Visions and Revisions

by Dale Peck

  Because freedom, it turned out, wasn’t like a new shoe: you didn’t need to break it in. It felt comfortable the first time you tried it on. It wasn’t the present that pinched, but the past. Brecht, no doubt, wouldn’t have approved of this decidedly ahistoric dialectic, but I think Tony Kushner might. Kushner hates capitalist imperialism—and, God bless him, he’s one of the few people who can articulately express this point of view on a national stage—but his queer politics have, at least since Angels in America, been inclusive to the point of assimilationist. Indeed, they’re so downright domestic it’s tempting to call them sentimental, when in fact they’re steeped in an understanding of the human psyche as sophisticated as it is compassionate. I was reminded of this when, in 2003, I watched Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Angels—and, as well, reminded of how much things had changed in the previous decade, regardless of how far we still had to go. Angels is generally considered the most significant literary response to the AIDS epidemic (and justifiably so), yet when I watched it on television a decade after its theatrical premiere it felt strangely flat. Part of the problem is a straightforward conflict of genres: unlike Nichols’s earlier adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (or, for that matter, The Birdcage), Angels insisted on its theatrical origins after it was filmed. As a play, it’s deliberately, powerfully anachronistic in its approach to narrative, updating—one wants to say outing—the midcentury work of Williams and Albee. It’s steeped in conversation, soliloquy, a linguistic framing of ideas that’s less articulation than excavation, and its characters interact with one another rather than their environment because, as the subtitle reminds us, the play is a fantasia (and a gay one too, with all the cultural as well as sexual associations that word brings). There’s something interior and not quite real about it. Onstage, Prior’s visions exist within a devolving continuum of what we think of as reality, a dislocation achieved more than anything else by the play’s language, which moves from the quotidian to the metaphysical in ever-accelerating cadences, but on the small screen such flights of fancy just look fake.

  Technical quibbles aside, though, the real obstacle to the miniseries’s success was nostalgia: Kushner’s, Nichols’s, mine, the nation’s. Because W.’s America of 2003, the year of the HBO adaptation, wasn’t Bill Clinton’s America of 1993, when the play premiered; which was already at an electoral remove from the America of 1991 and 1992 when the play was being written and workshopped and George H.W. Bush was fighting to stay in office; and removed even further from the America of 1985 that the play is set in, when Ronald Reagan had just won a second term by one of the largest electoral margins in history. At any rate it wasn’t the same America for gay people. History had been accelerated for us during the previous two decades. Civil rights battles that might have taken generations took only a few years, sometimes a few months; and though those battles were (and are) far from over, it’s safe to say that in 2003 gay men occupied a demonstrably more secure position than we did in 1992, or 1985. When Joe says to Louis, “Look, I want to touch you. Can I just touch you here?” he means both on the cheek, and also in Central Park—in public. For the hundredth, the thousandth time, a gay man was coming out to America, and it seemed perhaps that this time it took. We were safer in 2003, more visible, more capable of influencing the things said about us on a national level, and we owed that power to Angels in America and the intense cultural and political project of which it had been a part—but we were not, as was, I think, Kushner’s hope (not to mention his audience’s), capable of influencing the things America said about itself. History had acknowledged us, but it had also passed us by, by which I mean that the cultural and political response to AIDS made gay men more American, but it didn’t make Americans more gay. Whether you regard capitalism as selfish or selfless, inspiring or greedy, an exporter of democratic values or an exploiter of the inhabitants and resources of the third world, the thing that will save the planet or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven remarkably flexible in assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them. By which I mean that when I watched Angels in 1992 and 1993 I knew who I was: I knew who the play thought I was, and the play was right. But in 2003 I didn’t feel like the play was talking to me anymore. I didn’t feel like it knew who I was, because I didn’t feel like I knew who I was, not as a gay man anyway, nor as someone who had lived through the pre–combination therapy years of the AIDS epidemic, which existed in memory with the unreal quality of a military occupation. As the distantly familiar scenes flashed by on my TV, I felt like I was watching a home movie that had been shot when I was just barely old enough to remember—a movie in which I was, moreover, speaking French or Spanish or some other language I not only no longer understood, but didn’t remember ever knowing, and, if I can unite the two metaphors—war, language—I couldn’t help but wonder if the language I spoke now was my own, or a kind of colonial imposition. By which I mean that George Bush was president when Tony Kushner first wrote Angels, and George Bush was president when it was turned into a miniseries ten years later. By which I mean that perhaps it wasn’t the miniseries that didn’t do the play justice, it was the times. By which I mean, finally, that as soon as I finished watching Angels the only thing I could think to do was watch it again, because I wanted it to have a second chance.

