic.
ABSOLUTELY QUEER: that was the anonymous group OUTpost’s
headline claim about Jodie Eoster on the poster that appeared around
New York about the time The Silence of the Lambs was released. “Jodie
Eoster,” the caption beneath her photograph read, “Oscar winner. Yale
graduate. Ex-Disney Moppet. Dyke.” Well yes, . . . but queer? Absolutely
queer? Through what identification? Interviewed about queer protests
at the 1992 Academy Awards ceremony, where she won her second best-
actress Oscar for her performance in The Silence of the Lambs, Eoster
declared, “Protesting is constitutional. You can learn from it. Anything
beyond that falls into the category of being undignified. Confronted 192

with such a statement, Tm forced to agree with Larry Kramer: “Vito —

would really have screamed about that one.” Eor Vito’s was a feistier 193

kind of dignity, not Jodie’s idea of dignity but Judy’s, a survivor’s dignity.

If we really want to honor Vito’s memory — as a film scholar and movie

buff, as a queer, an activist, and a friend — we shouldn’t forget that he
loved Judy, and that his identification with her made him queer, not her.

21. Quoted in John Gallagher, "Protest Threats Raise Visibility at Academy Awards," Ad-
vocate, May 5, 1992, p. 15. In this same issue of the Advocate, the "etcetera" column
contains a photo of Jodie Foster whose caption reads, "A first-rate actress with a
third-rate consciousness we hope is straight" (p. 88).

/
 \
V N *•

t
4

< . \

k
X
t

THE SPECTACLE OF MOURNING

First presented at the panel discussion "The Names

Project: The Transforming Power of the Forbidden

Stitch," sponsored by the Family Planning Council of

Western Massachusetts, Springfield, October 26, 1991.

 % >
4

Speaking about the Names Project quilt is difficult for me, because it

means speaking about ambivalence, never as easy as expressing an un-

conflicted attitude. But at the same time I think that it might be possible
to understand this ambivalence as appropriate to the quilt, since the
^
quilt represents the work of mourning, a process that is itself profoundly

ambivalent. As Freud describes it, mourning myolves the painful con-

flict between the wish to cling to a lost loved one at the same time that

we must work through the loss and definitively give that person up.

My initial ambivalence about the quilt, which was that often voiced by

AIDS activists, was partially overcome when I first visited it on the Mall

in Washington during the 1987 national march for lesbian and gay rights.
Walking about the quilt, I was deeply moved — by the sheer enormity of

loss, by the varied sentiments about so many people’s lives, and by the
grief-stricken responses of fellow mourners. One thing struck me par-

ticularly about my own response. Seeing a panel bearing the name of

Michel Foucault,who was an intellectual idol, whose writings had de- I

pended on for much of my own work, and who had agreed to be a reader
of my dissertation less than a year before he died — seeing that panel

had less emotional impact on me than seeing, every now and then, a

name I recognized as that of someone I’d only dimly known, or known

about. It was those moments that most brought home to me the full ex-
tent of my own loss — not my good friends Craig, Dan, Hector, Rene,

Robert . . . ,
whose loss I had directly experienced, but others who, be-

cause I didn’t know them well enough, I hadn’t even known had died. In

other words, I had lost not just the center of my world but its periphery,

too. Reflecting on these feelings, I remember at the time saying to

friends that it was the symbols of the ordinariness of human lives that

made the quilt such a profoundly moving experience. hope it’s obvious I

that don’t mean ordinary as a negative quality: mean it in the sense

I I

Mourning

that Raymond Williams did when he said that culture is ordinary. My

feeling was related to the anger I’ve often felt about the media’s reserv-
of

ing its attention for the deaths of famous people while at the same time
Spectacle

the deaths of hundreds and thousands of others — those of ordinary

The
people — go unnoticed.
 t

196

197

Unfurling the Names Project Quilt on the Washington Mall, 1987 (photo: Jane Rosett).

Shortly after my first direct experience of the quilt, was sent a copy of aI

right-wing campus newspaper containing a diatribe against safe-sex ed-

ucation written by President Reagan’s White House AIDS advisor Gary

Bauer. Accompanying his vicious text was an equally vicious illustra-

tion, a cartoon of the quilt showing two panels being sewn. The name on
one was “Sodomy”; on the other it was “IV Drugs.” Nothing could better
corroborate what I wrote in “Mourning and Militancy”: that “seldom has
a society so savaged people during their hour of loss.” Every AIDS joke
is callous, but this is for me the most callous. It says that not only will
there be no sympathy for our lives, there will be no sympathy even for

our deaths. And from this my ambivalence returned. For while we know
that this callousness, this savagery, has been directed at us constantly
throughout the epidemic, we also know that, the cartoon notwithstand-
ing, the Names Project quilt is one of the few efforts of our community
that has been generally granted exemption from opprobrium.
 To understand this ambivalence, it may be necessary to isolate two dis-

tinct functions of the quilt. The firstus that it provides a ritual of mourn-

ing, and in two respects: the private mourning ritual of a person or

group involved in making a panel and the collective mourning ritual of

^
visiting the quilt to share that experience with others. The second func-
tion is what we might call the spectacle of mqijrning, the vast public-

relations effort to humanize and dignify our losses for those who have
not shared them. My ambivalence hinges on this second, spectacular

aspect of the quilt: Does a visit to the quilt, or the media’s approving at-

tention to it, assuage the guilt of those who otherwise have been so cal-
lous, whether that callousness takes the form of denial or of outright
disgust? Does it provide a form of catharsis, an easing of conscience, for

those who have cared and done so little about this great tragedy?

Perhaps I can clarify the question with another: Will there one day be a

panel on the quilt for Kimberly Bergalis? And will it memorialize those

words she uttered before Congress? “I didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m

being made to suffer like this. My life has been taken away.”^ With those
words, Kimberly Bergalis showed why she became both a darling of the
media and a tool of Congressman Dannemeyer in one of his many at-

tempts to pass wasteful, discriminatory, punitive legislation. As media

activist Gregg Bordowitz said, Kimberly Bergalis is the first member of

the general public with AIDS we have seen. She has never identified

herself with other people with AIDS. On the contrary, she identifies her-
self only as the victim of others with AIDS. She represents not PWAs, but

the so-called general public’s fear of people with AIDS.^

I don’t want to claim that media representations of AIDS are without

contradiction, but I do want to ask what it is about the quilt that makes

it so palatable to the media that paid such homage to Kimberly Bergalis

Mourning

1. Quoted in the New York Times, September 27, 1991, p. A12.

of
2. See Cathy Caruth and Thomas Keenan, "The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over': A Conversa-

Spectacle
tion with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky," American Imago:
Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 48, no. 4 (winter 1991); reprinted in Cathy

Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory(Ba\i\more: Johns Hopkins University Press,

The
1995), pp. 256-271.
 as the archetypal innocent victim. For I think we must recognize that
Kimberly Bergalis was a representational choice, a choice that did not
extend, for example, to Belinda Mason, whose “innocence” was no doubt
tarnished by the fact that she became an articulate spokesperson for all

PWAs, people whose struggles she entirely took on as her own. Belinda
Mason argued, in a letter written to President Bush just before her

death, against the very bill that Kimberly Bergalis testified for.

Perhaps that vicious cartoon can provide an answer. When Kimberly

Bergalis informed Congress that she didn’t do anything wrong, we know 198

exactly what she meant: She didn’t engage in sodomy and she didn’t use —
drugs. What the cartoon means to tell us is that the quilt is not telling the 199

truth, that what it isn’t telling us is that all these people who died of AIDS
were bad people, that they were sodomites and junkies. Of course, to

make its nasty point, the creators of this cartoon could hardly have in-

cluded panels that said hemophilia or perinatal transmission or just

plain sexual intercourse between married couples; these “innocent”
modes of contracting HIV would undermine their point. But their point
is what we have to attend to.

1 don’t think most people would espouse the belief that gay men and IV
drug users deserve to die, but I nevertheless think that most people are
afraid to look gay sex and drug use square in the eye as everyday facts of
many, many people’s lives. In everything I have written about AIDS,
which has concentrated mostly on gay men, I have insisted on the de-
termining fact of homophobia, which I believe is still the single most
powerful determinant of everything everyone has suffered during this

epidemic. And I’ve been especially critical of any response to this ho-
mophobia that makes any concessions to it. In “How to Have Promiscu-
ity in an Epidemic,” I criticized Randy Shilts for his gift of the Patient

Zero narrative to the media and Larry Kramer for his condemnation of
promiscuous gay sex in The Normal Heart. In “Portraits of People with

AIDS,” 1 asserted that Nicholas Nixon’s portrayals of gay men as death-

bed victims with fleshless, ethereal bodies were phobic images, images
of the fear of people with AIDS as still sexual. And I contrasted these
/
photographs with Stashu Kybartas’s videotape Danny, a portrayal of a
 N >
i

gay man with AIDS as both sexual and sexy. In “Mourning and'Mili-

tancy,” I wrote that what gay men had lost to AIDS, and what we^were

therefore mourning, was not only our lovers, friends, acquaintances,

and community members, but also our highly developed sexual cul-
^
ture. And I suggested that the repudiation of that culture entailed a fail-

ure to mourn, a form of melancholia. What has^een important to me is

to insist on precisely what the creators of that horrible cartoon insist on:
sodomy, to use their quaint, archaic word.

In seeing and being moved by the representation of what I called ordi-

nariness in the Names Project quilt, it is partially the representation of

sodomy that I saw. Not directly. There aren’t a whole lot of cock rings,

dildos, or Crisco labels, for example, although there are plenty of color-

coded handkerchiefs. But in a myriad different details, I saw my culture,

my sexual culture. I felt I knew many of these people, knew them from
the bars and bath houses, from the streets and parks. But I wonder how
true this is for others. I wonder what kind of ordinariness other people

see. And that’s one reason for my ambivalence. Does the quilt sanitize

or sentimentalize gay life? Does it render invisible what makes people

hate us? Does it make their continuing disavowal possible?

My ambivalence is about, on the one hand, my anger at a cartoon that

would vilify our ritual of mourning by replacing the name of a person

with that of a sexual act — sodomy — and, on the other hand, my desire
to celebrate the sexuality of those we mourn. Because if we fail to cele-

brate that sexuality, then we fail to celebrate a vital part of the lives of

those we mourn.

Jeff Nunokawa has written, in “All the Sad Young Men,’’ of another diffi-

culty that gay men have with mourning. Beginning with a reading of
Mourning

The Portrait of Dorian Gray, he analyzes the legacy of literary portrayals

of gay men as always already doomed, the logical outcome of our hav-
of

ing been pathologized from the moment homosexuality was invented

Spectacle

as a category of nineteenth-century sexology.^ Vito Russo saw the same

The

3. Jeff Nunokawa, "All the Sad Young Meni'AIDS and the Work of Mourning," in In-

side/Out, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 311-323.
 f

pattern in the history of Hollywood’s portrayals of gay men and les-

bians. At the end of The Celluloid Closet, he appended a necrology, in

which he cataloged the causes of premature death of hundreds of gay

and lesbian film characters. * That many in our society secretly want us
dead is to me beyond question. And one expression of this may be our
society’s loving attention to the quilt, which is not only a ritual and rep-
resentation of mourning but also stunning evidence of the mass death
of gay men. It would, of course, be unseemly for society to celebrate our
deaths openly, but I wonder if the quilt helps make this desire decorous.
200

One question 1 would pose about the quilt, then, is a question that 1
—
have learned to pose about any representation: Whom does it address? 20)

Who is its presumed audience? Is it for President George and First Lady
Barbara Bush, who, even when implored, would not deign to walk across
the street to see it?^ Is it for the media, surveying it from helicopters? Is

it for the general public, that fiction whose ugly face we saw personified
by Kimberly Bergalis? Or is it for those who can read from the represen-
tation of ordinariness the sex lives of so many people whose names the
panels bear? Is it for those who inhabit a culture of poverty, for whom
drugs are often a way of life? Is it for those who take solace in this col-
lective ritual of mourning, who recognize the names of friends and
loved ones, of sometime acquaintances, and encounters in the dark? Of

those like us and those bound to us by their struggle against both AIDS
and an indifferent society?

In the film Common Threads, Vito Russo is shown speaking at a 1988

ACT NOW rally in front of the Health and Human Services headquarters
in Washington the day before the big action at the Food and Drug Ad-
ministration in Rockland, Maryland. The moment of Vito’s speech used
in the film was when he said, “I’m here because I don’t want to have my

4. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper &
Row, 1981), pp. 261-262.

5. In spite of this fact. The Names Project Foundation brochure handed out on the oc-
casion for which I gave this paper included the following anodyne and cliche-ridden
blurb: "These amazing quilts . .
.
prove that no one is a statistic. Every life has its own
fabric, its own colors, its own soul. No two are alike.'— President George Bush,
Washington, D.C."
 V >
i

name on that quilt over there in front of the White House.” Vito died in

November of 1990, and I imagine one day many panels of the quilt will

bear his name, Vito must have been ambivalent about the quilt, too, be-

cause even though he was determined never to join him there, he made^
a panel for his lover Jeffrey. But Vito intended to survive. That was what
made him such a fierce activist. Certainly somg^activists misinterpreted

his comment about the quilt as hostility toward it. But I don’t think he

was hostile toward the quilt. He was hostile toward whaf made the quilt

necessary: so many, many early deaths.

For many activists who find those deaths unacceptable, the quilt is seen
as capitulation: it represents acceptance of those deaths. But this re-

turns us to the ambivalence of mourning that I spoke of in the begin-

ning. In an epidemic that didn’t have to happen, and whose continuing

to this day to spread virtually unabated is the result of political neglect

or outright mendacity, every death is unacceptable. And yet death itself

can never finally not be accepted. We have to accept death to continue

to live. But the difference, and the resulting ambivalence, is precisely

this: the difference between those of us who must learn to accept these

deaths and those who still find these deaths acceptable. And who can
say whether or not the Names Project quilt might cut both ways?

Mourning

of

Spectacle

The
 t

ACCOMMODATING MAGIC

First presented at “Dissident Spectators, Disruptive

Spectacles: A Conference on Watching the Media,”

Harvard University Center for Literary and Cultural

Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 15-16, 1992,

and published in Media Spectacles, ed. Marjorie

Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L Walkowitz

(New York: Routledge, 1993)- This is an expanded

version written in the fall of 1992.

/
 A
N i
4

We think, well, only gay people can get it — it’s not going to happen to

me. And here I am saying that it can happen to anyone, even me. Magic

Johnson.

—From the press conference at the Great Western Forum

% \

Then came the news about Magic. In a way, tlu^t changes everything. He
is not them; Magic is us.

— Daily News column of a few days lated

Magic is here. Magic is now. Magic is us.

— Sports Illustrated '5 version of the same-

Now everyone knows sofiieone who’s infected.

— The sportswriter’s presumption
Where were you when you heard the news about Magic?
— Newsweek suggesting the Kennedy assassination analogy^
My grandfather was a basketball player, and so was my grandmother. I

have photographs of both of them proudly posing with their high school
teammates. My brother was a star basketball player and now coaches
women’s college basketball, my sister married a high school basketball

coach, my nephew went to college on a basketball scholarship, and my

twelve-year-old, already five-foot-eight niece is a basketball prodigy

(since she’s too young for Magic, her room is covered with Michael Jor-
dan posters) . During my adolescence in the small town where I grew up,
people meeting me for the first time would note my height and the size
of my hands — big enough to palm a basketball — and say, “You must be
a basketball player.’’ Admitting that I wasn’t embarrassed me; it felt like

divulging my sexuality. In fact I did play basketball throughout most of

Magic

1. Earl Caldwell, "Magic; When Them' Becomes 'Us,'" New York Daily News, Novem-
ber 11, 1991, p. 29.

Accommodating
2. Leigh Montville, "Like One of the Family," Sports Illustrated, November 18, 1991, p. 45.

3. Charles Leerhsen et al., "Magic's Message," Newsweek, November 18, 1991, p. 58.
my childhood and adolescence, but being queer made me self-conscious
in locker rooms, so 1 stayed away from organized sports. What 1 meant
when I said I didn’t play was only that I didn’t turn out for the high

school team. Like a lot of other queers, when 1 left my hometown and
found out there were places where playing basketball wasn’t the only
measure of worth, I rarely played or watched a basketball game again.

So on November 7, 1991, when I listened to Magic Johnson announcing

his retirement from the Lakers because he’d tested HIV-positive, I had
to ask. Who’s Magic Johnson?
204

Of course I found out right away. By the time I watched Nightline that —
same night. I’d already learned enough about Magic to recoil at Larry 205

Kramer’s insensitivity when he declared Magic would become a pariah

and die. I doubted Magic would become a pariah, and though I agreed
that he’d probably die of AIDS, I knew it wasn’t the right time to say it.

But I understand why Larry was so angry. Those of us who have long
been coping with this crisis, who have watched lovers, friends, and ac-

quaintances die or are ourselves infected or ill, are enraged by the con-

stant repetitions. How many times do we have to hear “AIDS is not just a
gay disease”? “The virus doesn’t discriminate.” “Heterosexuals get AIDS,
too.” “HIV is transmitted through heterosexual intercourse.” “Everyone
is potentially at risk.” “AIDS is everybody’s problem.” How much longer
will the us/them rhetoric remain in place? How many people have to die
or become infected for it to matter? Why is attention paid only when
celebrities become infected, get diagnosed, or die?

Of course, we also know the answers to our questions, but it doesn’t

make the repetitions any easier. One answer was broadcast the very

next night, when Magic appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show. At his

press conference Magic had said that it didn’t matter how he got the

virus. It was a courageous gesture, but of course it wouldn’t play. So he

told Arsenio, “I’m far from being homosexual. You know that. Every-

body else who’s close to me understands that.” The crowd went berserk,
cheering wildly for several minutes. What could Magic do but flash that
/
 —

Magic Johnson on the Arsenio Hall Show, November 8, 1 991 (AP/Wide World Photos).

smile?
— “the most famous smile since the Mona Lisa” in Newsweek’s
estimation/ The crowd evidently felt vindicated now that they were re-
assured that they hadn’t been duped into hero-worshiping a secret fag.

Queers felt betrayed. We’d heard through the grapevine that Magic was

a secret fag, and 1 guess we hoped it was true.^ Not every queer stops
playing basketball when he leaves home, and we’d like people to learn
that, even if the hard way.

Writing a week later in Sports Illustrated, Magic repeated his denial of

the rumors
— “I have never had a homosexual encounter. Never”
and speculated on how he became infected. “It’s a matter of numbers.
Before 1 was married, 1 truly lived the bachelor’s life. I’m no Wilt Cham-
berlain, but as 1 traveled around NBA cities, was never at a loss for fe-
1

male companionship. . . . There were just some bachelors almost every

Magic
woman in L.A. wanted to be with: Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, and

4. Jack Kroll, "Smile, though Our Hearts Are Breaking," Newsweek, November 18,

1991, p. 65.
Accommodating

5. Peter Vecsey, "Rumors Fly about Magic, but the Motives Are Selfish," USA Today,

November 12, 1991, p. 6C.

 Magic Johnson. I confess that after I arrived in L.A. in 1979, 1 did my best
to accommodate as many women as I could — most of them through
unprotected sex.”®

Accommodate'? “He was doing these women some kind of favor?" Bar-
bara Harrison asked in Mademoiselle.^ The arrogance and contempt

Harrison recognized in the word choice were corroborated by Magic’s

friend Pamela McGee, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Magic’s
closest friends always knew him as a major player and womanizer. He
has had one-night stands with what he calls ‘freaks’ across America.”® 206

Like the denial of homosexuality, the misogyny does its work: promis- —
cuity, which Johnson would come to regret and thus to condemn, was 207

really the sin of others. Magic wasn’t in active pursuit; he just acqui-

esced to fast women: “1 know that we are pursued by women so much

that it is easy to be weak. Maybe by getting the virus I’ll make it easier for
you guys to be strong.”® Another repetition: women scapegoated as vec-
tors of transmission; their risk — the greater risk of infection — is not
the issue. And, as Martina Navratilova noted, the big-time double stan-

dard: if a woman athlete confessed to so many sex partners, she wouldn’t

be seen as a superstar but as “a whore and a slut.”‘°

Moralizing about promiscuity has been and continues to be one of the

most difficult rhetorics to combat for AIDS educators. Every queer re-
members the incredulity, disdain, and disguised envy that met early ac-
counts of gay men’s numbers of sex partners. Now that the tables are

10.

6. Magic Johnson, with Roy S. Johnson, "I'll Deal with It," Sports Illustrated, November
18, 1991, pp. 21-22. "Most" is something of an understatement. Johnson told the Ad-
vocate that he tried using condoms "just one time," but gave them up because he
"didn't getthe same feeling" (Roger Brigham, "The Importance of Being Earvin," Ad-
vocate, Apf\\ 21, 1992, p. 38). For Wilt Chamberlain's account of his sexual conquests,

see A View from Above (New fork: Villard, 1991).

7. Barbara Harrison, "Do You Believe in Magic?" Mademoiselle, March 1992, p. 94.

8. Pamela McGee, "Friend: Magic Had Plenty of One-Night Stands," New York News-
day, November 10, 1991, p. 4.

9. Johnson, "I'll Deal with It," p. 22.

Martina Navratilova, interviewed in the New York Times, November 21, 1991, p. B16.
 s >
4

turned, the envy comes out in the open, but it poses a new crisis. When
the studio audience on The Arsenip Hall Show cheered so wildly, their
%
homophobia was doubly displayed, for in their gloating that Magic was

no fag, they could not but demonstrate that they would rather die than

entertain the idea that he could be one. Had those “freaks” that Magic

accommodated been men instead of womep, Arsenio’s vociferously

heterosexual audience mighthave wanted to heave a collective sigh of

relief that they still aren’t implicated in this terrible epiddmic, as they’ve

wanted to believe all along.

Playboy moved fast to accommodate Magic’s news. Keeping sex safe,

untroubled, unencumbered for heterosexual men is their up-front

agenda, Michael Fumento’s Myth of Heterosexual AIDS their treacher-

ous guide." More repetitions: safe anatomy — fragile anus versus rugged

penis and vagina, “built,” as Playboy put it, “to sustain the rigors of

sex.”*2 Safe (and racist) geography — AIDS in Africa is a different epi-

demic and sex in Africa is a different practice. More safe (and racist)

geography — AIDS is contained in “communities”

— “What will kill you

in the South Bronx will make you a living legend in your home town.”*^
And of course, heterosexual transmission as a deceit perpetrated by the

“powerful gay lobby” to get more funding for “their” disease.

But there was still Magic. Playboy had some doubts: “Assuming that he
did not contract the virus from his dentist (no one checked), another

male (he denies the rumors) or intravenous drug use

,
(steroids?) ,
Magic

11. Michael Fumento's The Myth of Heterosexual AIDSiNewfork: Basic Books, 1990)ar-
gues that heterosexual transmission of HIV is enormously exaggerated by the media,

by politicians, and by "the powerful gay lobby" as a means of increasing funding for

a "gay disease." For Fumento, virtually every case of heterosexual transmission, and

especially female-to-male transmission, is a special case.

Magic 12. James R. Patersen, "The Playboy Forum: Magic," Playboy, March 1992, p. 43. The
fragile anus/rugged vagina hypothesis appeared as early as 1985 in John Langone,
"AIDS: The Latest Scientific Facts," Discover, December 1985, pp. 27-52. For an anal-
ysis, see Paula Treichler, "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epi-
Accommodating
demic of Signification," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas

Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 31-70.

13. Patersen, "The Playboy Forum: Magic," p. 43.

 is simply the newest member of a very small group of men who have
contracted the AIDS virus through heterosexual contact.” “Magic is an
exceptional man. ... He could accomplish more with a smile than you
or I could in a year of sophisticated courtship. ... He says he lived ‘the
bachelor's life,’ but that is like saying he could play a little ball. Just as he
redefined the guard’s position on the basketball court, he redefined the

number of sexual conquests that it is possible for a bachelor to achieve

off the court. All his passes were caught.

Playboys Magic is a whole new “myth of heterosexual AIDS.” You’d 208

think using a condom, like being a fag, was worse than death. Paradox- —
ically, because we queers know it’s not, and because nobody will ever 209

ask us, we have to learn to accommodate Magic.

From the moment of the November 7 press conference. Magic began

urging that “safe sex is the way to go,”*^ and he’s remained steadfast un-
der iiltense pressure to modify his position. He is accommodating
enough to tell kids that “the safest sex is no sex,” but he knows, just as

the kids do, that the truism is also a lie: No sex may be safe, but it’s not
sex. As he told Ebony, “That’s not the reality, and I’m trying to explain

that to people too. Reality is young people. ... are going to have sex no
matter what has happened to me. So if that’s going to be the case, then
they should practice safe sex.”*® Magic’s realism about the necessity of
teaching safe sex is no surprise, but the widespread acceptance of it is a
significant breakthrough.

In spite of extraordinary success in slowing seroconversion rates for gay

men, in spite of consensus among health educators about its efficacy,

skepticism about safe sex has lingered, registered along a spectrum from

“there’s no such thing as safe sex” to the hedge-your-bets “r” tacked

onto safe — not safe, but at least safer sex. But now, as if by magic, there

14. Ibid., p. 41.

15. Quoted in Pico Iyer, "It Can Happen to Anybody. Even Magic Johnson," Time, No-
vember 18, 1991, p. 26.

16. "Magic Johnson's Full-Court Press against AIDS," Ebony, AprW 1992, p. 108.
 X >
i

really is such a thing as safe sex. And the reason can be discerned m the
same Ebony article, as a moment piainfiilly reminiscent of the Arsenio
%

episode is recalled. Magic was speaking to students at Cardozo High

School in Washington. “And when he told them ‘I still kiss my wife a lot,’
^
the place went nuts — you couldn’t have heard a symphony of school

bells for all the screams and applause.’’*^ Safe se^c has become truly safe,

you see, because Magic has to accommodate his wife Cookie. Ebony’s

cover article was devoted to Magic and Cookie’s marriage, and was

meant to allay some new tabloid rumors — that Cookie had moved to

the maid’s room, was so afraid of contracting HIV that she wouldn’t let

Magic touch her. “All of those rumors are false,’’ Cookie reassured, and

“As for their marriage, ‘it has only gotten stronger, it’s just fine. . .
.’ As

Magic put it, ‘We are still doing our thing.”’*®

Accommodating Magic. I want to try to make it clear how difficult this

is. Behind the “there’s no such thing as safe sex’’ line, which has been
used mostly to prevent teenagers from getting safe sex education, there
has always been a tacit assumption, applied equally to queers and

teenagers (doubly to queer teens), that for such people sex is a luxury,

an indulgence, an excess, a dissipation. We are told to give it up, desist,

abstain. There has never been anything like an equivalence drawn be-
tween gay and straight sex, which is why gay men’s success in stopping

the spread of HIV infection with the adoption of safe sex practices has

never been seen as an example to emulate. Now, though. Magic John-

son is infected with HIV, and he is blissfully married to Cookie, and so

safe sex must be safe after all. Even PlayboywiW go this far: “
If Magic can

articulate the role of intimacy in his own life — the commitment that

supersedes fear of infection — then we all stand to learn something.

This is the real meaning of the marriage vow ‘till death do us part.’ This

is the real face of love.’’*®

Magic

17. Ibid.

18. Laura B. Randolf, "Magic and Cookie Johnson Speak Outfor First Time on Love, Mar-

Accommodating
riage, and AIDS," Ebony, April 1992, p. 106.

19. Patersen, "The Playboy Forum: Magic," p. 45.

Accommodating Magic — for queers — means accommodating this con-
tradiction: Safe sex will be accepted, taught to teenagers, adopted by
heterosexuals at risk, save lives — because of Magic, because it is nec-
essary to protect the sanctity and prerogatives of his heterosexual union.

Accommodating Magic — for queers — means accommodating the con-

tinued homophobic construction of AIDS discourse, apparently as un-

shakable today as it was when the new disease syndrome was named
GRID, for Gay Related Immune Deficiency.

It is this homophobia that we endure every time we see Magic accom- 210

plish something we’ve worked for so tirelessly for years, to no avail. For —
years we tried to get the media to distinguish between HIV and AIDS; 211

they finally found it necessary to comply in order to reassure Magic’s

fans that he was infected with HIV but did not have AIDS.^“ For years we
asked the media for images of people with HIV disease living normal,
productive lives. They gave us Magic playing the All-Star Game. For
years 'we badgered the New York Times to take a critical position on
George Bush’s do-nothing AIDS policies. They wrote a scathing edito-

rial headlined “Magic Johnson, as President. We badgered Bush di-

rectly. He rebuked us, but admitted to Magic, “I haven’t done enough

about AIDS,’’ and asked him to join his National Commission on AIDS.^^

20. Johnson himself made it clear how badly the media had failed on this point: "Dr. Mell-

man quickly told me that I didn't have AIDS, that was only infected with the virus that
I

could someday lead to the disease. But I didn't really hear him. Like almost everyone
else who has not paid attention to the growing AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and the rest
of the world, I didn't know the difference between the virus and the disease. While

my ears heard HIV-positive, my mind heard AIDS" (Johnson, "I'll Deal with It," p. 18).

