In 1997, not long after the new drug cocktails made HIV something other than a death sentence, Dan Savage had an essay in OUT, “The AIDS crisis is over (for me).” I admit that I love this title (and truly, I do love that early Dan Savage, who also wrote about how he liked cruising straight guys while holding his baby, or how he was disappointed to find out his first love hadn’t died of AIDS but had instead just moved without telling him—he was a lot more fun before he transitioned into being a pious dispenser of sexual wisdom, and now, uh, a member of the Intellectual Dark Web?) and it does, in an amusingly stupid way, get to the point that indeed it was over for people like him.
I’d love to have a column where I update readers on what crises are over for me— for me, Gaza never even got started! I’m fine here, thanks for worrying. Let the Palestinians cancel in-person classes at Columbia, paragliding, and Ocean Vuong (when they came for Ocean Vuong I said nothing, because I am not a loser).
Among things that are over for me are AIDS, Covid, and AIDS-Covid comparisons—which I notably made a few years ago in an essay I think nearly everyone hated. It started:
Out of straight people’s earshot, my conversations with other gay men about COVID often alight on comparisons with HIV. We note the profiles on dating and sex apps by which men declare themselves vaccinated—often with the date and brand of the doses—and enthusiasm for bareback (condomless) intercourse. And we joke—although I, at least, mean it—about our relief to find ourselves in a public health crisis for which we cannot be held specifically responsible.
Other gays, brains broken by critical theory, thought such comparisons in a tone of somber ‘multidirectional’ memorialization (Catlin later became the queen of monkeypox—where is your rage?—and wrote an essay about he felt bad his brief celebrity was centering whiteness lol)—or, brains broken by the ‘dissident’ right’s own retarded uptake of critical theory, seethed that AIDS and Covid had been politicized —don’t you hate it when life-or-death matters become political?
The one good thing, for my own thinking, about my excursion into ‘biopolitics,’ was that it lead me eventually back around to Arendt, and to being ready to be compassionate about how HIV-AIDS of course made gays totally insane in the 80s 90s and after—if a few years of Covid made everyone fucking nuts, a decade and a half of epidemic would surely do much worse.
Anyway, the above Barbara-Kruger-esque image are from a 1992 issue of a magazine of the Canadian arts magazine Fuse—a number dedicated to people “living with HIV.” As well as this NSFW one:
Hot.
I am in favor of anything that gives the signifying minimum necessary to make fucking feel ‘aesthetic’ or ‘political’* (people who think those two categories are terribly different, or even opposed to either each other or to fucking, might take a good look at the above cock-and-ass, asking themselves whether the black bars with text are politics or aesthetics, whether the bars are aesthetic and the text politics, and hopefully realize it’s a dumb exercise—politics and aesthetics rub sometimes uncomfortably sometimes pleasurably against each other, in a on-again-off-again friction that leads to no permanent fusion and offers no possibility of permanent release, in a motion that is not like but is the erotic).
It’s horrifying to even project myself for a moment into the world of 1992, with so much gay death and so much sad intellectual-cultural effort to transform that death into something else (attempts by intellectuals like Bersani, Crimp, Bronski etc., in the midst of the crisis, to assert that gay sexuality has this shattering power to challenge hetero-patriarcho-monogamist hegemony, to give it this other kind of dark exciting power, in what reads now as one of those camera-obscura-of-ideology moments the young Marx talked about—theory as the ‘inverted world,’ turning tragedy into the illusory compensations of fantastical significance, here indeed for inverts… or the attempts by people like Cooper or Love and Human Remains to imagine what if what was stalking gays was a smoldering serial killer—a hotter manifestation of the death drive than the one actually at work)—and after all people in that moment had every right to such fantasies or else become disillusioned, cynical, and conspiratorial. One of the artists involved in that issue made this the following year—and it’s not like he was quite wrong:
But it’s also hard to avoid noticing that after all, this sort of attitude today is associated not with vanguardist culturally/politically left arts activist spaces (which have been following the science, on everything from Covid to transkids—except the European science on the latter)—and that, after all, the “medicine is the police! leave my body alone!” shines forth in its full stupidity once you see your redneck uncle adopt it and die from Covid.
The challenge of the Enlightenment, Kant said, was/is to free ourselves from the authority of the book, the doctor and the priest—and in that sense the redneck uncle, Alex Jones, Charles Ortleb, the ‘AZT was invented by the CIA to kill gays’ homo, are all Enlighteners. So while Adorno and Horkheimer are cancelling the Enlightenment for unleashing industrial murder and scientific racism on the world, we might also cancel it for the strain of conspiratorial-critical-theory that they in their own way also represent.
