Cultural Notebook: Elegies of Loss and Memory

I woke up in a sweat
Desolate
For there were no more lovers left alive
No one had survived
So there were no more lovers left alive
And that’s why love had died
Yes, it’s true
Look, its happened to me and you

— Pet Shop Boys, “Dreaming of the Queen”

While we have been having a somewhat clinical conversation on the impact of HIV disease on gay sensibility of the 1980s, it is important to not lose sight of the fact that HIV disease was a profoundly human event for gay men and lesbians of the 1980s. The sudden and chaotic loss of friends, lovers, and acquaintances, the whole restructuring of the gay world of the 1970s, has triggered apocalyptic readings of the moment on gay consciousness, not only in Kramer’s invocation of the Holocaust, but as well in Andrew Holleran’s excellent collection of essays, Ground Zero, where he wryly notes, regarding AIDS and its effects on gay identity, “Disaster, real disaster, always comes as a shock.”




Aside from the political shiftings and challenges that the LGBT community faced in the HIV crisis of the 1980s, including homophobic reaction, guilt and depression, as well as a deeply felt personal threat, gay men produced some of the most powerful and beautiful narratives of loss in literature, reportage, film, and public art. These works sought to intervene in the representation of AIDS as either afflicting deserving "sinners" or the "innocent," as well as redirect the focus away from the spectacle of disease towards a narrative of experience: what did it feel like, from the inside?





Some of the most prominent HIV/AIDS memoirs and autobiographical literature of the period are deeply affecting, like Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, Gil Cuadros' City of God, the poetry of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam, and David B. Feinberg's Queer and Loathing. Other works, such as David Wojnarowicz's Memories Like Gasoline, In the Shadow of the American Dream, and Close to the Knives, and videos like Black Is, Black Ain't, Tongues Untied and Zero Patience, take on AIDS shibboleths and mainstream ideas of contagion with powerful narratives of resistance. John Weir’s Inevitable Decline of Eddie Socket and David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-sixed and Spontaneous Combustion are some of the first and best literary expressions of AIDS of the period. Richard Rodriguez's essay "Late Victorians" (PDF available via the link) was one of the more controversial readings of the recall to nature that to a limited extent is echoed in Kramer's call for engagement. The public art of Gran Fury, associated with ACT-UP, set the tone in the late eighties for the public expression of LGBT resistance to the death narrative of AIDS: sassy, political, ironic, and eye-catching, their efforts often indicted the Reagan administration and its lack of attention to the AIDS crisis. Their work is presented in this post, including the iconic image of the pink triangle on black background, one of the most enduring images of the period.

Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On remains, in some important way, the primary source text for the history of HIV in the 1980s, and its effect on the gay community. Susan Sontag's AIDS and its Metaphors sought to build on her earlier work on cancer. Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother is a memoir of the demise of her brother from HIV disease, an intense emotional narrative. Similarly, the powerful video Silverlake Life offers a raw vision of HIV disease through a videography of the experience of two gay men, whose death from AIDS is captured on film. While this may seem gratuitous, it serves as a reminder that HIV is not an abstraction, is not something that happens to other people, and is not something that has no effect. Behind every abstract "AIDS death" is a person, a life, hopes and dreams and aspirations. Silverlake Life jolts us out of our soporific theories into facing death literally.

The desire of gay cultural producers in the 1980s was to give voice to an experience that had been happening, up until about 1985, silently, stealthily, and quietly. The explosion of gay activism around AIDS in 1987 was a response to this lassitude, an expression of rage and grief that arguably, along with Stonewall and the assassination of Harvey Milk, permanently defined contemporary gay sensibility and changed the way the medical and government infrastructure related to AIDS. Remembering the human element of the HIV crisis serves not only to break down the barriers of distance that allow us to imagine ourselves as safe, but also serves as a memorial to the thousands of gay men who have died from HIV disease since 1980. The difficulty is in capturing the moment, the raw and sheer terror, in art. As Andrew Holleran wrote in the eighties—

Someday, writing about this plague may be read with pleasure, by people for whom it is a distant catastrophe, but I suspect the best writing will be nothing more, nor less, than a lament: “We are as wanton flies to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” The only other possible enduring thing would be a simple list of names—of those who behaved well, and those who behaved badly, during a trying time.