21. "Magic Johnson, as President," New York Times, Novembers, 1991, p. 22.

22. On January 22, 1992, prior to his first meeting with Bush, Johnson wrote the president
a forceful letter asking him to become the leader he had not yet been on AIDS. The

letter included three demands for increased funding: to speed research, to fund the
Ryan White CARE Bill fully, and to allow Medicaid to pay for people with HIV disease,
not just AIDS. On July 14, the New York Times reported that Johnson had told CNN
that he would probably resign from the National Commission on AIDS: "We need
funding," Johnson said, "and every time we askfor more funding we get turned down
by the President" ("Magic Johnson Says He Is Likely to Quit Bush's AIDS Panel,"
p. A18). Johnson's official resignation was announced on September 25, 1992.
/
 % >
a

Wherever Magic appears — the NAACP Image Awards, the American

Music Awards, on any talk show — there is adulation. His fellow players

arranged a pre-All-Star Game ritual of bear hugs. The spectacle of some-

one who is HIV-positive being revered and physically embraced is

deeply gratifying. But ourgratification is diminished, because we know

the boast to Arsenio makes it possible.

But we know something else, too. Gay men who have unequally borne
the burden of AIDS in the United States know that that burden has also
been unequally borne by people of color. In 1992, the majority of new
AIDS cases in the United States was reported among people of color.

African Americans account for 12 percent of the population, but more

than 25 percent of total reported cases of full-blown AIDS. More than

half of all women with AIDS are African American. Three out of four

women with AIDS are African American or Latina. Nine out of ten chil-

dren with AIDS and over half the teenagers with AIDS are African Amer-
ican or Latino. Magic admitted that he hadn’t practiced safe sex during
his bachelor years because, before receiving his test results, he still

thought of AIDS as a gay disease. That astonishes me, but then I recall

that, before he received his test results, I didn’t know who Magic was,

and that would probably astonish him. Now know very well who Magic
I

is, and he knows very well that AIDS is devastating African American

communities. His determination, from the outset, to “become a spokes-

man for the virus’’ is good news for those communities and for others

affected by AIDS. For an article in TV Guide about the production of

Nickelodeon’s “A Conversation with Magic’’ for kids, Linda Ellerbee
called a friend who is HIV-positive.

/ wanted to know what my friend, a gay man, thought about the enor-

mous attention Magic Johnson’s announcement had brought to AIDS.

Magic
After all, so many other good people have already died without most of

us seeming to notice.

Accommodating

23. Statistical information from the Centers for Disease Control as of April 1992.

%
"Yes" he said, "it's unfair. So what. . . .
If it takes a Magic Johnson to see

that AIDS is everybody’s problem, if he can use his fame to get the gov-

ernment to do more, if he can raise more money to fight the disease — to

find a cure — what does fair matter?"^*

Accommodating Magic. But “fair” does matter. Because “fair” can also
save lives, and “unfair” can be lethal.

If Magic Johnson’s credibility as a “spokesman for the virus” is ensured

by his defensive heterosexuality, coupled with his newfound commit- 212

ment to marital monogamy, where does this leave gay men? More sig- —
nificantly, given Magic’s express concern for African Americans, where 213

does it leave black gay men? Responding to Magic’s “far-from-being-

homosexual” claim to his pal Arsenio, and to the audience response,

Charles Stewart, a contributing editor of BLK, wrote in the New Repub-
lic, “One of the largest and most invisible groups affected by the AIDS
epidemic, black gay and bisexual men, just became even more invis-
ible.” After detailing what he termed the double jeopardy faced by many
black gay men — their alienation from gay community institutions,

largely experienced as white, and black community institutions, largely

experienced as straight — Stewart went on to voice his fear that Magic

might “destigmatize AIDS at the cost of restigmatizing black gay men,

who are still the prime risk group for this disease.

Just prior to his first meeting with the National Commission on AIDS,
Magic wrote to George Bush that he now knows “more about HIV and
AIDS than I ever wanted to.”^® But still, like Bush himself. Magic has
generally adopted an accommodating stance: He wants to save the kids.
In the AIDS epidemic, however, saving kids will mean knowing more
than Magic has so far let on that he does:

24. Linda Ellerbee, "Magic TV and Kids," TV Guide, March 21-27, 1992, p. 10.

25. Charles Stewart, "Double Jeopardy: Black, Gay (and Invisible)," New Republic, De-
cember 2, 1991, pp. 13, 15.

26. Letter from Earvin Johnson, Jr., to President George Bush, January 14, 1992.
/
 X >
4

— knowing, for example, that the availability of clean and free hypoder-
mic needles for IV drug users will save not only their lives but those of

their sex partners and children as well; '

— knowing that the disproportionate numbers of black women with

AIDS is due in part to women’s greater risk than pien’s of infection through
heterosexual sex;
•s

— knowing that the disproportionate number of AIDS cases among

African Americans includes a disproportionate number of AIDS cases

among black gay men;

— knowing that black men who have sex with men often don’t cop to be-
ing gay, might even say, if pressed, “I’m far from being homosexual’’;

— knowing that those men who have sex with men often also have sex
with women;

—and knowing that kids, black kids, even the ones who play basketball,
can be queer.

In 1987, when AIDSfilms produced Changing the Rules, the first made-
for-television safe-sex education video, the stated assumption was that
only straight people needed education; gay men were supposedly al-

ready informed. The assumption was wrong for a number of reasons:

because the many various men who have sex with men have vastly un-
equal access to education materials distributed by local gay community
institutions, depending on those men’s self-perceived sexual identities,

their geographic locations, their ethnic, racial, and class positions, and
because “gay men” is not a stable, already formed, unchanging group.

Magic
Children are in the process of becoming gay all the time, and they need
to be educated too.

Accommodating
Another repetition: Magic lohnson and Arsenio Hall’s video. Time Out:
The Truth About HIV, AIDS and You, proceeds from the same assump-
tion as Changing the Rules, this time, though, without directly saying
 r

so. In fact, the “gay issue” is included in several ways in this video di-
rected at teenagers. In an early segment, a white girl tells us that one of

her best friends is a lesbian and that it doesn’t bother her; a boy, possi-

bly Latino, says, “I’m openly gay. Through our knowledge and then our
education, we are beginning to decrease the number of cases in the gay
community, so that’s been my experience”; and finally another white

girl tells us she’s been out as a lesbian since she was fourteen, that she knows

sixteen people who have died, and that a number of those people were clos-
eted, married, and had infected their wives. From this segment we thus

learn that gay people can be tolerated by straights, that they already 214

know about AIDS, and that they infect unknowing straights. —

215

There is one other openly gay person in the tape. Among a number of

people who talk about testing positive, a young Brazilian American ex-
plains that learning his sero-status was made easier because his lover

was there for him: “I was real glad I was with my lover of that time,” he
says. “AVe both had tested together, and he tested negative and I tested

positive, and he was very supportive. He didn’t say, ‘Well, goodbye, now,
because you’re positive.’”

The longest part of this segment, however, is devoted to “lason, 22,”

who gets to be much more than a talking head. We first see Jason lifting
weights. He’s very hot. He tells us, “I don’t look like the stereotypical

HIV-positive person. You know, the stereotype is gay, old, sick-looking.”

Jason proves the stereotype wrong on each count: He’s straight, young,

and healthy-looking. The segment’s ostensible purpose is to show that

HIV-positive people can have sexual relationships. Jason has an HIV-

negative girlfriend.

As a queer, it’s difficult to watch the enactment of Jason’s little romance

and not imagine how it might have been different, perhaps because in

the opening black-and-white sequence, with Jason pumping iron, the

hard bodied, clean-cut, all-American boy looks so much like so many of

the queers in the gyms and bars these days. What — I can’t help think-

ing — if this guy’s HIV-negative lover had been another guy instead of a

girl? And what if, instead of being white, the couple had been black?
 X >
I

What might this video have accomplished with just these minimal

changes in casting and story line? ^

Of course, Jason has given us ample reason to question our desire for

any particular positive image to counter a stereotype, because a posi-

tive image is just what Jason is; and in being ^of gay, not old, not sick-
looking, Jason only reinforces the idea that gay, old, and sick-looking
are despicable things to be.

Time Out does do some important work. Its condom demonstration is

no-nonsense, explicit, and accurate, except that no mention is made of

the dangers of oil-based lubes. The whys and wherefores of HIV testing
are helpful, except that no mention is made of the necessities for

anonymity, or at least confidentiality. The abstinence issue is managed

well, because being sexually active is seen as the norm among teens.

This makes it possible to talk about choice and peer pressure — not to

demand abstinence, but to say that it’s okay to be a virgin. In “Contents

under Pressure,” Jaleel White raps “I’m not ready for the wild thing,”

and later Arsenio becomes an impromptu rapper (and in so doing

seems to chide big-name rappers for not appearing in the tape) to as-

sure his audience, “You don’t have nothin’ to prove.”

But Arsenio evidently does have something to prove. In one of his mo-
ments with Magic, Arsenio does a gratuitous reversal riff on the diffi-

culty women have in getting men to use condoms. “I had a girl over at

my house,” he tells his buddy, “and was like suggesting that get a con-
I I

dom and everything, and she copped an attitude. She was like ‘Oh, Tm
nasty now? I’m nasty? Why you ever bring me here if I’m nasty?’ And she

copped an attitude and left.” Magic’s lack of sympathy is no doubt

meant to remind us that Arsenio is one of those L.A. bachelors that

Magic
every woman wants to be with, so why fret over one that got away.

The framing conceit of Time Out is a basketball court-side talk between

Accommodating
Magic and Arsenio. As the tape begins, the two of them are shown play-
ing one-on-one: then they take a break to talk about AIDS. Their chat is

casual, between friends, intended to establish the themes that will be

 —

taken up by a host of young celebrities and other talking heads. But the
banter between Magic and Arsenio does more than lay out the themes:

it sets the tone. Who do they assume is listening in on this talk between
two straight guys at the gym?

The positive-gay-image desire sparked by Time Out’s portrait of Jason,

or the desire for at least one image of a self-affirming black gay man in

the video, is set in motion not merely by the tape’s representational ab-

sences, but by its all-too-familiar construction of its audience. That

construction returns us to the repetition with which I began: “AIDS is 216

not just a gay disease.” The statement is true, of course. But what follows —
from this truism is what really counts. What follows in Time Out, if we 217

are to believe Magic’s words, is that it doesn’t matter how you get the

virus. But if we believe what we otherwise see and hear, it does matter.
As far as this video is concerned, queers need to be represented — mar-
ginally — only for the edification of a straight audience. Magic and Ar-
senio a"re entirely unable to imagine and speak to queers. No one says,

“If you’re gay or lesbian, you need to. . .

.’’
Or better still, “If you’re gay

like me, you need to. . .

.” And I think it’s no accident that this absence
is all the more glaring as regards African American gays and lesbians, for

they appear nowhere in Time Out. What we really need to imagine

and to demand — is not hunky Jason as a black gay man, but Magic

Johnson and Arsenio Hall looking into the camera and saying, “We want
to talk to our black gay brothers and sisters, we want to talk to all you
young guys who are getting it on with other guys, and all you young girls
who are getting it on with other girls. We want to tell you that we respect
your sexual choices, and we want to give you the information you need
to protect yourselves from HIV infection. And we want to say to all our
gay and lesbian brothers and sisters who are HIV-positive or have AIDS,
we’re fighting this fight for you, because we know you’ve been fighting

this fight for us for a very long time.” But once we imagine something
like this, we begin to envision an AIDS education video very different
from Time Out, a video that in saying “AIDS is not just a gay disease”

would not be saying, implicitly, “If AIDS were just a gay disease, we
wouldn’t be making this video.” Time Out reenacts, through its ab-

sences, its failures of imagination, and its presurnption of audience.

 X i
4

Magic’s original disavowal on Arsenio’s show. In spite of all else itltries to

be, Time Out 'is Magic’s (and Arser\io’s) way to never stop saying, “I’m far

from being homosexual. You know that. Everybody else who’s close to

me understands that."
\ %

In his just-released autobiography. My Life, Johnson splits himself into

two identities: Magic Johnson, superstar basketball player and super-
stud bachelor: and Earvin Johnson, Jr., private person,'AIDS educator,

and faithful lover and husband to Cookie. In the chapter entitled

“Women and Me,” he writes, “Some people can’t understand how I

could love one woman and be with others. But there was a part of me
that was always with Cookie. Maybe that was Earvin, and the other part
of me was Magic.

Splitting himself into these two personas, Johnson can speak in two dis-

tinct voices, claiming, for example, as Magic, that he had a lot of plea-

sure leading the bachelor life, and, as Earvin, that Cookie was right, he

should have married her sooner. He can be both hedonist and moralist,
realist promoter of safe sex and pious proselytizer for abstinence. It’s

also Johnson’s way of explaining his broken engagements, his long de-

lay in marrying Cookie. Finally committing to Cookie and almost im-

mediately thereafter discovering his HIV infection, he settled on the
Earvin persona . . . until the All-Star Game and the Dream Team at the

Barcelona Olympics. After those new highs, the Magic guise emerged
again, and so Johnson eventually returned to the Lakers. When he re-

tired from the Lakers a second time, just a month later and almost ex-

actly a year after the press conference at the Forum announcing that he
had tested HIV-positive, he did it as Earvin, with no fanfare, simply by
issuing a written statement to the press. The ostensible reason for this

resignation was the fear others in the NBA had begun to express about

Magic
playing full-out against Magic, a reason condensed for the television

audience into the seemingly powerful image of a bleeding scratch on

Magic’s leg during a game. But the subtext of the second resignation sto-

Accommodating

27. Earvin "Magic" Johnson, with William Novak, My Life (New York: Random House,
1992), p. 227.
 —

ries, buried beneath Karl Malone’s and Gerald Wilkins’s exaggerated

and undoubtedly displaced — sense of their health risks, was that tena-
cious old rumor, circulated, according to the Nets’ Sam Bowie by “a lot of
male egos out there not wanting to believe they can get this from a woman
so they can go on doing what they want to do without having to worry.”^^

Johnson went over the whole thing once again with Arsenio, complain-
ing that Karl Malone should have had the courtesy to talk to him pri-

vately about his fears before going to the press, and reassuring his pal

that he’d had things out with Isiah Thomas, who had been fingered as a 218

source of the rumors (ironically enough, since the whispering suppos- —

edly began in the first place because Magic and Isiah always kissed each 219

other before their games).

I said at the beginning of this essay that I disagreed with Larry Kramer’s
Nightline prediction that Magic Johnson would become a pariah. I

thought at the time that Larry failed to understand the extent to which

AIDSphobia was dependent on homophobia. But maybe /failed to rec-

ognize how completely the two remain intertwined. Because he’s a

straight celebrity. Magic Johnson shows a deeper, perhaps uncon-

scious, understanding of the necessity of constantly guarding against

the taint of homosexuality now that he’s infected with HIV. Just think

how he might have reacted to this astonishing statement by an Ohio

teenager in his video Time Out: “We think in Centerville, Ohio, it doesn’t

seem like AIDS could really hurt us. It seems like it’s more of, like, a Hol-

lywood type thing — celebrities.” No wonder Magic has opted for Earvin.

1 also said before that I agreed with Larry that Magic Johnson will prob-
ably die of AIDS. Buried in only one story that I read about Magic was
the fact that he had a case of shingles in 1985.^“ For anyone familiar with

28. Harvey Araton, "Messages of Reality and Mortality," New York Times, November 1,

1992, section 8, p. 1.

29. Quoted in Harvey Araton, "The N.B.A. Discovers It Can't Outleap Reality," New York
Times, Novembers, 1992, p. B11.
/
30. Leerhsen et al., "Magic's Message," p. 62.
the course of HIV disease, that is an alarming, if ambiguous, fact. We
haven’t been told how impaired Magic’s immune system is — no T-cell

counts, no markers of any kind. Magic’s workout regimen and opti-

mistic outlook are all the press reports. Magic himself wrote in Sports II-

lustrated at the time he tested positive, “I told the fellas that this is just

another challenge for me. It’s Maurice Cheek^in the NBA Finals in 1980
and ’83 against the 76ers. It’s Larry [Bird] and Dennis Johnson every

time we stepped on the court against the Celtics. It’s Isiah [Thomas] and
Dennis Rodman in all those wars against the Pistons. It’s Michael [Jor-

don]. It’s because of all of those challenges that I’m able to face this

newest challenge.”^' But Magic’s determination “to fight the virus,” “to

beat this thing,” is for us probably the most demoralizing repetition of

them all. We’ve heard it so many times. We’ve wanted so much to be-

lieve it. But we can’t anymore. We’ve had to accommodate too much. I

wonder if now — with Earvin — it will be different.

31. Johnson, Deal with It," p.21.

 r

DON’T TELL

First presented as a keynote address for the

conference "AIDS Appropriations: Cultural Studies

Perspectives,” Rice University Center for the Study of

Cultures, Houston, October i, 1993.

/
 }

You can’t serve in the military if you're dead.

You can’t march in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade if you’re dead.

You can’t register as domestic partners if you’re dead.

ACT UP!
Take direct action to end the AIDS crisis.
Come to our weekly meetings on Monday nights at 7:30
at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center,
208 West 13 Street

One person can make a difference.

Alessandro Codagnone, poster for ACT UP New York, 1 993.

 I —

“Nobody talks about AIDS anymore.” This observation — or accusa-

tion — was made by ACT UP on one of several different posters that ap-

peared on hoardings around New York City in the summer of 1993. The
statement is elaborated in fine print: “We’ve turned the lives of our
missing friends and lovers into pieces of a quilt and our anger and ac-
tivism into red ribbons. Now more than ever is the time to ACT UP.”' The
factious red ribbon is returned to on a second poster, whose bold type
asserts: “You can’t wear a red ribbon if you’re dead,” followed, in smaller
print, by “You can’t serve in the military if you’re dead. You can’t march
in the St. Patrick’s Day parade if you’re dead. You can’t register as do- 222

mestic partners if you’re dead.” A third broadside demands, “If AIDS is —

Clinton’s obsession why are so many still dying?” 223

That question refers to a promise made by Clinton during his 1992 pres-
idential election campaign that, if elected, AIDS would be his obses-

sion, but the word obsession also recalls, to me, an article that appeared
in the Nation in February 1989 under the headline “The Deadly Costs of
an Obsession. think back to that article because its accusation
that AIDS had monopolized the attention of gay men and lesbians at the
expense of other pressing issues — was just the reverse of what ACT UP
charges — that AIDS has been displaced from our agenda by the Cam-
paign for Military Service, domestic partnership legislation, and other
gay rights concerns. In the Nation piece, Darrel Yates Rist assailed AIDS
activists and AIDS service organizations for diverting all the energies

and fundraising capabilities of gay men and lesbians away from any
cause but AIDS. What about homeless gay teenagers? Rist demanded.

1. A handout with related rhetoric also appeared. Its opening paragraph reads: "People
don't talk about AIDS anymore. They just die from it. AIDS is quickly becoming 'last

year's news' and AIDS activism is no longer considered 'appropriate.' Instead, AIDS
has become the familiar ache in the background of our days. We spend our mornings
scanning obituary pages, our afternoons visiting hospital rooms and our evenings at-

tending memorial services. Too exhausted to fight and too hurtto hope, we've turned
the lives of our missing friends and lovers into pieces of a quilt and our anger and ac-

tivism into red ribbons."

2. Darrell Yates Rist, "AIDS as Apocalypse: The Deadly Costs of an Obsession," Nation,
February 13, 1989, pp. 181, 196-200. Page numbers for further citations from this ar-

ticle appear in parentheses in the text.

 —
>
i

What about anti-gay violence or the rights of same-sex couples to

marry? What about organizations like the Hetrick-Martin Institute (for

%
the protection of gay and lesbian youth) or the National Gay and Les-
bian Task Force? Based largely on false charges, such as one that AIDS
activists deliberately exaggerate numbers of people infected with Hiy
to incite panic, the crux of Rist’s argument w^s that AIDS activism is

selfishly motivated by wealthy white gay men. He wrote, for example, of

“an elder of the (San Francisco] gay community, a man ofTnoney and in-
fluence,” who was incredulous when confronted with Rist’s concern
with the problems of gay youth. “When it comes to kids,” Rist declared,

“even the homosexual heart beats false; it beats only for men of a certain

age, a certain color — in fact, a certain social class” (p. 198). And, evi-

dently, it beats only for men. “Some angry lesbians,” he wrote at another
point in his discussion, “question whether bourgeois gay men ever
wanted more than comfortably closeted sex anyway — and now wonder
if they want more than a quick cure for AIDS in order to get back to the

old days” (p. 200).

Rist seemed to think he was making an argument for gay identity poli-

tics, which in his view AIDS activists deny by inhabiting a new, peculiar

sort of closet; thus: “A certain interest in AIDS has become a trendy code
for suggesting one’s homosexuality without declaring it, what being a
bachelor and an artiste used to suggest” (p. 200).^ But instead, by alleg-
ing the selfishness of gay white men, their inattention to race and class
and by doing so in the pages of a traditional left-liberal journal whose
record on gay and AIDS issues was abysmal — Rist only thwarted his

own stated cause. In the Nation an indictment of closetedness is hardly

an indictment at all — unless, of course, it involves Roy Cohn''

whereas bourgeois indifference to the problems of poverty and racism

3. "In my gym, a crossroads in Manhattan, a coterie of cultish gay men plastered ACT
DP's 'Silence=Death' logo everywhere in the facility and are given to working out in

ACT UP or G.M.H.C. T-shirts — as though sporting such gym wear were a courageous
act. But I've not seen one of that crowd so boldly advertise a more identifiably gay and
Tell therefore riskier issue" (Rist, "AIDS as Apocalypse," p. 200).

4. See Robert Sherrill, "King Cohn," Nation, May 21, 1988, pp. 719-725; see also "Right
Don't

On, Girlfriend!" in this volume.

is damning indeed: the charge of slighting class issues has all along
been the foundation of the traditional Left’s resistance to the new social
movements rooted in identity politics.

It is unnecessary now, as it was in 1989, to defend ACT UP’s political

record on questions of class, race, gender, and age or its commitment to

fighting for gay and lesbian rights not directly related to AIDS. I don’t

wish to claim that the record is exemplary, but merely to insist that it is

far more complex and far more commendable that Rist suggested.^

What nags me now, though, on rereading the article, is Rist’s equation,

cravenly ventriloquized into the mouths of lesbians, of AIDS activism,

the closet, and the desire for nothing but sex.

Getting laid, you might recall, is not among the things ACT UP’s poster
said you can’t do if you’re dead. Apart from wearing a red ribbon (which

after all, I suppose, the dead could do), ACT UP mentioned three possi-
bilitie's: serving in the military, marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade,
and filing for domestic partnership benefits. None of these rights is spe-
cific to gays and lesbians, but their mention in tandem with the asser-

tion that “nobody talks about AIDS anymore” is clearly meant to indicate
both their current prominence in gay and lesbian politics and that as
such they have displaced AIDS. By implicitly indicting that displace-
ment, ACT UP could in fact be accused of too narrow an identification
as a gay and lesbian group. The absurdity of ACT UP’s either-or propo-
sition regarding political causes, as well as its problematic gay- specificity,
becomes obvious if we substitute an alternative formulation that doesn’t
allude to current gay rights issues. How about: “You can’t get a job if

you’re dead”? “You can’t benefit from affirmative action if you’re dead”?

or “You can’t choose an abortion if you’re dead”?

Though am hardly more pleased by ACT UP’s accusation than was

I I

with Rist’s, ACT UP does have a point, and it is one that has been noted

by many others as well: AIDS is no longer the central issue on the gay

5. See, e.g., Douglas Crimp, with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1990), especially pp. 84-95, and "Right On, Girlfriend!" in this volume.
 , >
»

and lesbian movement’s agenda. This fact was starkly evident in the

contrast between the 1987 and marches on Washington. Whereas

people with AIDS and their lovers, friends, and supporters comprised
the lead-off contingent and indelible image of the 1987 march, gay men
and lesbians in military uniform were at the forefront in the spring of

'93. The ’93 march’s stated theme, “A Simple M^Uer of Justice,” virtually
forecast the displacement. It might seem a simple matter of justice that
gays and lesbians be allowed to serve as equals in the military; indeed

all manner of gay and lesbian equal rights might seem a simple matter
of justice. But just how could this phrase pertain to the AIDS crisis? At

the very least, I think we’d have to say that AIDS raises complex ques-
tions of justice, and not only of justice.

The problem with ACT UP’s allegation of displacement is not whether

or not it’s correct but its implicit moralism. ACT UP appears to attribute
the displacement to apathy, bad faith, selfishness, or cowardice. Or, at

best, to being led astray by President Clinton, who, in pretending to be

our friend, co-opted our agenda.® ACT UP’s poster might just as well

have asked, “If AIDS is Clinton’s obsession, why did he spend his limited
political capital — and force us to us spend ours — on the effort to lift

the military ban?” But how is it that we have been so easily duped? One
reason I pose the question is that, if ACT UP and others are right about

6. It was a commonplace among media pundits that President Clinton made a fatal po-

litical blunder by announcing so early in his presidency that he would lift the ban on

gays in the military. This was an issue, the media claimed, that nobody really cared

about, but because it was so controversial it was destined to dominate the news, dis-

tracting us from the things that really mattered, like the economy and national health

care. Who constituted this audience that didn't care about gays in the military? Thus

is a "general public" constructed, a general public presumed heterosexual even as a

gay constituency must be acknowledged to exist. But these sentiments were echoed

in the gay press. Until recently, much of that press claimed, gays in the military was
an issue most gay people didn't really care about. In Conduct Unbecoming, Randy Shilts
is more accusatory. He insists that, since Stonewall, gay leaders simply opposed the
military tout court— and thus gays in the military — as a knee-jerk leftist response, in-

spired as Shilts apparently thinks all gay leaders are by a 1960s counterculture men-
Tell

tality. In Shilts's simplistic view, gay leaders failed for two decades to recognize a

Don't crucial a gay rights issue. See Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians
in the U.S. Military (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), pp. 95-97, 153, and passim.
Page numbers for further citations from this book appear in parentheses in the text.
 .

our being guilty of displacement, then 1 too am guilty, even as 1 too have
at times deplored the displacement. 1 admit that 1 have been riveted by
the newspaper and television coverage of the debates over lifting the

military ban, just as 1 once followed every story or broadcast about AIDS.
The spectacle of naked homophobia and victim-blaming, of threatened
masculinity and reaction formation, of manipulated Senate hearings

and contorted policymaking, is very hard to resist, even in its horrors

and frustrations, or perhaps because of its horrors and frustrations. A

choice tidbit from a New York Times story: A sailor worried, “If these

people are allowed to come out of the closet. I’ll be serving aboard a 226

ship and wondering who’s who and what’s what.’’^ For my part, wonder I
—
why it is knowledge rather than secrecy that causes the sailor to wonder. 227

My interest here, however, is not to justify our displacement, or atone

for it, but rather to examine it for what it might tell us about our current
perspective on AIDS.

Displacement is a psychic mechanism usually of a defensive nature. The

cathexis onto a particular idea — one that has perhaps become unbear-
able to consciousness — is withdrawn from it and displaced onto an-
other idea. It should come as little surprise to us that we might now find
AIDS an idea that has become unbearable and against which we might
wish to defend. But ACT UP’s broadside moralizing either fails to recog-
nize or fails to credit the fact that AIDS has become an unbearable idea.
In “Mourning and Militancy,” written in 1989, 1 saw this moralism as re-
lated to our failure to honor the necessity of mourning: now in 1993 it re-

appears in a related failure to assess the depths of our despair. Perhaps,

given the work of political activism, this is inevitable. Despair might be
activism’s undoing. But disavowal of the prevalence of despair about

AIDS, or hectoring us because we feel it, will not help us overcome it.