Foucault, however, had a good point in reminding us that Kant was surely being a bit sneaky or playful in his injunction to liberate our minds, that this was in its own way subtly conservative, a mode of re-establishing authority in a post-traditional world—and that this is not, entirely, to our disadvantage. As I said in an essay for a sort of fascist dissident right website (a hundred dollars is a hundred dollars!):
Kant, Foucault argued, tried to bring about the unprecedented union of Diogenes and Plato, speaking truth to power in the public sphere while also covertly orienting political action. Of course, the enlightened public intellectual, who appears as the union of Diogenes’ shocking, iconoclastic rejection of contemporary pieties and Plato’s subtle, esoteric awakening of philosophical souls and education of the opinions of the holders of power, is Foucault himself. The modern philosopher seems to speak with heedless freedom, making bold critiques of our most cherished values and summoning to us overcome what Kant called our “self-imposed immaturity,” our childish dependence on traditional authority. Through this public parrhesia, however, the philosopher becomes an authority himself, shaping public opinion and guiding the decisions of elites… Through these ‘histories of the present’ the modern philosopher guides his supposedly liberated fellow citizens as surely as the classical philosopher guided his. The techniques of historicism, genealogy and critique, thus no longer appear as an acid corroding tradition, and with it the bonds that hold human beings together in a political community, but rather as the basis of a new and only apparently paradoxical bond, through which injunctions to liberation and autonomy enthrall those who hear them to the hidden influence of the modern philosopher.
To the promise of liberation, and the hermeneutics of suspicion, the right response—by Foucault’s (or my) lights—is not tenderqueer ‘reparative reading’ and but a still greater suspicion (not ‘post-critique’ but ‘post, critique’), albeit a playful one that recognizes both how the pursuit of autonomy enthralls and how certain ways of accepting heteronomy might liberate (just think of Ocean Vuong wearing a pup mask… which he claims was about co-opting forms of power or something… Foucault for not-me-being-horny sub bottoms **.)
All that to say, these images remain striking (as do Kruger’s—she had a retrospective a few years ago at the Chicago Art Institute and there’s something now quite camp, the way Cultural Revolution posters or Brecht plays are now, about her slogany demands that we free ourselves. Obey your thirst!) but the political thinking behind them seems like part of the tragic matrix for the AIDS crisis and other American tragedies—the sense that by the right sort of suspicion I can punch through the false beliefs that confuse and murder me. Of course, without a bit of that wake up, sheeple! energy I suppose nothing would ever get done, and it’s not like we’re not being systematically lied to, but I’m suspicious of this energy not least because, in my capacity as a historian of eighteenth-century France nearly a decade ago, I did some work on one of the first nutjobs to argue that elites are making us sick who also had some kooky arguments for why ‘Asiatic despotism’ would be a great idea—postliberalism before there was any liberalism to be post- about.
How to give our inner Alex Jones a bit of room to question received wisdom, without letting him have the mic—or pass it to Kanye—I suppose is the enduring challenge of Enlightenment.
The most enduring artwork from this issue of Fuse however is a still from Michael Smith’s performance “Person Livid With AIDS”:
Smith (no relation—but also, in a truer sense, a relation) had died the year before, age 33.
Looking at our past and present—and I’m not expecting more from the future—Cathy has it righter than critical-multidirectional-memory theorists, the dissident rightists, the pro-/anti-/post-whatever-ers:
*I love, for example, the work of Dean Sameshima, which according to him “deals with nostalgia, vindication and accumulation” (okay) by putting fun filters on vintage beefcake jackoff pics:
**
… Instagram, I really appreciate, particularly as a writer of colour, I rarely get to have my narrative in my own hands and I rarely get to show what’s valuable to me. I’ve been in interviews where I’m described as, “surprisingly eloquent despite his preteen frame.” And that was under the guise of “objective” reportage.
So the mask is a pup mask, right?
Yes.
Do you identify as a pup?
Those frameworks, I was never into. Because I always describe my work as that of a junkyard artist. I take older, defunct literary techniques and I cast them into new uses. And I think it’s the same. I don’t feel like a pup, it just didn’t feel true, but I like the mask and I like the anonymity, even amongst people who are familiar with each other. So I just kind of, I could say I co-opted the schema.
Wow, is this pup appropriation?
Guilty as charged. It is what it is. But I don’t go anywhere beyond that. There’s no barking or wagging. I’m glad that you asked though, because I always want to talk about how power and submission works in a novel, but I’m always afraid that very hetero journalists will just not…
Get it.
Get it. So I try not to bring it up for them and instead wait for them, but they never do. So I’m really glad that you have.