  IT WAS TONY Kushner who, in 1995, let me know that Leo Bersani’s Homos had been published, and it was Homos that made me realize I was on Kushner’s side—on the side of, if not domesticity, then human lives that resembled (with apologies to Herr Goethe) the elective affinities with which I was familiar, as opposed to performative modalities that often seemed like experiments in egotism and anomie. Queer theory, I realized when I read Homos in April of 1995, and the seven- or eight-year activist idyll it had helped usher into being, had run its course as a popular (populist?) intellectual force: whatever would happen next would happen somewhere else, in some other way. I don’t mean to say that Homos killed queer theory, let alone queer activism, only that, in the very audacity with which it invited readers “to rethink what we mean and what we expect from communication, and from community,” Bersani’s own arguments made the practical limitations of queer theory plain to me, particularly as it applied to the AIDS epidemic. No, that’s not quite it either. One of the great attractions of queer theory was its extraordinary reach across genres and disciplines, indeed across time, as it shined new light on the past and revealed the way in which sex, sexuality, and gender, far from being the rigid entailments that our neo-Victorian sensibilities had been schooled to think of as naturally and morally immutable, have in fact been in flux for as long as stories have been told. From that reimaged past, queer theory offered up at the very least the possibility of new ways of being in the not-too-distant future—the future that was in some apparent or implied way under construction at every ACT UP and Queer Nation demo, every community forum such as “Talk Sex” and the one sponsored by Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists, every academic and artistic conference devoted to queer arts and letters. “The soul is the prison of the body,” Foucault told us in Discipline and Punish, and it had been the privilege of philosophers and artists since time immemorial to contemplate the nature of that cage: whether it was of divine or mundane origin; what could and couldn’t be accomplished within its confines; if there was any means of escape. But AIDS was a cell inside the body inside the prison—an internal ankle monitor, as it were, as opposed to stone and bars and razor wire—and until a cure or vaccine was invented it would forever inhabit and inhibit the range and variety of the body’s actions, and, hence, of the moral imagination.

  There comes a moment in almost every individual’s life when he believes, rightly or wrongly, that he can be whatever he wants, but for queers in the late eighties and early nineties that prospect was infinitely more exciting, because we felt we could make the world into what we wanted it to be. And it was this sense of near-infinite possi
bility that Homos made me realize had been prematurely and permanently derailed by the AIDS epidemic. It was at one of the conferences mentioned above—at OutWrite, a colloquium on queer writing held each spring in Boston from 1989 to 1999—that Tony Kushner, in his opening plenary address, brought the long-awaited follow-up to “Is the Rectum a Grave?” to my attention. “Professor Bersani has published a new book called Homos,” Kushner told a rapt audience of several hundred. “Let me read you a paragraph found on page sixty-nine”:

  To move to an entirely different register, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America has analogous ambitions. For Kushner, to be gay in the 1980s was to be a metaphor not only for Reagan’s America but for the entire history of America, a country in which there are “no gods … no ghosts and spirits … no angels … no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political.” The enormous success of this muddled and pretentious play is a sign, if we need still another one, of how ready and anxious America is to see and hear about gays—provided we reassure America how familiar, how morally sincere, and, particularly in the case of Kushner’s work, how innocuously full of significance we can be.

  I want to enter Homos through this passage. In context, it’s nothing more than a snide aside, 120 words trivializing a seven-hour play and the enormous cultural response it engendered. It appears a third of the way into what had seemed until then a coherent, persuasive argument, but as I read the rest of Homos the shrillness of this particular passage—and the denial that shrillness usually masks—became revelatory to me.

  Tellingly, Homos’s last reference to AIDS occurs in the early pages of the third of its four longish chapters: “Having always longed to be one of those happy gays myself,” Bersani wrote, “I can’t help wondering what the pleasures were that led to this enviable absence of any interpretive aftertaste in the men Foucault probably did see, less frequently, I would guess, in Paris than around Castro Street where he lived when, during the glorious pre-AIDS years of the late 1970s, he was a visiting professor at Berkeley.” Hiding inside this somewhat convoluted sentence was the evocation of “the glorious pre-AIDS years,” and it was there that Bersani’s consciousness seemed to remain for the rest of his book, as Homos redirected its attention to, you might say, “the glorious pre-AIDS years” of the first half of the twentieth century. In its first two chapters Homos had picked up where “Is the Rectum a Grave?” left off in 1987, arguing what had by 1995 become a virtual truism (in large part because of arguments made by Bersani, Simon Watney, and the people who wrote in their wake), namely, that “nothing has made gay men more visible than AIDS,” and that “homophobic virulence in America has increased in direct proportion to the wider acceptance of homosexuals.” But where other writers might simply have argued for queers to redouble their efforts in the battle for equal rights and against HIV, Bersani made a surprising left turn in Homos, declaring: “Never before in the history of minority groups struggling for recognition and equal treatment has there been an analogous attempt, on the part of any such group, to make itself unidentifiable even as it demands to be recognized.”

