Love and Anger

Essays on AIDS, Activism, and Politics

Peter F Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317712244
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Literature

Love and Anger: Essays on AIDS, Activism, and Politics is one of the first books to take an interdisciplinary approach to AIDS activism and politics by looking at the literary response to the disease, class issues, and the AIDS activist group ACT UP. Containing both literary analysis and interviews with activists, Love and Anger will help you understand the unique struggle of a certain class of gay men, why the author challenges the belief that ACT UP is a radical group, and why the love story is a central part of the literary response to AIDS. Examining ACT UP in relation to class issues, Love and Anger discusses how, for certain middle-to upper-middle-class men in the group, ACT UP represented a political response not to fundamental social inequalities, but to the fact that their class position could not benefit them in the absence of an AIDS cure. In addition, you will gain insight into the political methods and goals of ACT UP through interviews with ACT UP members, and find out why the group is sometimes misperceived as being radical, "too gay, " or "not gay enough." Different from many other recent works, Love and Anger also combines literary analysis with fieldwork in order to examine the literary response to AIDS from historical and sociological contexts, not just a literary context. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, sociology, political science, history, and literary studies, this text provides you with an original interpretation of a number of novels and plays, including:

• Afterlife, a novel by Paul Monette, and The Normal Heart, a play by Larry Kramer, both of which envision the return of the class privileges that certain gay men had before AIDS emerged
• People in Trouble, a novel by Sarah Schulman, which challenges gay men to stop striving for the privileges of straight males and instead to focus on an AIDS movement that will support all groups affected by the epidemic
• Angels in America, a play by Tony Kushner, which demonstrates the incompatibility of love and political struggle in literature about AIDSBy examining AIDS activism and politics through the love story and through real-life examples such as ACT UP, Love and Anger integrates fact and fiction in a scholarly, yet comprehensible manner. It will give you a clearer understanding of the issues surrounding AIDS activism and politics, as well as give you insight into the attitudes and feelings of those affected by the disease.

PART ONE: AIDS, GAY CULTURE, AND THE POLITICS OF CLASS

Introduction to Part One

It is at the point where consumption converts its meaning from a disease into a cure that we may begin to speak of a consumer culture in the sense we experience it.¹

—Jean-Christophe Agnew

For middle- and upper-middle-class gay men in the United States, AIDS has constituted two kinds of crises: most obviously a health crisis, but simultaneously a crisis of consumption. Accustomed to having market access to whatever commodities they wanted, middle-class gay men found themselves faced with an epidemic for which no cure could be purchased because none existed.² As these men organized responses to their experience(s) of the epidemic, their efforts were largely structured by a fundamental contradiction: their possession of a tremendous amount of class privilege, combined with their inability to fully mobilize this privilege in the absence of a cure.

For men such as these, AIDS came as a rude shock, what I will refer to in the following two chapters as a “class dislocation.” This dislocation occurred along two lines. First, AIDS limited the ability of certain gay men to pass as straight in the public sphere. Having been socialized into middle-class, heterosexual, (usually) white families, many of these men had proven quite adept at juggling two identities before AIDS: a private gay identity on the one hand, and a normative (i.e., heterosexual) public identity on the other. AIDS, in essence, outed these men, marking them physically with the signs of a “gay disease” and thereby fundamentally distancing them from the heterosexual counterparts whose power, privilege, and material well-being they had strived to attain.³

Second, AIDS dislodged certain gay men from their tenuous positions within the dominant classes by transforming unmarked individuals into members of a stigmatized group. The ability of gay men to experience the privileges of straight men is dependent upon their ability to function socially as individuals. When gay men come together or are viewed as an identifiable group, they face discrimination and oppression; when they act alone, they can experience the privileges of most men. (Although there are few gay law firms, there are plenty of gay lawyers.) What AIDS represented was a group catastrophe: gay men (among others) were forced to appeal to the government and the public for needed assistance as a group, and they were in turn denied this assistance because of their membership in a group that the public deemed unworthy of concern.

Part One of this book examines two very different sites where the crises of class and consumption that I have just described were addressed: the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and three pieces of imaginative literature—Paul Monette’s novel Afterlife. Sarah Schulman’s novel People in Trouble, and Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart. My choice of such disparate examples is deliberate, since I believe that an interdisciplinary approach is crucial to an accurate understanding of cultural practice. In particular, my linkage of these very different examples represents a response to a tendency among practitioners of lesbian and gay studies to limit their attention to the study of texts. Although literary scholarship has taken a sharp turn toward the study of culture, the tendency of this scholarship to explain social and cultural phenomena primarily through readings of literary and visual texts has worked to narrow unnecessarily our understandings of broad cultural practices. Meanwhile, lesbian and gay studies has become a field dominated by scholars of literature, largely because of the acceptance and nurturance that English and literature departments have offered to the field.⁴ As scholars in more empirically oriented fields such as history and anthropology have begun to note, however, such a disciplinary focus has meant that lesbian and gay studies practitioners have tended to shy away from empirical approaches in favor of a similarly narrow study of texts, with profound consequences for the field as a whole.⁵ By contrast, the following chapters examine both a political movement and imaginative writings and, in doing so, attempt to suggest some of the ways in which anxieties over shifts in class and consumption structured a broad range of cultural practices by a generation of gay men devastated by AIDS—as well as some of the critiques that arose in response to these practices.

