In Order to Survive: Queer Cultural Production and the Emergence of AIDS Media
Open AccessMy dissertation project, “In Order to Survive: Queer Cultural Production and the Emergence of AIDS Media,” analyzes literature and film beginning in 1978, during the pre-AIDS/post-Stonewall era, and ends in the year 2000 at a time when protease inhibitors and drug cocktails were created to prolong the life of someone living with HIV and save the lives of those living with AIDS. My argument is that what lives on is a set of cultural tensions and creative artifacts, forged in the face of government hostility, challenged by becoming “homosexual in a heterosexual society,” and out of a necessity to survive and a will to live. What gets produced during this period of time is art made in emergency. Chapter 1 begins in 1978 with two novels, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, to examine gay male sexual culture and its geographies—New York City, Fire Island, the dancefloor, and the baths—and the varied approaches taken by both authors in examining gay life in the seventies. The tensions present in both novels are best described by what Edmund White and Dr. Charles Silverstein write in The Joy of Gay Sex as the challenge of becoming a “homosexual in a heterosexual society” (15). When AIDS struck in 1981, those same men, those fictional characters in both novels, would come together in real life to form an activist movement dedicated to the fight against AIDS when it struck the gay community in 1981—it was likely circulating among them in 1978 only to manifest itself as a plague when the media began coverage of it in 1981. From there, this dissertation project is structured around the artistic and emotional responses of artists, filmmakers, and activists. In Chapter 2, I examine the shared political affects of the visual artist and writer David Wojnarowicz and the filmmaker Gregg Araki. Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration is a rage-filled indictment of the political and cultural response to AIDS by the Reagan and Bush administrations, and talking heads, like William Dannemeyer Jr. Araki’s 1992 film, The Living End, is an in-your-face visual appropriation of the tactics of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and follows two HIV-positive protagonists that are grappling with what it means to live at a time when HIV was considered a death sentence. In Chapter 3 the visual artist, poet, documentarian, and SNAP! queen, Marlon Riggs confronts the cultural split between the Black community and Black gay men who, according to Riggs, are denied their blackness because of their queerness. Riggs’s work reflects the insights of women of color feminists, like Audre Lorde, who wrote in The Cancer Journals, “Silence has never brough us anything of worth” (8). This refusal to be silent is captured in Riggs’s penultimate film, Non Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret), and is the object of my analysis in that chapter. In Chapter 4, I examine three films, Philadelphia (1993), Jeffrey (1995), and The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy (2000). My argument in this chapter is that these three films about AIDS set up a triple bind: Philadelphia sets up the “straight gaze” that privileges emotional distance from the AIDS protagonist to the heterosexual spectator, the one in the cinema watching the film, and privileges subjectivity to the heterosexual protagonist in the film setup to defend the dying AIDS protagonist. This straight gaze is then exported to the gay rom-coms of the nineties, where HIV/AIDS is still present, but is kept at a distance by the HIV-negative subject. Finally, these films are made available for mockery by a new gay normal that develops at the end of the twentieth century. I conclude the dissertation project with a personal reflection on the experiences that shaped my own understanding coming of age during the AIDS crisis and how it informed my own experience of becoming a homosexual in a heterosexual society.
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