Last month, I attended an AIDS benefit concert by
the Sinikithemba HIV-positive Choir of South Africa. Its theme was "Give
Us Hope" and resoundingly proclaimed faith in god. The choir was exultant,
filled with the joy of the Christian gospel and presenting the message that
people who are HIV-positive can live lives of dignity and hope, celebration and
gratitude. The music rivaled any revivalist meeting. Had I not read Douglas
Crimp’s rich and provocative book Melancholia and Moralism, I might have
left the concert caught up in that upbeat narrative myself. Instead, I was
disconcerted (so to speak) and glad of it.

 Crimp’s book
is a collection of his addresses and essays over the past fifteen years, which
time span includes the identification of the AIDS virus, the escalation of
homophobia and sex hysteria, and through the rise of rightist gay politics in
mainstream America.  When Crimp
criticizes gay writer Larry Kramer whose writing, Crimp says, shows Kramer to
have "no sense of [the gay movement’s] history, its complexities, its
theory and practice" (p. 57), he reminds readers that historical context
and an appreciation for the ambiguities and messiness of activist
politics–especially in the face of ubiquitous and pernicious onslaughts by
homophobes within and outside the movement–is absolutely vital to being
genuinely responsible queers and supporters. This book is intellectually and
politically challenging, especially for readers who are not versed in gay
politics. For that very reason, I urge people to read it: there is no better
place to start educating oneself on the cooptation of gay politics by
conservatives than through the writings of Douglas Crimp. For clinicians who
want to learn more about gay and lesbian patients who present with depression, this
book offers a political and social context for situating the meanings of being
gay in the long and continuing era of AIDS.

There are several interwoven themes that emerge in
the course of the essays. One theme concerns art and its relation to political theory
and practice. Crimp models throughout his writing the meaning of the claim that
political action is contingent upon a given context but that "this
contingency of political investment is the necessary condition of all art"
(p. 25). Part of what’s wrong with much art that has developed since the
beginning of the AIDS crisis is artists’ traditional assumption about a
mythical "universal subject." Crimp shows that deploying notions of
the universal subject inevitably signify homophobia through the denial of queer
sexualities and politics. The universal is "us," pitted against
"them"–who, in AIDS art is typified by the imagined rampantly sexual
and sexuallly irresponsible gay man who is blamed for spreading AIDS. The
universal, objective, ostensibly apolitical "view from nowhere" in
art or elsewhere, Crimp suggests, is downright dangerous during an epidemic of
staggering proportions. Even attempts to elicit sympathy for the "AIDS
victim" is an appeal to our common humanity in ways that normalize
heterosexuality and monogamy and demonize the promiscuous sex lives that
supposedly brought on all this loss and mourning in the first place. Crimp
urges a "critical, theoretical, activist alternative to the personal,
elegiac expressions that appeared to dominate the art-world in response to
AIDS" (p. 40). 

Art and AIDS both are cultural artifacts, and the
sooner we grasp this point, the more quickly we can make headway in fighting
AIDS. AS Crimp says, "AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that
conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We Know AIDS only in and
through those practices" (p. 28). Much of what we see, Crimp argues, is
shaped by cultural (and artistic) conventions that "rigidly dictate what
can and will be said about AIDS" (p. 54); if we want to understand the
enormity of this cultural and medical crisis, or if we want direction on what
might be fruitful terms of engagement, we first must grasp two sorts of things:
the complexity of the issues at hand, and the complexity of representations.
The latter is, itself, an enormous task because our ways of conceptualizing and
representing gays and lesbians, queers, AIDS, HIV, ACT UP!, diverse sexual
activity, and monogamy are contaminated and shaped by homophobia and
hetero-normativity.

