I STARTED TEACHING courses on hiv/aids literature to undergraduates after spending more than five years researching the subject for my doctorate. The period in which I initially sought out and devoured any and all types of “AIDS literature” was uneven enough. During my first year as a graduate student, 1990–91, it felt like a narrowly delimited topic with a few score works of creative literature in all genres, and just a handful with substantial literary interest.
The first decade of the health crisis witnessed a number of plays, films, poems, memoirs, and novels about AIDS. But this was nothing compared to the deluge that appeared in the years 1990 to ’94. There had simply been a time delay. GLBT authors in particular had taken to the immediate needs of their own health, and that of their partners and friends. Even where that was not true, they had sometimes borne witness, sometimes taken notes, sometimes prevaricated, and sometimes protested through political activist organizations such as ACT UP. Literary productivity implied reflectiveness and the achievement of perspective; the day-to-day reality for gay writers, as for gay men generally, ruled out both reflective and perspective-bearing modes of thinking.
When the deluge came, it coincided with a marked upturn in the critical and commercial fortunes of GLBT literature, drama, and film, but most of these would have nothing to do with the epidemic. Gay men and lesbians were discovered to possess previously unrecognized purchasing power, comprising a niche market that might be tapped through its own stores, bars, and lifestyle magazines. The problem for hiv/aids, meanwhile, was quickly understood: nobody was buying. Publishers, booksellers, and film production companies understood the potent aura of stigma and taboo around the syndrome. Factor in the decline in health of those affected by AIDS, and you were left with a very select group of potential readers and viewers: academics, students, and a few others who continued to take stock of AIDS culture.
Just a year before, in 1996, “AIDS culture” had witnessed a different sort of watershed: a high-profile fictional account of hiv/aids’ impact on several constituencies, namely women, teenagers, African-Americans, and heterosexuals.
Even if Push’s significance may eventually lie in the sociological rather than the literary realm, the selection of a teenage PWA was, in hindsight, remarkable. The novel presented hiv/aids as a fact of life for a young, illiterate, obese African-American girl from Harlem. It thus broadened and complicated the demographic of characters infected and affected by HIV in fictional narratives, then strongly dominated by gay, white, mature male writers, who wrote mostly about their demographic peers.
History plays funny tricks. The release, to much acclaim, of Lee Daniels’ film adaptation of Sapphire’s novel, Precious (2009), offered one of several cinematic returns to the period of pre-treatment AIDS. And yet, for all the troubles she faced as a single mother living in poverty, she seemed unaffected by the harsh effects of the disease itself or its personal and social implications. Her trauma over whether to be tested for HIV—a pivotal decision in the book—was glanced over, as are her group counseling sessions for HIV-positive men and women, not to mention the AIDS-induced death of her father. The film announced explicitly its 1994 setting, well before the arrival of effective HIV treatments. Rather, Precious sits squarely among a number of film adaptations of AIDS-themed texts that have taken the “low road” by minimizing the effects of this life-changing mortal threat.
We can also include here A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham’s adaptation of his 1990 novel for director Michael Mayer (2004). In this release, the key fact of promiscuous gay character Jonathan’s decline in health due to HIV over the course of the year 1982 is only glancingly alluded to, and very much between the lines. Supposedly very ill by the end of the tale and covered in KS lesions, Jonathan in fact retains a robust look, gazing out at an uncertain, critically unspecified fate.
Television drama has—notwithstanding HBO’s Angels in America—witnessed a slightly different sort of erasure. Take the case of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, of which the first three volumes were adapted for the small screen, creating Peabody Award-winning television dramas about the lives of young and not-so-young San Franciscans in the 1970’s and early 80’s. Maupin’s completed film script for volume four, Babycakes (1986)—the first of the Tales to address the epidemic, and among the first novels to do so—was never optioned; nor has there been any interest in subsequent volumes, in which gay character Michael Tolliver experiences the loss of his partner Jon and struggles with his own impoverished health.
