Positive Images

Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of 'Post Crisis'

Dion Kagan

• Verlag: I.B. Tauris
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838608989
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medicina
• Thema: Enfermedades y alergias

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture? Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.

1

Gay Redemption

Domestication and Disavowal in The Gay 90s

'The Big A'

VICKIE:	You don’t even know, I’m sitting here... maybe... probably dying of AIDS. And I’m totally alone. [pauses]. You don’t understand, every day, all day, it’s all that I think about, OK? Every time I sneeze, it’s like I’m four sneezes away from the hospice. And it’s like it’s not even happening to me, it’s like I’m watching it on some crappy show like Melrose Place or some shit, right? And I’m the new character, I’m the H-I-V/AIDS character, and I live in the building and I teach everybody that ‘It’s OK to be near me, it’s OK to talk to me!’ And then I die... And there’s everybody at my funeral wearing halter-tops or chokers or some shit like that.
LELAINA:	[Laughing anxiously] Vickie, stop, OK? Just stop. You’re freaking out. And you know what? You’re gonna have to deal with the results. Whatever they are, we’re gonna have to deal with them... just like we’ve dealt with everything else.
VICKIE:	This isn’t like everything else.
LELAINA:	I know that, all right? But it’s gonna be OK, you know? I know it’s gonna be OK. [Pauses]. Melrose Place is a really good show.

Reality Bites, Dir. Ben Stiller, 1994

Reality Bites is an American romantic comedy-drama tracing the postcollege fortunes of four twenty-somethings in Houston, Texas in the early 1990s. It revolves around an aspiring videographer, Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder), who documents her friend’s disenchanted ‘slacker’ lives. After a series of quirky episodes developing the familiar predicaments of so-called Gen X-ers, the film establishes a more conventional love triangle in which Lelaina’s affections are divided between slick TV executive Michael (Ben Stiller) and disaffected grunge rock artist Troy (Ethan Hawke), two men whose differences come to emblematise her own (and Gen X’s) internal conflicts between pragmatism and idealism, conventional life choices and high-minded, artistic ones.

Perhaps due to the film’s generous lashings of television trivia and its close association with the Generation X moment in global Anglo-American popular culture, Reality Bites became somewhat iconic. This is a little ironic given the film itself repeatedly ironises its own patchwork of pop-cultural references. In any case, my interest here is not in whether this cultural touchstone accurately captured the moods and lifestyles of Generation X, but in the way it depicted HIV/AIDS and gay male life, two themes that are marginal to the central heterosexual romance narrative but whose treatment provides an instructive glimpse at a broader set of trends in mainstream American film and television of the 1990s that I wish to reexamine in this chapter.

Reality Bites has two supporting characters, Vickie and Sammie. Vickie (Janeane Garofalo) is Lelaina’s sassy, quick-witted housemate and best friend, and the reluctant assistant manager of clothing store The Gap. She has a series of dry one-liners and one-night stands before confronting her fears of HIV/AIDS and of being alone, twin phobias that are conflated under the sign of promiscuity. Early on we see Vickie adding to a long list of names of the men she has slept with in a notebook by her bed. Later we see her through the lens of Lelaina’s documentary camera, announcing her arrival at a medical centre: ‘The free clinic AIDS test!’ she announces with faux excitement, ‘The rite of passage for our generation. We’re so lucky!’ Shortly after, in the tragi-comic confession quoted above, Vickie admits that she is terrified she could be HIV positive. Reality Bites doesn’t indicate whether or not Vickie has been practising safer sex, but this is somewhat immaterial. Given the pervasive images of PWAs¹ in 1980s and early 1990s mass culture as figures of merciless isolation,² and the highly publicised conflation of HIV/AIDS with promiscuity, we can recognise, if not perhaps share, Vickie’s fears. In light of these associations, it’s no surprise that Vickie’s fear of AIDS is associated with her fear of being alone.

These fears are presented as universal, for Gen X at least: as Vickie says, the test is ‘a rite of passage for our generation.’ In the universe of Reality Bites, HIV is a fact of life, a ‘biting reality, and Vickie’s confession expresses its place in the emotional landscape of her world. Tellingly, she frames her confession through the ironic citation of popular TV soap opera, Melrose Place (1992-99), the 1990s standard-bearer for titillating sex drama and over-the-top plot twists. The TV reference bespeaks a knowing awareness of the way in which popular screen images of AIDS and HIV/AIDS awareness-raising discourses were, by this time, dominated by the generic conventions of melodrama³ and ‘kitsch sentiment’, as Daniel Harris’s provocative essay, ‘The Kitschification of AIDS’ later catalogued.⁴ Vickie’s AIDS speech gestures – however faintly – to Harris’s critique of the liberal, sentimental gaze of mainstream US culture that offers tokenistic and morally simplistic, ‘politically correct’ minority representations, wrapped up in commercial agendas and resulting in portraits of romanticised pity and martyrdom. The Melrose Place reference also reflects the way in which, more broadly, the conventions of popular media culture (re)frame the fears and fantasies of everyday life.

