Melancholia and Moralism : Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics

by Douglas Crimp

• ISBN13: 9780262532648
• ISBN10: 0262532646
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Winner, Trade Illustrated Category, 2003 Association of American University Presses (AAUP) Book, Jacket, and Journal Show. In Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp confronts the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the wider society. With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDS epidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rights movement would no longer have a reason to exist. Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics has never been greater. AIDS, he demonstrates, is the repressed, unconscious force that drives the destructive moralism of the new, anti-liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay writers as Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as Sullivan. Crimp examines various cultural phenomena, including Randy Shilts's bestseller And the Band Played On, the Hollywood films "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," and Magic Johnson's HIV infection and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also analyzes Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's AIDS musical "Zero Patience," Gregg Bordowitz's video "Fast Trip, Long Drop," the Names Project Quilt, and the annual "Day without Art."

Author Biography

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Acting Co-Director, Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Melancholia and Moralism: An Introduction	1	(26)
AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism	27	(16)
How To Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic	43	(40)
Portraits of People with AIDS	83	(26)
Good Ole Bad Boys	109	(8)
Randy Shilts's Miserable Failure	117	(12)
Mourning and Militancy	129	(22)
The Boys in My Bedroom	151	(14)
A Day without Gertrude	165	(4)
Right On, Girlfriend!	169	(26)
The Spectacle of Mourning	195	(8)
Accommodating Magic	203	(18)
Don't Tell	221	(24)
Rosa's Indulgence	245	(8)
De-Moralizing Representations of AIDS	253	(20)
Painful Pictures	273	(8)
Sex and Sensibility or Sense and Sexuality	281	(22)
Index	303