Some eighteen years after Maupin closed the Tales series, he reopened it with the first-person narrative Michael Tolliver Lives (2007), a novel whose raison d’être is found in its title. While fundamentally lacking drama and repeatedly stopping to recapitulate highlights of the earlier six books, Michael Tolliver Lives at least sought to bring our collective cultural narrative of hiv/aids into the world of treatments, and outlined how these should not be considered a panacea:
I’m still in the Valley of the Shadow—as Mama would put it—but at least it’s a bigger valley these days, and the scenery has improved considerably. In my best moments I’m filled with a curious peace, an almost passable impersonation of how it used to be. Then my T cells drop suddenly or I spot a violent rash on my back or shit my best corduroys while waiting in line at the DMV, and I’m once again reminded how tenuous it all is. My life, whatever its duration, is still a lurching, lopsided contraption held together by chewing gum and baling wire.
And here’s the kicker: the longer you survive the virus, the closer you get to dying the regular way. … There are plenty of ironies in this, lessons to be learned about fate and the fickleness of death and getting on with life while the getting is good but you won’t read them here. I’ve had enough lessons from this disease.
Determinedly bittersweet, Michael Tolliver Lives portrays the quotidian experiences of the HIV-positive, drug-cocktail-dependent person who no longer experiences—if s/he ever did—the visceral, salutary uplift of restorative good health, but instead plows on in the imperfect, always uncertain here and now. On one hand, Tolliver announces: “The double whammy of HIV and advancing age makes me a pretty shaky deal in the happily-ever-after department.” On the other, Maupin deals his character a pretty generous hand, in the form of a devoted younger partner Ben, about whom Tolliver quips in the closing moments: “I looked over at my husband and reminded myself for the umpteenth time that his youth was not contagious. It would certainly make the journey more pleasant, but it wouldn’t save me from my destination.” Ben develops as a character in Mary Ann in Autumn (2010). Moreover, what Adam Mars-Jones has called the “approximate interchangeability of crises” in the Tales—so evidently threatened in the 1980’s with the advent of AIDS—returns, as the cast of characters deals with all manner of ailments, from uterine cancer to gout and Alzheimer’s.
Maupin’s representation of the vicissitudes of post-treatment AIDS, however, is as anomalous today as his initial referencing of the syndrome was back in the early 80’s. Absence and silence surround hiv/aids, even as those affected by them grow starkly in number, reduced to what might be called “culturally symbolic freight.” It fell to novelist Sarah Schulman—author of People in Trouble (1990) and Rat Bohemia (1995), among the most vivid fictional accounts of political activism in early AIDS-ravaged New York—to report: “The world before protease inhibitors is clearly The Past, emotionally for me now. … It has ceased to be a continuum” (in Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS, Edmund White, ed., 2001). Schulman’s own recent fictional output has, logically enough, also turned away from the themes of the epidemic and political activism. AIDS is history.
Just as the onset of AIDS immediately superseded the sexual free-for-all of 70’s gay male culture, turning it into the so-called “golden age of promiscuity” (which forms the title of a 1996 novel by Brad Gooch), recent medical advances have distanced us not only from the darkest fears about hiv/aids, but also from much consciousness of AIDS at all. There have been a few self-conscious appeals to the notion of history, such as Felice Picano’s epic fictional account of the segue from sexual hedonism into AIDS, titled Like People in History (1995), and Larry Kramer’s as-yet-unpublished novel about the centrality of gay men and women to America’s cultural, social, and political order, up to and including the AIDS crisis, to be called The American People. Meanwhile, Alistair McCartney’s 2008 novel The End of the World Book: A Novel illustrates brilliantly the relegation of the epidemic in the West to the past. A collection of more-or-less random memories and comments made by its narrator, ordered in the way of children’s encyclopedia entries, The End of the World Book pointedly lacks an entry on the syndrome per se. But where “AIDS” might be found, the reader instead discovers:
AIDS, PRE–
The so-called golden era of gay life is usually said to have occurred during the 1970s, that decade of unbridled sex, set to a soundtrack of disco music; the decade leading up to AIDS, or perhaps leading down to AIDS, like a long set of steps. It is an era we have designated in retrospect, and we must ask ourselves: were the men who were part of this era aware of all their gold? The era is said to have ended with the first case of AIDS in 1981. However, when I gaze into my disco-mirror ball, I see that we have been looking the wrong way. The golden era actually begins in 1981, and then, not confined to the space of a decade, stretches backward like a long gold streak, far away from us, far away from disco, all the way back to antiquity.
