“Unsung, the noblest deed will die.” — Pindar, Fragment 120
THE ART OF AN ERA is defined by the manner in which creative people collectively respond to a history and cultural change. The Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and Pop Art are significant 20th-century examples of this relationship. In more recent years, the psychotherapeutic memoir and confessional poetry have both been hallmarks of bestselling literature. When it comes to modern gay life, however, no other phenomenon has so completely defined a generation as AIDS.
Soon after the epidemic struck the gay community in the early 1980’s, writers started to produce an always somber, often highly political literature that sought to bring attention to its terrifying impact on gay life. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart was the first major play to address the impact of AIDS on gay men, as did the somewhat more temperate As Is, by William M. Hoffman, at a time when mainstream society, the media, and the government were all turning a deaf ear.
In retrospect, there are distinct differences not only between the AIDS literature of twenty-plus years ago and contemporary treatments of the disease, but also between popular perceptions of what it means to be gay and male in America then and now. In most cases, art became a weapon used to educate and advocate on behalf of gay writers and artists, many of whom were themselves casualties of the disease.
In the same way that the epidemic evolved in the U.S. from one that affected predominately gay males to one that affected a broader population encompassing women, children, African-Americans, and Hispanics, AIDS writing has also become less ghettoized. And yet, the earliest, angriest works remain a testament to the epidemic’s importance to late-20th-century history. While many of these writings consisted of novels, memoirs, and plays, they tended to maintain a journalistic tone consistent with documenting the earliest stages of a disease that was as mysterious and fascinating as it was terrifying and momentous.
In more recent years, AIDS has played less of a leading role in gay writing, its political message blunted as it has often been relegated to a more atmospheric presence than a driving force of the plot. Doubtless this reflects the simple fact that since the mid-1990’s new medicines have gradually shifted the imagery of AIDS from one of people dying of the disease to one of people living with it.
AIDS writing can be loosely divided into three stages beginning with its inception in the early 1980’s. An activist phase corresponds to the immediate, angry reaction to the epidemic and its impact on the gay community at a time when politicians and community leaders remained mute. This was followed by a kind of confirmatory period during which many writers sought ways to co-exist with the disease rather than to achieve a political victory. Today, we’re in a kind of pluralist era in which AIDS is one of the many plot devices that writers both gay and straight use to develop their narratives.
Larry Kramer’s works (both then and now) embody a true sense of activism, whether he’s targeting AIDS or, more recently, crystal meth use in the gay community. In the 1980’s, the theatrical community was arguably the first to respond to the AIDS crisis by producing plays that reached at least a small audience of theatergoers in New York and elsewhere, while attracting celebrities to the cause of publicizing the epidemic’s risks and human toll. At one point, Barbra Streisand narrated a special production of The Normal Heart in preparation for the would-be film adaptation that she wanted to direct, while Doric Wilson brought street life to the stage, Paula Vogel provided fantastical escapes in The Baltimore Waltz (1990), and Tony Kushner was preparing to hit Broadway with his two-part saga, Angels in America.
The transition of Tony Kushner’s work from the stage to the small screen offers some insight into the shift in public perceptions during the 90’s. When the play first debuted in 1991 (in San Francisco), it was received by bowled-over audiences as bold, controversial, and militant in its approach to AIDS. By comparison, when the movie version was produced and aired by HBO four years ago, it reached audiences that were already wise to the disease’s impact not only on gay life but throughout the world. The magical exchanges between real and imagined characters in the play can no longer rely on quite the same reactions of horror and surprise that gave the play its buoyancy, though they’re arguably entertaining on a less political level. While the play cannot be relegated to the status of a “period piece” given its continued relevance, both the reality of the epidemic and the public’s attitude toward it have changed dramatically since its debut.
In his introduction to Edmund White’s The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality (1994), David Bergman writes: “The most radical consequence of the body for gay men in the last twenty years is, of course, AIDS. AIDS has become an excuse to turn against the body, no longer elevate sensuous joys and erotic pleasures to the place they occupied in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.” This is one thing that made the sudden appearance of AIDS on the cultural radar screen so intolerable to so many gay male writers. Just when it seemed as though the gay experience was coming to light in the arts and letters, a black hole came along to devour this light and return gay life to the shadows. Suddenly “gay” was synonymous with the AIDS epidemic in the public’s mind. For the activists who had fought their way out of the closet, this was a mortal tragedy of the highest order. The whole push toward sexual liberation was now being transmogrified into a campaign for “safer sex” or for no sex at all.
Edmund White has struggled with the concept of “dangerous sex” ever since AIDS made its ghostly entrance. While more recent books by White have, significantly enough, returned to a more unfettered approach to sex in all its permutations, those of the early AIDS era reveal his turmoil over how to defend casual sex against the backdrop of a growing health crisis. While the idea of guilt-free sex had once been the battle cry of gay liberation, it now became precisely the means by which one could acquire a fatal disease.
Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time (1988) and Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast (1996) are both examples of how writers eventually began to confront the epidemic in a less angry, more personal way. “I don’t know if I will live to finish this,” wrote Monette as the first line of his memoir. Like many writers of the late 80’s and 90’s, Monette turned his attention from the political and social struggle to his own personal struggles with the disease, including society’s perceptions of people like him. Instead of pointing fingers, writers attempted to define their own detachment from society in a new way, not just as gay men, but often as gay men living with AIDS (or the effects of it on friends and lovers). The political overtones were replaced by a kind of romantic tragedy in which young, healthy men struggle with suffering, physical breakdown, and those twin themes of all tragic writing: love and death.