AIDS did not occur in a historical vacuum; nor did the processes described in the following chapters simply drop from the sky. Although the story I am about to tell focuses primarily on AIDS, what the class logic structuring these responses to the epidemic points to in the broadest sense is a profound and defining ambivalence within post-Stonewall gay culture—an ambivalence that has been particularly apparent among white, middle-class gay men. As my analysis will suggest, gay identity and culture are fraught with a number of contradictions and divisions that make gay men unique among “minority” and subordinate cultures: Gay men can pass as straight, either all the time or in selective contexts; gay men are born into a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds; many gay men do not come to identify as gay until well into adult life; many gay men identify as gay but do not partake of gay culture or community. What these divisions and contradictions have meant, then, is that many gay men have historically stood both inside and outside of dominant culture simultaneously.⁶ For some gay men, their “outside” positioning has been the impetus for an engagement with activist politics. For others, however, their “inside” positioning has provided an opposing incentive to integrate and “pass”—to deny in their actions and their lifestyles the ways in which they are excluded from dominant culture.

As we shall see, by lumping gay men into an outcast group and forcing them to adopt the political tactics of the oppressed, AIDS constituted a moment in which the positioning of middle-class gay men in relation to dominant culture moved significantly toward the outside. If many gay men were ambivalent about their dual positioning before AIDS, however, the class dislocations that resulted from the epidemic only served to exacerbate these feelings. In fact, a number of the responses to AIDS created by these men have been premised on one of two notions: that they continue to remain “inside” dominant culture despite the epidemic, or that such a positioning is worth recovering. What makes a group such as ACT UP or a novel such as Afterlife particularly interesting, in fact, are the sparks produced when the ambivalence that many middle-class gay men already had about their positioning on the “outside” rubbed against a health emergency that demanded an oppositional practice, e.g., activism.

Although the following chapters can certainly be read as a critique of class privilege within segments of gay male culture, it is important to keep in mind that middle-class gay men suffer from multiple types of oppression within our society, including gay bashing and antigay discrimination. My argument in the following two chapters is not intended to trivialize this level of oppression. For one thing, although I will be focusing almost exclusively on class in my analysis, I do not wish to imply that class is the only important axis of identity in the lives of middle-class gay men (an assertion that would position such men as privileged but not simultaneously oppressed). Rather, my primary focus on class is simply intended to suggest that, in the absence of an AIDS cure, middle-class status could no longer function as the position of privilege that it used to be for many gay men.

Nor is the following argument intended to minimize the amount of suffering that white gay men and the white gay male community have undergone because of AIDS. Eric Rofes among others has done an excellent job of recounting the physical and psychological toll—the amount of death and suffering—that AIDS has produced within the white gay male community.⁷ Readers should recognize, however, that to acknowledge the class privileges that structured both a movement such as ACT UP and the writings of certain of its members is not simultaneously to denigrate that movement or to cast aspersions on its participants (who, in fact, included myself). Nor is it to imply that the class privileges that many financially secure gay men have experienced in their lives have managed to wipe out their personal experiences with oppression. White, middle-class gay men have experienced quite enough death in the past fifteen years to render such a claim ridiculous.

It is also important to differentiate the argument that follows from a potentially homophobic discourse that positions gay men as frivolous overachievers in a consumer society. Barren of children, this argument goes, gay men have found themselves swamped with disposable income and have accordingly participated in an irresponsible consumption frenzy unavailable to heterosexuals. Gay and lesbian critics of this position have pointed out that gay men as a whole are not wealthier than their straight counterparts (and may in fact be slightly poorer), that such thinking is derived from media perceptions of gay men that ignore working-class gays (who tend to be less visible), and that gay disposable income can be easily eaten up in the caretaking of elderly parents or, increasingly, children.⁸ Although this is certainly true, it is also true that men as a group still make considerably more money than women do in this country, so that a gay male couple with two male wage earners will, on average, have more income than a heterosexual couple with one male and one female wage earner—regardless of whether dependents are involved.⁹

Rather than taking sides in this debate, my own analysis looks at AIDS from another perspective—one which emphasizes class over sexuality. My description of AIDS as a “crisis of consumption” for middle-class gay men might at first glance appear to link homosexuality with consumption, but this is not my intention. Rather, the following two chapters view AIDS as a crisis of consumption for these men not because they are gay, but because they are middle class. Since AIDS has not widely affected middle-class heterosexual men in the United States, however, the crisis of consumption that I examine in these chapters is located primarily (although one could argue not strictly) within the gay male community.