Bearing McCartney’s mocking claim in mind, let us return to popular film. If we examine commercially successful Hollywood vehicles like Brokeback Mountain (2005) or A Single Man (2009) as ventures in queer sexuality, what are they if not attempts to mediate another space and time for gay desires, a time unaffected by the inconvenient compromises of a world health pandemic? Brokeback Mountain considers a milieu—nearly timeless and rural—where the syndrome need not be conjured up, though other hazards endure. A Single Man transports us to a simpler, more beautiful world, even if it is one in which the gay protagonist must contend with grief, loss, depression, and thoughts of suicide.
Again and again, popular narratives have returned us to the convenient, ubiquitous storyline of coming to terms with one’s marginal sexuality and “coming out.” Although we know very well that sexual health, risk, and safety are intimately bound up with such concerns, in popular narratives they prove fully detachable. Douglas Carter Beane’s recent Broadway theatre hit The Little Dog Laughed (2007) features a gay actor, Mitchell Green, whose agent tries to prevent him from coming out. The issue of hiv/aids never comes near Mitchell’s thoughts throughout this contemporary burlesque—not even during sexual negotiations with swinging rent boy Alex. The epidemic does, however, emerge just once in each act, affording the audience two oddly gratuitous jokes. Mitchell, seeking to reassure an author that he will treat a gay romance plot sensitively if it’s made into a film, gives his pledge “as a gay man who will never dishonor the memory of three famous gay men who died of AIDS and insert the name of a young boy who was gay-bashed to death and became famous.” How funny is that?
In Act Two, bisexual hustler Alex’s girlfriend Ellen confronts him with the consequences of the night when “we didn’t use a rubber”:
Alex: Oh shit.
Ellen: It’s not as bad as—
Alex: Oh fuck, you have AIDS. You have AIDS because I have AIDS and fuck—I have AIDS. What is Mitch gonna do with me? Fuck, I gave Mitch AIDS. Oh fuck.
Ellen: Would you shut the fuck up? Maybe just for five seconds this isn’t about you or Mitch. Maybe it’s about me. And I don’t have AIDS. It’s not about that. I’m pregnant.
Alex’s concerns about AIDS are ridiculed in Ellen’s response as hysterical and nonsensical. Her rejoinder propels the plot forward and away from any prospect of sexual risk, even as it confirms that risk-bearing sex must have taken place.
In popular, contemporary cultural narratives featuring gay male storylines, AIDS is invariably the elephant in the room. It may be invoked, and perhaps located in time, before being made to vanish. In the film based on Steve McVicar’s book I Love You, Phillip Morris (2009), Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor play gay lovers who meet in jail, have a long history of promiscuous sex—including, in McVicar’s account, unsafe sex—and see plenty of their peers die in the worst years of the epidemic. The movie, meanwhile, plays with the epidemic only by way of announcing the cunning of Carrey’s character Steven Russell, who escapes from prison by faking his own terminal AIDS diagnosis.
Fittingly, the last Hollywood movie to address AIDS substantively did so in terms that announced its effective obsolescence. Craig Lucas’ The Dying Gaul (2005), adapted from his own play of that name, had scriptwriter Robert being offered a huge sum if he would change a semi-autobiographical script—called “The Dying Gaul,” about his relationship with a now-deceased male partner—into a story featuring only heterosexuals. As Jeffrey, the studio executive chasing the script, put it:
Jeffrey: You want to reach as many people as possible with the universal human… truth about these two characters. One of whom is a Person With AIDS. Now: Don’t. Say. Anything. Until—Okay. Hold all my calls. Most. Americans. Hate. Gay people. They hear it’s about gay people, they won’t go.
