AIDS Literature and Gay Identity

The Literature of Loss

Monica B. Pearl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136227936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick – and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project - lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sexual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respectively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancholia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation.

1 Introduction

Gay Grief

This book examines the literary response to the AIDS crisis. It concentrates on literature produced between 1988 and 2012, written in English, predominantly American, and published, primarily, in Britain and the United States.¹ This book is concerned with the narrativization of AIDS, and constitutes a psychoanalytic investigation of the literature of AIDS and into how the literature, through the mechanisms of mourning and melancholia, both forms and reveals shifting identities in response to AIDS. I concentrate on how AIDS narratives depict, construct, and often reconstruct subjectivity among a community of readers as refracted through grieving and its narrative representations. While I claim that the literature of AIDS is a response to grief, that is, it is part of the work of mourning itself, I also pursue the ways that the literature charts changes in the identities and identifications of those who are writing and those who are reading this literature.

Time Span and History

In much the same way that Gregory Woods identifies an “age of antibiotics,” as the time when, after 1941, particularly for men, “sex became safe,”² and as a time that especially influenced the gay male literature produced in the 1970s, so also do I want to draw attention to the period of AIDS writing that I have chosen to examine—largely, but not exclusively gay—as circumscribed in some significant ways by pharmaceuticals. The years 1988 to 1994—the period in which the first part of my investigation of AIDS literature is delimited—begins at a point after the initial unformed literary cries of anguish and desperation of AIDS writing, at just the moment when a more solid literature of AIDS is emerging, and ends just prior to the point when in the Western world, particularly in the United States, a new class of drugs called protease inhibitors began to change the relationship that gay men, both those afflicted by AIDS and its illnesses and those affected by AIDS in myriad other ways, had to death. Because of the advent of protease inhibitors and the discovery that they could be used in combination (in what is called combination therapy) to combat the virus in a way that none of them did singly, it was understood (often erroneously) that it was no longer the case that the illnesses associated with AIDS were fatal illnesses. Though they are not a cure, and though there were some individuals who were already “long-term survivors” without the intervention of antiviral medication, the emergence of the drug cocktails made up of protease inhibitors changed the responses and attitudes to AIDS. What changed was that it was no longer thought to be an automatic equation that AIDS equaled death or loss.³ What the protease inhibitors were able to do was make the virus in the body undetectable. They do not eradicate HIV. However, they often do render the person with AIDS healthier and prolong the lives of those whose prognoses would have been, pre-protease inhibitors, much shorter. The availability of these drugs changed the relationship between AIDS and death, particularly in the attitudes and reactions toward AIDS among American and English readers. So strong was the general understanding that the advent of protease inhibitors has signaled the denouement of the AIDS crisis that journalist Andrew Sullivan announced in The New York Times (albeit not without controversy) the “end of AIDS.”⁴ The final chapters of the book consider the literature of the period after this pharmaceutical threshold.

It was first recognized in New York and in San Francisco in early 1981 that young men, most of whom identified as gay, were beginning to manifest similar and unexplainable symptoms, and then dying quickly.⁵ First termed GRID, for “gay-related immune deficiency,” the syndrome was defined and given the name AIDS by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1982 “[w]hen it was revealed that members of other groups—hemophiliacs, Haitian immigrants, recipients of blood transfusions, intravenous drug users, the sex partners (and sometimes children) of those carrying the virus, and millions of heterosexual men and women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—were also infected.”⁶ This was also when the first article appeared in The New York Times, bringing to widespread attention the rare cancers discovered in homosexual men.⁷ The gay press, however, was already reporting on the illnesses among gay men.⁸

A crucial moment in the history of the AIDS epidemic was the start of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1981. Initially a grassroots organization in New York City dedicated to educating the gay community, caring for those who were ill, and bringing more attention to the illness, it became the model for other AIDS service organizations in the United States and in Europe. A turning point in public recognition of the AIDS epidemic came when the actor Rock Hudson died of AIDS in 1985. It was only then that the U.S. president, five years into the crisis, delivered his first speech on AIDS. It was partly this sense of neglect by government officials responsible for allocating resources and of life-threatening delays on the part of the Federal Drug Administration who oversaw the pipeline for experimental AIDS drugs that escalated grassroots reaction and incited AIDS activism. In March 1987, a speech by Larry Kramer at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center in New York City instigated the formation of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a grassroots AIDS activist organization. This kind of confrontational grassroots activism galvanized media attention to AIDS in America, garnering immediate and widespread public attention to the crisis.

