Tony Kushner, no stranger to Brechtian dialectics, is fighting the same cathartic entropy I mentioned earlier when, at the end of Angels in America, Prior shoos the audience from the theater with the words, “The Great Work Begins.” But of course the great work had already begun when Perestroika, the second part of Angels, premiered in 1992 (in London), and ’93 (New York). The work had begun in the fifties, sixties, and seventies when gay men created a subculture in the shadows and on the margins of the straight world, a limited but libidinous demimonde within whose borders most gay men—which is to say, the mostly white and mostly middle-class gay men who managed to find their way there—were perfectly comfortable. Certainly there was much to love about that world, and much to lament as well, although the latter had more to do with the ways in which the gay minority mimicked the hetero majority’s hierarchies of race, class, beauty, etc., rather than its own (real or enviously imagined) adolescent excesses.
But regardless of its strengths and failures, this world’s continued existence was made untenable by the outbreak of AIDS in 1981, which dragged gay men into the spotlight. No, that’s not quite right: AIDS gave gay men no choice but to step into the spotlight or die in the wings; and in the late eighties, when the gay community recovered its strength and its voice, if not its physical health, the work of building a new culture began. It was, at least marginally, a more diverse group this time around, in terms of race and gender and indeed sexual identity, a time when the word “gay” in many organizations’ names was replaced (although often only nominally) with “gay and lesbian,” then “gay, lesbian, and bisexual,” then “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender,” then “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex,” an all-inclusive mouthful that was increasingly, in everyday speech if not official communications, replaced with “queer” (or with “gay,” although now “gay” was supposed to mean “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex,” and whatever new or as-yet undeclared sexual identity might reveal itself next). But no matter what they called themselves, late eighties’ queers weren’t content with second-class status. Whether they would rattle their cups against the gates of the heterosexual palace and demand, in Bruce Bawer’s puling phrase, “a place at the table,” or carve out a separate but equal sphere was still up for grabs. For a hot minute, in fact, it looked like the Liberian vision would win out, and I’ve often wondered where we would have ended up if combination therapy hadn’t come along, not to mention the tech boom, which lured both the left and right into throwing over their ideals for the sake of easy money. But if, physically, the improvement was immediately apparent, the cultural gains were measured in smaller increments. In, say, a shift in vocabulary: in 1991, for example, when Millennium Approaches premiered and gay men were still railing at newspapers and magazines for not acknowledging the true status of same-sex relationships (c.f., Craig Lucas and Norman René’s Longtime Companion or Allen Barnett’s “The Times As It Knows Us”), the preferred term for two men in a longterm relationship was still “lovers.” But by the time Angels made it to HBO in 2003 “lover” was giving way to “husband,” which, though tinged with irony, was nevertheless a harbinger of the near-total emphasis on marriage equality that would take over the gay rights movement after the war against AIDS had been “won.” Then, too, there was the question of where you used these words, the government offices or job interviews in which “lover” or “husband” became “friend” or “roommate” or “that guy with me,” or when you just bit your tongue. In the fifties and sixties you made the change out of shame, in the seventies and eighties out of fear, in the nineties out of prudence; but by the time the millennium rolled around you didn’t make it at all, and, what’s more, hardly remembered doing it in the past.
Because freedom, it turned out, wasn’t like a new shoe: you didn’t need to break it in. It felt comfortable the first time you tried it on. It wasn’t the present that pinched, but the past. Brecht, no doubt, wouldn’t have approved of this decidedly ahistoric dialectic, but I think Tony Kushner might. Kushner hates capitalist imperialism—and, God bless him, he’s one of the few people who can articulately express this point of view on a national stage—but his queer politics have, at least since Angels in America, been inclusive to the point of assimilationist. Indeed, they’re so downright domestic it’s tempting to call them sentimental, when in fact they’re steeped in an understanding of the human psyche as sophisticated as it is compassionate. I was reminded of this when, in 2003, I watched Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Angels—and, as well, reminded of how much things had changed in the previous decade, regardless of how far we still had to go. Angels is generally considered the most significant literary response to the AIDS epidemic (and justifiably so), yet when I watched it on television a decade after its theatrical premiere it felt strangely flat. Part of the problem is a straightforward conflict of genres: unlike Nichols’s earlier adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (or, for that matter, The Birdcage), Angels insisted on its theatrical origins after it was filmed. As a play, it’s deliberately, powerfully anachronistic in its approach to narrative, updating—one wants to say outing—the midcentury work of Williams and Albee. It’s steeped in conversation, soliloquy, a linguistic framing of ideas that’s less articulation than excavation, and its characters interact with one another rather than their environment because, as the subtitle reminds us, the play is a fantasia (and a gay one too, with all the cultural as well as sexual associations that word brings). There’s something interior and not quite real about it. Onstage, Prior’s visions exist within a devolving continuum of what we think of as reality, a dislocation achieved more than anything else by the play’s language, which moves from the quotidian to the metaphysical in ever-accelerating cadences, but on the small screen such flights of fancy just look fake.