  It wasn’t a popular assessment then, and it’s not a popular assessment now (although the passage of time has, for better and worse, borne it out). But whether or not the political expediency of an innate gay identity will ever be justified by scientific fact, queers will always be defined (at least from the outside) not by their sexual desire but by whether and how they act on it. It’s sex that makes you gay, at least in the eyes of the straight world, and it’s gay sex that made gay culture, not the other way around. In Bersani’s view, queers had yet to tap the revolutionary potential of gay sex, a potential rooted in sexual acts that were as free from the trappings of “heteroized sociality” as possible. It should come as no surprise, then, that Bersani was interested in promiscuity. In a footnote to “Is the Rectum a Grave?” he had this to say about Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On:

  I won’t go into … the phenomenon of Shilts himself as an overnight media star, and the relation between his stardom and his irreproachably respectable image, his long-standing willingness, indeed eagerness, to join the straights in being morally repelled by gay promiscuity. A good deal of his much admired “objectivity” as a reporter consists in his being as venomous toward those at an exceptionally high risk of becoming afflicted with AIDS (gay men) as toward the government officials who seem content to let them die.

  Bersani’s 1987 criticisms seemed apropos to the situation regarding New York’s sex clubs in 1995, and, in fact, were still on his mind. From Homos: “Recent objections in the gay press to a new bathhouse in San Francisco sounded like Randy Shilts all over again.” In fact, one of the strongest elements of Homos was its attack on things that promote a “denial of sex”—both sex acts themselves, but also, and more important, the context in which those sex acts occur, and the new contexts they might make possible, viz. this approving, if not simply wistful, quotation from Foucault with which Bersani opened his third chapter: “I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay life-style, not sex acts themselves … It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate.”

  It’s tempting to say that AIDS hijacked the Foucauldian inquiry into these “as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships,” not least because the disease claimed Foucault’s life in 1984, but also because the epidemic consumed almost the entirety of gay political and cultural activity for a decade and a half, during which time the words “gay” and “AIDS” became inextricably linked as cultural signifiers, and almost any gay political campaign was seen as an extension of the fight against AIDS, and any effort to combat the epidemic as advancing the “homosexual agenda.” Foucault’s claim seems less tenable in hindsight, given that, in the wake of the so-called “end of AIDS” in 1996, the gay agenda moved rapidly to the center (about which, said the happily married homosexual, sigh), but it’s important to remember that in 1995 the future looked far from certain, and Bersani’s inquiry into the kinds of new relationships gays, and gay sex, might produce seemed neither academic nor esoteric. Okay, it seemed both academic and esoteric, but it also seemed like the kind of question that could be asked only by someone who considered himself a member of a group that felt itself to be at a profound threshold—a group that could be seen as occupying territory analogous to that of freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War or of various Eastern European peoples after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, or perhaps simply of any emigrant who leaves behind the old country, the old language, the old culture, for a new one. In the wake of the visibility that AIDS had thrust on queers, and that ACT UP and queer theory had helped to solidify into genuine, if qualified, political power, queers were asking themselves who they wanted to be now, not just as individuals, but as a community and a constituency, and how they would use that identity to shape the larger world.

  But where most of Bersani’s contemporaries looked for cues in the feminist, the civil rights, and other identity-based political and social movements, Bersani looked to fiction—to specifically, three novels by André Gide, Marcel Proust, and Jean Genet, who, “in sharp contrast to contemporary gay and lesbian theorists” are “drawn to the anticommunitarian impulses they discover in homosexual desire.” From Gide’s The Immoralist, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, and Genet’s Funeral Rites, Bersani sniffs and sifts out the possibility of “a redefinition” of sociality, one “so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself.” This “difficult” project is aired in the fourth and final chapter of Homos, which Bersani advised readers to think of “not as a more or less enjoyable addendum of literary criticism to the arguments made in the rest of this book but, instead, as absolutely crucial to the persuasiveness of those arguments.” It was a brilliant if often baffling performance, both of which made the conclusions Bersani drew hard to argue with, but it was, finally, the attempt to extend these individual arti
stic obsessions into a Weltanschauung that raised questions about what, exactly, Bersani intended readers to do with the information he provided.