Why do we despair? Surely because we seem no closer now than we did

when ACT UP was formed in 1987 to being able to save our lives. And

7. Larry Rother, "The Gay Troop Issue; Off Base, Many Sailors Voice Anger Toward Ho-
mosexuals," New York Times, January 31, 1993. For an analysis of this "epistemo-

phobia," see Kendall Thomas, "Shower/Closet," Assemblage 20 (April 1 993), pp. 80-81
 unlike that moment, when the very fact of our growing activism af-

forded the hope that we could s*ave ourselves, very few of us still truly

believe that the lives of those now infected can be saved by what we do.
Of course, we still know what is to be done. Other lives can still be saved V
by preventing further transmission: the quality of lives can be improved
by preventing discrimination and by ensuringj^ccess to treatment and

services; and certainly more money and effort can be directed toward

research and education. But without hope for ourselves and our friends

many of us now turn away from these battles. Clearly though, our de-

spair does not amount to total defeat, for as the charge of displacement

implies, we are still engaged, only in another cause. Perhaps if we can

discover in the displacement the nature of our defense, we can begin to
work it through.

The defense is easy enough to identify, at least insofar as it concerns the

redirection of our energies to lifting the military ban: It is a substitution

of the image of the healthy body for that of the sick body. We can see the
desire for the substitution already in early demands by AIDS activists

for positive images. Think, for example, of ACT UP’s call, in the face of

the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of Nicholas Nixon’s close-up

photographs of disfigured, diseased, and dying people with AIDS, for

“the visibility of PWAs who are vibrant, angry, loving, sexy, beautiful,

acting up and fighting back.’’® Well, we now have the visibility of just

such people, but, of course, they are not people with AIDS, they are men
and women in uniform. What makes these bodies different from the

bodies of people with AIDS? Why do we suppose these bodies are

healthy? What constitutes these bodies as a psychic defense against our

despair about AIDS?

In Conduct Unbecoming, Randy Shilts profiles a vast number of gays

and lesbians hounded out of the military. The individual stories, poignant

Tell

8. 1 analyze Nixon's photographs and ACT UP's demonstration against them in "Portraits
Don't

of People with AIDS," in this volume.

 and enraging, are also highly repetitious, variations on a single theme;
ultimately they blur into a single narrative. It is the story of an all-

American boy or girl, usually from a military family, an achiever, ideal-

istic, politically and socially conservative, believing so strongly in his or

her country as to want nothing more than to serve it, and generally do-
ing so with excellence and honor. But the kid is haunted by a secret de-
sire, one he or she thinks can be overcome or at least avoided by joining
the military. The desire doesn’t go away, it becomes more urgent, and fi-

nally the soldier accepts it. Sooner or later the investigation begins, the
career ends in separation, often with dishonorable discharge, and the 228

military has lost a great soldier, a great American. Here are portions of —
the beginning of one such narrative in Conduct Unbecoming: 229

Vernon E. Berg III was the eldest son ofNavy Commander Vernon E. Berg,

Jr, one of the most respected officers in the Navy's chaplain corps. . . . No
one could believe how much his namesake resembled his father. . . . As
youngVernon grew into his full five-foot-nine-inch frame and his hair

turned sandy blond, he was still the carbon copy of his dad, right down
to the deep blue eyes and second-tenor voice, which was why they called
him Copy. . . . Copy began establishing his own track record of being a
winner. ... He was not just another track letterman at Erank W. Cox
High School; he was also student-body president. At Boy’s State, he was
not just a delegate, he was a candidate for governor. At Boy Scout Troop

422 he was not simply another Life Scout, he was Alowat Sikima, Chief
,

of Eire, the top position of the elite Order of the Arrow fraternity for the
entire Chesapeake Bay area. Whenever local chapters of the Lion’s or Ro-
tary or Optimist’s Clubs needed a good teenager to speak, they trotted out
Copy Berg. . . . Only in his sexual attractions did his confidence waver.
(pp. 171 - 172)

Copy Berg is what Shilts calls a “responsible homosexual with impec-

cable credentials” (249). The phrase ostensibly describes those whose
cases against the military ban would stand a good chance of winning in

federal courts, but it also characterizes the image repertoire marshaled

in arguments for lifting the ban. The images have become familiar to all

of us: from Leonard Matlovich and Miriam Ben-Shalom to Margarethe

 >
»

Cammermeyer, Dusty Pruitt, Keith Meinhold, Jose Zuniga, and Toseph

Steffan/^
%
X

Midshipman Joseph Steffan’s autobiography Honor Bound fills out in

detail the sort of narrative rehearsed again.and again by Shilts.*“ It be-

gins with a chapter entitled “Warren,” the n^^me of the little town in

northern Minnesota where Steffan grew up. Steffan’s literary conceit

here is the description of his daily long-distance run, Which provides

the frame within which Steffan depicts Warren itself and relates his high

school triumphs as a two-mile competitor in regional track meets after

unpromising youthful attempts to be the athlete his father wanted him

to be. Warren is one of those supposedly typical American towns where

everybody knows everybody by name and you don’t have to lock your

doors at night. And Joseph Steffan is one of those supposedly typical

products of such towns: He wins not only track meets but also science

9. Although my discussion here will focus on this image repertoire, I want at least to

mention an argument for lifting the military ban that such images fail to make. It goes

without saying that very few of us can live up to the image of the "responsible homo-

sexual with impeccable credentials." This is one reason positive images— because
they are idealizations— can be so disabling. More damaging still, arguments limited

to standard, uncritical notions of patriotism, of noble desires to serve and even to risk

one's life for one's country, sidestep the more ordinary reasons that mostyoung people
volunteerforthe military: to geta job,to getan education, to getawayfrom dead-end,
deadening, or even deadly environments. This accounts, of course, for higher pro-
portions of military personnel being drawn from the ranks of poor African-American

and Latino populations. And not only are young gay men and lesbians just as likely to

be poor, just as likely to be black and Latino, as are young heterosexuals, but they may
have other, equally pressing reasons to find a way out of their stultifying home envi-

ronments. Almost anyone who has grown up queer in rural or small-town America
knows how necessary it is to survival to find a way out, eventually to find the way into

those communities that will nourish and sustain our queerness. Because I grew up
queer in just such a place — a small Northwestern town that has become infamous

as headquarters to the Aryan Nations— I not only know this but recoil at the depic-

tion of such places as the locus of all that is good and honorable about America.

10. Joseph Steffan, Honor Bound: A Gay Naval Midshipman Fights to Serve His Country

(New York: Avon Books, 1992). Page numbers for further citations from this book ap-

pear in parentheses in the text. See also Gays and the Military: Joseph Steffan ver-

Tell sus the United States, ed. Marc Wolinskyand Kenneth Sherrill (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1993).

Don't

\
 t

fairs; he gets elected class president, never drinks alcohol, joins a group
called Teens Encounter Christ, sings in the choir, attends Boys State,

graduates salutatorian, and gets accepted at the Naval Academy — typ-

ical, therefore, in the sense of exemplary. As a midshipman, Steffan is

more than exemplary; in his fourth year he was named battalion com-
mander, which made him one of the three top-ranking midshipmen in

his class and put him in direct command over one-sixth of the Acad-

emy’s forty-five hundred midshipmen. He also sang the national an-

them at the Army-Navy football game, an honor that he performed in

front of President Ronald Reagan. Again stressing the all-American fla- 230

vor of his hometown, Steffan writes, “Back home in Warren my parents —

huddled with a dozen of their friends in front of the television. At the 231

American Legion hall, the women’s club stopped in the middle of their

annual prayer breakfast and moved into the bar to watch on the big-

screen television, while around town most everyone in Warren was

waiting to see someone from their hometown sing on national televi-

sion’’ (p. 101).

But for all his triumphs, Steffan is haunted by his secret, which finally

brings him to personal crisis:

/ was feeling very depressed, like nothing I had ever experienced in my

life. At the heart of this depression were recurring thoughts about my sex-
uality. I was workingso hard to ignore them, to shut them out, but I could

not turn off a part of my own mind. These thoughts were always there, al-
ways resurfacing, reminding me that I was avoiding something. . . . I

thought I could control my mind and shut off a part of my being. It was
a battle I was losing. . . .

One night before midterm exams, I was trying in vain to study in my

room. My ability to concentrate was at an all-time low, and 1 simply

couldn’t focus. There were so many pressures to deal with, so many things
going on in my head. Finally, I just couldn't take it anymore. I slammed
my books shut, threw on a pair of sweats, and walked down the stairs

and out of the hall. . . .

/
 X *
»

From the beginning, I had avoided dealing with my sexuality," but it

didn’t feel like avoidance anymore. Now it felt like a lie — a lie whose per-
petuation was begitining to sicken me, to eat away at my souC I had

crossed the line between doubt and certainty months before, but I kept
lying to myself (pp. 103-104)

A few paragraphs describe Steffan’s problems reconciling his growing

knowledge that he is indeed gay with his naval career aspirations. Then:

After what seemed like an hour, I finally got up and started walking back
to the hall. I still didn't completely understand what it meant to be gay,
or even fully accept my homosexuality. A part of me still wanted to be
straight, to be “normal” — because I felt it would make my life easier. But
I had taken a first crucial step toward acceptance. That step was the be-

ginning of a long process of “coming out”. . . .

For the first time in many mon ths, I finally felt at peace with myself I

had finally stopped fighting who I knew I was and began accepting
myself. . . .

Like many gay men and lesbians, I discovered that there is no hiding
from yourself. Homosexuality is simply not a choice; it is an identity, (pp.

104-105)

From this moment in the narrative, Steffan always speaks with certainty

about his identity, his being, what he is. Never once, though, does he
speak of any sort of sexual activity.

The rest of the story is well known: Just six weeks before his scheduled
graduation from the Academy and his assignment to the elite subma-
rine service, Joe Steffan was forced to resign because the academy brass
had discovered his homosexuality.

Tell
Steffan’s court battle for reinstatement in the Navy is celebrated not only
because he was such an exemplary midshipman, but also because of
Don't
the grotesque bias and ignorance displayed by the presiding judge.

Judge Oliver J. Gasch repeatedly referred to Steffan as “that homo" in

the court room, and in a thirty-five-page ruling against Steffan, nearly

one quarter was devoted to the argument that banning homosexuals

from the military is necessary to prevent the spread of AIDS, an argu-
ment whose relevance to the case the government’s lawyers had explic-
itly denied. Although Steffan and his lawyers knew they had a good
case, from the beginning they were worried about Gasch: “Despite the
strength of our position, we were concerned about how Judge Gasch felt
about the issues surrounding homosexuality. In his research Marc Wolin- 232

—
[

sky, one of Steffan’s lawyers] discovered that Judge Gasch had recently
decided in favor of the military in a military case involving homosexual 233

conduct. Although ours was not a conduct case, we questioned whether

he would appreciate the difference between homosexual status and ho-
mosexual conduct. This distinction could well determine his entire ap-

proach to the case” (p. 203). Clearly, given Judge Gasch’s final opinion
about protecting the military from AIDS, the distinction failed him.

The ignorance displayed in Judge Gasch’s equation of homosexuals and

AIDS is not his alone. I heard it voiced time and again during televised

debates on lifting the ban, and time and again I waited in vain for it to

be cogently disputed by opponents of the ban. Perhaps because the as-

sertion was so often made amidst a barrage of other, more often stated

irrational objections to lifting the ban, the ban’s opponents let it go. But

I think ignoring the equation is not merely a question of not dignifying so

plainly false an argument with a reply. To me, the failure is symptomatic.

A reply might go like this: The military routinely tests for HIV infection,
and its policy does not call for discharging those who test positive, but

rather for monitoring their health. HIV is transmitted by unprotected

anal, vaginal, and possibly oral sex and by shared hypodermic needles
when injecting drugs, any of which activities may be practiced by men
and women, gay and straight. Lesbians, who are five times more likely

than gay men to be separated from military service for homosexuality,

are proportionately at very low risk for AIDS. And gay men, though here-
/
 X >
»

tofore proportionately at greater risk than heterosexuals in the' United

States, tend to be better informed about and likely to practice risk re-

duction. Reinforcing the idea that only gay people get AIDS promotes
the ignorance of those engaging in heterosexual sex and reduces the
V.

likelihood of their adopting risk reduction practices. Moreover, if^the

military turns a blind eye to the established fact that many men and
women in the military engage in homosexual sex, whatever their pro-
fessed “sexual orientations,” there is little likelihood that homosexually

explicit risk reduction education will be provided. If, however, the ban
on gay men and lesbians in the military were lifted, there would be a

greater likelihood of explicit AIDS education and probably of an overall

reduction of HIV transmission in the military.

The failure to make this argument appears to me symptomatic because

such an argument necessarily speaks about transmission, which in turn

necessarily entails sex, but the ban’s official opponents did not speak of

sex; they spoke of identity. From the beginning, the fight to lift the mili-
tary ban was an issue framed, like loseph Steffan’s court case, as one of
status versus conduct, as identity versus behavior. That framing of the

issue made it possible for President Clinton to believe he honored the

spirit of his commitment to end the ban by accepting the policy of Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is nearly everywhere recognized as

a defeat for lesbian and gay rights and a broken Clinton promise be-

cause it legislates the closet, codifies into policy the very means of ho-

mophobic oppression. As if it were not clear enough how the closet

oppresses, the military spelled it out for us. Under the new policy, it is

theoretically okay to be gay or lesbian but it is not okay to say so. But
“saying so” is not only a question of speech, it is also a question of con-

duct. Or, more accurately, the one automatically entails the other. Not
only is homosexual sex — anywhere, anytime — grounds for separation

from the military, but the announcement of one’s homosexual identity

leads, according to the policy, to the presumption — nominally rebut-

table — of a propensity to break the rules of conduct: to say “I am gay”

Tell
means, according to this policy, “I have engaged in or will engage in

sodomy.” Thus, although Clinton and the opponents of the ban argued
Don't

for equal rights on the basis of status, the policy declares that homosex-
ual status, when owned up to, is not simply status, it is also conduct, or

at least the propensity to engage in illegal conduct.

Conduct is presumably what Clinton had in mind in the spring of 1993

when, during a question-and-answer session in the Rose Garden, he
sought to reassure a concerned preacher that his support for lifting the

ban should not be interpreted as his condoning the homosexual life-

style." The odd locution homosexual lifestyle may be supposed to mean

many things, but I doubt that Clinton intended to allay the preacher’s

fear of his condoning fags listening to bel canto or dykes singing folk 234

songs, or even dykes riding Harleys and fags wearing pumps. I think —
Clinton meant fags and dykes fucking, although lesbians fucking might 235

still be unimaginable to those who employ the term lifestyle to encom-

pass what they deplore. After all, how often were lesbians mentioned in
the debates about the military ban when the issue was, say, close quar-

ters or shared shower facilities? At the risk of perpetuating the invisibil-

ity, 1 won’t have much to say about lesbians either. The reason is that the
argument I intend to make is about the identities and identifications of
gay men, which 1 think the virtual absence of lesbians from the gays-in-

the-military debate only proves is not symmetrical or analogous to, is

indeed entirely different from, the argument one would have to make
about the identities and identifications of lesbians. Moreover, the sepa-
ration of lesbians from military service is generally the result not of their

perceived threat to other female military personnel, but of their refusal

of the attentions of male personnel. Indeed, the very little that was said
about lesbians and by women during the debates over the ban suggests
that if lesbians were the issue and women were making the decisions,
the ban would have been lifted with very little argument.

The new military policy’s linkage, through the “presumption of a propen-

sity,’’ of status and conduct, even as status and conduct are conceptual-

11. "Most Americans believe that the gay life style should not be promoted by the mili-

tray or anybody else in this country We are trying to work this out so that our
country does not . . . appearto be endorsing a gay life style" ("Excerpts from Clinton's

Question-and-Answer Session in the Rose Garden," New York Times, May 28, 1993,

P.A14).
 —
V
V i
4

ized as two separate things, has the paradoxically salutary effect o^ forcing

us to ask the question, Where is sex in our politics of identity? In the mil-

itary’s own version of our identity politics, status and conduct are in

practice linked by more than this newly conceived propensity. On the

one hand it is admitted that there are nowand always have been homo-
sexuals in the military. Less often discussed ^^the also-well-known fact

that there is a great deal of same-sex sexual activity in the military, and
that such activity is as condoned as heterosexual sex so long as the par-

ticipants maintain a heterosexual identity. It is thus only the connection

between homosexual conduct and homosexual identity that allows that

conduct to be viewed as homosexual and therefore punishable by sep-

aration. In this manner, the military also severs sexual acts from sexual
identities to make room for the range of sexual activities that are rou-

tinely practiced throughout the military.

In traditional lesbian and gay identity politics, we had good reason to

argue that sex — sexual acts, sexual desire, sexual fantasies — does not

determine lesbian and gay identity. While lesbian and gay identities
were understood to be socially constructed through postulates about
sexual desire and sexual acts, when claiming those identities for our-

selves we sought to shift the emphasis to our shared oppression and our
self-determined communities and cultures. We opposed the term ho-

mosexual — proposing instead homophile, then gay and lesbian, then

queer — in part because the sex in homosexual was inevitably used to

reduce us to our sexual desire; and with the exclusive focus on our sex-
uality, we were stigmatized as merely and exclusively sexual beings

and thus sexually obsessed, sexually voracious, sexually predatory. The

persistence of this stereotype is obvious in arguments against lifting the

ban, where the assumption is that, if allowed to come out in the open,

we won’t be able to keep our hands off anyone of the same sex.

By insisting on status versus conduct, identity versus behavior, oppo-

nents of the ban attempted to displace that stereotype by avoiding sex

Tell
altogether. In place of the insatiable sexual predator, we were treated to

the image of the gay or lesbian soldier with an exemplary service record
Don't

or the young recruit with a desire only to serve his or her country. Just

%
what it was that made the soldier or recruit gay or lesbian in the first

place, what constitutes a gay or lesbian identity, was left unsaid. Unfor-

tunately, this “unspeakableness”

— “the love that dare not speak its

name” — can only return us to the stereotype, which continues to do its

work. And that work will be fully accomplished in the disciplinary power
of the new policy, which punishes identity in the name of a propensity

to conduct unbecoming.

Now, lest it seem that the formulators of the new policy have their prior-
ities right — right, that is, in relation to more recent, antiessentialist 236

theories of identity — 1 want to argue that sex for the policymakers is —

still prior to and foundational for identity. Although it is the soldier’s 237

enunciation of gay or lesbian identity that leads the military to presume

conduct, the fact that the presumption of propensity necessarily fol-

lows the enunciation determines it as prior. With the small caveat of “re-
buttable,” the policy says that homosexual sex, engaged in or desired, is

essentially what the enunciation of homosexual identity means. Noth-

ing argued by opponents of the ban counters that essentialism. That is

because, spoken or unspoken, emphasized or de-emphasized, sex is

still the foundation of our identity politics.

It is of course Michel Foucault who has explained how we become

trapped in the disciplinary apparatus through essentialist forms of
identity politics. For Foucault, sex is not a material substrate existing “in

itself,” prior to the regulatory and normalizing regime of sexuality.

Rather sex is an imaginary idea discursively produced inside the de-

ployment of sexuality as the anchor of its operations:

The notion of “sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial

unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations,

and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a
causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered

everywhere. . . .

It is — in fact, an imaginary point determined by the deploy-

through sex
ment of sexuality — that each individual has to pass in order to haveac-
 ^ >
i

cess to his own intelligibility to the whole of his body to his

identity. . . »

Foucault goes on to warn that therefore

« \

we must not think that by saying yes to sex, gne says no to power; on

the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deploy-

ment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if

we aim — through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sex-

uality — counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleas-
to

ures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of

resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deploy-
ment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures,

(p. 157)

This strategy has left Foucault open to the charge of coy evasion. Just
what is meant by “bodies and pleasures” as opposed to “sex-desire”? To
the extent that Foucault later elaborated on what he meant, he only in-

vited harsher criticism. In a famous instance, Leo Bersani linked Fou-

cault with Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon in the project of

a “pastoralizing,” “redemptive reinvention of sex.”'^ Bersani’s criticism

emerged from his analysis of the homophobic stereotype mentioned

earlier, that is, the one that represents the homosexual as nothing but

sex. In Bersani’s formulation, this stereotype becomes considerably

more specific, indeed gender-specific (and gender-dysphoric). The
stereotype is, in fact, a man being fucked, or to use Bersani’s notorious
words, “a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal

ecstasy of being a woman” (p. 212). Significantly, Bersani’s vivid de-

scription is of a representation, a representation that forms in the un-

conscious of “the good citizens of Arcadia, Florida,” when “looking at

12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Ue\N\ork:V\ntaqe, 1990),

pp. 154-156. Page numbers for further citations from this book appear in parentheses
in the text.
Tell
13. Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,
ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 215. Page numbers forfurther ci-
Don't

tations from this article appear in parentheses in the text.

 t

three hemophiliac children” with AIDS whose house they are about to

burn down (p. 212). But though this representation is thus murderous in
its possible effects, it is also, for Bersani, the picture of gay men’s most
radical achievement. For Bersani’s claim is that gay men’s identities are

formed through what he calls variously a “loving identification” (p.

208), an “uncontrollable identification” (p. 222), indeed a “nearly mad

identification” (p. 209) with our phallocentric, homophobic oppres-
sors, but — and here is the radical achievement — we “never cease to
feel the appeal of [that identity’s! being violated” (p. 209). Thus it is gay
men’s constant undermining of our identities through self-debasement 238

or self-shattering — through being fucked — that constitutes the possi- —

bility of a radically antiphallocratic gay politics. Although Bersani does 239

not make the distinction, it seems necessary to point out that “being

fucked” is nof what Foucault means by sex. Indeed “being fucked” may
well be more like what Foucault had in mind when he spoke of “bodies

and pleasures,” with breaking away from the agency of sex. For if getting
fucke'd is that which undermines identity, it cannot be taken to be the
foundation for identity.

At the end of his essay, Bersani noted the danger of his theory for gay

men in the age of AIDS: “But if the rectum is the grave in which the mas-

culine ideal ... of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be cele-

brated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized

that potential as the certainty of biological death, and has therefore

reinforced the heterosexual association of anal sex with . . . self-

annihilation . .
.” (p. 222).

Bersani’s fear had already been confirmed by Jesse Helms, who stated
on the floor of the Senate in 1987, “Every AIDS case can be traced back

to a homosexual act.”'"* While Helms is of course entirely wrong about

the facts, he may be entirely right about the representation — the one

Bersani described as unconsciously formed by the citizens of Arcadia

and the one that still appears as a ghostly afterimage whenever we see a

14. See Congressional Record, October 14, 1987, pp. S14202-S14220; see also "How to

Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic" in this volume.

 i

Bureau, In Honor of Allen R. Schindler, 1993.

person with AIDS. But is it possible that we also see that representa-

tion — albeit it unconsciously — when we look at, say, loseph Steffan?

Tell

At about the same time in the summer of 1993 as ACT UP’s posters sur-
Don't

faced around New York, two others, la^rger and more elegantly produced
by the artist-design term Bureau, also appeared. Always hung as a pair,

one carried the portrait of radioman Allen Schindler, the other the pic-

ture of his murderer, apprentice airman Terry Helvey. Circling above

Schindler’s handsome young face are the words “To die for." The story
to which these posters refer was much in the news when lifting the mil-
itary ban was being debated.*^ Schindler, just coming to grips with his
homosexuality, was stationed in Sasebo, Japan, assigned there to the
USS Belleau Wood, known as one of the roughest and most out of con-
trol in the navy. Schindler’s journal indicated that he feared for his life

after his homosexuality became known. His entry for October 2, 1992,
read, “More people are finding out about me. It scares me a little. You
never know who would want to injure me or cease my existence.” His
fears proved well founded, for shortly after he wrote the entry in his

journal, he was followed into a public men’s room in a park three blocks
from base and brutally beaten to death by Terry Helvey with the partic-
ipation of fellow airman Charles Vins. The Navy informed Schinder’s
mother only that he had been assaulted in a park and was dead, nothing
about the perpetrators or the motive. When Schindler’s mangled body
arrived home, it was so disfigured that his mother was able to recognize her
son only from the tattoos on his arm. Finally acknowledging Schindler’s
homosexuality, the navy then attempted to explain his murder as the

result of a homosexual love affair gone sour, the same “unhappy gay
sailor” syndrome that the Navy had concocted to explain the gun-turret
explosion on the battleship Iowa in 1989.

The Bureau poster project creates a representation of gays in the mili-

tary considerably more complex than the positive images put forward

by opponents of the ban; that greater complexity obtains in the posters’

registration, through a kind of doubling, of ambivalence. The pictures

of the two sailors show them both perfectly conforming to descriptions

of the supposedly all-American handsome guy. Think not only of Copy

15. See, e.g., "Death of Gay Sailor Is Investigated as Bias Crime," New York Times, Jan-
uary 10, 1993, sec. 1, p. 17; "Gay Sailor Tells of a 'Living Hell,'" New York Times, March
8, 1993, p. A15; Eric Schmitt, "Inquiry on Sailor's Killing Tests Navy on Dealing with
Gay Issues," New York Times, May 10, 1993, p. All.
 i
i

X
Berg and Joe Steffan but of Scott Peck in his own father’s description of

him before Sam Nunn’s Senate committee. Marine Colonel Fred Peck
called his son “a recruiter’s dream come 'true — 6 feet 1 inch tall, blue-

eyed, blond hair, and a great student.”**^ The amazing ubiquity of blonds ^
among all these good-soldier images resonates chillingly with Allen

Schindler’s term for the men that attracted hirqi;^he coded them in his

journal as “blond things.” But in the Bureau double portrait, one of the

dreamboats is straight, the other gay, one a murderer, the other his victim.

“To die for” — to die for what? One’s country? one’s masculinity? one’s
sexuality? But of course “to die for” has another meaning altogether, as

in “he’s to die for”: 1 think he’s hot. But who? Allen? Terry? both? Can we
tell them apart? Can we say who is the hotter? Whom we’d rather fuck?
Whom we’d rather be fucked by? Is our identification and/or desire drawn
inevitably, as Bersani’s analysis might suggest, to Terry, the murderer?

The Bureau poster opens up within a simple pair of images not only the

ambivalence of stereotypical representations, their pleasures and dan-

gers, but also what is secret in them. That same summer a gay bar where
I often hang out prominently displayed a series of banners and T-shirts

printed with the slogans “Bomb the Ban” and “Operation Lift the Ban”

along with signs that asked that patrons support the Campaign for Mil-
itary Service. In the men’s room — not that there’s a ladies’ room — of

the same bar a flier advertised every first Wednesday of the month as

M.I.U. night — Men In Uniform night, the night devoted to patrons who
dress in military and other regalia. I don’t want to overinterpret the

over-the-bar versus over-the-toilet priorities of the Spike, but I do think

Bureau’s bringing the two together in their own statement on the ban is
more true to the way we actually live our politics in relation to our de-

sires. From Paul Cadmus and Kenneth Anger to Tom of Finland and Pierre
et Gilles, the man in uniform has fueled gay men’s sexual fantasies. It is

these pictures of bodies and pleasures that are repressed in the positive

images and rhetorics of official opponents of the military ban.

Tell

Don't

16. "A Recruiter's Dream," New York Times, May 13, 1993, p. A22.

f
 “To die for” — Foucault writes that it is sex that we are willing to die for:

Hence the fact that over the centuries it has become more important than
our soul, more important almost than our life; and so it is that all the
world’s enigmas appear frivolous to us compared to this secret, minus-
cule in each of us, but of a density that makes it more serious than any
other. The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by
the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its en-
tirety for sex itself for the truth and sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying
for. It is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued with
the death instinct, (p. 156)

For Foucault, then, the death instinct emerges at the historical moment
when identity becomes equated with sex. Taking Bersani’s point, per-
haps we may say that this seemingly inevitable association of sex and
death is overcome when identity is shattered in the radical ascesis of a
man being fucked. But that image — the image of the grown man, legs
high in the air . .
.
— is now so indelibly attached to the person with
AIDS that we disavow it.

Perhaps, then, displacing our attention from AIDS to gays in the mili-

tary relieves us of our despair about sex and death by providing us with
an image repertoire that allows us to think of death in an altogether dif-

ferent and largely metaphoric register — as a supposedly patriotic will-

ingness to die for one’s country. If sex is still secretly present in this
displacement, as I think the Bureau poster shows it to be, that secre-
tiveness makes possible again the coupling of sex and death that does
not “literalize that potential as certain biological death.” I wonder,
though, if this is not also the “comfortably closeted sex” to which Darrel
Yates Rist claimed AIDS activists wished to return but which in fact
AIDS activists are determined to combat as a lethal displacement.

As a coda, I want to cite the text of still another poster. This one also showed
up on the streets of New York in the summer of 1993. More discreet than
the others in both proportions and tenor, it was produced by the few re-
maining members of the AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury^after a
long hiatus in their activities. The poste'r consisted only of four ques-

tions, printed in small black type on white paper. The questions require
us to think about the despair that ACT UP’s posters disavow. They ask>

Do you resent people with AIDS?