But for all this self-awareness, Reality Bites itself, as we shall see, goes on to rehearse similarly reductive conventions. Lelaina’s other friend Sammy (Steve Zahn) is a character whose main attribute is that he is gay. Unlike the rest of the cast, Sammy has neither romantic interest nor sexual encounters. He functions mostly as comic relief and he has scarcely a sub-plot to call his own apart from a brief sequence in which he comes out of the closet. Before this there is a comedic ‘rehearsal’ scene in which Sammy and Vickie read from dummy scripts, emphasising the ‘scriptedness’ of the coming out scene. The film then cuts to a dejected Sammy sitting outside his mother’s house where the ‘real’ emotional fallout is documented by Lelaina’s camera. Sammy says

Well, I came out to her and... she’s still a little bit upset. But you know [pauses]. You know, I think the real reason... I’ve been celibate for so long isn’t really because I’m that terrified of The Big A... but because I can’t really start my life... without being honest about who I am [cut].

Given Sammy is gay and given the fears expressed by Vickie we might assume that ‘The Big A’ is a reference to AIDS. But it may also refer to anal sex given that Sammy says he has been celibate. Either way, in this brief sexual confession, something is unmentionable. Moreover, in spite of the self-aware parody in the coming out rehearsal scene, this is, ironically, the only character development – the only scene – that Sammy gets: Lelaina cuts her documentary right at the point where Sammy seems about to open up and tell his story.

I open this discussion of HIV/AIDS and ‘The Gay 90s’ with this example because it very clearly iterates a broader trend in popular culture from the time. In Reality Bites the presence of a gay male character is not a big deal, yet he doesn’t get a plot of his own besides the dramatic disclosure of his sexuality. Sammy’s predicament exemplifies a broader tendency in the emerging positive images of the 1990s, which is to portray homosexuality almost exclusively in what Dennis Allen calls ‘narratives of disclosure.’ Narratives of disclosure, Allen explains, are ‘continually substituted for any possible narrative, romantic or otherwise, predicated on such a sexuality’; beyond the revelation of homosexuality, there is no actual gay drama.⁵ Funnily enough, Allen identifies the example of Matt Fielding (Doug Savant), the resident gay character on Melrose Place, the very show that Vickie references in Reality Bites. For Allen, homosexuality in Melrose Place is an ‘endlessly repeated story’,⁶ and Matt is constantly relegated to the role of ‘accomplice to the machinations of other characters.’⁷ The coming out vignette serves as an epistemological support to the imperatives of the enveloping hetero sexually-oriented narrative; it creates a space for the participation of a queer character but prevents them from rupturing either the development or the closure of the over-arching heterosexual plot. As Scott Paulin writes, this ‘practice of denotation, linked as it is to a discourse of “coming out”, implies a greater willingness to acknowledge that gay men and lesbians exist, [however] it does not necessarily imply a greater commitment to challenging the ideology that privileges heterosexuality in the first place’.⁸ Sammy’s narrative inconsequence is neatly conveyed by Lelaina’s exasperated question to him later in the film: ‘Sammy, what are you even doing here? You don’t even live here!’ Plotless and sexless (and apparently homeless), Sammy exemplifies a broader 1990s trend of recruiting queer characters to secondary and supporting roles in hetero-oriented narratives, and, importantly, the quarantining of them from other queer people and from acting on their sexual desires.

The phenomenon of a desexualised gay character who is restricted to a narrative of disclosure was particularly ubiquitous in the 1990s and there is a substantial archive of criticism, both popular and scholarly, on these avowedly ‘positive images’. But what if we were to return to this moment in modern gay representation and ask afresh about the role of AIDS in these images? How is this figure of gay male celibacy informed by the lurid AIDS crisis discourses discussed in the previous chapter? What happens if we attempt to bring the unspeakable ‘Big A from the margins of narrative consciousness to the centre of the analysis?

As will become clear in this chapter, Sammy’s euphemistic reference is a useful clue to a broader cultural project of AIDS disavowal. The displacement of the drama of AIDS from Sammy to Vickie in Reality Bites – from celibate gay man to sexually active straight woman – is part of the mechanisms of a historically particular cultural trend that I call ‘Gay Redemption.’ The conventions of Gay Redemption permit gay male characters to enter mass culture on the proviso that they remain sexually inactive. These strategies became widespread in the 1990s⁹ and remain prevalent in contemporary entertainment culture. Looking back, it seems increasingly clear that the specific forms of narrative containment that surrounded this sexually unthreatening queer figure operated to disavow the particular sexual anxieties aroused by HIV/AIDS. This ‘New Gay Man, as Shugart calls him,¹⁰ emerges with particular visual, narrative, performance and casting conventions developed specifically to accommodate these disavowals.

In the remainder of this chapter we will make several returns. First, we’ll return to the Gay 90s, to the birthplace of the New Gay Man and his original contexts of production and reception. Here, as we shall see, certain modes of characterisation, embodiment and narrative role (or lack thereof) op...