Technical quibbles aside, though, the real obstacle to the miniseries’s success was nostalgia: Kushner’s, Nichols’s, mine, the nation’s. Because W.’s America of 2003, the year of the HBO adaptation, wasn’t Bill Clinton’s America of 1993, when the play premiered; which was already at an electoral remove from the America of 1991 and 1992 when the play was being written and workshopped and George H.W. Bush was fighting to stay in office; and removed even further from the America of 1985 that the play is set in, when Ronald Reagan had just won a second term by one of the largest electoral margins in history. At any rate it wasn’t the same America for gay people. History had been accelerated for us during the previous two decades. Civil rights battles that might have taken generations took only a few years, sometimes a few months; and though those battles were (and are) far from over, it’s safe to say that in 2003 gay men occupied a demonstrably more secure position than we did in 1992, or 1985. When Joe says to Louis, “Look, I want to touch you. Can I just touch you here?” he means both on the cheek, and also in Central Park—in public. For the hundredth, the thousandth time, a gay man was coming out to America, and it seemed perhaps that this time it took. We were safer in 2003, more visible, more capable of influencing the things said about us on a national level, and we owed that power to Angels in America and the intense cultural and political project of which it had been a part—but we were not, as was, I think, Kushner’s hope (not to mention his audience’s), capable of influencing the things America said about itself. History had acknowledged us, but it had also passed us by, by which I mean that the cultural and political response to AIDS made gay men more American, but it didn’t make Americans more gay. Whether you regard capitalism as selfish or selfless, inspiring or greedy, an exporter of democratic values or an exploiter of the inhabitants and resources of the third world, the thing that will save the planet or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven remarkably flexible in assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them. By which I mean that when I watched Angels in 1992 and 1993 I knew who I was: I knew who the play thought I was, and the play was right. But in 2003 I didn’t feel like the play was talking to me anymore. I didn’t feel like it knew who I was, because I didn’t feel like I knew who I was, not as a gay man anyway, nor as someone who had lived through the pre–combination therapy years of the AIDS epidemic, which existed in memory with the unreal quality of a military occupation. As the distantly familiar scenes flashed by on my TV, I felt like I was watching a home movie that had been shot when I was just barely old enough to remember—a movie in which I was, moreover, speaking French or Spanish or some other language I not only no longer understood, but didn’t remember ever knowing, and, if I can unite the two metaphors—war, language—I couldn’t help but wonder if the language I spoke now was my own, or a kind of colonial imposition. By which I mean that George Bush was president when Tony Kushner first wrote Angels, and George Bush was president when it was turned into a miniseries ten years later. By which I mean that perhaps it wasn’t the miniseries that didn’t do the play justice, it was the times. By which I mean, finally, that as soon as I finished watching Angels the only thing I could think to do was watch it again, because I wanted it to have a second chance.
IT WAS TONY Kushner who, in 1995, let me know that Leo Bersani’s Homos had been published, and it was Homos that made me realize I was on Kushner’s side—on the side of, if not domesticity, then human lives that resembled (with apologies to Herr Goethe) the elective affinities with which I was familiar, as opposed to performative modalities that often seemed like experiments in egotism and anomie. Queer theory, I realized when I read Homos in April of 1995, and the seven- or eight-year activist idyll it had helped usher into being, had run its course as a popular (populist?) intellectual force: whatever would happen next would happen somewhere else, in some other way. I don’t mean to say that Homos killed queer theory, let alone queer activism, only that, in the very audacity with which it invited readers “to rethink what we mean and what we expect from communication, and from community,” Bersani’s own arguments made the practical limitations of queer theory plain to me, particularly as it applied to the AIDS epidemic. No, that’s not quite it either. One of the great attractions of queer theory was its extraordinary reach across genres and disciplines, indeed across time, as it shined new light on the past and revealed the way in which sex, sexuality, and gender, far from being the rigid entailments that our neo-Victorian sensibilities had been schooled to think of as naturally and morally immutable, have in fact been in flux for as long as stories have been told. From that reimaged past, queer theory offered up at the very least the possibility of new ways of being in the not-too-distant future—the future that was in some apparent or implied way under construction at every ACT UP and Queer Nation demo, every community forum such as “Talk Sex” and the one sponsored by Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists, every academic and artistic conference devoted to queer arts and letters. “The soul is the prison of the body,” Foucault told us in Discipline and Punish, and it had been the privilege of philosophers and artists since time immemorial to contemplate the nature of that cage: whether it was of divine or mundane origin; what could and couldn’t be accomplished within its confines; if there was any means of escape. But AIDS was a cell inside the body inside the prison—an internal ankle monitor, as it were, as opposed to stone and bars and razor wire—and until a cure or vaccine was invented it would forever inhabit and inhibit the range and variety of the body’s actions, and, hence, of the moral imagination.