Michael Grumley’s “The Last Diary,” excerpted in David Bergman’s The Violet Quill Reader (1994) from the twenty volumes he left at his death, is described by Bergman as a “personal statement.” Grumley painstakingly recorded his final days with a kind of urgency and journalistic diligence common to other writers experiencing the physical impact of the disease. Before his death, he chronicled his own physical breakdown—his fevers and subsequent medications—interspersed with notations about lovers and friends who had already died or were dying around him. Felice Picano also kept journals about his experiences with the Violet Quill. His entries from the 1970’s to the early 80’s catalog a pre-AIDS era in which writers who would eventually become important figures in the fight against the epidemic were mostly focused on raising the sexual quotient of their work.
Like Monette and Grumley, Harold Brodkey immortalized his decline toward death in This Wild Darkness (1996), which first appeared as short stories in The New Yorker, for which the author was a regular contributor. In his final memoir, Brodkey, an avowed bisexual who was at the time married to a woman, examined his predicament in a much different light from the fraternity of dying writers who came before him. When he died three years after being diagnosed with AIDS in 1996, he was part of a new generation of scribes who took an introspective look at their disease, but from a less tragic and, one might even argue, an authentically heroic perspective. While Brodkey was often candid about his own sexuality, specifically his homosexual affairs in the 1960’s and 70’s, his presence within this pantheon gave way to a new approach to the disease. “One wants glimpses of the real,” he wrote on the last page of the last book he would ever publish. Brodkey spent more than a hundred previous pages making lucid sense of everything from doctor visits and pharmaceutical regimes to the irony of his predicament, all with the same perverse fascination that he exhibited when discussing other parts of his more than six decades of life.
Another bridging masterpiece is Armistead Maupin’s seemingly lighthearted Tales of the City, which offers a sometimes soap operatic glimpse into a gay coming-of-age beginning in 1970’s San Francisco. Like many other works featuring prominent gay themes and characters, Maupin’s serial later made a foray into AIDS with a sly reference to an infected, aging film star (inspired by Rock Hudson) and the stunning changes in the gay community as the epidemic began to cast its long shadow over the hopeful beginnings of the modern gay rights movement. While never a dominant theme in the ongoing “Tales,” the epidemic is an undeniable catalyst in the Bacchic passage that followed the Bacchanalian 70’s.
More recent writings by gay men have focused less on the horror of AIDS commensurate with a more sex-positive stance. A younger generation of gay writers, among them Alex Sanchez, has been able to reach new audiences with fiction about coming of age in a world that’s no longer dominated by a fear of infection. Indeed, the bulk of writings now being published about AIDS belongs to a different literary canon altogether, one whose practitioners are more likely to be women and minorities than gay white men, and they come with a more global perspective.
Many African-American writers, notably J. L. King and journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis, have focused on the sexual underground known as the “down low,” exposing this trend and taking the “DL” to task for allowing men to retreat into the closet by living as heterosexuals in public even while pursuing homosexual affairs in secret. A prominent topic within the African-American community, the DL is widely blamed for rising HIV infection rates among African-American women and children.
Scientific advances and medical knowledge have taught at least two generations what causes AIDS, how it can be transmitted, and how its transmission can be prevented. While many gay writers often addressed the utter mystery of the disease at a time when so little was known about how it was transmitted—proposed culprits included amyl nitrate or “poppers” and even exposure to the sun—the scientific consensus about the mode of transmission and infection via HIV has diminished the literary value of this once insidious killer. Now the focus is more on the practical matter of how to get retroviral drugs into more people’s hands, especially those in Africa and other parts of the world.
In the Continuum, a play written and performed by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter about two HIV-positive women in Los Angeles and Zimbabwe, debuted Off-Broadway in 2005. While plays about AIDS have been produced ever since the disease first had a name, this production provided a new set of discoveries about what it means to be HIV-positive in the 21st century. The play also considered what it means to be two women living in two completely different parts of the world with two vastly different support systems based on geography, economics, and gender. This concern points to a very different perspective on the epidemic’s social impact from the one that dominated early gay dramas starting some 25 years ago.
Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World (1990) is an early work in which the presence of AIDS in one of the central characters does not overwhelm a deeper, more complicated characterization of this individual and his relations with others. Cunningham’s big “crossover” novel, The Hours (1998), which features only one gay male character, nevertheless returns to a description that evokes an earlier era of AIDS literature in all its graphic horror: “Up close like this she can smell his various humors. His pores exude not only his familiar sweat (which has always smelled good to her, starchy and fermented; sharp in the way of wine) but the smell of his medicines, a powdery, sweetish smell. He smells, too, of unfresh flannel (though the laundry is done once a week, or oftener) and slightly horrible (it is his only repellent smell) of the chair in which he spends his days.”
Recently, Naomi Siegel reviewed a new production of William Finn’s Broadway musical Falsettos in The New York Times (4/22/07) in a piece entitled, “Less Provocative but No Less Dysfunctional.” Fifteen years after its debut, Falsettos is one of several books and plays by which we can now gauge society’s reaction to AIDS and gay life. While Siegel spends a lot of time praising the musical’s daring themes, she also acknowledges just how un-shocking an HIV-positive character, lesbians next door, and two men in bed are in 2007 compared to 1992. This isn’t to say that Falsettos or any of these works is any less important as the scope of AIDS and gay life evolves. Quite the contrary, what makes each of these works so monumental is the lasting history it imparts to those of us who may not have a firsthand recollection of a time when “safe sex” wasn’t just a catchphrase but a matter of life and death.
Natalie Hope McDonald is a freelance writer and editor based in Philadelphia.