\

Do you trust HIV-negatives?

Have you given up hope for a cure?

When was the last time you cried?

 t

ROSA'S IMDULGEWCE

First presented at the panel discussion “Civil Wars:

Queer Theory and the Arena ofActivism" The New

School for Social Research, New York, May 17, 1994.

/
 —
i

X
Recently I saw, for the first time, Rosa von Praunheim’s early film Army
of Lovers, or Revolt of the Perverts (1979), screened at the Newjestival

as part of a series called “Gay Sunshine: Documents of the Early Post-

Stonewall Era.”‘ The film’s strident voice-over narration castigating gay^

men for their turn away from political struggle to indulge their sexual

pleasures in bars, back rooms, and bathhouses reminded me of that

self-righteous 1970s gay-lib chant “Out of the bars and into the streets.”

Lee Edelman has brilliantly analyzed, in his essay “The" Mirror and the

Tank,” contemporary rhetorics of AIDS activism that return, if some-

what more subtly, to that opposition between political activism and a

passive indulgence in sex, which, Edelman argues, only reaffirms the

homophobic discourse of homosexual sex as always already passive

and narcissistic — indulgence.^

But von Praunheim’s film contradicts its own rhetoric, or perhaps en-

gages in a peculiar form of auto-critique, for there is Rosa himself, noth-

ing if not indulgent, taking every opportunity to get it on in front of the

camera. In one sequence he has sex with a porn star while the star, in

voice-over interview, describes his work in the sex industry. In another,

Rosa describes a film production course he taught at the San Francisco

Art Institute in which the assignment consisted of having his students

film him engaging in sex with another guy, the resulting very explicit

film, or at least someone’s resulting very explicit film, forming the se-

quence of Army of Lovers Rosa narrates.

I ’m going to let this internal division in Army of Lovers stand for the cur-

rent division between what we call queer theory and what we should
probably still call lesbian and gay activism. I don’t mean to polarize these
positions or to draw any sort of rigid distinction between the academy

and the “real world” or the “street.” Rather I want to admit a certain fail-

ure of the theories we work to elaborate to change the struggles we en-

Indulgence

1. The New Festival is New York's lesbian and gay film festival.

2. Lee Edelman, "The Mirror and the Tank; 'AIDS,' Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Ac-
tivism," in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York:
Rosa's

Routledge, 1994), pp. 93-117.

«
 i

gage in. A single example of this division, but one that has many many
ramifications, should suffice to make my point. Queer theory has
worked on many fronts and with many tools to destabilize and de-
essentialize sexual identity. And yet wherever lesbian and gay rights and
even lives are at stake, those working for us seem still to need to insist on
stable and essential sexual identities. We may scoff at Simon LeVay and
his naive biological determinism, but it was LeVay, not his cogent so-

cial-constructionist critic Carole Vance, who was asked to testify on our

behalf against the Colorado referendum outlawing gay-affirmative leg-

islation. We may deplore Richard Green and his effeminophobic sissy- 246

boy syndrome, but it was Richard Green, not his critic Eve Kosofsky —
Sedgwick,^ who was asked to submit an affidavit for Joseph Steffan’s equal 247

protection claim in his court battle to win reinstatement in the Navy.^

I don’t mean to imply that queer theory is irrelevant to such questions.

On the contrary, I think these legal arguments made on our behalf are
very dangerous ones and that it is one of our tasks as queer theorists to

discern the dangers and develop the means to avoid them.

Last summer began work on I a paper in which I wanted to interrogate

the charge, made by ACT UP —

in a series of posters but also made by
many others after the April march on Washington — that AIDS had
been displaced from the agenda of lesbian and gay activism by the issue
of gays in the military.^ My intent was to take the question of displace-

ment seriously, to understand why that displacement would occur, and

to see what it might reveal about our collective feelings about AIDS. I

was interested in writing about this problem not only because I could
see the dangers inherent in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, but also be-

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate
Boys," in 7enr/enc/es (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 154-164.

4. See Gays and the Military: Joseph Steffan versus the United States, ed. Marc Wolin-
sky and Kenneth Sherrill (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially
"Affidavit I of Richard Green: On Homosexual Orientation as an Immutable Charac-
teristic," pp. 56-83; and "Affidavit II of Richard Green: On Recent Developments in the
Field of Brain Research," pp. 171-173.
/

5. See "Don't Tell" in this volume.

 i

X
cause it involved a conflict that was also my own: On the one hand, I

was absorbed by the debates about gays in the military, and, on the
other, I felt guilty about turning my attention away from AIDS, a guilt I

often projected by lamenting the fact that so many others seemed to be^
doing the same thing. The central point of my paper was that we are of-

ten unable to acknowledge our despair abou,t;\IDS and that, until we

acknowledge it, we cannot begin to work through it and take the next
forward step as activists. By this I don’t mean returning'to what we had
been doing before, which I think is impossible, but determining how we
can continue to struggle both against the forces opposing us and against
the fear and sorrow inside us.

But writing the paper entailed its own kind of displacement. As I at-

tempted to analyze the consequences of an image repertoire put for-

ward by activist opponents of the military ban, I got sidetracked by the

question of sex. Or perhaps I should say I routed my analysis through

sex. For what I wanted to show was that our displacement involved the

wish to detach gayness from the sick body of the person with AIDS and
attach it instead to the healthy body of the soldier. But this, I argued,

had been accomplished through a disavowal of the extent to which the

soldier, too, was a sexualized image for us.

My discussion of the image repertoire of the all-American, patriotic, ex-

emplary soldier focused on loseph Steffan, whose celebrated reinstate-

ment case hinged on making a distinction between status and conduct,

on positing a homosexual identity distinct from sexual behavior. The new
military policy, of course, allows for no such distinction, since it insists

that homosexual identity necessarily entails homosexual conduct ei-

ther engaged in or intended. Moreover, the courts have ruled, in several

cases, that homosexual orientation is essentially determined by homo-

sexual conduct. Nevertheless, Steffan’s case and other equal protection

cases argued before the courts have attempted to disentangle identity

Indulgence
and conduct, since what must be proved to achieve suspect class status,
and thus heightened Constitutional scrutiny, is a particular trait’s im-

mutability, and conduct is by definition mutable. Here is a passage from

Rosa's
 —

Richard Green’s argument on this point, taken from his affidavit in sup-
port of Steffan’s equal protection claim:

While sexual activity among heterosexuals and homosexuals is common

and diverse, significant portions of both populations engage in little or

no interactive sexual conduct, both temporarily and for long periods of

time, for various reasons. Indeed, there is substantial anecdotal evidence
that during World War II, gays in the military simply refrained from en-
gaging in homosexual conduct in order to avoid the harsh penalties that
could be imposed. The fact that an individual is celibate for some short 248

or long period of time does not mean that they do not have a sexual ori- —
entation, however. Celibacy, like any other sexual choice involving con- 249

sen ting behavior by a partner, is a healthy one when it is freely chosen.

Just what Professor Green might mean by “freely chosen” in this context

is anybody’s guess. But the larger question that 1 wanted to pose through
my analysis was, Where is sex in our own theories of identity? To what
extent does our antiessentialism help us through the conduct/status

morass? How does it help us argue, as of course we must, for the right to
our sexual pleasures as well as the right to simply be, or in this case be
in the military?

The answer for me was to be found in the work of Michel Foucault

paradoxically, since Foucault also argues for detaching conduct from
identity. But he does so not by disavowing sex, but by insisting on “bod-
ies and pleasures” as against an identity predicated on sexual desire, the
desire that Richard Green would claim is always there to determine sex-
ual orientation even when it is held in check. Here is one of Foucault’s
explanations for substituting pleasure for desire:

lam advancing this term [pleasure! because it seems to me that it escapes

the medical and naturalistic connotations inherent in the notion of de-

sire. That notion has been used as a tool, as a grid of intelligibility, a cal-
ibration in terms of normality: "Tell me what your desire is and I will tell
you who you are, whether you are normal or not, and then lean validate
 —
}

or invalidate your desire." One keeps running into this tactic, which goes

from the notion of Christian concupiscence all the way through the Freud-
ian notion of desire, passing through the notion of the sexual instinct in

the 1840s. Desire is not an event but a permanent feature of the subject: it^

provides a basis onto which all the psychological-medical armature can

attach itself.

The term "pleasure" on the other hand is virgin territory, almost devoid

of meaning. There is no "pathology" of pleasure, no "abnormal" pleasure.

It is an event "outside the subject," or at the limit of the subject. . .

The new policy on gays in the military proves the wisdom of Foucault’s

tactical move. For so long as we continue to base our claims for rights on
a gay identity founded on desire, the institutions of normalization will

be able to declare our desire abnormal and charge us with having bro-
ken or intending to break the rules of conduct. And even if this were not
so obviously the case, any right to be gay that entails the requirement

“freely to choose” celibacy is no right worth fighting for.

Rosa von Praunheim’s exhibitions of his own sexual pleasures in Army

of Lovers are, in this light, perhaps the most truly radical moments of
his film, as opposed to the moralizing radical rhetoric on the sound-
track. But that is not really my point. 1 don’t think the task of queer the-

ory is to determine what is the truly radical position. Rather I think

queer theory needs to take the conflict itself more seriously, including
no, especially — the conflict all of us experience about our pleasures.

The gulf that 1 began by acknowledging is, I think, an expression of this

conflict, but it should be understood not as one that we fall on one side
of or the other. It is, rather, the conflict that we cannot help but experi-

ence as subjectivity itself. 1 realize that this is a rather un-Foucauldian

statement, insofar as it accepts a premise that is central to psychoanalysis.

But if Foucault himself did not experience this conflict, why would he
Indulgence
have so insisted on the necessity of “becoming other than what one is”?

Rosa's
6. Quoted in David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay HagiographyiNewfork:
Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 93-94. .
I want us to attend to conflict because I think it is one way that we might
begin to bridge the gulf between queer theory and activist politics. That
is, if we acknowledge that conflict comes not only from differences over
tactics or strategy but also exists as a result of the feelings we all struggle
with — feelings that are, of course, aroused in relation to the oppres-

sions we all share — then we might be able to reach across the divide

between queer theory and gay and lesbian politics.

 \
'
X
\
i

ft ;

A
' (

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i \

k -A
 >

DE-MORALIZING
REPRESENTATIONS OF AIDS

First presented at the conference on AIDS and

Activism organized by a coalition of activist groups

called Love+ (Visual AIDS Tokyo; Stop AIDS,

Sapporo; and Dumb Type and AIDS Poster Project,

Kyoto) in conjunction with the Tenth International

AIDS Conference, Yokohama, japan, August 12, 1994

/
 \
4

AIDS

of

Joe (Denzel Washington) listens to Andy (Tom Hanks)

explain a scene from Andrea Chenier 'm Philadelphia, 1993.

Representations

De-Moralizing
 —

The most celebrated sequence of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphiii sliows

its main character Andy (Tom Hanks) dancing with his IV stand to the

tune of Giordano’s Andrea Chenier. Trancelike, Andy interprets to a

bored, then dumbstruck Joe (Denzel Washington), Maddelena’s “La

mamma morta,’’ sung by every homo’s favorite diva, Maria Callas. (Two
outraged readers wrote letters to Poz, the monthly magazine for people
with AIDS, excoriating it for misidentifying the voice as that of Montser-
rat Caballe — a mistake so glaring, according to one of the letters, as to

“undermine the entire credibility of the magazine.’’)' As if fearing se-

duction, or perhaps contagion, Joe beats a hasty retreat, hesitates out- 254

side the door long enough for an ambiguous second thought, then goes —
home to hug his baby girl and crawl into bed with his wife. All the 255

while — though we are rather far from Andy’s stereo at this point

Callas continues singing of her reconciliation to life through heaven-

sent love, and Joe experiences a silent epiphany. You can just watch him
thinking, “It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, healthy or ill,

straight or gay . . . love is love.’’

Why do J feel betrayed by this sequence? For one thing, if love is love and
it doesn’t matter if you’re straight or gay, I want to know why Jonathan
Demme didn’t show Andy getting into bed with his boyfriend Miguel
(Antonio Banderas) as Callas continued to sing. After all, didn’t Joe say

he wasn’t all that familiar with opera? So whose subjectivity is repre-

sented here, anyway? The answer, of course, is that it’s the subjectivity

of the spectator, constructed by Demme’s film as straight and unaf-

fected by AIDS. That spectator might not be familiar with opera either,

but Andy explains this particular aria well enough for anyone to under-

stand that opera’s themes — like those of Demme’s movie — are univer-

sal. To make his point, though, Demme has to forsake the subjectivity

he begins by representing as so fascinating, so different, so incompre-

hensible, but as nevertheless supposedly also laying claim to the uni-

versal. Demme steals Callas from the dying opera queen, who reveals

1. “La Mamma Morta-fied," Poz6 (February-March 1995), p. 16. In saying that Callas is

every homo's favorite, I merely and deliberately repeat received wisdom. My own fa-
vorite singer, hands down, is Caballe, but still, my favorite diva is Callas.
 % >
«

his subjectivity through his identification with her, and gives her
away — to Joe and his wife and baby, and thus implicitly to every “nor-

inal” family unit. (I didn’t actually count them, but it seemed to me that
there were more babies than queers in Philadelphia.)

\ \

The reason, I think, many of us focus on the opipra scene in Philadelphia

is that it’s the only one where we can in any way recognize Andy’s char-
acter as queer. If I feel betrayed by the sequence, it is because this single

signifier of Andy’s queerness, once displayed, is divested of its queer

specificity. And what Demme seems thus to be saying is that you have to
dispense with what makes a queer a queer in order to get anybody else

to feel sorry that he’s going to die.

o
There are two, conflicting propositions about AIDS, or more precisely
about knowledge regarding AIDS, that I want to try to bring into relation

in this essay: first, that knowledge about AIDS, gained in one time and
place — often the hard way, by learning from deadly mistakes — might
help others, at later times and in other places, to avoid those mistakes

and thus to prevent the horrible ravages of a vast epidemic such as the
one we experience in New York City, where we have, as of September 30,
1994, over 70,000 reported cases of AIDS, of whom more than 47,000

have died. And second, that knowledge about AIDS is always local, will

always be bound by a particular time and place, which will often make
knowledge gained in one place seem inappropriate or nontransferable
to another.
AIDS

of

There are other ways of describing this contradiction. Although AIDS is

truly pandemic, and everyone everywhere will potentially be affected by

Representations

AIDS, the global pandemic is really many interrelated but quite differ-

ent epidemics, with different causes and different effects, affecting dif-

ferent kinds of people. Or still another way of characterizing this

conflict is to say that while certain forms of knowledge appear to be ob-
De-Moralizing

jective and thus everywhere and always applicable, other forms of

knowledge begin by admitting their subjective and local limitations.

This acknowledgment of subjectivity is something that we often see as a
particular strength of art, and thus we often value art made in response
to AIDS as having something unique to tell us about the personal, hu-
man side of the epidemic. It is usually to art that we turn, it is said, to see

the “faces of AIDS” as opposed to the statistical abstractions of science

and sociology. And because art can “give AIDS a face,” we often assume
that it will solicit the sympathy of those not immediately affected by the
disease, thus effecting the translation of the individual situation into

the shared condition. When I first wrote about AIDS, my intention was
to contest this distinction between the objectivity of science and the 256

subjectivity of art. On the one hand, I wanted to show that even the —
most established facts about AIDS were far from objective. All facts — 257

social facts, scientific facts, medical facts — only in time come to be

seen as true and objective, but they, no less than other things we think
we know, are constructed — built on subjectively contrived ideas, hy-

potheses, experiments, studies, surveys, descriptions, negotiations,

and so forth. On the other hand, I wanted to argue that art, or cultural

work generally, had as much right to make objective truth claims as did
science. Indeed, I submitted that it was the function of art not only to
express the experiences of love and caring, loss and mourning, fear and

despair, anger and outrage, but also to inform, to educate, and to en-

gage in the activist struggle against the negligence of our governing in-
stitutions and the falsehoods perpetrated by our media. The simplest
way to characterize the argument I was attempting to make is to say that
all knowledge — whether scientific or artistic — is interested knowl-
edge and thus open to contestation; knowledge of whatever sort is never
free of our investments, the sense in which it is true for us.

In the eight years since I first made this argument, have seen that I there

is a significant problem with it. For in thinking about the subjectivity of

knowledge production largely in terms of competing interests and in-

vestments, I failed to account for the most crucial feature of subjectiv-

ity — that governed by the unconscious, which often works against our
conscious interests. And it is this aspect of subjectivity that so often de-

termines how any of us, including our often irresponsible governments,

/
responds to AIDS.
 X >
a

Let me give an example. As everyone knows, what is now called AIDS

was first reported in the United States among otherwise healthy gay
%
men. For a short time, it was assumed by some scientists that the syn-

drome had something intrinsically to do with homosexuality, even

though a “scientific” knowledge of sexuality would certainly under-
stand that there can be nofh/ng intrinsic to hopiosexuality, since intrin-
sically homosexuality is nothing at all. In any case, AIDS was very soon
seen in people who had never engaged in homosexual sex, but the link

between homosexuality and AIDS has nevertheless persisted with

amazing tenacity. Lip service might be paid to such statements as “AIDS
is not just a gay disease,” or “AIDS is everybody’s problem,” but still, if

you ask most Americans who gets AIDS, they’ll answer. Homosexuals.

There are many reasons for this, some more logical than others. To this

day, the majority of people with AIDS in the United States are gay men,
even if the overall percentages have steadily declined. An even greater

majority of images of people with AIDS seen in the media are of gay

men. Perhaps equally important, the people who have most visibly mo-
bilized to fight the epidemic are gay men and lesbians. Thus the images
of service providers, advocates, activists, doctors, and lawyers coping
on a day-to-day basis with the epidemic are also images, for the most
part, of gay men and lesbians. In addition, most of the alternative rep-

resentations of AIDS are produced by gay and lesbian artists, film- and
videomakers, and writers.

Still, this preponderance of images of AIDS as a gay disease has, for

many years now, existed alongside the countervailing information that

AIDS is transmitted by heterosexual as well as homosexual sex, that it is

AIDS

of
also transmitted by sharing needles when injecting drugs, through

blood transfusions and the use of blood products, and from mother to

child. But despite this information, the association of AIDS with homo-
Representations

sexuality in the United States is still extraordinarily powerful. When the

star basketball player Magic lohnson discovered that he was HIV-
positive in late 1991, he said that he hadn’t practiced safe sex because he

thought AIDS was a gay disease. Not long after he said that, the major-
De-Moralizing

ity of new cases of AIDS reported in the United States were among
African Americans and Latinos, including large numbers of women and
children and straight as well as gay men. How is it that Magic lohnson,
who had been very engaged with the needs and concerns of African
Americans, could have been unaware of the extent of devastation
wrought by AIDS on African Americans?

The answer to that question is suggested by what happened to Magic

himself. Shortly after he rejoined the Los Angeles Lakers in 1992, Magic
was forced to retire a second time. The officially reported reason was
that his fellow players in the NBA were afraid to play against him be-
cause of the possibility of a bloody accident on the basketball court, but 258

the subtext of many of the media stories suggested that Magic quit for —
another reason: some of his fellow players had revived rumors that 259

Magic was gay. Now, I doubt that those players really believe Magic is

gay. I think, rather, that by claiming that Magic was gay, they were able
to say, in effect, “This disease is not my problem. I don’t have to worry. I

don’t have to use condoms when I’m out on the road having lots of sex.’’

“AIDS is not my problem.’’ This simple statement (or thought) is with-

out question the most widespread, the most tenacious, and the most

dangerous formulation in this pandemic. Indeed, I think it would not be

wrong to say that the statement “AIDS is not my problem” is as respon-

sible as anything for the fact that so many people worldwide have been
infected with HIV. Whether the statement is enunciated by govern-
ments in the form of refusals to acknowledge the risks to their popula-
tions, to conduct responsible education campaigns, and to fund research,
or of discriminatory practices such as exclusionary immigration and
travel policies: by the blood banking, blood products, and pharmaceu-
tical industries in the form of caring more for profits than for human
life; by the media in the form of failures to pursue and report accurate
information and to alert their audiences to the seriousness of the threat

posed by AIDS; by communities in the form of scapegoating other

groups and failing to acknowledge and support their own affected con-

stituents: or by individuals in the form of distancing themselves from

those already affected by the epidemic — the result is the same: an ever

growing transmission of HIV to more and more people all over the
world.
 V
X i
»

X
Most people don’t say, outright, “AIDS is not my problem.’’ Rather they

translate that statement into some version of “AIDS is the problem of

others." In the United States, the statement translates as “AIDS is a gay

disease” or “AIDS is a junkie’s disease.” In other places, it translates as^

“AIDS is a disease of prostitutes.” In still others, “AIDS is a Western dis-

ease,” “AIDS is an African disease,” or “AIDS is Southeast Asian disease.”

It is by now a truism that the us/them construction of AfDS is the major

obstacle to overcome, that we must all accept that AIDS is ourproblem.
But what is not so commonly acknowledged is the extraordinary psy-

chic force of the statement that AIDS is not my problem — a force so

strong as to make it possible to hold fast to such a statement even when

it is rationally known to be absolutely false. I know this psychic force

firsthand. I remember first learning about what would later be called

AIDS in the summer of 1981, when the New York Times first reported

the discovery of a rare form of cancer in gay men. Soon after that report,

news about horrible rare diseases diagnosed in otherwise healthy gay

men circulated widely in New York’s gay community. As it became more

and more evident that an epidemic disproportionately affecting sexu-
ally active men was spreading, reacted, as did many of my gay
gay I

friends, with my own version of the us/them mechanism. “It’s only hap-

pening to those guys who go to sex clubs.” “It’s only happening to those

guys who take lots of drugs.” “It’s only happening to those guys who’ve

had lots of sexually transmitted diseases.” I reassured myself that I was

not one of “those guys,” the ones who get AIDS. And I did so even

though I went to sex clubs, I took drugs, and I’d had my share of sexually
AIDS
transmitted diseases. But somehow, by some form of magical think-

of
ing — this is the force of the unconscious — I exempted myself from the
category of “those guys,” the others, the ones who get AIDS. I stopped
exempting myself only when a close friend was diagnosed, a friend I’d
Representations

had sex with, a friend who lived his life very much like I lived mine. Only
then did I begin saying, “AIDS is my problem.” Only then did I begin

practicing safe sex. It could easily have been too late. And that is the ter-

De-Moralizing
rifying moral of this story: if we wait until AIDS affects us directly, until

friends or lovers or family members or we ourselves are infected, it is

too late.

%
 *

In the United States, it was already too late for many gay men by the
time AIDS was first recognized in 1981. For that reason, gay men and our
lesbian friends responded to the AIDS epidemic in a way that almost no
one else responded: by saying "AIDS is our problem.” With that ac-
knowledgment, everything changes. You learn all you can and help to

educate others. You begin to protect yourself and those with whom you
interact. You build systems of care and support. You make demands on
your social institutions and your government. You fight for the attention

of the mass media, and you create your own media.

But you also run a terrible risk: In saying, “Yes, AIDS is our problem,”
you allow others to go on saying, "AIDS is not my problem, it’s your
problem.” Even worse, some will say you are the problem. There is still

another, even more terrible risk, one that we are only beginning to rec-

ognize: the risk entailed by the long-term effects of having to sustain

changes in attitudes and behaviors in the face of so much adversity and

loss. lYloreover, this risk is compounded by the fact that attempts to get
others to recognize the impending threat of AIDS are often predicated

on the abandonment or sacrifice of those already affected.

For the most part, cultural work about AIDS has been produced by
those who are directly affected by the epidemic, artists who are them-

selves infected with HIV or who have lost friends, lovers, family, and
community members to AIDS. Art has attempted to convey what it feels

like to deal with the epidemic — to be ill, to care for those who are ill, to

face death, to mourn, to be outraged, to be defeated. But art about AIDS

has also attempted to combat the epidemic directly — to teach safe sex
practices, inform people about their risks, fight discrimination, expose
the lies of governments and media, arouse affected groups to anger and
activism.

When I first wrote about art and AIDS in 1987, it was the latter practices,
those that directly combated the epidemic, that seemed to me most in

need of recognition. I pleaded for support of art practices rooted in

community activism and engaged in political struggle. Although I was
not opposed to art that expressed feelings of loss and despair, I never-
 V >
»

theless preferred and championed politically activist cultural work.

What have come to

I realize, though, is that 1 drew too rigid a distinction

between the two kinds of art about AIDS, that the feelings of loss and
despair expressed in the one kind of art would become necessary in ac-^
tivist art as well.

In 1987, one of the works focused on was Testing the Limits, one of the
I

first of what became a significant genre of videos and films document-

ing the burgeoning AIDS activist movement in the United States and
elsewhere. This collectively produced video featured New York City

community-based organizations dedicated to fighting the epidemic in

the hardest hit communities. It was highly inspirational and served as a

useful organizing tool. The same collective began working immediately

on a longer, second video on the same subject, which centered on ACT
UP. Finally completed in 1992, the second tape. Voices from the Front,

is similar in style and format to the first, but is feature-length, more pro-
fessionally produced, and covers much more ground with much greater
depth. It was far more widely seen, as it won a prize at the Berlin film

festival, aired on national public television, and even had short com-
mercial releases in movie theaters. I suppose that it might serve its up-

lifting objective rather well, showing as it does huge, well-organized

ACT UP demonstrations that led to concrete political victories. But it

can serve that objective only for those who were not members of the

ACT UP it pictures: for those of us who were, the video provokes a mix

of nostalgia and despair, in part because ACT UP as we knew it then no

longer exists, at least in New York.
AIDS

of
Voices from the Fron t ends with the famous final remarks of film scholar

Vito Russo’s speech at the 1988 demonstration at the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration, in which he proclaims: “After we kick the shit out
Representations

of this illness, we’re all going to be alive to kick the shit out of this system
so that this never happens again.’’ Vito’s fighting words are followed by
a quick montage of images of ACT UP demonstrations, and then the
words “In memoriam,’’ whereupon we see the repetition of images of
De-Moralizing

twelve of the people we just watched in the video who died before the

tape’s completion. The final one is Vito Russo himself. I personally find
 f

it agonizing to watch Vito’s rousing “We’re all going to be alive" followed

by such a brutal contradiction of his words. And in the time that has
passed between the tape’s release and today, many more people in the

video have died.

Videomaker Jean Carlomusto, who worked for a time with the Testing
the Limits collective, reflects on this contradiction in the videotape Fast
Trip, Long Drop by Gregg Bordowitz, who was also a member of the
original Testing the Limits collective but left after the completion of the
first tape. Sitting in her editing room at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Car- 262

lomusto says: —
263

In the beginning, when we were shooting [video] at various protests,

there was a kind of energy that was amazing. It was the energy of people
really coming together, really speaking out and thinking of new and cre-
ative ways [to fight AIDS]. As time went on, it became sadder and sadder
to sit in an editing room with this material, because as you would look at
the material youd start to think, "Oh, well, he’s gone . . . he’s gone ...,’’

and it became almost your only chance to see people who you hadn’t seen
in a long time, or a chance to see someone who looked a lot healthier at

that particular time. And it really became more and more a record of loss.
In that way, the material that once had been so energizing starts to be-

come almost a burden, difficult to watch. Because of that, it completely

changed its meaning.^

This change of meaning has had a strong effect on the way I came to

think about art and AIDS, even though it was always theoretically part

of the argument I was making. I always knew that politically engaged

artworks confronting the AIDS epidemic were highly contingent, that

their messages would not transcend the time and place for which they
were made. The AIDS activist graphics that I wrote about in AIDS Demo
Graphics, for example, were produced for specific demonstrations,

were about local issues of the moment, and thus have no meaning today
except as mementos, documents, or examples of the type of work that

2. Fast Trip, Long Drop, Gregg Bordowitz, 1993 (distributed by Video Data Bank).
 >

might be made for other times and places. One such graphic, produced
for a 1988 demonstration at City Hall in New York, juxtaposes a photo-

graph of then Mayor Ed Koch with the text, “10,000 New York City AIDS
deaths/ How’m I Doin’?” Even at the time the poster was created, it^

would have meant little outside New York, and now, in New York, hardly
anybody remembers that Koch was always f^uously asking “How’m 1

Doin’?” and the number of AIDS deaths is far more than 10,000. Even a
•V

work like Gran Fury’s famous bloody hand print with the headline “The
government has blood on its hands” had to be revised to remain rele-

vant. The text along the bottom of the poster that originally stated “One
AIDS death every half hour” had to be changed just a few years later to

“One AIDS death every twelve minutes.” What makes the contingency
of meaning in these two obvious examples more than just a matter of

banal fact is that, whereas 10,000 AIDS deaths in New York City or one
AIDS death in the United States every half hour once seemed unimag-
inably horrible, today we can only wish the epidemic were so limited.