There comes a moment in almost every individual’s life when he believes, rightly or wrongly, that he can be whatever he wants, but for queers in the late eighties and early nineties that prospect was infinitely more exciting, because we felt we could make the world into what we wanted it to be. And it was this sense of near-infinite possibility that Homos made me realize had been prematurely and permanently derailed by the AIDS epidemic. It was at one of the conferences mentioned above—at OutWrite, a colloquium on queer writing held each spring in Boston from 1989 to 1999—that Tony Kushner, in his opening plenary address, brought the long-awaited follow-up to “Is the Rectum a Grave?” to my attention. “Professor Bersani has published a new book called Homos,” Kushner told a rapt audience of several hundred. “Let me read you a paragraph found on page sixty-nine”:
To move to an entirely different register, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America has analogous ambitions. For Kushner, to be gay in the 1980s was to be a metaphor not only for Reagan’s America but for the entire history of America, a country in which there are “no gods … no ghosts and spirits … no angels … no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political.” The enormous success of this muddled and pretentious play is a sign, if we need still another one, of how ready and anxious America is to see and hear about gays—provided we reassure America how familiar, how morally sincere, and, particularly in the case of Kushner’s work, how innocuously full of significance we can be.
I want to enter Homos through this passage. In context, it’s nothing more than a snide aside, 120 words trivializing a seven-hour play and the enormous cultural response it engendered. It appears a third of the way into what had seemed until then a coherent, persuasive argument, but as I read the rest of Homos the shrillness of this particular passage—and the denial that shrillness usually masks—became revelatory to me.
Tellingly, Homos’s last reference to AIDS occurs in the early pages of the third of its four longish chapters: “Having always longed to be one of those happy gays myself,” Bersani wrote, “I can’t help wondering what the pleasures were that led to this enviable absence of any interpretive aftertaste in the men Foucault probably did see, less frequently, I would guess, in Paris than around Castro Street where he lived when, during the glorious pre-AIDS years of the late 1970s, he was a visiting professor at Berkeley.” Hiding inside this somewhat convoluted sentence was the evocation of “the glorious pre-AIDS years,” and it was there that Bersani’s consciousness seemed to remain for the rest of his book, as Homos redirected its attention to, you might say, “the glorious pre-AIDS years” of the first half of the twentieth century. In its first two chapters Homos had picked up where “Is the Rectum a Grave?” left off in 1987, arguing what had by 1995 become a virtual truism (in large part because of arguments made by Bersani, Simon Watney, and the people who wrote in their wake), namely, that “nothing has made gay men more visible than AIDS,” and that “homophobic virulence in America has increased in direct proportion to the wider acceptance of homosexuals.” But where other writers might simply have argued for queers to redouble their efforts in the battle for equal rights and against HIV, Bersani made a surprising left turn in Homos, declaring: “Never before in the history of minority groups struggling for recognition and equal treatment has there been an analogous attempt, on the part of any such group, to make itself unidentifiable even as it demands to be recognized.”
It wasn’t a popular assessment then, and it’s not a popular assessment now (although the passage of time has, for better and worse, borne it out). But whether or not the political expediency of an innate gay identity will ever be justified by scientific fact, queers will always be defined (at least from the outside) not by their sexual desire but by whether and how they act on it. It’s sex that makes you gay, at least in the eyes of the straight world, and it’s gay sex that made gay culture, not the other way around. In Bersani’s view, queers had yet to tap the revolutionary potential of gay sex, a potential rooted in sexual acts that were as free from the trappings of “heteroized sociality” as possible. It should come as no surprise, then, that Bersani was interested in promiscuity. In a footnote to “Is the Rectum a Grave?” he had this to say about Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On:
I won’t go into … the phenomenon of Shilts himself as an overnight media star, and the relation between his stardom and his irreproachably respectable image, his long-standing willingness, indeed eagerness, to join the straights in being morally repelled by gay promiscuity. A good deal of his much admired “objectivity” as a reporter consists in his being as venomous toward those at an exceptionally high risk of becoming afflicted with AIDS (gay men) as toward the government officials who seem content to let them die.