Crimp offers tremendously helpful analyses and
deconstruction of texts by gay writers, revealing to readers the ways that
homophobia and narrative norms co-structure each other to entrench familiar
dichotomies such as the Promiscuous, Selfish Homosexual in contrast to the Good
Monogamous Gay who is really just like straights–as long as sexual practices
aren’t mentioned. In "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," for
instance, he shows how the narrative style of omniscient point of view sets up
the arch-villain (promiscuous and irresponsible), whose special purpose is to
secure the character of his opposite, the Good Monogamous Gay. Simplistic,
false, and destructive dichotomies such as good gay/bad gay,
promiscuous/monogamous, practicer of safe sex/irresponsible, and
identity/conduct permeate conservative gay writing and politics, as Crimp
documents.  Crimp shows how and why each
of these dichotomies is harmful to the gay movement and is moralizing of an
awful sort.

The moralizing that Crimp dissects is primarily that
of proclamations of the moral good of monogamy and safe sex. These values
(propounded by conservative gay writers) are virtually always pitted against
diatribes about sexual promiscuity that reek of rampant homophobia. But in
addition, moralizing that casts gay sex as so dangerous as to need to be
contained, policed, and normalized misses a crucial point about gay sex: that
gay men and lesbians have forged their own cultures, sexual and otherwise, and
moralizing threatens these cultures to their core. "Alongside the dismal
toll of death, what many of us have lost is a culture of sexual
possibility." And sexual possibility, Crimp reminds readers, is not
abhorrent or dangerous per se. Sexual possibility is what makes possible the
development of many and diverse ways of being sexual and erotically excited,
and gay men and lesbians know this from experience. "We were able to
invent safe sex because we have always known that sex is not, in an epidemic or
not, limited to penetrative sex. Our promiscuity taught us many things, not
only about the pleasures of sex, but about the great multiplicity of those
pleasures" (p. 64). The current trend toward moralizing is not only
falsely reductive–it is a cause of immense mourning.

Mourning is crucial to AIDS activism, Crimp argues,
although in "Portraits of People with AIDS" he criticizes artists’
fixation on images of death and dying that, although purporting to "put a
face on AIDS," ends up rendering invisible the personality and life of
each person portrayed. So what is the
place of mourning? Crimp queries. He argues, mostly in "Melancholia and
Militancy" but in other essays as well, that a deep melancholy has
enveloped many people in the gay movement, and the typical antidote to
melancholy has been thought to be activism. But mourning, rage, despair,
anxiety, fear, and confusion must be allowed to exist side by side with
activism in order for mourning not to become pathological. In "The
Spectacle of Mourning," he interrogates the public’s interest in the Names
Project quilt. He asks, what template of "gay person" does the
straight viewer imagine when he or she ponders the quilt and the mourning
ritual. "Does the quilt sanitize or sentimentalize gay life? Does it
render invisible what makes people hate us? Does it make their continuing
disavowal possible?" (p. 201). The public (straight people and many gays
and lesbians too) need "innocent AIDS victims" to mourn, as Crimp
shows in example after example.  The
phobic image of anal penetration precedes
any representation of gay men, because images have a psychic component that
haunts how the public perceives gay men. "What we do sexually is the root cause of the hatred directed at us and,
moreover, that many arguments for tolerance of gay men and lesbians attempt to
obfuscate that sexuality" (p. 277; emphasis in original). For the public
to mourn the death of the millions and to care about the millions more that
will die, most need to imagine something other than gay men doing the nasty.
Crimp puts the matter very clearly: "In everything I have written about
AIDS, which has concentrated mostly on gay men, I have insisted on the
determining fact of homophobia, which I believe is still the single most
powerful determinant of everything everyone has suffered during this epidemic"
(p. 199).

These essays show the developing thinking of a
writer who is self-reflective and continuously in dialogue with other writers
and artists; although often sharply critical, he remains passionately engaged
with some rather infuriatingly offensive gay writers. As Crimp says in the
Introduction, "one result of having these essays all together in strict
chronological order will show that I took these early criticisms seriously and
tried to make my arguments more nuanced" (p. 25). Nuanced they are, and so
rich in content that I can only refer you to the author’s writing fully to
appreciate the richness in political theory and activism contained therein.

©
2003 Nancy Nyquist Potter

Nancy Nyquist Potter, Ph.D., Department of
Philosophy, University of Louisville, Kentucky

Categories: Ethics, Sexuality