But the change of meaning to which Jean Carlomusto refers in Bor-

dowitz’s video is less about this sort of contingency than about the sub-

jective experience of the work’s audience. For people who live outside

New York or were not members of ACT UP in the time period docu-

mented by Voices from the Front, the video might very well function as

intended — as a testament to the possibilities of progressive change as

a result of community activism and as a stimulus to create or join an ac-
tivist movement. But those of us whose own activism is represented by

the video often feel violated, as once again the complexities of our lives

AIDS
are oversimplified — and this time not by the mass media but by our

of
own activist artists. First we were pariahs or victims, now we are im-

mortal heroes. But of course we are neither. We are ordinary people

whose struggle against this epidemic has taken its own terrible toll.
Representations

Gregg Bordowitz addresses us, only half humorously, in Fast Trip, Long
Drop, as “the burnt out, the broken hearted, and . . . the profoundly

confused.”

De-Moralizing

My purpose is not to condemn Voices from the Front as dishonest. The

failure to acknowledge the toll that death was taking on AIDS activism is
 not merely the failure of this video, which in many ways is an exemplary
work. Instead it represents a wider failure of AIDS activism to confront
the daily emotional toll that AIDS inevitably takes. The difference be-
tween the original Testing the Limits and Voices from the Front is a dif-

ference between a moment of optimism at the founding of a movement

and a later moment when such optimism has become hollow and there-
fore false. Another way to characterize this difference is to return to

what I said at the beginning of this essay — that objective information is

everywhere and always also subjective.

264

What does this relation between subjectivity and objectivity mean for —
cultural work about AIDS? 265

To me, it means that the ways we imagine and address our audiences
will be the most important thing we do, and that the rhetorics we em-
ploy must be faithful to our situation at this moment rather than what
seemed true and useful the last time we set to work. In the introduction

to AIDS Demo Graphics, I wanted to explain how the graphic work pro-
duced by members of ACT UP constructed its audience differently from
the viewers intended by much of the art about AIDS produced within
the traditional art world. Here is what I wrote:

AIDS activist art is grounded in the accumulated knowledge and politi-

cal analysis of the AIDS crisis produced collectively by the entire movement.

The graphics not only reflect that knowledge, but actively contribute to
its articulation as well. They codify concrete, specific issues of impor-

tance to the movement as a whole or particular interests within it. They

function as an organizing tool, by conveying, in compressed form, infor-
mation and political positions to others affected by the epidemic, to on-
lookers at demonstrations, and to the dominant media. But their primary
audience is the movement itself. AIDS activist graphics enunciate AIDS
politics to and for all of us in the movement. . . . [Through themj, our
politics, and our cohesion around those politics, become visible to us.^

3. Douglas Crimp, with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990),
pp. 19-20.
 a

X
What I hoped to convey in this text is similar to what Gregg Bordowitz
wrote about the first Testing the Limits video in an essay entitled “Pic-

ture a Coalition”:

Imagine a screening. In a local community eenter a consumer VCR deck

and a TV set sit on a table. Representatives frQjp the various communi-
ties affected by AIDS sit in front of the TV. They watch a video composed

of interviews with each of them. They see themselves pictured in relation

to one another as they sit next to one another.

Consider this screening. It presents both means and ends for the video

AIDS activist. The AIDS movement. . . creates itself as it attempts to rep-

resent itself Video puts into play the means of recognizing one’s place

within the movement in relation to that of others in the movement. Video

has the potential to render the concerted efforts — as yet unimagined —

between groups. The most significant challenge to the movement is coali-
tion building, because the AIDS epidemic has engendered a community

of people who cannot afford not to recognize themselves as a community

and to act as one.^

Voices from the Front works to achieve something quite different from

what Bordowitz describes here, where the AIDS activist movement

comes into being through the very process of self- representation. Voices
does not presume its primary audience to be those shown in the video

coalescing around their own self-representation. Rather, it presumes its

audience to be on the outside looking in. The subjectivity of those rep-

resented is sacrificed to the goal of reaching others.

AIDS

of

It must, I think, be acknowledged that the historical circumstances of

people who have been coping with AIDS for over a decade have changed
Representations

drastically in the past few years. Our disaffection from AIDS activism is

but one indication. Another, which we are even more loath to discuss

publicly, is that seroconversion rates among gay men, including those

De-Moralizing

4. Gregg Bordowitz, "Picture a Coalition," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,

ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 195.
 t

gay men best informed about AIDS, have begun to rise again after a pe-
riod of fairly steady decline. This means that many men who had been
consistently practicing safe sex no longer are. It is difficult for us to

speak openly about this because, on the one hand, we have been rightly

proud of the fact that we had changed our sexual behaviors more thor-
oughly than anyone could have predicted. On the other hand, being

open about this fact immediately draws the scorn of those who have
never cared about our welfare. Thus the moralizing rhetoric of “re-

lapse,” “irresponsibility,” “selfishness,” and “compulsivity”; and sadly,

the moralizing is not limited to our declared enemies. A new political 266

group of gay men calling themselves HIV Prevention Activists has —

formed in New York. Their mission is to close gay sex clubs. One of their 267

members, Gabriel Rotello, an openly gay columnist for New York News-
day, wrote a column sensationally entitled “Sex Clubs Are the Killing

Fields of AIDS” in which he describes unprotected sex in a gay sex club

as a “sex murder/suicide.

But moralizing will not help any of us through this new crisis any more
than will the repetition of a heroic rhetoric of our past achievements in
fighting the epidemic. What is necessary now is the self-representation

of our demoralization. We urgently need resources to help us cope with

the consequences of losing hope for a cure for AIDS, of dealing with loss
upon loss, with so much hatred directed at us, and with the simple and
horrible fact, very rarely given voice, that all of us will almost certainly

live with AIDS for the remainder of our lives, however long that may be.

When most of us began practicing safe sex, we made a kind of bar-

gain — saying, in effect. I’ll make this sacrifice for now, until AIDS is

over with. But who among us foresaw that the sacrifice would be for-

ever? Who is psychically able to accept the consequences of “forever”?

The singular achievement of Gregg Bordowitz’s film Fast Trip, Long

Drop is that it dares to represent this demoralization, embodied in the

film in the person with AIDS, Bordowitz himself. But though the film is

5. Gabriel Rotello, "Sex Clubs Are the Killing Fields of AIDS," New York Newsday, April

28,1994,p. A42.
 >
i

autobiographical, the subjectivity represented is not individualized as

Bordowitz’s own. There are two central characters in the film, both

played by Bordowitz: Gregg Bordowitz and Alter Allesman (Yiddish for

“ole everybody”). The first is funny, sad, lonely, searching, fatalistic.

The second is cynical, defiant, furious, dangerous. We can rarely be

sure, though, which is which, except when Allesman appears on the tel-

evision show “Thriving with AIDS,” produced by Bordowitz (a parody

of “Living with AIDS,” which Bordowitz actually produced for Gay
Men’s Health Crisis).

The central metaphorical tale in Fast Trip, Long Drop, the trope for

which the film is named, is the story of the death of Bordowitz’s father,

Leslie Harsten, whom Bordowitz never really knew. When Harsten was
thirty, Bordowitz’s age when he made Fast Trip, he went to Idaho to

watch Evel Knieval’s daredevil jump over the Snake River Canyon in a

homemade missile. About midway over the canyon, the contraption

abruptly descended into the gorge (A newspaper story reporting the

event was headlined “Fast Trip, Long Drop”). Evel Knieval survived, but

Leslie Harsten did not. Crossing a highway intersection after leaving the

spectacle, Bordowitz’s father was killed when he was hit by a pick-up

truck and then a camper. Reiterated throughout the film with stock

footage of crazy daredevil stunts, this is a true story about the indeter-

minate relations of risk and chance. Evel Knieval dared fate and sur-

vived: Harsten was killed When Bordowitz

by sheer happenstance.
recounts a drunken episode in which he begged a man to fuck him, re-
membering that they should have used a condom only after the guy

AIDS
came, he is telling another story of risk and chance, one that may or may
of
not prove fatal, and one that many of us could tell about ourselves.

These funny/harrowing tales of risk and chance open out within the
Representations

film to encompass more complex reflections on the history of human

misery, how it is that we find agency and meaning within historical cir-
cumstances not of our own making. Taking his Jewish heritage as one
context for his reflections (the film uses Klezmer music throughout),
De-Moralizing

Bordowitz narrates over archival footage from pre-World-War-II shtetls

and Eastern European Jewish cemeteries. He begins by remembering

 I

268

269

Gregg Bordowitz, Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993.

that his grandfather once told him that in the shtetl, epidemics of
cholera and typhus came and went and that survival was a matter of
luck. He goes on:

People have been dying and suffering of all kinds of things for some time.

I guess I’m just a part of history. Until now, youth and ignorance have af-
forded me a kind of arrogance. I thought I was unique, my suffering was
different, my misery was a new kind of misery. What’s new about it is

the way we speak about it, the meanings we make about it. What’s not
so new is the misery. Can one become resigned to the fact of misery with-
out losing one’s hope? I guess what’s unique about my pain is that it’s

mine, mine to feel and mine to represent, mine to overcome, mine to re-

sign to, mine. At first, owning it, acknowledging it, seemed like a revolu-
tionary act. Now, accepting the fact of my own mortality has become the

hardest thing I’m facing, and I have to do it. The task has appeared to

me with great force, with urgency. It grabbed me and shook me. It won’t
/
let go.
 V i
i

Bordowitz’s attempts to assert agency have already appeared in Fast Trip

as the record of his work with ACT l/P as an organizer and documentary
videomaker. But after this reflection on'his own fate, and immediately
following the statement, “Before I die I want to be the protagonist of my
own story, the agent of my own history,” what we see is Bordowitz’s be-

lated attempt to learn to drive. Bordowitz approaches his new task war-
ily: car crashes, after all, have been a leitmotiv of Fast Trip. But warily,
too, because the date of the driving lesson is given in the film as June

1995 (the film was completed in the fall of 1993). It represents, as Bill

Horrigan wrote, “a modestly hopeful projection, a vision of perfect or-

dinariness poignant for that very reason.

Poignant, too, because — hedged, held amidst day-to-day contingen-

cies, historically pondered — it is hope that neither rings false nor

promises transcendence. It is not the rousing hope of Voices from the

Front, which, in reminding us how blindly we once kept the faith,

speaks to us now only of loss; nor is it the humanist hope of Philadel-

phia, which trusts far too much in the homophobe’s progress and leaves
the queer with his slightly mad vision of heaven-sent love. In this re-

spect, the function of the opera scene in Philadelphia is not unlike the

magical happy ending of the film Longtime Companion, where all those

who have died in the epidemic suddenly come back to life, run down
the boardwalks of Fire Island Pines and onto the beach. It is therefore

not surprising that Maddelena’s aria of love and transcendence is reprised

one more time at the end of Philadelphia, just as Andy, on his deathbed,
says to Miguel, “I’m ready.”

AIDS

of
Fast Trip, Long Drop has a coda following the credits that speaks very

differently of death. Lying in his bed, smoking a cigarette, Bordowitz looks

at the camera and says, “Death is the death of consciousness, and I hope
Representations

that there’s nothing after this.” Then he begins to giggle, then to laugh
openly, then to cough, whereupon he drops his cigarette on his chest.

“Shit,” he says, then, “Cut.” No transcendence, no catharsis, the end.

De-Moralizing

6. Bill Horrigan, "One-Way Street," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 3

(1994), p. 368.
 t

Gregg Bordowitz, Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993.

/
4
 r

PAINFUL PICTURES

First presented at the discussion “Have You Always

Been Artistic? A Seminar on Artistic Practice and

Queer Cultural Politics,” held at the Museum of

Contemporary Art, Sydney, in association with the

Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival,

February 25, 1995-

/
 A few years ago I gave a lecture in which I criticized the ways in which
museum officials sought to defend Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs
against the criminal charges brought against the Cincinnati Art Mu-
seum and its director for exhibiting them in The Perfect Moment.^ was I
^

concerned about the evacuation of the photographs’ sexual contents

through an insistence on their purely formajL^aesthetic qualities. To

score my critical points, 1 played my audience for laughs, first showing

X

them Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a bullwhip shoved up his rec-

tum while reading Janet Kardon’s description of the work, which she
called “a figure study”; “The human figure is centered,” she testified.

“The horizon line is two-thirds of the way up, almost the classical two-

thirds to one-third proportions. The way the light is cast, so there’s light

all around the figure, it’s very symmetrical, which is very characteristic

of his flowers. . . I followed this excerpt from Kardon’s defense with a

statement by Robert Sobieszak, who sought to redeem Mapplethorpe’s

S&M photographs by suggesting that they portray a difficult psycholog-
ical quest. Sobieszak claimed, [The X Portfolio photographs] reveal in
“

very strong, forceful ways a major concern of the artist ... a troubled

portion of his life that he was trying to come to grips with. . . At this

moment
1. I switched to a slide of the X Portfolio picture titled Heiniut

and Brooks, a photograph of fist fucking. I thought it would be funny to

accompany the phrase “trying to come to grips” with the image of a fist

thrust up a rectum. Except for when gave the lecture to predominantly

I

gay audiences, though, I didn’t get a lot of laughs at this point. Indeed,

after I first presented the lecture, one of my university colleagues told

me that she had found it almost unbearable to look at that photograph,

in which she could see only excruciating pain. At the time, I didn’t know
how to respond, perhaps because I hadn’t really thought enough about
the photograph. It had served my purposes merely as the punch line of

The lecture derived from "Photographs atthe End of Modernism," the introduction to

my book On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); see also Janet Kar-

don, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment (Philadelphia: Institute of Contem-

Pictures
porary Art, 1988); and Richard Bolton, The Culture Wars: Documents form the Recent
Controversies in the Arts (Hevj fork: New Press, 1988).

Painful
2. Quoted in Jane Merkel, "Art on Trial," Art in American, no. 1 2 (December 1 990), p. 47.

3. Quoted in Merkel, "Art on Trial," p. 47.

 /

274

275

Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut and Brooks, 1978

(© The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. Used with permission).

a joke and, I thought, to show both how inoffensive and how beautiful
the photographs on trial really were. The pleasures of fist fucking are
not something 1 necessarily take for granted, but neither are they en-

tirely foreign to me (indeed, 1 used to be regularly approached in gay

bars because my hands are so visibly larger than most — some people
just can’t resist a challenge).

Looking again at Helmut and Brooks, 1 feel a bit more charitable toward
Janet Kardon and Robert Sobieszak. One cannot begin to describe the

photograph adequately without mentioning its compositional symme-

tries, its tonal subtleties, its sheer formal beauty, and, at the same time,

the photograph’s impact surely resides in the contrast between those

qualities and the challenge of its subject matter. Whether we see fist
 —
V
V i
t

fucking as painful or pleasurable — or pleasurable because painful

we cannot but be impressed by the photographic staging of this extreme

sexual moment in a spare, well-lighted Studio, a set-up where we have
come to accept a bell pepper or a nude body, perhaps, but not a sexual
act whose intensity cannot be faked for the camera.

Another argument proffered by the defense at the Cincinnati trial was

that the offending photographs should properly be seen in the context

of Mapplethorpe’s work as a whole. This would have allowed the jury to

see the same studio setting and the same formal beauty as it appeared
in classically posed nudes, exquisite flower arrangements, and glam-
orous portraits. In one of a number of highly prejudicial rulings, the
judge in the case disallowed that contextualization. But there is another
contextualization, more interesting to me, that no one thought worth
arguing for — that of the sexual subculture in which Mapplethorpe par-
ticipated at the time he made the X Portfolio pictures. Clearly no one
thought any advantage could be gained by describing the sexual pur-
suits of the gay leather scene and analyzing Mapplethorpe’s restaging of
those pursuits for studio pictures of striking beauty and originality. That
task was left to queer theorists such as Richard Meyer, Paul Morrison,
and Gayle Rubin.

I am, of course, aware that arguments are made in courts of law in order

to win cases and that arguments are made in academic arenas for other

purposes entirely, but I think the discrepancy in this instance can be in-
structive. If we begin by admitting that many of the pictures in Map-
plethorpe’s X Porf/b/io depict gay male sexual practices that we cannot
hope to defend in front of a jury, then we might understand that there is

something about these practices that is inimical to American democ-

4. See Richard Meyer, "Robert Mapplethorpe and the Discipline of Photography," in The
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David
Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 360-380; and Paul Morrison, "Coffee Table
Pictures

Sex: Robert Mapplethorpe and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Life," Genders 11

(fall 1991), pp. 17-36. Gayle Rubin's argument was presented at a conference in con-
Painful junction with the showing of The Perfect Moment at the Institute of Contemporary

Art, Boston, in 1990.

racy as presently constituted, something whose defense would there-
fore be, at the same time, a contestation of the limits of our democracy.

I don’t want to claim that fist fucking is something every gay man does,
or wants to do, or even approves of. But I do want to claim that what we
do sexually is the root cause of the hatred directed at us and, moreover,
that many arguments for tolerance of gay men and lesbians attempt to
obfuscate that sexuality. Here is an example of what I mean, drawn from
a very different context: In the made-for-network-TV movie Serving in
Silence, produced by Barbra Streisand and starring Glen Close and Judy 276

Davis, Close, playing Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, is asked by her —

military interrogator to clarify her statement that she is a lesbian. “You 277

are currently active as a lesbian?” he asks. “I am in a relationship with a

woman,” she responds. “A sexual relationship?” he inquires. “It’s not
about that,” Cammermeyer replies. “It’s about who I am. I am a lesbian.”

This film is unlike most social-issue films made for American television
in that it makes no attempt to give a so-called balanced view. No one is

allowed to defend the military’s anti-gay policy: it is presented as the re-

sult of blatant prejudice. Cammermeyer is shown to be a great soldier, a
perfect mother and daughter, a model citizen, a true American hero.
But I would submit that her perfection is entirely dependent on the idea
that her lesbianism is a matter of identity, not sexuality, of identity not

in any way even based on sexuality. Indeed her lesbian identity is some-
thing that, according to the movie’s narrative, can be known to her hus-
band and children even before Colonel Cammermeyer acknowledges it
to herself, much less acts on it.

The absurdity of this nonsexual lesbianism could perhaps be accounted

for by the strictures of American TV, or for that matter by the simple rep-
etition of a prejudice whose most famous proponent was Queen Victo-
ria, except for the fact that it so exactly reproduces the arguments made
by various gay and lesbian activists during the struggle, in 1993, to
rescind the ban against gays and lesbians in the U.S. military. The dis-

tinction between status and conduct, identity and behavior, was the
linchpin of those arguments. And the predictable result was that homo-
 V >
i

sexual conduct is still punishable with separation from the military. But
the military further outsmarted its lesbian and gay antagonists by insist-
ing on the basis for identity that we ourselves felt better left unspoken.
In the military’s new policy, a gay identity freely admitted to automati-

cally presumes that the soldier has either committed homosexual acts

or intends to do so and is therefore subject to Reparation in any case.

The TV movie Serving in Silence also illustrates rather w'ell the political

conditions in which queer cultural politics now operate in the United

States. President Clinton’s feeble attempt at lifting the military ban against

gays and lesbians met with fierce resistance articulated in the most

cliched and vicious homophobic terms and resulted in virtually total

defeat. At the same time, gay and lesbian military personnel became so
visible during the debates and were so generally admired for their patri-
otic service that a film entirely sympathetic to their cause has now aired
on national television. This political paradox derives, I think, from the
fact that the visible image so readily admired always ultimately gives
way to another that is just as readily vilified.

The dramatic increase in queer visibility did not begin with the gays-in-
the-military issue, of course, but with AIDS. For all our attempts to be-

come visible in the years after Stonewall, nothing we were able to do for

ourselves ensured our visibility so much as the horrible crisis that beset
our communities in the early 1980s. It goes without saying that that vis-

ibility came at a terrible cost, the cost of hundreds of thousands ill, dy-

ing, and dead. But the cost is not only in lives but in the sort of visibility

we achieved. On the floor of the Senate in 1987, arch-homophobe Jesse

Helms stated that “every AIDS case can be traced back to a homosexual
act.’’^ Some four years later, on the tenth anniversary of the first official

reports of what is now called AIDS, an editorial in New Hampshire’s

right-wing Manchester Union Leader repeated Helms’s opinion; “Ho-

mosexual intercourse is the genesis of every single case of AIDS in that

Pictures
every case is traceable — either directly or indirectly — to that practice.

However the disease is transmitted, the sexual perversion that is anal

Painful

5. Congressional Record, October 14, 1987.

 r

intercourse by sodomites is the fundamental point of origin.”*^ In other

words, what has really become visible is not queer subjects but a fanta-

sized, phobic image of anal sodomy. Even if the quoted statements are

those of extremists and completely false, I think we must take seriously

the idea that this image haunts every image of a gay man that comes
into public view.^ And the fact that lesbian sex cannot even be spoken

might well also be a function of the force of this phobia about gay male
sex. It is instructive in this regard that opponents of lifting the military
ban almost entirely ignored lesbians in the military, even though les-

bians are five times as likely as gay men to be drummed out of the ser- 278

vice because of their homosexuality. Their arguments focused instead —

on male soldiers worried about their backsides in combat situations or 279

being afraid to enter the shower in the barracks.

My sense is that gay men and lesbians rushed into the battle to lift the

military ban, and away from the battle against AIDS, because they
thought that, by separating identity from behavior and focusing on im-
ages of model citizen-soldiers, they could for once leave sex out of the

equation. And I think we lost that battle precisely because we underes-

timated the degree to which, reinforced by AIDS, the phobic image of
anal penetration haunts every image of homosexuality: Even the pic-

ture of a healthy homosexual or a patriotic lesbian is always already

contaminated with that image.

What am arguing is that images have a psychic component that cannot

I

be negated by simply making that component invisible. In his own way

perhaps even lesse Helms realized this. It has always been curious to
me that, in attacking Mapplethorpe, Helms did not much concentrate
on the S&M images of theXPorf/o7/o. He was far more intent on stirring
up fears about two rather innocent portraits of children. But a single

6. Quoted in Andrew Merton, "AIDS and Gay-Bashing in New Hampshire," Boston Sun-
day Globe, June 9, 1991, p. 2NH.

7. Leo Bersani made this point in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/
Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 197-222, esp.

211 - 212 .
statement might suffice to explain his tactics: “This Mapplethorpe fel-

low . . , was an acknowledged horposexual. He’s dead now, but the ho-
mosexLial theme goes throughout his work.”® Helms absolved himself
of the necessity of having to speak about fist fucking or any other of the
V
terrifying acts of sexual perversion depicted in Mapplethorpe’s X Port-
folio. Mapplethorpe was a homosexual and Jie died of AIDS. Enough
said — enough said, because that picture of anal penetration is already

firmly in place.

I wonder now if my university colleague’s sense of excruciating pain on

seeing a slide of Mapplethorpe’s Helmut and Brooks was not in fact the

pain of recognizing — at least unconsciously — that struggles for gay

visibility and rights will always be stopped short by such an image. For
the torment registered in that image is not, after all, that of the body of
the receptive participant, who we might well suppose is loving his sub-

mission, but of every gay man — and every lesbian — who will suffer

because of the image’s force in the homophobe’s unconscious.

I will conclude by saying that, in my view, two things are now inescapable
for queers in the United States: the AIDS epidemic, which appears to be
something all of us will live with, in one way or another, for the rest of

our lives; and a fear and loathing of homosexuality based on straight

men’s phobic fantasies of anal penetration. And if these things are in-

escapable — and inescapably related to each other — we cannot afford

to engage in a politics that denies them, obfuscates them, or downplays

them in any way. Rather we must make them the very grounds of our po-
litical struggle. Sometimes even a formally beautiful photograph can make
that clear to us.

8. Quoted in Maureen Dowd, "Jesse Helms Takes No-Lose Position on Art," New York
Times, July 28, 1989, p. B6.
 «

SEX AND SENSIBILITY, OR

7 SENSE AND SEXUALITY

First presented as a keynote address for the

conference “QueerZone: Mediating Community,”

sponsored by the University of Western Sydney,

Napean, in conjunction with the Sydney Gay and

Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, February 19, 1998, and

published under the title ‘‘Melancholia and

Moralisnf in Loss, ed. David L. Eng and David

Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2002).

/
 X >
4

In the national gay-bashing media frenzy over so-called gay serial killer

Andrew Cunanan, man who ^ot Gianni Versace in the summer of

the

1997, the compelling question was, Why did he do it? What happened to

this “excessively charming” guy that set him on a murder spree? There
was a lot of wild speculation — about the fear of aging (at 27!), the in-

evitable result of dabbling in S&M,' or just runijjmg out of luck — but what

finally made sense as an explanation was the conjecture that Cunanan

had tested HIV-positive back in San Diego and so sought his revenge on
other gay men.^ Insistently clear in the tenor of this conjecture — and in

the obvious disappointment when it was later reported that Cunanan

posthumously tested HIV-negative — was that it would have simply
and definitively solved the whole bizarre mystery. If he had indeed
tested positive, no more explanation for his killing spree would need to

be sought.

This conclusion was presented by the media as so foregone, as having

such utterly compelling logic, that no one seemed able to reply, with
much more compelling evidence: Hundreds of thousands of gay men
have tested HIV-positive over the course of the AIDS epidemic, yet, so

far as we know, not one of them has turned into a killer as a result. Why
1.

then does the “logic” so magically trump the evidence? What exactly is

this logic?

Remember Patient Zero? As portrayed by Randy Shilts in And the Band

Played On, he was the Canadian flight attendant who brought AIDS to

the North America, the vengeful guy who would switch on the lights af-

ter a bathhouse encounter, point to his KS lesions, and say to his sex

partner, “Tm going to die and so are you.”^ Skepticism about this story
was, to Shilts, “the typical crap I get from certain segments of the gay

The S&M-serial-murder connection was most belabored by Maureen Orth, "The

Sensibility
Killer's Trail," Vanity Fair, September 1997, pp. 268-275, 329-336.

2. See Joel Achenbach, "The Killer Virus Motive; Unfounded Rumor Casts HIV as a Vil-

lain in Slaying," Washington Post, July 19, 1997, p. FI.

and

3. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New
Sex
York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 165.
press. . . . The fact is, Patient Zero did exist. . . . The mainstream press
loved my book.”^

Indeed, they did. Patient Zero was just the scapegoat they were looking

for. Not only did his story “explain” how AIDS spread throughout Amer-
ica, but the explanation had all the attraction of a story everybody al-

ready knew — the story of gay men’s sexual compulsion coupled with

murderous irresponsibility. In the meantime Shilts himself became a

minor media celebrity and the media spokesperson on gay and AIDS is-

sues in the United States, until he himself succumbed to the disease in

1994.

Shilts’s popular success and the tactics that won him that success have
not been lost on the current generation of gay journalists. And so, sadly,

the homophobia and scapegoating of HIV-positive gay men that was fu-
eled by Shilts’s Patient Zero story have been revived. The turning point
was IVfichelangelo Signorile’s New York Times op-ed piece “H.I.V.-
Positive, and Careless,” published in February 1995.^ In the piece, Sig-

norile misrepresents prevention theorist Walt Odets’s plea for safe-sex

information targeted specifically at HIV-negative men to be a condem-

nation of sensitivity toward HIV-positive men, and in the process he

pits the two groups against each other. Signorile acknowledges having
had unsafe sex and being afraid to be tested. His solution to the emo-
tional conflict brought about by these circumstances is to look for

someone to blame. He doesn’t condemn positive men outright. Instead

he indicts “Byzantine AIDS organizations” for their refusal “to empha-
size the particular responsibilities of HIV-positive men.” He then goes
on to blame positive men by inference. After suggesting that his own
unsafe activity might result from misplaced confidence after testing
negative, he writes, “On the other hand. I’m frightened that finding out

4. Quoted in "Randy Shilts's Miserable Failure," in this volume.

5. Michelangelo Signorile, "H.I.V.-Positive, and Careless," New York Times, February 26,
1995, p. El 5.

6. See Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of
AIDS {Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
 >
4

X
I was positive might also play into my carefree nature, that 1 might in my
darkest moments care little about the concerns of an HIV- negative man."