Bersani’s 1987 criticisms seemed apropos to the situation regarding New York’s sex clubs in 1995, and, in fact, were still on his mind. From Homos: “Recent objections in the gay press to a new bathhouse in San Francisco sounded like Randy Shilts all over again.” In fact, one of the strongest elements of Homos was its attack on things that promote a “denial of sex”—both sex acts themselves, but also, and more important, the context in which those sex acts occur, and the new contexts they might make possible, viz. this approving, if not simply wistful, quotation from Foucault with which Bersani opened his third chapter: “I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay life-style, not sex acts themselves … It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate.”
It’s tempting to say that AIDS hijacked the Foucauldian inquiry into these “as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships,” not least because the disease claimed Foucault’s life in 1984, but also because the epidemic consumed almost the entirety of gay political and cultural activity for a decade and a half, during which time the words “gay” and “AIDS” became inextricably linked as cultural signifiers, and almost any gay political campaign was seen as an extension of the fight against AIDS, and any effort to combat the epidemic as advancing the “homosexual agenda.” Foucault’s claim seems less tenable in hindsight, given that, in the wake of the so-called “end of AIDS” in 1996, the gay agenda moved rapidly to the center (about which, said the happily married homosexual, sigh), but it’s important to remember that in 1995 the future looked far from certain, and Bersani’s inquiry into the kinds of new relationships gays, and gay sex, might produce seemed neither academic nor esoteric. Okay, it seemed both academic and esoteric, but it also seemed like the kind of question that could be asked only by someone who considered himself a member of a group that felt itself to be at a profound threshold—a group that could be seen as occupying territory analogous to that of freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War or of various Eastern European peoples after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, or perhaps simply of any emigrant who leaves behind the old country, the old language, the old culture, for a new one. In the wake of the visibility that AIDS had thrust on queers, and that ACT UP and queer theory had helped to solidify into genuine, if qualified, political power, queers were asking themselves who they wanted to be now, not just as individuals, but as a community and a constituency, and how they would use that identity to shape the larger world.
But where most of Bersani’s contemporaries looked for cues in the feminist, the civil rights, and other identity-based political and social movements, Bersani looked to fiction—to specifically, three novels by André Gide, Marcel Proust, and Jean Genet, who, “in sharp contrast to contemporary gay and lesbian theorists” are “drawn to the anticommunitarian impulses they discover in homosexual desire.” From Gide’s The Immoralist, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, and Genet’s Funeral Rites, Bersani sniffs and sifts out the possibility of “a redefinition” of sociality, one “so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself.” This “difficult” project is aired in the fourth and final chapter of Homos, which Bersani advised readers to think of “not as a more or less enjoyable addendum of literary criticism to the arguments made in the rest of this book but, instead, as absolutely crucial to the persuasiveness of those arguments.” It was a brilliant if often baffling performance, both of which made the conclusions Bersani drew hard to argue with, but it was, finally, the attempt to extend these individual artistic obsessions into a Weltanschauung that raised questions about what, exactly, Bersani intended readers to do with the information he provided.
To offer the barest-bones outline of Bersani’s readings: from Gide’s The Immoralist, he built an argument against being “a good citizen” if you’re a homosexual—of, in fact, the very impossibility of being a good citizen, assuming we capitulate to a Gidean model of what Bersani called “intimacies devoid of intimacy.” In Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, with its extensive and uncritical exploration of the idea that male homosexuality is the condition of a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body, Bersani found a “dance of essences” in which “the multiplication and crisscrossing of gender identifications … defeats any cultural securities about what it might mean to be a man or a woman.” And finally, in Genet’s Funeral Rites, Bersani saw proof of the view of history that believes (pessimistically, if not simply conservatively) that any overtly political move replicates the institutions of power it seeks to overthrow with identically “oppressive conditions.” The evidence, then (selective as even Bersani admitted it was), seemed to argue in favor of the “revolutionary inaptitude” of homosexual desire for “heteroized sociality” that Bersani talked about back in 1987, although this came across not as tautological but as a kind of making good on an earlier bluff: Bersani had laid his aces on the table. But what prize was he claiming?