This is not to say, however, that gay men have not developed a particularly problematic relationship to processes of consumption in ways besides their purported stockpiling of disposable income. In fact, the argument that follows intersects with a number of recent investigations into the role of consumption within gay culture. Anthony Freitas, Susan Kaiser, and Tania Hammidi have argued, for instance, that gay political subjectivity in the United States has become increasingly tied to the corporate recognition of gays as a target market, a particularly important signifier of “citizenship” in a consumer society.¹⁰ Likewise, Nicola Field has criticized the extent to which particular commodities have been positioned as “common references” through which gay culture is understood to recognize itself—e.g., items targeted specifically to gay consumers (magazines, freedom rings) or the organization of mass-marketed commodities (furniture, clothing) into what is sometimes called gay style.¹¹ Although the following two chapters do not interrogate these positions directly, these arguments do raise some important questions. If consumption is constitutive of contemporary (middle-class) gay identity, we might ask, then what are the implications for gay subjects when consumption as a process becomes impossible? What happens to gay male culture when the one thing many gay men need to buy the most—a cure—is not for sale? And what kinds of responses—political and cultural—have developed in light of the class dislocation that has occurred as a result? In order to consider these and other questions, I turn my attention first to ACT UP.

Chapter 1

Acting Up: AIDS and the Politics of Class

To go into a Catholic mass, in a beautiful cathedral in New York … and start throwing condoms around in the mass, I’m sorry, I think it sets back the cause. We cannot move to the extreme.¹

—President George Bush, 1992

ACT UP/New York was founded in March of 1987, and Larry Kramer is generally given the credit—if not for creating the anger and energy that would fuel the organization, then for giving the speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center in New York that caused the anger and energy to crystallize.² ACT UP was created in the context of a burgeoning epidemic that showed no signs of ending, of a federal government whose response to the epidemic had been minimal at best, and of AIDS service organizations (such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York) that, according to critics such as Kramer, had devoted most of their energies to service provision at the expense of political activism. Kramer’s speech called for an AIDS organization that would be “devoted solely to political action,” and his words struck a chord within a community in which certain segments had already begun to turn toward such a response.³

ACT UP/New York would always be the most celebrated, and arguably, the most important ACT UP, but almost eighty ACT UP chapters existed by 1993. Strictly speaking, all ACT UP chapters are spin-offs of ACT UP/New York, but ACT UP/New York’s role in the genesis of the Rhode Island chapter was particularly direct. On leave from college in 1987 and living in New York, Brown University student Stephen Gendin had agreed to attend Larry Kramer’s March 10 speech in exchange for Kramer’s participation in a conference that he was organizing. Gendin became a founding member of ACT UP/New York, an experience that he would bring back with him when he returned to Rhode Island in the fall of 1987, and he was one of six people arrested at ACT UP/RI’s first major demonstration in May 1988.

ACT UP/New York’s initial focus was quite simple: drugs. The cure was out there somewhere, and homophobic politicians, profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies, and an antiquated federal bureaucracy were preventing it from reaching the people who needed it. The first ACT UP demonstration took place on March 24, 1987 on Wall Street; the focus was the unholy relationship between the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and drug companies working on AIDS, especially Burroughs Wellcome, which had just announced a $10,000 per year price tag for its newly approved AIDS drug AZT. ACT UP gained nationwide notice within the gay community following its participation in the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in October 1987, and by the time ACT UP/RI was founded in the spring of 1988, ACT UP had begun to expand its purview to include issues that were less directly relevant to the needs of its primarily middle-class, male membership. Although ACT UP/New York would continue its intensive and nationally respected research on drugs, pharmaceutical companies, and the federal AIDS bureaucracy through its Treatment and Data committee (T and D), dozens of other committees and caucuses formed over the next several years to address a diverse array of local, state, and national issues: women’s lack of access to government-sponsored clinical trials, the treatment of homeless people with AIDS (PWAs), the workings of the insurance industry, the unavailability of condoms in New York public schools. Public attention, meanwhile, was focused on ACT UP’s major demonstrations: at the FDA in 1988, the Fifth International Conference on AIDS in Montreal in 1989, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1990, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 1990, and perhaps most famously, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1989.

In the history of social and political movements in the United States, ACT UP is something of a standout, an anomaly during a decade in which the vibrant activism of the 1960s and early 1970s (second-wave feminism, black civil rights, the New Left) had largely been abandoned.⁴ At the same time, ACT UP must also be understood as a something of a paradox—a movement for social change that was created in large part by individuals with a significant investment in the status quo. In ACT UP/New York and ACT UP chapters throughout the country, the majority of activists were white men, many of whom were quite well-off financially, and most of whom had little (if any) previous interest in or experience with grassroots activism.⁵

Professional, affluent, and unfamiliar with activist politics, these men came to ACT UP with a number of expectations and understandings: that dominant institutions (a capitalist economy, a pluralist political system) could and should work for them, that power was connected to institutional access and to whom one knew, that people would be willing to listen to what they had to say. Moreover, as white middle-class men, these activists came to ACT UP with a foothold in the dominant classes—a shaky foothold in light of AIDS, no doubt, but one that might...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Aids, Gay Culture, and the Politics of Class
• Part Two: Love and Politics
• Appendix Research Methodology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index