To understand just what Signorile is saying here, it helps to read hi^

elaboration of this statement as it appeared in his Ouf magazine column

on the same subject: "Not knowing my statu«^ seems to keep me con-

cerned about putting others at risk, perhaps because I understand per-

X
N

sonally their struggle to remain HIV negative. But if I knew I were

positive. I’m afraid that in my darkest moments I might have less con-

cern for my partners, that I might be less inclined to sympathize with

the difficulties of HIV-negative guys.”^ In the psychic mechanism known
as projection, Signorile defends against his internal conflicts about hav-

ing unsafe sex by expelling his fears outward. He takes his imagined

positive self as the reality of men who are actually positive and thus as-

sumes positive men are unable to sympathize with those who are nega-
tive and perfectly willing to infect them. Signorile magically converts

his worries about his own risky behavior into fear of the irresponsibility
of HIV-positive men.

The temporality of the shift to a renewed climate of moralism signaled

by Signorile’s “H.I.V.-Positive, and Careless” is clearly captured in the

following: “Ten years ago the gay community was fighting off hate-

mongers who were intent on locking up H.I.V.-positive people; as a

community we needed to foster self-esteem among H.I.V.-positive gay

men and to guard against attempts to stigmatize them. Now it seems

that some of what we did for those who are positive was at the expense
of those who are desperately trying to stay negative.”® “Ten years ago,”

attempts to stigmatize HIV-positive people seemed a legitimate con-

cern, while “now”. . . what? Stigma is no longer a problem? Sensitivity to
stigma has become too burdensome? Has hurt those who are negative?

Has prevented us from demanding “responsibility” from those who are

positive? Several assumptions appear to be operating here. First — and
a distortion of recent history that appears throughout Signorile’s
Sensibility

this is

and
7. Michelangelo Signorile, "Negative Pride," Out20 (March 1995), p. 24.
Sex
8. Signorile, "H.I.V.-Positive, and Careless,".p. E15.
 —

writings and those of his fellow mainstream gay journalists — is the

dangerous and counterfactual view that homophobia and AIDS phobia

are no longer the threats they were “ten years ago.” Second is the impli-

cation that fighting the stigma attaching to HIV-positive people amounts

to granting them license to be “irresponsible" from which follows the
highly stigmatizing implication that HIV-positive people are naturallv

inclined to be irresponsible. We need only to look at the “logic” of the

speculation about Cunanan’s murderous motive to see this stigma in

full force.

284

A particularly alarming consequence of this narrative about “ten years —

ago” as opposed to “now” is the fact that de-sensitizing ourselves to the 285

stigma of homosexuality and AIDS has led to the tendency of gay jour-
nalists themselves to stigmatize HIV-positive gay men, something that,

with the notable exception of Randy Shilts, had not heretofore oc-
curred. Take, for example, the Advocate of July 8, 1997, whose cover car-
ries a' picture of Brad Davis and the following text; “Sex, drugs, &
bathhouses are back ... A new bio of gay icon Brad Davis reminds us of
the dead end we face,” followed in large type by “Bad Brad.” Inside, un-

der the rubric “The Return of Our Bad Habits,” are three stories: “Men
Behaving Badly,” a distillation of Signorile’s screed against the gay party
circuit in his book Life Outside; “Slipping Up,” an article about the re-

turn of unsafe sex; and “Our Man Brad,” an indictment of Davis’s

“lifestyle” and gay men’s supposed emulation of it.^ Ostensibly a pre-

view of Susan Bluestein Davis’s biography of her late husband, this story

is in fact a malicious portrait of Davis as a drug-taking promiscuous

hustler. A pull-out quote on the first page reads, “Since his excesses
killed him, why are we still hooked on his tragic glamour?” And the story
turns to the reigning authority for the cautionary note it is hammering
home: “If Davis represents anything for gay men today, Signorile says, it

should be a warning about the perils of excess.” There is no attempt to

understand and sympathize with Davis’s life or to mourn his tragic death
from AIDS. As the religious Right would say, he got what he deserved.

9. David Heitz, "Men Behaving Badly"; John Gallagher, "Slipping Up"; Robert L Pela,

"Our Man Brad," AdvocatelZl (July 8, 1997), pp. 26-38.

 }

Signorile was at it again in his July ’97 column for Ouf magazine, ^‘Bare-

back and Reckless.”*" Puffed up with moral indignation, Signorile seems

X
to have entirely forgotten his own “careffee nature,” as he now feigns ut-
ter incomprehension that there could be “a significant number” of gay^

men “willfully and sometimes angrily defying safer sex efforts, rebelling
against the rest of us, and thereby keeping Hl^Y transmission thriving,

affecting adversely the entire gay world.” Signorile does not target pos-

itive men specifically here, although he singles out Toz magazine,

“which,” he writes, “sometimes seems to eerily glamorize AIDS.”

Rather, the divide Signorile now enforces is that between the “respon-
sible” and the “irresponsible.”

This divide is everywhere present in moralistic attacks by the new gay

journalists on gay men’s sexual desires, behaviors, and public sexual
spaces. Larry Kramer has a long and ignominious history of these at-

tacks, and in 1997 he outdid even himself. In a barely coherent article

billed on the cover of the Advocate as “AIDS: We Asked for It” and re-
t

titled inside “Sex and Sensibility,” Kramer lambasts Edmond White for

writing so much and so explicitly about sex in his novel The Farewell

Symphony, excoriates any gay person who has the temerity to question

the desirability of gay marriage, and ultimately concurs with Patrick

Buchanan from the early days of AIDS: “We brought AIDS upon our-

selves by a way of living that welcomed it. You cannot fuck indiscrimi-
nately with multiple partners, who are also doing the same, without

spreading disease, a disease that has for many years also carried death.

Nature always extracts a price for promiscuity.”**

Andrew Sullivan, who wrote a November 1996 cover story for the New
York Times Magazine declaring the AIDS epidemic over, has one nag-
ging fear about the new combination therapies that have so miracu-

lously spelled the “plague’s end”: not that they might fail — indeed are

failing for many people with AIDS who are not drug-naive — or that the
Sensibility

vast majority of people with HIV infection throughout the world won’t

and
10. Michelangelo Signorile, "Bareback and Reckless," dof45 (July 1997), pp. 36-39.
Sex
11. Larry Kramer, "Sex and Sensibility," AdvocatelSA (May 27, 1997), p. 59.
 —
t

have access to them. Sullivan’s fear is that these new drugs will give gay
men the freedom to go back to their bad old promiscuous habits.*^ And
Gabriel Rotello is especially insistent about the difference between the
good gays and the bad. “Indeed,” he writes in his book Sexual Ecology,
“the gay world may experience a general cleavage between those who
adopt a lifestyle of sexual restraint and those who drift further into accept-
ance of a homosexuality that is inevitably diseased and death-ridden.

These journalists virtually invite a restigmatization of AIDS. “What re-

mains to be seen . . .
,” Rotello writes, “is how sympathetic the great 286

moderate to conservative center of society will be to a social movement —

many of whose most articulate members seem complacent about risk- 287

ing death on a massive scale, and whose very source of difference

sexuality — is seen as the behavior leading to the problem.”*^ An earlier
phrasing of this statement in Rotello’s book is more revealing still: “It

remains to be seen whether the liberal and moderate allies of gay people
will feel compelled to fight the AIDS battles of the future, or fight them
very hard, when the vast majority of sufferers are perceived, even by

themselves, to have ‘no excuse.’”^®

Here is the most chilling divide, and the new justification for stigma: men
who become positive now — Signorile’s “now" again. The problem “now”
as opposed to “ten years ago” is revealed to be the difference between
those who have an excuse — they didn’t know — and those who have no
excuse — they knew. If you slip up now, if you get infected now, it’s your
own fault, and what’s more you know it’s your own fault. The ACT UP
slogan “All people with AIDS are innocent” no longer holds for you.

o
12. Andrew Sullivan, "When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epidemic," New
York Times Magazine, November 10, 1996, pp. 52-62, 76-77, 84.

13. Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (NewYork: Dutton,
1997), p. 287.

14. Ibid., p. 284.

15. Ibid., p. 280.

 N >
i

The recent emergence of this small coterie of conservative, openly gay

media spokesmen, who virtually monopolize discussion of lesbian and

gay issues in the American mainstream media, is one of the contradic-
tory effects of the relative success of struggles for lesbian and gay visi-
^

bility and rights in the United States. These journalists have achieved

and maintained their power — whether naively«j- cynically — by adopt-

ing positions on lesbian and gay issues that are commonsensical, sim-
\

plistic, reductive, and often classically homophobic. Nevertheless, thanks

no doubt to the novelty of openly gay men occupying positions of na-

tional prominence, they have become minor celebrities even among

many lesbians and gay men, winning community service awards, speak-

ing engagements, and lucrative publishing contracts with trade pub-

lishers for books aimed at a gay market. They dominate discussion in

the lesbian and gay press as well, which has, during this same conjunc-
ture, mainstreamed itself as just one more variant of consumer lifestyle
journalism. Whereas formerly the lesbian and gay press — usually local,

financially insecure, and politically engaged — played a central role in

constructing community and solidarity through fostering open discus-

sion among a wide range of voices, the current gay media seek to deliver

a privileged segment of self-identified gay people to product advertis-

ers. Their means are no different from those of the American media
more generally: They focus on celebrity, fashion, and entertainment.
Anything truly vital about queer life and subcultural expression is con-

sidered too marginal for the magazines’ imagined readers. Politics is

equally off-limits, except a narrowly defined politics of assimilation, on

the one hand, and, on the other, a politics of manufactured controversy,

highly sensationalized to bolster circulation.

Meanwhile, another, also contradictory, result of our struggle for rights

has been the recent flourishing within the academy and academic pub-
lishing of radical queer theory — contradictory in this case because

queer theory generally calls into question the idea of stable, coherent

lesbian and gay identities that formed the basis of our earlier politics.
Sensibility

Although queer theory thus represents a break with earlier lesbian and
and
gay studies, and although it is far from homogeneous in its complex ar-
Sex
guments about identity and difference, one aspect of this work is quite

4
 —
i

univocal and continuous with earlier scholarship: It can be defined,

fundamentally, as antihomophobic. Indeed, queer theory is if anything
more concerned with and more sophisticated about the operations of
homophobia, or what is sometimes called hetero-normativity, than
were lesbian and gay studies or gay liberation politics.

1 he vitality of queer theory cannot, however, be counted an unqualified

success. Its place in the academy is still hotly contested and structurally
weak, and all academic intellectual work in the United States is rele-

gated to the margins of mainstream discussion, and is still further mar- 288

ginalized today after more than a decade of relentless right-wing attacks —

on the academy, which the liberal media has been all too happy to par- 289

ticipate in.‘® The gay lifestyle media has contributed to the marginaliza-

tion, too, scoffing at queer theory whenever it bothers to notice it at all.

The now canonical texts of queer theory within the U.S. academy
among them ludith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter,
Lee Edelman’s Homographesis, Diana Fuss’s Inside/Out, David Halperin’s
One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Saint Foucault, Eve Kosof-

sky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies, and Michael

Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet — these books have rarely been re-
viewed by, nor have they influenced the arguments and positions artic-

ulated in, the gay lifestyle media. What is given generous attention
instead are books by gay celebrity journalists: Bruce Bower’s A Place at
the Table and Beyond Queer, Gabriel Rotello’s Sexual Ecology, Michel-
angelo Signorile’s Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex,
Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life, and Andrew Sullivan’s Virtu-
ally Normal and Gay Marriage: Pro and Con.

If, following Michel Foucault, a central tenet of queer theory has been an

analysis of, and resistance to, normalizing technologies of power, the cen-
tral precept of these journalists has been acceptance of normalization
and vilification of anyone whose way of life might challenge an uncriti-

16. For two particularly scurrilous examples, see Lee Siegel, "The Gay Science," New
Republic, November 9, 1998, pp. 30-42; and Martha C. Nussbaum, "The Professor of

Parody," New Republic, February 22, 1999, pp. 37-45.

 a

^ >
i

cal compliance with institutionalized norms. The journalists repudiate

the legacies of gay liberation, whether militant, democratic activism,

resistance to state regulation of sex, or the creation of a vibrant alterna-

tive culture: they portray women, including lesbians, as existing to ^

moderate male sexual behavior as a function of their biology; they ar*

gue that gay marriage will be a panacea for everything from AIDS to ac-

cess to any other rights we could reasonably expect (Andrew Sullivan

has famously written, “Following legalization of same-sex marriage and

a couple of other things, 1 think we should have a party and close down
the gay rights movement for good”);^^ they even extoll what Signorile

calls, with no qualms whatever, “small-town American values.”*® As

Michael Warner wrote, “For them, the legitimate outcome of a politics
of sexuality is a happy lesbian or gay identity in a ‘normal,’ private

home: mature, secure, and demure.”*®

This is nof a productive intellectual debate; in fact, it is no debate at all.

Queer theorists rarely address the mainstream writers or attempt to

write for mainstream publications, and the journalists only sneer at

queer theory, without having understood — or probably even read —

word of it. The dangerous consequences of this failure of engagement
extend well beyond intellectual discussion.

o
In the summer of 1997 — the summer of Andrew Cunanan’s murder
spree — a group of us in New York City attempted to intervene in this

situation. We came together over a number of interrelated concerns: the

threat to HIV prevention posed by Gabriel Rotello’s claim that safe sex

has been a failure and his contention, agreed on by his fellow journal-
ists, that monogamy and marriage are the only way to end the AIDS epi-

17. Quoted in Out Facts: Just about Everything You Need to Know about Gay and Lesbian
Sensibility
Life, ed. David Groff (New York: Universe, 1997).

18. Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs,
Muscles, and the Passages of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); see especially
and
chapter 5, "The Deurbanization of Homosexuality," pp. 181-207.
Sex
19. Michael Warner, "Media Gays: A New Stoae Wall," Nation, July 14, 1997, p. 15.
 demic; the harassment and shutting down of public sexual culture as a
result of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s so-called quality of life campaign;
the exclusion of lesbians from media discussion and the portrayal of
lesbian sexuality as properly private, domestic, and monogamous: and,
finally, the exclusion from mainstream and gay media discussion of
anyone but this select group of conservative gay writers. We called our-
selves Sex Panic! ironically, to call attention to the fact that we felt we
were in the middle of one. Within a few months of our first meeting, we
held two successful community teach-ins, got a number of pieces pub-
lished in the media, and sparked an outcry throughout the gay press.
Attention to Sex Panic! culminated the following November in a front-
page Sunday Week-in-Review article in the New York Times, reveal-
ingly titled “Gay Culture Weighs Sense and Sexuality” and illustrated
with a pair of photographs, one showing two smiling, confetti-covered
men at their gay wedding ceremony, the other, two faceless male bodies
in the dark corridor of a sex club.^"

Perhaps the most painful lesson we learned in our brief existence was
just how difficult it is to get the media to hear our side of the story. The
media construction of the issues is spelled out in the New York Times
title: on the one side is “sense” — a group of gay journalists trying
to stop the continuing spread of HIV by getting gay men to adopt nor-
mal, responsible behaviors, while on the other side is “sexuality”
Sex Panic! fighting for gay men to be as promiscuous as they want to
be. One journalistic account, albeit written by a young academic who
claimed to be a queer theory groupie, encapsulated the media’s re-
ductive version of the debate: “These disagreements pit the value of

gay male promiscuity against the dangers of HIV transmission. ”2>

Sex Panid’s positions were allowed a quoted sentence here and there,
lifted out of context and made to conform to the predetermined framing
of the issues. And frankly, none of us in Sex Panic! was particularly

20. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Gay Culture Weighs Sense and Sexuality," New York Times,
November 23, 1997, section 4, pp. 1,6.

21. Caleb Crain, "Pleasure Principles; Queer Theorists and Gay Journalists Wrestle over
the Politics of Sex," Lingua Franca, October 1997, p. 28.
 X >
»

adept, when speaking to the media, at sticking to basic points, ham-

mering them home, and guarding against saying something that rnight
easily be misconstrued when reduced to a sound-bite. Our insistence

that the issues were complex was taken as dangerous relativism or ^

prevarication — failure to take an ethical position in life-and-death

circumstances. The celebrity gay journalists, b>gontrast, are very prac-

ticed at speaking the media’s language and readily resort to dema-

goguery: moreover their insider status gives them easy access. As the

novelist Christopher Bram said of Larry Kramer, “He likes to call himself
a voice crying in the wilderness, but his wilderness is the op-ed page of

the New York Times." And indeed Larry Kramer went right to the Times

op-ed page with a piece attacking Sex Panic! Here is part of what he

wrote:

The facts: a small and vocal gay group that calls itself Sex Panic has taken
it upon itself to demand "sexual freedom," which its members define as

allowing gay men to have sex when and where and how they want to. In

other words, this group is an advocate of unsafe sex, if this is what is

wanted, and of public sex, if this is what is wanted. It advocates uncon-

ditional, unlimited promiscuity.

The facts: public sex means sex in parks, in public restrooms, in bath-

houses, in the back rooms of bars and discos, at weekend parties, on

beaches — anywhere men can gather. . . .

(A question: why is public sex a civil right? I do not want to see straight

people copulating in the park or in public restrooms. And I do not believe

that heterosexuals view such acts as theirs by right.)

The truth is, most gay men live calm, orderly lives, often as couples, and
they are embarrassed by what Sex Panic espouses. They are ashamed this
issue has surfaced again. . . .

Sensibility

Without a strong, vocal opposition. Sex Panic is on the way to convincing

and
much of America that all gay men are back to pre-AIDS self-destructive
Sex
behavior that will wind up costing the taxpayer a lot of extra money. In-
 deed, what Sex Panic is demanding could easily allow our enemies, as
well as many of our straight friends, to deny all gay people what rights
we’ve won or are still fighting for.^^

The day this column appeared, an e-mail went out to members of Sex
Panic! asking for letters to be written to set the record straight, and
many did so. The following day, five letters were printed under the
headline “Defenders of Promiscuity Set Back AIDS Fight.” Not one was
by a member of Sex Panic! and not one disagreed with Kramer’s posi-
tion. Three days later, three more letters appeared, this time opposing
Kramer. Published under the rubric “In Debate, Gay Men Aim to Find
Middle Path,” one letter came from Berkeley professor and queer theorist
Leo Bersani. Bersani confidently refuted the most damaging of Kramer’s
assertions — that “gay men created a culture that in effect murdered
us” — but ended his letter with the following question: “Is it possible for
gay men to have a debate that is not defined by self-destructiveness on
the one side and, on the other, a hysterical aversion to sexual plea-

sure?”23 This sounds like a commonsense question — and that is pre-

cisely the problem. What is this self-destructiveness? Bersani refers to

“a small number of gay men” who “suggest that unsafe sex is fine.” It is

not clear that Bersani attributes this opinion to Sex Panic! but he makes

no attempt to distinguish it from Sex Panic!’s position. This is, I think, a

telling example of the perils of speaking about such complex issues to
the mainstream media. Although it is true that a few gay writers have
provocatively celebrated the pleasures of unsafe sex, sometimes with-

out providing the necessary context to make their celebrations compre-

hensible,2'* the current debate can only be seen as defined by such
provocations if they are conflated with attempts to understand why gay
men have unsafe sex and to explain why simple condemnation of un-
safe behavior will not help.

22. Larry Kramer, "Gay Culture, Redefined," New York Times, December 12, 1997, p. A23.
23. Leo Bersani, "Homophobia Redux," New York Times, December 16, 1997, p. A30.
24. Most famous among the provocateurs is porn star and writer Scott O'Hara, who
founded the queer sex zine Steam in 1993. See Scott O'Hara, Autopornography: A
Memoir of Life in the Lust Lane (New York: Harrington Park, 1997).
 »

>

In a number of important theoretical texts — primarily The Freudian

Body and “Is the Rectum a Grave?”— Bersani, following the psychoan-

alyst lean Laplanche, has made the argument that sex is constitutively

masochistic because it brings about a shattering of the self.^^ Sex pro-

^

vides “pleasure in giving up what our civilization insists that we re-

tain — our ego boundaries.”^® But where the iB^isculine (heterosexual)

psychic position is characterized by a “paranoid defensiveness against

this fundamental, self-shattering masochism, the result is a “hyperbol-

ically defended and armored” ego, “willing to kill in order to protect the

seriousness of [its] statements. Gay male sex represents, by contrast,

the radical potential of the ego’s continual deflation leading to self-

extensibility. The final sentence of Bersani’s famous essay “Is the Rec-

tum a Grave?” reads: “Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the

sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in

so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode

of ascesis.”2® (It should be emphasized that Bersani privileges gay male

sex only insofar as it is understood as a heuristic category for rethinking

the relations of psychic and social life.)

Now, whether or not we agree with Bersani’s sexual theories, I think we

can certainly agree that Bersani’s resorting to a pop-psychology notion

of “self-destructiveness” to describe one side of the current debates

about gay male sexuality thoroughly contradicts his own theoretical

propositions — propositions that hinge precisely on the self- destroying

potential of sex. To adopt a seemingly reasonable position, to “find a

middle path” in the words of the Times, may be a strong temptation

25. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art(Ue\N York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1986); "Isthe Rectum a Grave?" in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Ac-

tivism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 197-222. See also Tim

Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, "A Conversation with Leo Bersani," October^!
(fall 1997), pp. 3-16.

26. Quoted in Dean et al., "A Conversation with Leo Bersani," p. 7.

Sensibility

27. Bersani, quoted in Dean et al., "A Conversation with Leo Bersani," p. 8; and "Is the

Rectum a Grave?" p. 222.

and
28. Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" p. 222 (emphasis in original).

Sex
 r

when writing for the mainstream media, but when your entire intellec-

tual project is devoted to celebrating sex as a radical force opposed to

self-contained mastery, a jouissance beyond sense, it is an act of ex-

traordinary intellectual self-betrayal.

Bersani’s self-betrayal points to what is missing from media debates

about gay sex, that is, any genuinely theoretical understanding of what
sex is, of the deeply disruptive, anticivilizing psychic force of sex. The
mainstream media and conservative gay journalists alike treat sex as a

simple behavior, obedient to will and reason, as if it were no different 294

from, say, driving a car. When driving, there are rules and regulations —
and courtesies that any responsible person will follow in order to re- 295

main safe and help ensure the safety of others on the road. Although
there are many uncivilized drivers, to be a civilized driver does not re-

quire overcoming insurmountable psychic conflict. Sex, however, rep-

resents nothing but conflict in relation to civilizing impulses.

Why, then, do gay men have unsafe sex, and how do we talk to the me-
dia about it? Certainly the vast majority of gay men who have unsafe sex
are still those who have not been given the information and support that
would help them protect themselves. Federally funded, sexually explicit
HIV education targeted directly at gay men is still effectively curtailed in
the United States by so-called community-standards regulations.^^

Young men in particular, and especially young men of color, very rarely

have access to homosexually specific HIV education at the time they

begin sexual experimentation. They are, not surprisingly, statistically

the most vulnerable to HIV transmission. Because this is not what the
current debates focus on, these young men are rendered all the more in-
visible and vulnerable. At issue instead, in the current furor over unsafe

sex, are those of us who have been well exposed to HIV prevention edu-
cation, who know the risks of unsafe sex, and who still, at least occa-
sionally, have unsafe sex. Why do we do it?

29. On this subject, see Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went
Wrong (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
 i

I have a simple answer: We are human. When say this that we have I —
unsafe sex because —
we are human what mean is something like
I

what Bersani intends when he theorizes sex as constitutively masochis-

tic, potentially ego-shattering, opposed to self-mastery. But how to put

this to, say, the New York Times'? As an exercise — an exercise, it turned
out, in futility — I decided to see how 1 might^^rite about this issue for

the Times. So here is a piece 1 submitted to the op-ed editor shortly af-

ter Larry Kramer’s piece on Sex Panic! appeared.

o
Why do gay men continue to have unsafe sex, knowing how dangerous
the consequences can be? Many voices in the media, prominent gay

journalists among them, tell us it’s because we are self-destructive, or

just plain fools. But hectoring won’t help anyone practice safe sex. HIV
prevention is, unfortunately, not a simple matter; if we pretend it is, the

result could be more, not fewer infections. Exhorting gay men to just

grow up and be responsible ignores how powerful and charged with

conflict sex is for everyone. Imagine then how much more conflicted it

must be for gay men living in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. In a soci-

ety that shows its disapproval of gay sex in countless ways — messages
we all receive from infancy to adulthood — gay men’s most basic, life-

sustaining desires and pleasures become especially fraught. Add to this

the fact that each of our sexual encounters might lead to the transmis-

sion of a deadly virus, and you might begin to understand the distress

that so many of us have endured for the better part of two decades.

During this time, the majority of gay men have practiced safe sex most

of the time, and untold numbers of lives have been saved. Anyone who
thinks this has been easy should think again. The assumption that us-

ing a condom every time you have intercourse — every time, no excep-

tions — is just plain good sense disregards all the powerful drives and
Sensibility

emotions that can get in the way of “good sense’’ during sex: the need to

express feelings of trust and intimacy, the desire to live in the moment,
and
to overcome shame, to break the rules. Every one of us feels these emo-
Sex
tions, simply because we are human. To suggest that gay men should
not feel them, or should put them aside for the rest of our lives, is to

deny us our humanity.

If discussions of gay sexual behavior began by acknowledging the ex-

traordinary difficulties gay men have lived with, both before and during
the epidemic, and how bravely and ethically most of us have lived with

these difficulties, I doubt anyone would be so quick to label our behav-

ior self-destructive. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Gay men’s behav-
ior throughout the AIDS epidemic has been profoundly self-protective.
In our struggle to protect our lives, many of us have also fought to pre-

serve the publicly accessible sexual culture that has nurtured us, pro-

vided a sense of community, solidarity, and well being — given us, in

fact, the courage and will to save ourselves. Where did we learn about

safe sex? From the government? In school? Of course not. We learned

about safe sex in our own community, from each other, in bars, bath-

houses, and sex clubs. But first, of course, we had to invent safe sex.

When others characterize gay sexual culture as destructive, as having

caused AIDS in the first place, is it any wonder that we protest? As a

member of the activist group Sex Panic! which came together over con-
cerns about continuing high rates of HIV infection, I don’t demand un-
conditional sexual freedom. Rather I ask that the rich, distinctive social
world gay people have worked so painstakingly to build be honored and
supported — not because it is perfect, but because without it we have
only the isolation, alienation, and abjection that so many in this society
would impose on us. If always practicing safe sex is difficult for us to
sustain now, how much more difficult would it become if we had no
public community support?

The current push for economic privatization and the ceding of urban
space to private entities shielded from public accountability find a
counterpart in the vilification of public gay culture, whether what is op-
posed are bars and nightclubs, political activism, or just “flaunting it in

public.’’ But those who call for a complete reconstruction of gay culture
 —
i
t

•>

seem to forget that the social norms they consider responsible and
civilized are the very norms that have always stigmatized and shunned
us, and against which we had to find ^n alternative. Why should we
adopt them now? Why should we abandon the life-affirming and plea-

sure-filled world that we have created, where we have learned genuine

responsibility to one another, for a worlqf^ that only grudgingly

tolerates us? Whether or not it is important for gay people to gain

the right to marry — and this is far from agreed on among gay people
it is dangerous to assume that marriage would make us safe from
AIDS. Studies showing that fewer than half of heterosexual couples
with one HIV-positive partner consistently practice safe sex suggest
otherwise.

This is not a debate between so-called ordinary homosexuals and a

marginal group of sex radicals. Nor is it a debate about monogamy ver-

sus promiscuity. These false oppositions denigrate the culture all gay
people have made. Unlike other oppressed groups, we gay people do
not acquire our culture as a birthright. We have to create it after we find
our way out of the hostile environments we grow up in, often including

our own families. Among our greatest achievements are the diverse
possibilities we have invented for the expression and fulfillment of af-

fectional and sexual relations. These possibilities are a function of our

public world, overlapping communities of interest and desire, where we

find each other and learn to care about each other. When that public

realm shrinks — when the city closes down our bars and clubs for

cabaret license violations and other trumped up charges — we lose

much more than places for sex. We lose the places where our lives have
taken on social meaning and made it possible for us to overcome the at-
omized, private, and often secret identities that most of us lived with
before finding others like ourselves.