Taken collectively, Gide, Proust, and Genet’s novels formed the core of a canon that, in Bersani’s reading, offered glimpses of an escape from the tyranny of “the self,” which Bersani saw as “the precondition for registration and service as a citizen.” “Personhood,” Bersani told readers, is “a status that the law needs in order to discipline us and, it must be added, to protect us.” This self or personhood seems to bear the same relationship to consciousness as the puppet does to its invisible master—save that, in Bersani’s model, the puppet has the real power, by limiting the master’s expressions and actions to those he can transmit through his wires to the puppet’s facsimile of a body. Ostensibly nothing more than a middleman between society and the unquantifiable array of cognitive processes it was created to represent—i.e., consciousness, for lack of a more specific term—the self, like a modern multinational bank, has grown so large that its own concerns have come to dominate both the internal and external realities it mediates. Hence all psychic and social activity will ultimately be in its service rather than a community’s—selfish, in the simplest locution, rather than selfless. (And yes, I’m aware I switched from a fairly extended conceit about puppets to a second one about banking in the middle of that explanation: such are the prerogatives of the self, which cares not a whit for Aristotelian aesthetic unities.)
In his 1990 book The Culture of Redemption, Bersani rejected the idea of art’s redemptive power based on a Freudian notion of the origins of art, arguing that art should not be used to redeem the things of the real world for the simple reason that it cannot. Bersani’s notion of homosexuality, though “problematized,” as we said so often in the eighties and nineties, was equally, indeed resolutely, Freudian. For Bersani, homosexual desire is a turning away from the other toward the same, and an identity based on this turning-away must, by rights, be equally asocial. “Art perhaps knows nothing but such confused beginnings,” Bersani wrote with Ulysse Dutoit in Arts of Impoverishment, “and in pushing us back to them it beneficently mocks the accumulated wisdom of culture.” But as Tony Kushner pointed out in his opening address at OutWrite, in order to mock the accumulated wisdom of culture you must first be part of it. These tensions—between the desires to destroy and to create, between the explicit desire to be asocial and the implicit recognition that any work of art is inevitably social—produced the occasional shrill note in Homos, such as his pan of Angels in America, and these shrill notes, as I said, became revelatory to me, particularly the last and most significant of them, when Bersani asked his readers to contemplate Genet’s love of Nazism as a model for their own behavior. (Yes, you read that correctly.) In Genet’s Nazi worship, Bersani saw “an unqualified will to destroy” that created “a myth of absolute betrayal—the betrayal of all human ties,” and he arrived at this conclusion through an exegesis that must be experienced to be appreciated:
This is not a political program. Just as Genet’s fascination with what he outrageously calls the beauty of Nazism is in no way a plea for the specific goals pursued by Nazi Germany, Erik and Riton are positioned for a reinventing of the social without any indication about how such a reinvention might proceed historically or what face it might have. Funeral Rites does nothing more—but I think it’s a great deal—than propose the fantasmatic conditions of possibility for such a proceeding. It insists on the continuity between the sexual and the political, and while this superficially glorifies Nazism as the system most congenial to a cult of male power justified by little more than male beauty, it also transforms the historical reality of Nazism into a mythic metaphor for a revolutionary destructiveness which would surely dissolve the rigidly defined sociality of Nazism itself. Still, the metaphoric suitability of Hitler’s regime for this project can hardly be untroubling. It reminds us only too clearly that Genet’s political radicalism is congruent with a proclaimed indifference to human life as well as a willingness to betray every tie and every trust between human beings. This is the evil that becomes Genet’s good, and, as if that were not sufficiently noxious, homosexuality is enlisted as the prototype of relations that break with humanity, that elevate infecundity, waste, and sameness to requirements for the production of pleasures. ¶ There may be only one reason to tolerate, even to welcome, Funeral Rites’s rejection (at once exasperated and clownish] of relationality: without such a rejection, social revolt is doomed to repeat the oppressive conditions that provoked the revolt.