Nonfiction literature played a part early on in the history of grassroots AIDS prevention work. Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz produced the book How to Have Sex in an Epidemic in 1983, the first publication to respond cogently and prudently to the crisis at hand without alarm or advising draconian anti-sex measures. It was through print and an increasing sense of reliance on literature among a growing and changing gay population that a gay community coalesced and redefined itself and spread word about ways to protect oneself and others from illness and take care of oneself if one became ill. Print has been one of the primary media for AIDS representation. For example, consider this reaction to the abundance of the available printed material on AIDS:

Anyone interested in AIDS must suffer from … vertigo: the number of books, essays, pamphlets, and articles, the kinds of information, issues, and events that occur are so overwhelming in sheer number as to defeat any attempt at comprehensive incorporation by one person; the ever-increasing number of written responses to the history of representation of the disease makes it impossible even to survey recent literature much less to comprehend the totality of discourse about HIV since its appearance as GRID in January 1982.⁹

In other words, if “AIDS has effected what amounts to an epistemic shift in gay culture,”¹⁰ a large part of this change has been engendered and chronicled by the printed word.

The year 1988 is significant for AIDS literature. It is the year that noted gay novelists published their first works of AIDS literature. Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time¹¹ and Edmund White and Adam Mars-Jones’ collection of AIDS short stories The Darker Proof¹² were published in 1988, marking the beginning of a serious and lasting AIDS literature. It was also in 1988 that other previously known gay novelists published their first pieces of AIDS fiction, including Christopher Bram’s In Memory of Angel Clare, Robert Ferro’s Second Son, and Ethan Mordden’s Everybody Loves You.

The first AIDS fiction, by and large, was gay fiction. This changed, but not very quickly or very drastically. While the publication of memoirs of loved ones (or oneself) ill and then dead from AIDS continued,¹³ the fiction written by or about other communities affected by AIDS was still sparse and infrequent. There started to appear nonfiction memoirs of a sort, or accounts of loved ones fallen to the illness, in the 1980s,¹⁴ but except for Alice Hoffman’s novel At Risk, most AIDS fiction produced in the 1980s was written by gay men about gay men. There was almost no literature produced by other afflicted groups, like intravenous drug users and women. In 1990 Fran Peavey’s memoir of living with AIDS was published,¹⁵ and in the same year one extraordinary exception to the limited production of literature by both women and drug users appeared, though it was from a small publisher and little known: an AIDS memoir of a user of intravenous drugs who contracts AIDS, by Rae Shawn Stewart, called Letters from a Little Girl Addict.¹⁶ The first fiction that concerns women drug users is Achy Obejas’ We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?¹⁷ in which a story called “Man Oh Man” is told from the perspective of a female intravenous drug user, presumably with AIDS, about her boyfriend and about shooting up drugs. Many of the other stories in this collection are also about having AIDS and include lesbian characters, many Latina, a rare amalgamation of identities for AIDS literature. During these years the primary “literature” produced by women consisted in short personal accounts of their lives and how they contracted AIDS.¹⁸

One can surmise that the reasons why women and drug users were not able to produce literature in the way that gay men were have to do with a dearth for women and drug users of both cultural and financial resources and also, in the earlier years of the epidemic, the great disparity in prognosis for men and for women once diagnosed; that is, gay men lived up to three times longer than did women after diagnosis.¹⁹ Richard Goldstein comments on the dearth of AIDS writing other than gay AIDS writing:

No comparable process of self-expression exists among the other groups hit hardest by AIDS—IV drug users, their children, and their mostly black or Hispanic partners—in part because of the paralyzing impact of poverty and stigma among these groups, in part because there is no “community,” perceived as such, to bind drug users together.²⁰

In Shaun O’Connell’s early assessment of AIDS literature, he concludes that the “AIDS crisis has already produced a considerable body of literature, though not yet a great work of art.”²¹ The earliest AIDS fiction, books like Paul Reed’s Facing It, the first AIDS novel,²² was desperate and often more invested in instruction than aesthetics. Almost none of these novels is still in print.²³ Michiko Kakutani, book critic of The New York Times, writes of early AIDS fiction:

In the beginning so little was widely known about the disease that writers seemed to feel an urgent need to teach, to remonstrate, to somehow convey raw facts. The disease had to be named and described so it could be fought, and early works of fiction tended almost by necessity to be polemical and didactic. Since then, novels and plays alike have grown both more personal and more abstract.²⁴

My investigation begins in 1988 because it is the year during which novels were published that were formative of the canon of AIDS literature, after the fledgling and desperate first attempts to write about the experiences that AIDS gave rise to, when AIDS was already beginning to be understood among certain communities of gay men to be an interwoven element of everyday life and society and not the unprecedented, tragic, and expeditiously fatal malady that it was in the early to mid-eighties.²⁵ It was still tragic, but it was no longer new. One of the only significant pieces of literature to appear before that year, except for some short stories in small gay periodicals, such as Christopher Street and The James White Review, and a few in the first of the George Stambolian’s Men on Men series,²⁶ is Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now,” published in The New Yorker in 1986.²⁷ It was as though before 1988 there was a hesitation to respond to AIDS with fiction. As Andrew Holleran commented in his 1988 collection of essays, the “truth was quite enough; there was no need to make it up. To attempt to imagine such scenes seemed impertinence of the worst kind.”²⁸

One of the significant ways that the literature of AIDS changes after 1994 is that it becomes retrospective. For example, the first “epics” of gay literature were produced at nearly the same time. Consider that in 1995 two important gay writers produced such epics: Felice Picano’s Like People in History and Ethan Mordden’s How Long Has this Been Going On?²⁹ both of which chronicle gay life in major cities from some time just before Stonewall to the time of writing. They provide a grand sweep of historical events and trends culminating in the losses incurred from AIDS.³⁰ That there should now be historical novels of gay life implies some sort of closure, or at least transition in narrative and experience—a transition to what is still uncertain, though certainly to a life that incorporates, but no longer dwells on, the losses incurred by AIDS. There is a gay history now, the appearance of gay epics such as these imply, an era that closes with the advent of the AIDS epidemic.

AIDS writing also becomes retrospective in another way, and that is in the appearance of anthologies of AIDS writing. Anthologies often signal the end of an era. Take Sharon Oard Warner’s anthology of AIDS short stories, and Marie Howe and Michael Klein’s anthology of American AIDS writing.³¹ Both published in 1995, when the literature was beginning to be anthologized for yet a different reading public, one who might not have sought out the individual books as they were originally published. The year 1995 also shows a change in AIDS literature from one that is primarily mournful to another stage that is, I suggest, more about anger and anomie. This is shown in the appearance of unlikable, or “difficult,” characters who have AIDS. Consider, for example, the novel Walking on Air by R.S. Jones, which represents a shift in AIDS writing in that the tone is not melancholy but dispassionate.³² In Flesh and Blood, a novel by the major gay writer Michael Cunningham published in 1995, the narrative is unusual for allowing the primary gay character to remain free from AIDS, while it is a primary female character who becomes infected.³³

Geography, History, and Community

The United States was where the first literary approaches to AIDS in the English language were produced, and where the advent of protease inhibitors first made their claim and had the effe...