Anyone who truly cares about slowing the HIV infection rate in gay men
Sensibility

might begin by learning more about how we’ve survived thus far
against overwhelming odds. Maybe then we’ll get some of the genuine
and
support we need in our efforts to maintain the safe sexual behavior we
Sex
 t

have worked so hard to practice all along. And it might help to remem-
her, when some of us fail: We too are human.^“

o
An HIV prevention leader and personal friend of mine asked, in a news
story about AIDS, “Am I the only one tormented with nagging curiosity,
anxiety, and doubts when I learn that another friend has serocon-

verted?” I knew who he was tormented about. He was tormented about

me. He never said this directly to me, but his indirection has been easy 298

to read. Here is what I think his curiosity, anxiety, and doubt are about: —
He knows me from the time we were fellow members of ACT
UP in the 299

late 1980s. He knows that am one of the lucky ones,

I someone who was
sexually very active in New York City during the 1970s and early 1980s
who nevertheless remained HIV-negative. He knows that I have writ-
ten, taught, and lectured extensively about AIDS. He knows that I began
practicing safe sex in the mid-1980s, and that I understand the risks of

unsafe sex. He and have had many discussions about

I prevention, and
particularly about how new prevention strategies can be developed that
take account of the difficulties of maintaining safe sex practices over the

long term, in the face of powerful fantasies of unsafe sex and transgres-
sion, of growing despair and survivor’s guilt, of the fact that sex is not
amenable to rational will. Knowing all this, what he is really curious to

ask is. How can you — you of all people — have seroconverted? His anx-
iety and his doubt follow that question with another: If you can sero-
convert, is it possible that I too could seroconvert? Or my boyfriend? My
other negative friends? Is anyone safe?

My answer again is simple, and it is the same answer. seroconverted I

because am human. And no, no one is safe, not you, your boyfriend, or
I

any of your negative friends. Because you and they are human too. My
only disappointment in all this is that I should have to protest my hu-

30. This opinion piece was submitted to Katherine Roberts, op-ed page editor of the New
York Times, on January 26, 1998; the newspaper indicated no interest in publishing it.
 V i
»

manity to a friend. Still, 1 understand it, for to accept my humanity is to

accept my frailty. Or to put it differently, it is to accept that I have aji un-

conscious. It is to accept that everything I experienced, everything I

knew, everything I understood could not guarantee my safety.

Perhaps my motive for writing an op-ed piece tp^the Times now appears
in a different light. But I want to protest that it is not written only in self-

defense. It is written against the fantasy of absolute safety. For this is, I

think, the most dangerous thing of all about the renewed moralizing
about having unsafe sex and becoming infected now. The moralizing is,

in fact, a psychic defense. If we tell ourselves that only irresponsible

fools still expose themselves to HIV, we allow ourselves to imagine that

we are safe, since few of us would say of ourselves that we are irrespon-

sible fools. Even if we did, we would very likely still think it possible to

stop being an irresponsible fool — and then we’d be safe. But if even the

educated, rational, and responsible among us can become infected

with HIV; if AIDS activists and prevention educators can seroconvert

now, then we have to think differently, with still greater complexity and
self-understanding, about protection. We have to think about the force

of our own unconscious, of our terrible vulnerability, of the fact that we,

too, are human. And we have to accept the possibility, even the in-

evitability, that some of us will fail.

How might queer theory help us do this? How does saying that we are

human differ from the conservative journalists’ traditional humanist

view that we are no different from anyone else save for whom we choose
to love? The answer to this question is as complicated and disputed as

all the work of queer theory occupying the shelves of our university li-

braries. But I will attempt to shorten the answer to a few sentences.

Queer theory, like much recent postmodern theory, tells us that hu-

manity is not a universal and natural condition of being but a contin-

gent and cultural construction of historical, social, linguistic, and psychic

Sensibility

forces. Knowing this, queer theory also knows the political urgency of
understanding how and why we are denied our humanity within and
and
through those very forces. The abjection of homosexuality is not a
Sex
simple matter of ignorance to be overcome with time, education, and
“progress,” but a deep-seated psychic mechanism central to the con-

struction of normative subjectivity and thus of social cohesion. Armored

with this understanding, we can protect against sacrificing our human-
ity in the very act of struggling to get it recognized, or purchasing it at

the cost of another’s humanity, which is the perilous ethical cost of ac-
cepting the regimes of the normal. What queer theory has yet to learn is

no less urgent: How do we make what we know knowable to legions?

 %

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i
s
t »

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X

V
%

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V'
*
4

K
 f

#
f

INDEX
Figures are indicated by bold page numbers.

ABC 20/20 segment on AIDS, 90, 103 After the Ball (Kirk and Madsen), 142—144

Abstinence, 64, 216, 218. See a7so Celibacy Against Nature e^&iibition, 110—111, 112—

or chastity 113/1.5, 112, 113, 114-116

Academy Awards protest (1992), 193 AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syn-
Activist art, 23-26, 24n.29, 28-29, 38. See drome). 5eea7so AIDS epidemic; HIV
aiso ACT- UP graphics; Art and aes- transmission; People witli AIDS (PWAs);

thetics Viral metaphors

art about AIDS, 257, 261-262, 265, 270 as a gay disease, 47, 59-60, 234, 243, 258,

changing meanings of, 263—264 260, 261, 278-279

collective efforts, 158-159, 163 {see also "AIDS carriers,” 94-95/1.12, 94, 96-97, 118

Gran Fury collective; Testing the as a global issue, 7—8, 41, 60

' Limits collective) as a morality tale, 4-5, 6-8, 7n.l0, 13-14,

political art (the term), 25—26 16, 103, 106—107 (seeafso Moralistic
the power of, 25, 32—33, 116 discourse)

ACT- UP nonviral ("gay lifestyle”) view of, 45—46

ACT- UP New York, 189-191, 264 objective vs. subjective knowledge of, 256,
demonstrations to combat AIDS, 86, 96- 257-258, 265
97, 132, 173, 177, 193, 201, 264 rates of infection and trends in, 49, 59—
on the displacement of AIDS as an issue, 60/1.11, 74/1.29, 113, 209, 210, 212, 259

223, 225-226, 227 viewpoints on the disease and its origin, 20,

history of, 22, 144, 189—190 28, 45-46

Media Committee, 20 AIDS activism, 17, 22, 160-162, 223/1.1, 223-

ACT- UP graphics, 162/1.1, 222, 223/1.2, 223, 224, 223-227, 244, 255-267. See also

243-244, 247-248, 263-264 Activist art; ACT- UP; Displacement of

Let the Record Showproject, 33, 34, 35—37 AIDS issues; Lesbian and gay rights
SILENCE=DEATH posters, 18/1.24, 37, 115, demonstrations, 20, 86, 96-97, 132, 193, 264

130-131, 162 despair and optimism in, 228—229, 244

ADS Epidemic, The (Greyson), 79, 80, 81 within context of gay politics, 144—145,

Advocate, The, July 1997 issue, 285 223-225

African Americans and AIDS, 2, 211, 212, internal divisions and disaffection of, 189—

213, 214, 258—259. See also Johnson, 191, 192, 263-267

Magic; People of color and AIDS mourning and, 131, 133-135, 136-141, 146-

invisibility of gays and bisexuals with 147, 166, 173-175, 178 (see also

AIDS, 213, 214 Mourning)

Africans and AIDS, 1, 60, 66/1.22, 212 vs. quietism, 132, 139, 140
 , .

X
"AIDS carriers." 94-95n.l2, 94. 96-97. 118 Testing the Limits (Testing the Limits col-
*
“AIDS: Changing the Rules” (PBS). 67. 214 lective). 37. 40. 262. 263. 265

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. See ACT- The ADS Epidemic {Greyson), 79. 80' 81

UP This is Not an AIDS Advertisement ( Julien)

AIDS discourse. 39—40. 54. See a7so Homo- 81.82 V

phobia in AIDS discourse; Media rep- as a venue for self-representation. 258. 26/.

resentations of AIDS and PWAs; Self 268. 27p

representations of PWAs Voices from the Front (Testing the Limits

us/them dichotomy in. 65. 205. 258—259. coUective). 21. 262^263. 264-265.

260.300 266

AIDS education. 36. 38—40. 44—45. 65. 81. Zero Patience (Greyson). 125—128. 128

See also Safe- sex education Ambivalence. 16. 140-141. 148. 196. 197-198.

British government campaign. 44. 77. 8Ln.34 200. See also Psychological processes

efficacy of various approaches. 74— 75n.29 American Film Institute Video Festival. “Only

on heterosexual transmission. 65— 66n.22. Human” series. 39—40

65-67. 214 American Foundation for AIDS Research

“safe” partners advised. 65—66 (AmFAR). 32n.7. 32. 116. 171-172

sexual restraint or anti-sex themes. 77—79. AmFar. See American Foundation for AIDS
267.283 Research (AmFAR)

AIDS epidemic And the Band Played On (Shilts). 22. 46—48.

early period of. 211. 226-227. 258. 261 118. 199

IV drug users undercounted. 59—60 HBO movie of. 46. 124—125

“AIDS Hits Home” (CBS Sixty Minutes) novelistic style of. 53—54
88-91 Anonymous HIV antibody testing. See HIV
“AIDS in the Arts” (McNeil/Lehrer). 29n.4. antibody testing

29-30 Antihomophobia. 289. See also Queer theory

“AlDSpeak” (Shifts). 46-48 Antiviral medication. 2. 8. 174. See also

AIDS Quilt. See Names Project Quilt Medical treatments for AIDS

AIDS-related diseases. 149. 170. 174 Army ofLovers /Revolt of the Perverts (von
Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) lesions. 78—79. 93. Praunheim). 23. 246. 250—251

101. 103. 105 Arsenio Hall Show with Magic Johnson.

Pneumocysfjs pneumonia. 47. 60n.ll 205-207. 206. 208. 210. 212. 218

AIDS research. See under Research and AIDS Art against AIDS. 28. 31—32. 116

AIDS treatments. 5ee Medical treatments Art and aesthetics. See aVso Activist art; Art
for AIDS world; Photography

Alternative AIDS media. 5ee also Gay and political correctness and. 110—111. 116

lesbian film and video strategies of appropriation. 152. 153. 154.

Danny (Kybartas). 100-103. 105. 105-106. 154-155. 156. 157-158. 160

199-200 and the tabooed image. 274—276. 275. 280

featured in the “Only Human” series. 39—40 universal or idealist ideas about. 24. 25.

Marta (Ebert and Landry). 21—22 29-31. 30-31

Index

Poz magazine (PWA published). 255. 286 Art Positive collective. 158—159
 3

Art world. See also Museum of Modem Art Bower, Bruce, 289

(New York) Bowie, Sam, 219

“AIDS in the Arts” (McNeil /Lehrer), 29/1.4, Boy with Arms Akimbo collective, 158—159,
29-30 163

Cincinnati Art Museum controversy, 274, Brain, Christopher, 292

276-277 Bridges. Fabian, 93-97, 99-100, 106, 123

Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadel- British government AIDS campaign, 44, 77,

phia), 152 81/1.34

Grey Art Gallery, 88 Bronski, Michael, 133n6

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 110 Buchanan, Patrick, 106, 176, 286
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 167—168 Buckley, William E, 35—36
304
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Bureau posters, 240, 240—241, 242
funding and "obscenity,” 156-157, Burke, Edmund, 170

157/1S.4-5 Burroughs, William, 106 305

New Museum of Contemporary Art, 33—34, Bush, Barbara, 201

34. 37-38 Bush, George H., 175, 199, 201, 211/1.22, 211,

San Francisco Arts Commission, 158 213

Audience subjectivity, 255, 264 Bush, George W, 4/i.5, 17/1.23, 17

Authority, 114 Butler, Judith, 289

Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero, 53 Caballe, Montserrat, 255

Bathhouses, gay, 52, 95, 95/1.12 Califia, Pat, 63

Baudrillard, Jean, 106—107 California Institute for the Arts, 113n.6, 113

Bauer, Gary, 69, 197, 200 Callas, Maria, 255

Ben-Shalom, Miriam, 229 Callen, Michael, 127

Berg. Vernon III (Copy), profiled in Conduct Cameron, Edwin, "The Deafening Silence of
Unbecoming. 229-230, 241-242 AIDS.” 2.

Bergalis, Kimberly, 174, 198—199 Cammermeyer, Margaretha, 229—230, 277

Bersani, Leo, 293 Camp, 22, 111

The Freudian Body, 294 Campaign for Military Service, 19, 23, 223,

"Is the Rectum a Grave?” 238-239, 294-295 242. See also Military ban on gays and
Berube, Allen. 133n6 lesbians

Bisexuals. 90, 123, 213, 214 Campbell, Duncan, 121—122

Black Power movement, 189 Campus Review, 69. See also Bauer, Gary
Blades, Ruben, 66—67 Canada, AIDS education in, 81

Blood banking industry, 46 Candlelight vigils and marches, 132, 135

Bordowitz, Gregg, 116, 198 Carlomusto, Jean, 263

Fast Trip, Long Drop, 21, 263, 264, 267— L Is for the Way You Look. 185-187, 186, 187
270, 269, 271 Catholic Church

"Picture a Coalition,” 266 Cardinal O’Connor, 38, 170//.2, 176

self- representation in, 267, 268, 269, 270, homophobia and, 13

272 opposition to safe-sex education, 38, 76

 CBS Sixty Minutes program, “AIDS Hits Coalition building, 266

Home,” 88—91 Codagnone, Alessandro, 222

CDC (Centers for Disease Control) Cohtj, Roy, 178-179, 179/J.12, 224

cluster study information re: “Patient Zero," Comic books on safe sex (GMHC), 70—71, 72,

54/J.8, 121, 124, 126-127 73-74 V

'
risk group classification of, 65, 89, 103 Coming oUt process, 188, 231—232

epidemiology, 48, 60n.ll, 168 Coining Up, ^1—122

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Common Threads, 201—202

47,60 Community Research Initiative, 32n.7

Celibacy or chastity, 23, 249—250. See also Community values, 76—77
Abstinence Compulsory heterosexuality, 140, 176, 209—

promoted in AIDS education, 77—79 210,289

as a theme in the politics of identity, 277 Comrade/Sister, 110

Celluloid Closet (Russo), 200—201 Condom use, 67-68, 140, 209, 216, 296-297

Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), Conflict (psychic), 16, 250—251, 283—284,

124 293,295,296

Centers for Disease Control. See CDC (Cen- Congressional actions. See U.S. Congress

ters for Disease Control) Construction. See a/so Deconstruction

Chemotherapy, 105 of gay culture, 298—299

Chiaramonte, Lee, 62—63 of the self (See also Self-representations of

Chiles, Lawton, 73, 75 PWA),130

Cholera epidemic of 1832, 28 Cooper, Dennis, 24n.29

Christianity, conservative, 35, 47, 285. Cooper, Dennis and Richard Hawkins,

See also Catholic Church Against Namre, 110—111, 112—113/1.5,

Cincmnati Art Museum, The Perfect Moment 112, 113, 114-115, 116

exhibit controversy, 274, 276—277. Crimp, Douglas and Adam Rolston, AIDS
See a/so Mapplethorpe, Robert DEMO GRAPHICS, 263, 265. See also
Clinical drug trials and FDA approval pro- ACT- UP graphics
cess, 8, 36, 174. See also Medical treat- Cultural practice, 32—33, 39—40, 40—41. See

ments for AIDS a/so Activist art

Clinion, William (Bill), 19, 223, 226n.6, 226, Cunanan, Andrew, 22—23, 282
234-235, 278

Closet, the. See also Coming out process; Dannemeyer, William, 140, 198

Outing Dan/iy(Kybartas), 100—103, 104, 105—106,

associated with apolitical positions, 224— 199-200

225 Darrow, WUliam, 54n8, 121

closeted portrayals of gay people in film Davis, Bette, 14

(Russo), 200-201 Davis, Brad, 285

epistemology of (Sedgwick), 176, 179—180, Day without Art event, 166—168

187-188, 289 Death and dying, 263—265. See also Living

homophobia and, 136, 176—179 with HIV and AIDS

Index
 ,

Death drive (Freud), 144,146-147, 149 247, 250. See also Military ban on gays
Foucault on, 243 and lesbians
Death instina. See Death drive (Freud) Douglas, Paul Harding and Laura Pinsky,
Death wish, 144—145 148/J.41

Deconstruction, 20, 28, 130, 163 Drugs. See IV drug users: Medical treatments

Deitcher, David, 24, 24/1.31, 26 for AIDS: Pharmaceutical industry

Delaporte, Francois, Disease and Chiliza- Drug users. See IV drug users
tion, 28 Duesberg, Peter, 45
De Lauretis, Teresa, 187 Dugas, Gaetan, 50, 51, 53, 121, 123, 124. See
Demme, Jonathan, 23, 181, 255, 256. See also “Patient Zero”

also Silence of the Lambs Dworkin, Andrea, 238

Philadelphia, 254, 254-256, 270 306

Demonstrations, 20, 86, 96-97, 132, 173, 193, Ebert, Matt and Ryan Landry, Marta, 21-22
201, 264. 5eea7soAlDSactivism Eho/JV' magazine, 209-210 307

Denneny, Michael, 29 Economic privatization, 297

Department of Health and Human Services, Edelman, Lee
37,49 Homeographesis, 18-19//.24, 22, 130, 289
Der Spiegel, 51 "The Mirror and the Tank," 19//.4, 246
Desire, 184. 5eea7soSexuality and pleasure “The Plague of Discourse,” 18—19/7.24,

(Foucault), 249—250 130-131

Deutsche, Rosalyn, 25 Ellerbee, Linda, 212-213

Dewhurst, Colleen, 30 Epidemiology, 48, 59-60/7.11. See also CDC

Dinkins, David, 170/J.2, 170, 192 (Centers for Disease Control)

Discrimination, 91, 146 Esquire magazine, 118

Disease, 28, 41 Essentialism, 113. See also Identity

Displacement, psychic process of, 227 feminist theory and, 188-189, 289

Displacement of AIDS issues, 8-9, 223/j.l, gay identity and, 237-238, 247
223-227, 244, 255-267 Ethics, 12

moralistic discourse and, 8-9, 227 as authentic responsibility, 1, 15—16

by opposition to the military ban on gays morality vs. moralism, 2-3
and lesbians, 223-224, 248, 279 Ethnicity. See People of color and AIDS
DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Ac-

tivist Television), 161, 166 "Faces of AIDS." See afso Self-representations

Dobbs, Bill, arrest of, 158-159, 159//.9, 159- of PWAs: Stereotypical representations

161/j.lO “AIDS Hits Home,” CBS Sixty Minutes,

Docudrama. See Television docudramas 88-91
Dominant discourse on AIDS. See Homo- Pictures ofPeople series (Nixon), 23, 84, 85,

phobia in AIDS discourse: Press cov- 97-98, 100, 115-116, 199, 228
erage of the AIDS epidemic: Television Portraits in the Time ofAIDS (Solomon)
coverage of AIDS and PWAs 88, 91-93, 97-98
"Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy, 234-236, 242, Factionalism, 189—190
 ,

Falwell, Jerry, 35 Garland, Judy, 171, 193

Fast Trip, Long Drop (Bordowitz), 263, 264, Gasch, Oliver!., 233
V

267-270, 269, 271 Gayfthe term). Ill, 236

Fauci, Antliony, 45 Gay and Lesbian Community Services Cen-

FDA. 5eeFood and Dmg Admuiistration (FDA) ter (NY), 144 V

Feminist movement, 189 Gay and lesbian film and video. See also M-

Feminist tlieory, 182, 184-185, 188-189, 238, ternatiy^ AIDS media

289 Army of Lovers/ Revolt of the Perx'erts (von
Fetishism Praunheim), 23, 246, 250—251

mourning and, 98, 135 Celluloid C/osef (Russo), 200—201

sociopolitical, 9—11 L Is for the Way You Look (Carlomusto)

Fettner, Ann Giudici, 45 185-187, 186, 187

Fettner, Ann Giudici and Willliam A. Check, “Only Human” series, 39—40

The Truth About AIDS, 54n.8 Gay and lesbian film festivals
Film and video. See Alternative AIDS media: Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festi-
Gay and lesbian film festivals: Gay and val, 139

lesbian film and video; Hollywood and New Festival, 246

mainstream films Gay and Lesbian Organization (IGLO),
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 201 170/1.2

drug trials and approval process, 8, 36, 174 Gay and lesbian studies. See Queer theory
Foster, Jodie, 175, 180, 184—185, 188, 193. See Gay bars, 62, 143

also Silence of the Lambs Gay bathhouses, 52, 95, 95/1.12

Foucault, Michel, 112, 196, 289 Gay community, 62. See also Gay liberation:

on identity, 237—239 Gay sexual culture

on pleasure vs. desire, 249—250 AIDS impact on, 144—146

Sa/nf Foucauif (Halperin), 289 construction of gay culture, 298—299

on sexuality, 237—238, 243, 249—250 moralism in, 56—57, 141—145, 267, 286

Francis, Don, 125 Gay identity. See Lesbian and gay identity
Freud, Sigmund, 196. See a/so Melancholia: Gay journalists, 4/i.6, 20/1.26, 285, 288, 292

Mourning Gay liberation

The Ego and the Id. 144 AIDS epidemic and, 14—15, 15/1.21

Mourning and Melancholia, 8n.l3, 133— attacked or scorned, 4/1.6, 4—6, 13, 24/1.29,

135, 137-138, 141-142, 145 24

Fumento, Michael A. equated with promiscuity, 56—57

"AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?” 66/1.22 vs. gay moralism, 286, 291—293 (see also

Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, 208—209 Moralistic discourse)

Funerals, 135—136 ideals of, 107, 140

Vito Russo memorial, 170—175 post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS generation, 6—7,

Fuss, Diana, 189, 289 14-16

Gay Liberation Front, 189

Galassi, Peter, 84, 86, 97 Gay lifestyle media, 285, 288, 289. See also
Index

Gallo, Robert, 45 „ Gay press

 /

Gay marriage, 289, 290, 298. See also Mo- Generational perspectives, 139, 141
nogamy the gay liberation generation, 6-7, 14-16

Gay men. See Gay sexual culture: Gay sexu- Giuliani, Rudolph, 291
ality; Lesbian and gay identity GMHC. See Gay Men’s Health Crisis
Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), 56, 56-59, Goldstein, Richard, 30—31

60-61 Gossip, 178, 180, 186, 187-188

safe-sex education campaign, 70-71, 72, Gould, Robert, 66/7.22

73-74, 75-77 Government. See afso British government
Gay Olympics, 188 U.S. government public health policy, 31-
Gay press. 5ee also; Gay journalists; Gay life- 32,36,91
style media: Press coverage of the AIDS Gran Fury collective, 38-39, 161, 166, 244,
epidemic 308
264
Advocate, The, 285 Control, 137nl5

Coming Up, 121-122 Let the Record Show, 33, 34, 35-37, 38 309

Comrade/ Sister, 110 Green, Richard, 247, 249

New York Native, 44—46 Greyson, John, 110-111, 113
Outweek, 193, 284, 286 The ADS Epidemic, 40, 79, 80, 81

Poz, 255, 286 Zero Patience, 125—128

Gay rights. See Lesbian and gay rights GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), 211
Gay sexual culture. See also Gay liberation; Grundberg, Andy, 84
Gay sexuality
achievements in addressing the AIDS epi- Haacke, Hans, 38/7.9.

demic, 64-65, 297-298 Hall, Arsenio

adversely affected by AIDS, 14-15, 15/7.21, show with Magic Johnson, 205-207, 206,
140-141, 143-145, 200 208,210,212,218
celebrated as radicalizing, 239, 295 video produced with Magic Johnson ( Time
gay bars, 62, 143 Out), 214-218, 219

gay bathhouses, 52 Hall, Stephen, 4/7.5

held responsible in part for the epidemic, Halperin, David, 289

46-48, 56, 297-298 Harper, Phillip Brian, 9-11

Gay sexuality. See also Gay sexual culture; Harrington, Mark, 148-149
Lesbian sexuality Harris, Daniel, "AIDS and Theory,” 19-20, 22
Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio series on, 274- Harris, Thomas, 182/7.18, 182

277,275,280,281 Harrison, Barbara, 207

phallicism and anti-phallicism in, 238-240 HBO films

sites of, 238-239, 243, 294 And the Band Played On (Shilts) 46, 124-
,

societal disapproval of, 52, 243, 296 125

Gay youth, 224 Serving in Silence, 277, 278

Gender, 162, 163, 238. See afso Feminist the- Health and Human Services Department, 37,
ory; Queer theory 49,201
“General Population,” 65 Health care access, 1, 286-287
"General Public,” 198, 201, 226n6 Health care workers, 146/7.38, 258
 X i

Helms, Jesse. 17, 172, 176. See also Helms heterosexual transmission, 36, 55, 88, 208—

amendments 209,218,298

homophobic comments, 35, 68—71, 239, as ‘Inonviral” (lifestyle-related), 45—16

278, 279-280 us/them dichotomy in discourse on, 65,

Helms amendments 205, 258-259, 260, 300 v

prohibiting NEA funding for homoerotic Ho, David, 9—10/7.14

art. 156-157, 157/JS.4-5, 158, 163 HocquengheHj, Guy, 61/7.12

on safe-sex education prohibiting gay Hollywood and mainstream films. See also

themes, 17, 68. 69—70, 72, 74/J.28, Silence of the Lambs

75n.30, 75-76, 157 Academy Awards protest (1992), 193

Helvey, Terry, 240, 240—242 And the Band Played On (HBO film), 46,
Hemophiliacs and AIDS, 90, 174, 239 124-125

Heroism, 21, 49/J.5, 49 Longtime Companion, 270

Heterosexism. See Compulsory heterosexu- past gay themes in film (Celluloid Closet),

ality; Homophobia 200-201

Heterosexuality Philadelphia, 254, 254-256, 270

hetero-normativity, 140, 209—210, 289 Serving in Silence (HBO film). 111, 278

proclamations of heterosexuality by Magic Holzer, Jenny, 38n.9

Johnson, 205—210, 206, 212, 213 Homoeroticism. See also Mappletliorpe,

Heterosexuals and AIDS, 73, 88—89 Robert

choosing "safe” partners, 65—66 amendment prohibiting NEA funding for,

HfV transmission, 36, 55, 88, 208—209, 218, 157/7S.4-5, 158, 162-163

298 as “obscenity,” 156—157, 163

Heterosexual women in the AIDS move- Homophile (the term), 236

ment, 61 Homophobia, 60, 142—144, 162, 170

HUl, Joe, 132n.6 AIDS backlash, 191

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). See homoeroticism as obscenity, 156—157, 163

HIV- positive status; HIV transmission (see also Helms, Jesse)

HIV antibody testing, 147—149 internalized homophobia, 12, 52, 53, 144,

HIV-negative status, 283, 284 285

H rV- positive status murders of gay people (recent), 170, 241

stigmatization related to, 282, 283, 284— outing of celebrities and, 179

285 parallels with anti-Semitism, 29

stigmatization of recently infected persons, phobic fantasies and, 106, 124

15, 287-288, 300 psychic dimensions of, 279—280, 300—301

HIV prevention. See AIDS education stereotypical representations, 22—23, 116,

HIV Prevention Activists, 267 124, 181-182, 182nl5, 238, 242

HIV transmission, 233—234, 291 Homophobia in AIDS discourse, 199, 208,

“AIDS carriers,” 94—95/7.12, 94 211, 219-220, 226-227, 239, 246. See

fears associated with, 146/7.38 also Moralistic discourse

fragile anus vs. rugged vagina /penis theory AIDS as a gay disease, 47, 59—60, 234, 243,
Index

of, 208 258, 260, 261, 278-279

 "AIDS carriers/’ 94-95n.l2, 94, 96-97, 118 Internalized homophobia, 7/7.10, 12, 52, 53,

“innocent victims,” 73, 90, 174, 198—199 285. See also Homophobia
mourning process harmed by, 135-136, International AIDS Conferences
137-139, 138/7.17, 197-198 Atlanta, 66nl3

popular fear of AIDS, 119-120 Durban, 2

Homosexual (the term), 47, 111-115, 235, 236. Montreal, 142, 147

See also Lesbian and gay identity San Francisco, 95/7.12

"Homosexual body,” 111—112 Stockholm, 119

Homosexual identity. See Lesbian and gay Intravenous drug use. See IV drug users

identity Invisibility of black gay men in AIDS dis-

Horrigan, Bill, 40, 270 course, 213, 214

Horrigan, Bill and B. Ruby Rich, 40 Invisibility of lesbians, 29, 168, 235, 279, 291

How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, 65n20 Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO),

Hudson, Rock, 123, 178-179 170n2

media response to his death, 49—51, 55 IV drug users

Human condition AIDS and, 32/7.6, 41, 59-60/7.11, 59-60

as an abstraction, 92 needle exchange programs, 192, 214

AIDS and (“Only Human” series), 39—40 social disapproval of, 76, 199

queer theory and, 300—301

unsafe sex and, 296, 297, 299 Jewish identity, 268—269

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). See Johnson, Cookie, 210, 218