Robert: What about Philadelphia?
Jeffrey: Philadelphia is a movie about a man who hates gay people, period. And it’s been done. To get people into the movie theatre, they have to think it’s going to be fun, or sensational, or some kind of—make them feel fantastic about themselves. No one. Goes to the movies. To have a bad time. Or to learn anything… No one. Is going to see. The Dying Gaul… Now if we make Maurice a woman with AIDS, and let’s face it, heterosexuals are getting AIDS in disastrous numbers … we’ll give you one million dollars for your script. With which you can go out and write four hundred new screenplays about gay men with AIDS, without, whatever is the most important to you.
“It’s been done”: Jeffrey confirms the “pastness” of hiv/aids, citing the now-historical filmic precedent of Philadelphia (at this point, barely eleven years old). Hollywood and popular culture more broadly have not, in fact, turned their backs on gay themes. But they have embraced these themes selectively, engaging with gay male sexual lives in a selective and partial way. as suggested by the very title of Frank Oz’s In and Out.
The wider world of HIV infection, which continues at epidemic levels and is decimating host populations, must expect no look-in, barring the rare, exceptional art house vehicle, such as Canadian filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald’s ambitious account of AIDS in Africa, 3 Needles (2005). I am aware of how strident and polemical my argument may sound. Certainly I am not advocating that individual texts be judged according to the narrow criteria of recognition or otherwise of the hiv/aids epidemic. GLBT cultural criticism and academic studies have very much moved on, and rightly so, from the somewhat naive celebration of positive images which characterized its pre-1990’s, essentialist period. Nobody can be placed under any obligation with respect to hiv/aids.
Yet, to quote Santayana’s dictum, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; and surely there is something massively forgetful about our contemporary moment and its fostering of all manner of GLBT identities in, as it were, a historical bubble—one that avoids the years 1981 to 1997, and which pretends that the world post-1997 is HIV-free, or free at least from posing serious concerns. The bubble sources GLBT histories from the golden age of the 70’s all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, as McCartney slyly pointed out. It can, too, encompass the immediate present, offering young GLBT viewers in particular amusing, confident role models of the kind put forward by television sitcom Will & Grace (1998–2006, directed by James Burrows), which consisted of almost 200 episodes addressing aspects of gay urban life while mentioning the syndrome just once, when female character Grace decides to test for HIV. Scriptwriters Tracy Poust and Jon Kinnally readily conceded the point in an interview (in Poz magazine, May 2006):
“We talked about it from the beginning,” says Poust. “But this was the first time there was going to be a gay male lead on TV. We wanted him to be healthy and happy.” While the characters often talked about safe sex, they only mentioned HIV once, when Grace went in for a test. The virus itself never made an entrance. “In real life, they would have been around HIV for 20 years, but we decided that Will and Grace should live in a fantasy world,” says Poust.
What the bubble will not do is recall a more recent time whose struggles, losses, and consequences are, in fact, all too palpably still with us. It thus prevents teenagers and young adults from experiencing their minority sexual identifications in the vital ongoing contexts of health, risk, and sexual responsibility—though I accept that this is a sociological observation, and primarily a social rather than an æsthetic or literary concern. The result, nonetheless, has been either the erasure of, or highly selective engagement with, this subject. Accompanying this will-to-silence has been not only a disturbing rise in STD transmissions across the West, but also, specifically, a forgetfulness in GLBT culture and thus among ourselves that is irreverent, escapist, and—if we dared to admit it—deeply shocking.
Richard Canning recently contributed an article titled “The Literature of AIDS” to The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian and Gay Literature.
