GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE November 29, 2002

evening'sout

'AIDS theorists' have lost sight of the primary goal

Melancholia and Moralism by Douglas Crimp

MIT Press, $29.95 Reviewed by Earl Pike

Ann Coulter, the right wing's current darling and political ideologue, is an admirably bright woman. In her book Slander she reveals why so many Americans dislike or distrust liberals, and their perceived understanding of liberal academia. The theorists of the left, she contends, are intellectually snotty; they make people feel dumb.

Consider this excerpt-which includes a

quote from Leo Bersani, but which is there in the book anyway-from Douglas Crimp's new Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics:

"Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis.' (It should be emphasized that Bersani privileges gay male sex only insofar as it is understood as a heuristic category for rethinking the relations of psychic and social life.)"

I have no idea what that really means. I

know a fair number of Big Words, and I had to look up ascesis in my little desk-top Webster's. It's not in there; I can only guess that the word is somehow related to ascetic, which means, on one level, bodily self-denial. But even with that clue. I have no idea what the passage really means.

And that is the major fault with Crimp's book, and indeed, much of the critical debate about AIDS "theory": it translates poorly.

A professor of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, Crimp has conducted important cultural investigations on queer theory and the politics of AIDS. But in the face of an epidemic of overwhelming proportions, those investigations are growing in-

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The main points, after all, have already been made, and the rest is adornment, or academic quibbling: In the course of Melancholia and Moralism, Crimp takes on the internalized homophobia of Randy Shilts, the undercut homosexuality of Philadelphia, the sexual dread of Silence of the Lambs, etc., sprinkling it all with the requisite quotes from Foucalt, and occasionally even Freud.

Been there, done that; and today, 14,000 people will still get infected around the world. Also, there is now a furiously debated cleavage between different “camps” of activists and theorists that sometimes bubbles over into outright slander and fisticuffs, that, because of its cannibalistic nature, tears the fragile progressive coalition apart.

Larry Kramer blasts Crimp in the New York Times, and Crimp counters. Others follow suit. Oddly enough, the most egregious charge they level at each other is internalized homophobia-the mortal sin of queer theorists. Crimp openly bemoans, in this most recent book, the fact that gay people are more likely to read

Bruce Bower's A Place at the Table than Lee Edelman's Homographesis. You and I, we're not smart enough for the big leagues.

Don't get me wrong: I think writers like Crimp have contributed enormously to our understanding of queer/AIDS politics, philosophy, and theory. But there's a widening gap between theory and practice. In the trenches, we're grasping desperately for an understanding of AIDS in 2002 that can incorporate queer politics, the dynamics of race, health care infrastructures, the changing manifestations of gender, the nature of sexual desire and practice, and even our concepts of spirituality-and can do all that in a way that positively influences our practical responses to AIDS. What we need more than anything else right now is theorists who can translate, who can create not merely understandings, but meanings.

In the middle of Melancholia and Moralism, Crimp analyzes an ACT UP poster from 1993. Distributed around the time when the debate about gays in the military was just heating up, it challenges us to face the enormity of the growing epidemic. The text reads:

You can't wear a red ribbon if you're dead. You can't serve in the military if you're dead.

You can't march in the St. Patrick's Day parade if you're dead.

You can't register as a domestic partner if you're dead.

Act up!

To which I would add one more line, as a footnote to Crimp's book:

You can't read queer theory if you're dead.

Earl Pike is the executive director of the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.

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