HIV-positive status; HIV transmission Johnson, Magic (Earvin Jr.), 23, 175, 203,

Humor, 21 258-259
Huysmans, J.-K., 112 heterosexuality publicly proclaimed and
public response to, 205—210, 206,
Identity. See also Lesbian and gay identity 212,213,218

essentialist notions of, 188—189 Kramer on, 205, 219—220

gay identity and essentialism, 237—239, My Life (autobiography), 218
247-248 National Commission on AIDS tenure,
identification and, 186—187 211/7.22,211,213

Identity politics, 188-189, 191—192, 224, 237- Nickelodeon program on AIDS featuring,
239, 270 212-213

Ideology, 122, 130 misogyny and, 207

Images. See Art and aesthetics: Representa- Time Out (video with Arsenio Hall), 214—
tions 218,219

Immigration and Naturalization Service, 118, Jonathan Mann Memorial Lecture, 2

124 Jones, BillT., 30

Indiana, Gary, 110 Joseph, Stephen, 60/7.11, 147, 148, 149

"Innocent victims” of AIDS, 73, 90, 174, 198- Journalists. See Gay journalists; Photojour-
199 nalists; Press coverage of the AIDS

Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), epidemic

/
152 Journal of Homosexuality, 63
 ,

X i
4

Journal of Sex Research. 63 terminology, 111—112, 236

lulien, Isaac, This is Not an AIDS Advertise- “universal” language, 76

'
ment, 81, 82 Laplanche, Jean, 294

Latinos and AIDS, 36, 62, 192, 21, 215

Kantrowitz, Arnie, 171 Lesbian (the term), 236

Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) lesions, 78—79, 93, 101, Lesbian and Gay Community Services Cen-

103, 105 ter (N^ York), 190—191

Kardon, Janet, 274, 275 Lesbian and gay identity, 232, 247. See also

Kaufman, David, “AIDS: The Creative Re- Gay community; Identity: Lesbian

sponse,” 28—29 visibility issues

Keenan, Thomas, Fables of Responsibility, disavowal of difference and, 142—144

1. 15-16 and essentialism, 237—238, 247

Kennedy, Edward, 75 identity politics, 188—189, 191—192, 224, 237

Kirk, Marshall and Hunter Madsen, After the normalization of, 289—290

Ball, 142-144 pathologization of, 200—201

Koch, Edward (Ed), 177, 264 sexuality and, 236, 237—239

Kolata, Gina, 75n.29 stability vs. destabilization of, 288—289

Kramer, Larry, 46, 60, 137/1.5 status vs. conduct distinctions in, 233—236,

comments at Vito Russo’s memorial, 171— 249,277,280

172, 175 Lesbian and gay rights

on Magic Johnson, 205, 219—220 AIDS issue and, 224—226, 277

holding the gay community partly respon- multiple issues, 223—224

sible for the AIDS epidemic, 56—57, rights discourse vs. queer theory, 246—247,

71n.27, 193,286, 292-293 250-251

works by Washington, D.C. march (1987), 196, 197,

“AIDS: We Asked for It,” 286, 292-293 226

The Normal Heart, 55—59, 61, 62, 199 Washington, D.C. march (1993), 226

Reports From the Holocaust, 132, 144— Lesbian and Gay Studies Center (Yale), 158

145 Lesbians and AIDS, 41, 62—65

Krauss, Rosalind, 110 involvement in AIDS movement, 61, 62, 261

Krim, Arthur, 172 Lesbian sexuality, 63, 277, 278, 291. See also

Krim, MathiJde, 172 Lesbian and gay identity

Kruger, Barbara, 38/1.9 Lesbian visibility issues, 278

Kybartas, Stashu, Danny, 100—103, 105, 105— invisibility of lesbians, 29, 168, 235, 279, 291

106, 199-200 video on (Carlomusto), 185—187, 186, 187

LeVay, Simon, 247

Labor, Health, Human Services and Educa- Levine, Sherrie, 152, 153, 156, 162

tion Bill (1998), Helms Amendment to, Liebowitz, Lran, 185

17, 68, 69-70, 72, 74/1.28, 75/1.30, 75- Lifestyle. 5ee Gay community; Gay lifestyle

76, 157 media

Language L Is for the Way You Look (Carlomusto)
Index

“AIDSpeak” (Shilts), 46-48 185-187, 186, 187

 i

Living with HIV and AIDS, 87, 100, 175, 219- stereotyihcal, 91-92, 97, 99-100, 146, 215-
220, 228. See also People with AIDS 216,257,258
(PWAs) Medical treatments for AIDS. See also Re-
self- representations important in, 258, 267, search and AIDS
268,270 drug trials and FDA approval process, 2, 8,
Longtime Companion, 270 36, 174

Los Angeles, 113—114 lack of access or unequal access to, 2, 59,

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions 286-287

(LACE), 110 new and combination treatments, 2, 9n.4,
90/J.8, 103

MacKinnon, Catherine, 238 Meinhold, Keitli, 230

Malone, Karl, 219 312
Melancholia, 8/J.13, 9, 141-142, 143, 144. See

Manchester Union Leader, 278—279 also Freud, Sigmund; Mourning

Mandatory HIV antibody testing, 148—149 Memorial services, 135—136 313

Mapplethorpe, Robert Vito Russo memorial, 170—175

appropriating classical styles, 152, 154, 155, Metropolitan Health Association, 38-39, 78

162, 162-163 Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), 167—168

Helmut and Brooks, 23, 274, 275, 280, 281 Meyer, Richard, 276

X Portfolio series, HA— 211 , 281 Meyers, Woodrow, 170

Marshall, Stuart, Bright Eyes, 40, 103, 112 Military ban on gays and lesbians, 226/J.6,

Mars-Jones, Adam, 120 226-227, 228-230, 230/1.9, 232-235

Marta (Ebert and Landry), 21—22 Campaign for Military Service, 19, 23, 223
Mason, Belinda, 199 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, 234-236, 242,

Matlovich, Leonard, 229 247,250

Maturity narrative (AlDS=maturity), 4-5, opposition to displacing AIDS activism,

6-8, 7n.l0, 13-14, 16, 103, 106-107. 223-224, 248, 279

See also Moralistic discourse Miller V. California, 157/1.5, 157

McGee, Pamela, 207 Modernism, 152, 163

McNeil /Lehrer Report, “AIDS in the Arts,” Moffett, Donald, 17, 18

29n.4, 29-30 MOMA. See Museum ofModem Art (New

Media representations of AIDS and PWAs, York)

86, 95/J.2, 101. 5ee a/so “Faces of AIDS”; Monogamy, 56, 64, 213, 290. See also Gay
Hollywood and mainstream films: marriage
Press coverage of the AIDS epidemic; AIDS education promoting, 65—66
Television coverage of AIDS and PWAs Moon, Michael, 134—135
hyping of Magic Johnson’s heterosexuality, Moralistic discourse, 8, 11-13, 16, 218, 284

205-210,206,212,213,218 AIDS activism and, 8—9, 227

“Patient Zero” hype, 51, 54, 124 AIDS as a morality tale, 4—5, 6-8, 7n.l0,

phobic fantasies and, 106, 124 13-14, 16, 103, 106-107

response to Rock Hudson’s death, 49-51, 55 as community values, 76—77

reversals of, 102 (see a/so Alternative AIDS critique of, 19—20 (see a/so Psychological
media) processes)
 5

Moralistic discourse {continued) funding practices regarding horrio-

erotic art, 152, 156—157, 157ns. 4—

*
vs. gay liberation discourse, 286, 291—293

gay spokespersons engaged in, 56—57, 141— National Institute of Allergy and Infectibus

145,267,286 Diseases, 45

mord certitude, 3 National Institutes of Health (NEH), 48, 118— v

'
promiscuity=death theme, 239, 286, 287 119

Morality, 2—3 National Lesbi^jn and Gay Health Conference,

as authentic responsibility, 1, 15—16 118

Moran, Tom, 85, 86. See also Pictures of Navratilova, Martina, 207

People series (Nixon) Nazism, 2, 33

Morrison, Paul, 276 Needle exchange programs, 190, 192, 214.

Mortality. See Death drive See also TV drug users

Morton Downey Jr. Show. 119 Negative images. 5ee Positive /negative im-

Mourning ages: Phobic fantasies: “Faces of AIDS”:

and AIDS activism, 131, 132—135, 136—141, Media representations of AIDS and
146-147, 166, 173-175, 178 PWAs
AIDS obituaries, 178 New Festival, 246
homophobic discourse interfering with, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 33—34,
135-136, 137-139, 138/J.17, 197-198 34, 37-38

psychic work of, 134—136 (see also Psycho- New Statesman, 121—122
logical processes) New York City Department of Health, 59n.ll,
Mourning rituals, 132—135 78-79

candlelight marches, 132, 135 New York Native, 44—46

funerals and memorial services, 135—136 New York Times, on AIDS, 2, 4n.5, 54—55, 59,
mass or collective, 195, 198, 201 [see also 137n.l5,291

Names Project Quilt) Nickelodeon program with Magic Johnson,

Moynihan, Daniel, 75 212-213

Mulvey, Laura, 182n.l6, 182 A/igri dine program, 205, 224

Museum of Modern Art (New York), 84 Nixon, Nicholas, 97—98

Committed to Print exhibition, 115—116 ACT- UP protest at exhibition of, 86—88

Picmres ofPeople series, 23, 84, 85, 97—98, on his relationship with the subjects, 84, 86,
100, 115-116, 199, 228 98-99
Pictures of People series, 23, 84, 85, 97—98,

Names Project Quilt, 23, 68—69, 135, 196, 197, 100, 115-116, 199, 228

200, 201-203 Normalization of AIDS, 175

as collective mourning, 195, 198, 201 Normativity

Narcissism, 22, 138, 246 heterosexual, 140, 209—210, 289

Nation, The, 21n.26, 224 racial -national, 10

National Commission on AIDS, 211/J.22, 211, Nunn, Sam, Subcommittee, 242

213 Nunokawa, Jeff, “All the Sad Young Men,” 200

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Nuremberg Trials, 33—35, 38

Index
 t

‘‘Objective truth,” 120, 122-123, 127-128 portrayal of Fabian Bridges, 93-97, 99-100,

“Obscenity," 156-157, 157ns.4-5 106, 123

an representing taboo images, 274-276, Peck, Scott, 242

275, 280 People of color and AIDS, 10, 87, 89, 175, 212,

Helms amendment against homoerotic 224

an, 156-157, 157n.4, 158, 163 African Americans, 2, 211, 212, 213, 214, 258-
O’Connor, John J., 38, 170n.2, 176 259
Octoberjoumal, 22, 40, 110, 111 Latinos, 36, 62, 192, 21, 212, 215

Odets, Walt, 283 women of color, 41, 87, 212, 214

O’Hara, Scott, 293/1.24 young men of color, 295
Olander, William (Bill), 33, 93 People with AIDS (PWAs). See also “Faces of
“Only Human” series, 39—40 314
AIDS”; HIV-positive stigmatization
Opponunistic infections. 5ee AIDS-related banned from crossing borders, 118, 124
diseases caretaking of, 145-146 315

Ortleb, Charles, 45, 46 images in alternative media of, 100

Outing, 175-176, 178, 179-181, 185-188, 193. living with HIV and AIDS, 100, 175, 219-220,
See also Closet, the 228
Outpost collective, 193 media representations of (see “Faces of
“Outside/ Inside” conference, 158/1.8 AIDS”)
Oii/wee^: magazine, 193, 284, 286 phobic fantasies of, 106

as the proper focus of AIDS discourse, 48

Panon, Dolly, 185-186 self-empowerment of, 100

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 140 self- representations of, 258, 267, 268, 270
Pasteur Instimte, 48-49 (see also Alternative AIDS media)

“Patient Zero” Pharmaceutical industry, 2-3, 4n.5

in And the Band Played On (Shilts), 22, 50, Philadelphia. 254—256
53-54, 54/1.8, 120-121, 282-283 opera scene in, 254, 255, 256, 270
CDC cluster study version of, 54/1.8, 121, Phobic fantasies, 106, 124, 279. See also Psy-
126-127 chological processes

media response to, 51, 54, 124 Photography. See a/so Levine, Sherrie; Mapple-

Patton, Cindy thorpe, Robert; Nbcon, Nicholas; Solo-

“Resistance and the Erotic,” 66/1.23 mon, Rosalind; Weston, Edward

Sex and Germs. 63—64 appropriation of in Levine, 152, 153, 156,
PBS 157-158
“AIDS: Changing the Rules,” 67, 214 neoclassicalism in, 152, 153, 154-155
“AIDS in the Ans” (McNeil /Lehrer), 29/1.4, photographer-subject relationship, 84, 86,
29-30 98-99
Charlie Rose show, 14 Picasso, Pablo, portrait of Gertrude Stein,

Frontline program, “AIDS: A National In- 167-168

quiry,” 93-97, 123 Pictures ofPeople series (Nbcon), 23, 84, 85,

protest against Frondine program, 96-97 97-98, 100, 115-116, 199, 228
 i

Pink triangle, 33—34, 115 New York Times, 2, 4n.5, 54—55, 59, 137/1.15,
P/ayboy magazine, on HIV transmission, 291

208-209, 210 Playboy, 208-209, 210

Pleasure, 140—141 Su/7 dayPeop/e tabloid, 103

vs. desire (Foucault), 249—250 Prisoners and AIDS, 41

and pain, 274—276 Projection, 7n.l0, 284

P/ieuntocysfis pneumonia, 47 Promiscuity N*

Political art (the term), 25—26. See aiso Ac- "AIDS carriers,” 94— 95/J.12, 94, 96—97, 118

tivist art gay spokespersons condeYnning, 48, 50,

Political correctness, art and, 110—111, 116 171-172, 175, 199, 298

Political demonstrations. See Demonstrations heterosexual male promiscuity as "accom-

Politics of identity, 188—189, 191—192, 224, modation,” 205—207, 218

237-238, 270 vs. maturity (AIDS as a morality tale), 4-5,

Popham, Paul, 52—53 6-8, 7/7.10, 13-14, 16, 103, 106-107

Pornography, 156, 157n.5, 293n.4 as a positive phenomenon, 64—65 (see

Portraits in the Time ofAIDS (Solomon), 88, also Gay sexual culture)
91-93, 97-98 promiscuity=death (AIDS) theme, 286,

Positive /negative images, 21, 100, 143, 182, 287

216, 217, 228, 230n9, 241-242 Prostitutes and AIDS, 41

Poster art. See ACT-UP graphics Protease inhibitors, 8. See also Medical

Postmodernism, 20, 157, 163, 252, 300. See treatments for AIDS

also Deconstruction Pruitt, Dusty, 230

as anti-universalism, 256, 300—301 Psychological processes

strategies of appropriation, 152, 153, 154, ambivalence, 16, 140—141, 148, 196, 197—198,

154-155, 156, 157-158, 160 200

Poststructuralism, 28 displacement, 227

Poverty, 2, 89 homophobia and, 279—280, 300—301

Poz magazine, 255, 286 internalized homophobia, 12, 52, 53, 285

Praunheim, Rosa von. Army ofLovers /Revolt phobic fantasies, 106, 124

of the Perverts, 23, 246, 250—251 projection, 7n.l0, 284

Prejudice. See Homophobia psychic conflict, 16, 250—251, 283—284, 293,

Presidential AIDS Commission, 35, 36 295, 296

Press coverage of the AIDS epidemic repression, 131—132, 133

Der Spiegel, 51 self-abasement, 8, 13, 141, 142, 239

Ebony, 209-210 of sexuality, 76, 294, 295, 296

Esquire, 118 unconscious mechanisms, 120, 123—124,

gay journalists, 4n.6, 285, 288, 292 {see also 139, 149, 257, 260, 300

Gay lifestyle media) the work of mourning, 134—136 (see also

Manchester Union Leader, 278—279 Mourning)

Nation, The, 2ln.26, 224 Public health policy, 31—32, 36, 91

Index
New Statesman, 121—122 Public’s fear of AIDS, 119-120, 124

New York Native, 44—46 PWAs. SeePeople with AIDS (PWAs)

 r

Queer (the term), 112-113, 189, 192, 236-293 Right-wing politics, 4/is.5,6, 4, 156, 289. See
Queer Nation, 191 also particular politicians

Queer teens and AIDS, 210 Risk groups, 89, 103. See also by gcoup

Queer theory, 7n.l2, 22, 288-290, 300-301 CDC classification of, 65, 89, 103
on being human, 300-301 Risk reduction education. See Safe-sex edu-

gay activist discourse and, 246-247, 250- cation

251 Risky behavior, 10-13, 15, 103

Quietism, 132, 139, 140 unsafe sex, 267, 296, 297, 299
Quilt. See Names Project Quilt Rist, Darrel Yates, “The Deadly Costs of an

Obsession," 144-145, 147, 223-224,

Racism, 1—2, 20, 59—60. See also People of 243
color and AIDS 316
Rivera, Giraldo, 103

Ramsaur, Kenny, 103 Rose, Jacqueline, 147

Rather, Dan, 88, 89, 91 Rosenberg, Tina, 4//.5 317

Reagan, Ronald, 24, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 46, 55, Rosenblum, Robert, 31-32, 32/1.6

70, 175, 197 Rosenthal, A. M., 54—55

Reich, Wilhelm, 133, 147 Rotello, Gabriel

Reno, 185 "Sex Clubs are the Killing Fields,” 267

Representations of AIDS and PWAs, 25, 86- “Sexual Ecology,” 287, 289

87, 95/1.2, 101, 253. See also "Faces of Rubin, Gayle, 276

AIDS”; Media representations of AIDS Rural America. SeeSmall-town America

and PWAs: Stereotypical representa- Russo, Vito, 188, 201-202, 262-263

tions Celluloid Closet, 200—201

self- representations, 258, 267, 268, 270 death and memorial of, 170—174, 193
(see afso Alternative AIDS media) “On the Closet Mentality,” 180—181
Repression (psychic), 131-132, 133. See also Ryan White Emergency CARE Act, 174
Psychological processes

Research and AIDS. See also Medical treat- Safe sex

ments for AIDS condom use, 67-68, 140, 209, 216, 267, 296-
American Foundation for AIDS Research 297
(AmFAR), 32n.7, 32, 116, 171-172 invented in the gay male sexual culture, 61,

on antiviral medications, 2, 8, 9n.4, 174 63-65, 297-298

drug trials and FDA approval process, 8, 36, skepticism over, 209—210

174 Safe-sex education, 17, 62, 64, 68-69, 295

science and, 31, 32/1.6, 32, 45 efficacy of various approaches, 74—
Responsibility 75/1.29

authentic, 1, 15—16 Gay Men’s Health Crisis “Safer Sex Comix,”

vs. irresponsibility in gay men, 286-287 70-71, 72, 73-74, 76-77
vs. promiscuity (AIDS as a morality tale), Helms Amendment prohibiting gay themes
4-5, 6-8, 7/1.10, 13-14, 16, 103, 106- in, 17, 68, 69-70, 72, 74/1.28, 75n.30,

107 75-76, 157

Rich, B. Ruby, 40, 184-185 San Erancisco Arts Commission, 158
 Scapegoating, 52, 207, 383 Sex workers, 41

stigmatization of HIV-positives, 282, 283,* ^ Shapiro, Esther, 46, 124

284-285 Sherrill, Robert, “King Cohn,” 179n.l2

stigmatization of recently infected PWAs, Shuts, Randy, 122

15,287-288,300 as an AIDS “hero,” 49

'

Schindler, Alan, 240, 240—242 his criticism of the media establishment,

Schmidt, Benno, 159— ISln.lO, 159, 162 51 .V.

Science and research, 31, 32/7.6, 32, 45 critique of, 48, 52-54, 120, 122-123, 127-

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 247 128

Epistemology of the Closet, 176, 179—180, defense of the Patient Zero narrative, 120—

187-188, 289 122, 123

Tendencies, 289 on the popular fear of AIDS, 119—120, 124

Sekula, Allan, "Dismantling Modernism,” 98 view that the gay community was partly

Self-abasement, 8, 13, 141, 142, 239 responsible for the AIDS epidemic,

Self-derogation, 188 46-48

Self-destructiveness, 293—295, 296 works by

Selfhood as a construction, 130. See also And the Band Played On, 22, 46—48, 53—
Identity 54, 118, 124-125, 199 (see also “Pa-

Self- representations of PWAs, 258, 267, 268, tient Zero”)

270. Seeafso Alternative AIDS media Conduct Unbecoming, 226/7.6, 228—230

Seroconversion/sero-status. 5eeHfV anti- “Talking AIDS to Death,” 118-119

bodytesting; HfV-negative status; HfV- Signorile, Michelangelo, 287

positive status; Medical treatment of “H.I.V. Positive, and Careless,” 283—285

AIDS Life Outside, 285, 289, 290

Servaas, Cory, 35, 36 Ou ftveek magazine column, 177—178, 180,

Serving in Silence (HBO film), 277, 278 284,286

“Sex Is” poster series (Boy with Arms S1LENCE=DEATH posters, 18/7.24, 115, 130-
Akimbo collective), 158—159, 163 131, 162

Sex Panic!, 19, 291-293, 296, 297 SILENCE=DEATH project, 33n.8, 37

Sexuality. See also Gay sexuality; Homo- Silence of the Lambs, 175, 180, 183, 184—185

eroticism; Lesbian sexuality novel the film was based on, 182/7.15, 182

AIDS and, 40 queer protests of, 193

Foucault on, 237—238, 243, 249—250 Small-town America, 102, 230— 230n.9, 290

male and female desires, 184—185 Sobieszak, Robert, 274, 275

and moralistic discourse, 11—13 Social class, 224—225

myths about, 65 Social construction of gay culture, 298—299

psychic dimensions of, 76, 294, 295, 296 Sokolowski, Thomas

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), 260 “Looking in a Mirror,” 93—93

Sexual promiscuity. See Promiscuity preface to Rosalind Solomon: Portraits in

Sexual restraint advocacy, 283. See also the Time ofAIDS, 88, 91-92, 97

Celibacy; Monogamy; Moralistic dis- Solomon, Rosalind, 88, 91—93, 97—98

Index

course Steffan, Joseph, 240, 242

 5

Honor Bound, 230—234 Television coverage of AIDS and PWAs. See

reinstatement case, 234, 247—249 also Alternative AIDS media
Stein, Gertiude, Picasso’s portrait of, 167— ABC 20/20 segment on AIDS, 90, 103

168 “AIDS in the Arts” (McNeil /Lehrer), 29/1.4,

Stereotypical representations, 181. See also 29-30

Bridges, Fabian: “Faces of AIDS": “Pa- Arsenio Hall S/iowwith Magic lohnson,
tient Zero”: Representations 205-207, 206, 208, 210, 212, 218

homophobic stereotypes, 22—23, 116, 124, CBS Sixty Minutes program, “AIDS Hits
181-182, 182nl5, 238, 242 Home,” 88-91
in media coverage of AIDS and PWAs, 91— Nickelodeon program with Magic lohnson,
92, 97, 99-100, 146, 215-216, 257, 258 212-213
Stewart, Charles, 213 318
Nighdine program, 224
Stigmatization of HlV-positives, 282, 283, PBS Frondine program (“AIDS: A National

284-285 Inquiry”), 93—97, 123 319

recendy infected PWA stigma, 15, 287—288, PBS program on “AIDS in the Arts,” 29-30
300 Television docudramas
St. Martin’s Press, 29, 50, 54n.8 And the Band Played On (HBO) , 46, 124—
Stonewall, 57, 61 125

post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS period, 6—7, Serving in Silence (HBO), 277, 278

14-16 Terminology, 111-112, 236

Subject-artist relationship Tesdng the Limits (collectively produced

in Danny, 101 video), 37, 40, 262, 265, 266
in Nbcon’s series, 84, 86, 98—99 Testing the Limits collective, 37, 262, 263

Subjectivity, 10-11, 256-257 Thatcher, Margaret, 44, 81

audience subjectivity, 255, 264 The ADS Epidemic {Greyson), 79, 80, 81

and objectivity in knowledge about AIDS, Three Anonymous Queers, 172, 173

256, 257-258, 265 Time Outvideo (Johnson and Hall), 214—218,

Sullivan, Andrew, 6— 7n.l2, 7n.l3, 8—9, 11, 219

286-287, 290 Tom Moran, Nbcon portrait, 85, 86

appearance on PBS, 14 Transmission of HIV. See HIV transmission

critique by Harper, 9—11 Transvestites, 57, 61—62

Gay Marriage, 289 Treatment. See Medical treatments for AIDS

Love Undetectable, 11—14 Treichler, Paula, 88-89

“Profit of Doom?” 4n.5 TV coverage. See Television coverage of AIDS
“Pro Pharma,” 2—4, 4ns.5— 6, and PWAs
Virtually Normal, 4/1.6, 289
“When Plagues End,” 5—9 Ulene, Art, Safe Sex in a Dangerous World,

Summers, David, 86 65-66

Sunday People tabloid, 103 Unconscious mechanisms, 120, 123—124, 139,

149, 257, 260, 300. See also Psycholog-

Taylor, Elizabeth, 24, 25, 26, 30 ical processes

Teenagers and AIDS, 78-81, 210 Uniform as sexualized imagery, 242, 248
 i

Universalism, 7, 10, 24, 30 Videos. See Alternative AIDS media

vs. contingency or particularism, 162—163,* ^Vins, Charles, 241

255, 256, 300-301 Viral metaphors, 41, 106, 168

“universal" language, 76 Visibility, 186, 278

universal point of view, 53 Voices from the Front, 21, 262—263, 264—265, v
‘
Unsafe sex, 267, 296, 297, 299 266

being human and, 295—299 von Praunheir^Jlosa, Army ofLovers /Revolt

US. Congress of the Perverts, 23, 246, 250—251

amendment prohibiting funding for homo-

erotic art, 156—157, 157n.4, 158, 163 Warner, Michael

amendment prohibiting gay themes in Fear of a Queer Planet led.), 289

AIDS education, 17, 68, 69-70, 72, “Media Gays,” 4/1.6, 290

74/1.28, 75/1.30, 75-76, 157 Watney, Simon

debate on safe-sex education amendment, Policing Desire, 40, 44, 77—78, 135—136

68n.25, 70-71, 73-75, 74/1.28 “The Spectacle of AIDS,” 111-112, 114

Nunn Subcommittee, 242 Weeks, Jeflhey, 112

US. government. SeeafsoCDC (Centers for Weicker, Lowell, 73—74, 74n.28, 75

Disease Control) Weston, Edward, 152, 153, 156, 162

Department of Health and Human Services, White, Edmond, The Farewell Symphony,
37.49.201 286

FDA (Food and Drug Administration), 8, 36, White, Ryan, 174

174.201 White House Office of National AIDS PoUcy,

Immigration and Naturalization Service, 17/1.23, 17

118 Wilkins. Gerald, 219

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Williams, Raymond, 196

Diseases, 45 Wojnarowicz, David, 24, 26

presidential administrations Women and AIDS, 168, 258—259

Bush, George H., 175, 199, 201, 211n.22, heterosexual women in the AIDS move-

211,213 ment, 61

Bush, George W., 17/1.23, 17 lesbian involvement in AIDS movement,

Clinton, William (Bill), 19, 223, 226/1.6, 61, 62, 261

226, 234-235, 278 lesbians and AIDS, 41, 62—65

Reagan, Ronald, 24, 25, 34, 36, 37, 46, 55, risk of infection greater, 214

197 women of color and AIDS, 41, 87, 212, 214

White House Office of National AIDS Policy, Woodruff, Judy, 93, 96, 106

17/1.23, 17 World Health Organization, 118

Vance, Carol, 157/1.5, 247 Zane, Amie, 30

Verhoef, Hans Paul, 118, 124 Zero Patience (Greyson), 125—128, 128

Versace, Gianni, 282 Zuniga, Jose, 230

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 n

Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as

Sullivan. Crimp examines various cultural phenomena, including Randy

Shilts's bestseller And the Band Played On, the Hollywood films Silence

of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and Magic Johnson's HIV infection

and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also analyzes Robert

Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's

AIDS musical "Zero Patience," Gregg Bordowitz's video Fast Trip,

Long Drop, the Names Project Quilt, and the annual "Day without Art."

DOUGLAS CRIMP is Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at

the University of Rochester. He is the author of On the Museum's

Ruins mi Press, 1993) and editor of AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural

Activism (MIT Press, 1 988).

COVER IMAGE

lix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Couple). 1993. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen

allery, New York, in representation of The Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

6849
hoto by Peter Muscato.

00680

)K AND JACKET DESIGN

143 atrick Ciano

1
3
his unflinching critique of gay complacency and conser-

vatism, his search for common ground between theory

and action, and his tireless dissection of systemic dis-

sent and denial seem more prescient — if not more

piercingly radical — than ever before."

— Todd Haynes Jilmmaker