If you separated Bersani’s message from its “mythic metaphor”—which, while perfectly acceptable within traditional liberal discourse when acknowledged as metaphor, was also kind of distracting with its talk of “superficially” glorifying Nazis—what you had was a pretty straightforward (if almost decadently refined) act of interpretation in which art is used as the basis for an experience that inflicts the same kind of anti-epiphany on the self that Genet sought in sex. But lurking behind this professed love of destruction is the phoenix-like notion that from disintegration, reintegration always occurs, and that what is newly made will be in some way stronger than what it replaces. Art is, in other words, redemptive: there’s no other word for it. As it happens, I share this phoenix-like conception of both sex and art, but I also think that successful reintegration after disintegration is not a given. It has to be acknowledged, and this Bersani refused to do, perhaps because he realized that to undertake self-consciously the process of self-immolation is to risk dousing the flame before it’s burned everything away. By admitting that you don’t actually desire permanent disintegration, you may attempt to simulate it in the effort of sparing yourself the pain that is the inevitable and, unfortunately, necessary collateral of any serious attempt to recreate the self, let alone society.
But this, I think, was not the real source of the shrill notes in Homos. What really bothered Bersani—or, at least, what bothered me—was the unarticulated, unacknowledged, yet unavoidable conclusion that even a partial “redefinition” of sociality, let alone “a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself,” could only be accomplished at the expense of every person living with HIV and every person who might become infected before our old selves, both as individuals and as a culture, had been destroyed and remade, and possibly even after. It takes institutions to fight an epidemic: medical, scientific, above all political, but it was precisely these kinds of bureaucracies that Bersani’s “revolutionary” program sought to destroy. And what would a world in which “relationality” has been “rejected” look like? None of the authors Bersani cited gives us any real idea what to look (let alone work) for: “The Immoralist,” Bersani admitted, “has nothing to tell us about such a society,” and, similarly, Funeral Rites offers no “indication about how such a reinvention might proceed historically or what face it might have.” Proust “does sketch the outlines of a community grounded in a desire indifferent to the established sanctity of personhood,” but all Bersani told readers about this “community” was that “the person disappears in his or her desire, a desire that seeks more of the same, partially dissolving subjects by extending them into a communal homo-ness.” In other words, Proust doesn’t tell us much either. It’s tempting to say that what this world most looks like is a gay sex club, but if that’s the case then it’s a club along the lines of Gabriel Rotello’s “AIDS killing grounds” rather than a haven of “brotherly” love. But even the idea of an institution in which all this self-destroying sex can take place would have botched the experiment—would, as such clubs did in 1975 and 1985 and 1995, albeit in very different ways in each of these signal moments, provide a psychologically safe space in which the flesh is mortified even as the psyche is given a respite from the relentless homophobia that exists beyond the clubs’ doors. In fact it seemed that what you really needed was a place like 924 N. 25th St., #213, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53233, i.e., the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer, in which twelve gay men found their personhood “partially dissolved” in a vat of acid before Dahmer flushed them down the toilet.
Is this—to use one of Bersani’s favorite words to describe an argument he considers to have been pushed to a kitschy extreme—“bitchy”? Probably. But how was one supposed to respond rationally to a call for queers to cease caring for one another as a first step toward a utopian project that the author himself couldn’t or wouldn’t describe? This was 1995, remember: a year in which 50,000 Americans died from AIDS and 200,000 more were trying not to. A year in which AIDS activism had run of out of ideas, AIDS fatigue had become entrenched in queer life, and AIDS research appeared from the outside to be at a standstill. And, for me, it was also the year in which I came to understand how completely AIDS circumscribed the body, not just as a material entity, but an imagined one. It was in 1995 that I finally realized that to write about sex without mentioning AIDS was merely that: to write about sex without mentioning AIDS. AIDS was still there; it was merely unsaid. To set a work of fiction in some pre- or post-AIDS utopia was as much a comment on AIDS’s stifling power as anything else, and the same held true for a work of nonfiction that derived its ethos from “the glorious pre-AIDS years” of the first half of the twentieth century while simultaneously casting its gaze forward, to a twenty-first century in which AIDS was magically absent—which objective was also at play when groups like Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists did everything they could, not to promote safe sex, but to eliminate sexual contact between HIV-positive and HIV-negative people, and talked about AIDS “dying out” as the incidence of infection decreased. And though I know that Bersani was aware of these mundane yet crucial truths, it was still clear that he had set them aside. He had failed—like those “good Germans” with whom he admonished Edwin Meese in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” who by their silence provided tacit approval for the Holocaust—to find AIDS unbearable. He had, unintentionally or otherwise, given in to the creeping thanatos that after fifteen years, not just of plague but of “innocuously … significan[t]” cultural production about the plague, had spread from the individual to the cultural level. Bersani had offered a novel and in many ways appealing strategy for a revolution to dismantle the oppressive systems of patriarchy and capital. All we had to do was fuck our lives away.