"All they needed": AIDS, consumption, and the politics of class

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 86-115

  Cohen, Peter F ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AIDS RELATED COMPLEX; ARTICLE; FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT; HISTORY; HUMAN; MEDICAL CARE; POLITICS; PUBLIC HEALTH; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIOECONOMICS; UNITED STATES;

AIDS-RELATED COMPLEX; FINANCING, PERSONAL; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MEDICAL ASSISTANCE; POLITICS; PUBLIC HEALTH; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0031179921     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Quoted from Paul Monette, Afterlife (1990; reprint, New York, 1991), p. 278.
2. Jean-Christophe Agnew, "The Consuming Vision of Henry James," in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York, 1983), p. 74.
3. On the ability of AIDS to "out" gay men, see Stephanie Bell, "'Galpals' and 'Space Alien Drag Queens': Outing, AIDS, and Tabloid Newspapers," Radical America 25, no. 1 (1991): 88-90;
4. and Richard Meyer, "Rock Hudson's Body," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Wearies, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York, 1991), esp. pp. 274-78.
5. While it can probably go without saying that AIDS is not a "gay disease," it should be noted that AIDS is not a "disease," period. AIDS is a syndrome made up of a number of opportunistic infections (fungi, viruses, cancers, bacterial infections) that take advantage of the damage that an individual's immune system has incurred following infection with HIV. For many years, in fact, an AIDS diagnosis was dependent on the appearance of a certain threshold number of these opportunistic infections. People do not die from AIDS: they die from the infections their immune systems cannot fight off. This said, I will occasionally refer to AIDS as a "disease" in this article, largely as a form of shorthand. For a clarification of the differences between the terms "disease" and "syndrome" in relation to AIDS, see Jan Zita Grover, "AIDS: Keywords," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA, 1988), pp. 18-20.
6. Paul Monette's best-known works are two of his nonfiction books: Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (New York, 1988)
7. and Becoming a Man: Haifa Life Story (New York, 1992).
8. For an overview of Monette's literary career, see David Roman, "Paul Monette," in Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, CT, 1993), pp. 272-81.
9. While my own background is in the interdisciplinary field of American studies, I am speaking here in general terms.
10. See, for instance, Lisa Duggan, "The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay History," GLQ (Gay Lesbian Quarterly) 2 (1995), esp. 181, 188;
11. and Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, "Sexual Traffic," differences 6 (1994): 91-94.
12. My argument here intersects with a number of recent investigations into the role of consumption within gay culture. Anthony Freitas, Susan Kaiser, and Tania Hammidi have argued, for instance, that gay political subjectivity in the United States has become increasingly tied to the corporate recognition of gays as a target market, a particularly important signifier of "citizenship" in a consumer society (Anthony Freitas, Susan Kaiser, and Tania Hammidi, "Communities, Commodities, Cultural Space, and Style," in Gays, Lesbians, and Consumer Behavior: Theory, Practice, and Research Issues in Marketing, ed. Daniel L. Wardlow [Binghamton, NY, 1996], p. 89).
13. Likewise, Nicola Field has pointed out how particular commodities have been positioned as "common references" through which gay culture is understood to recognize itself - e.g., items targeted specifically to gay consumers (magazines, freedom rings), or the organization of mass marketed commodities (furniture, clothing) into what is sometimes called gay style (Nicola Field, Over the Rainbow: Money, Class, and Homophobia [London, 1995], pp. 50-51 [quote is from p. 50]). What I am asking here, then, is if consumption is fundamentally constitutive of contemporary gay identity, then what are the implications for gay subjects when consumption as a process becomes impossible? What happens to gay male culture when the one thing many gay men need to buy the most - a cure - is not for sale?
14. Monette was, in fact, a member of ACT UP, and a group closely resembling ACT UP makes a cameo appearance in Afterlife. For Monette's description of his attitudes toward and work with ACT UP and other political organizations, see the essays in Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (New York, 1994),
15. esp. "Mustering," "Getting Covered," and "Puck." ACT UP (or groups resembling ACT UP) has made other prominent appearances in the imaginative literature about the epidemic: see, e.g., Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble (New York, 1990),
16. and Rat Bohemia (New York, 1995);
17. Larry Kramer, The Destiny of Me (New York, 1993);
18. and David B. Feinberg, Spontaneous Combustion (New York, 1991).
19. An AIDS "terrorist" group is also central to James Robert Baker's novel Tim and Pete (New York, 1993).
20. The brief history of ACT UP/New York that follows is drawn largely from "ACT UP/ New York Capsule History," World Wide Web http://www.actupny.org, January 1996;
21. Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle, 1990);
22. Maxine Wolfe, "The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP): A Direct Model of Community Research for AIDS Prevention," in AIDS Prevention and Services: Community Based Research, ed. Johannes P. Van Vugt (Westport, CT, 1994);
23. Sally Chew, "What's Going Down with ACT UP," Out (November 1993): 72 ff.; and the interviews I conducted with members. While ACT UP/New York still meets, my comments are limited to the period ending around 1993; because of substantial decreases in activity and membership, the ACT UP/ New York described in this essay is one that exists in name only today.
24. For a discussion of some of the movements that did exist during this period, see Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley, CA, 1991).
25. Although the exact makeup of ACT UP/New York is hard to establish and has shifted greatly over time, a survey conducted by Gilbert Elbaz in June and July of 1989 provides a more quantitative snapshot of the group than the qualitative discussion that follows. Elbaz reports that he received 413 surveys out of the 450 that he distributed. Of respondents, 79.7% self-identified as male; 78.5% self-identified as white; 95% self-identified as having attended college or graduate school; 82.8% self-identified as professional, white collar, artists, or students; one quarter self-identified as earning over $35,000 annually, and a little less than a half self-identified as earning $25,000-$35,000 annually; and only 5.1% self-identified as heterosexual. Gilbert Elbaz, "The Sociology of AIDS Activism: The Case of ACT UP/New York, 1987-1992" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1992), pp. 65-69.
26. Contextualizing ACT UP in relation to previous gay political movements is difficult. In contrast to the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s or the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s, ACT UP was organized not only in opposition to homophobia but also in response to a deadly epidemic. The fact that people were dying produced within ACT UP an undercurrent of desperation, anger, and grief that manifested itself in the raucous demonstrations for which the group became known, and that distanced ACT UP from earlier organizations that were largely middle class and male (such as the Mattachine Society or the Gay Activists Alliance). On the homophile and early gay liberation movements, see John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, 1983);
27. Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston, 1981); and Out Rage '69, directed by Arthur Dong (Testing the Limits Collective, 1995), videotape.
28. In addition to printed sources, my knowledge of ACT UP is based largely on field-work I conducted with two very different chapters. From 1990 to 1993, I was an active member of the ACT UP chapter in Providence, RI (where I lived), and I spent the summer of 1993 as a visitor to ACT UP/New York. It is important to stress here that there are many parts to, and versions of, the story of ACT UP, only a few of which are discussed in this article. In particular, I have focused on the experiences of gay white men in the group, given that my larger focus in this article is their experience of the epidemic. My analysis of ACT UP is not intended to be the final word on the topic: a comprehensive history of the group has yet to be written.
29. Such a description is at least somewhat applicable to many of the women and people of color in ACT UP as well. As Travis Jones suggested, in fact, while people-of-color caucuses in ACT UP/New York were often critical of ACT UP's frequent inability to recognize the AIDS-related needs of racial minorities, "in some ways, we [people of color] were as much out of touch with those communities as were the people we were busy indicting." "If you looked at the Black Caucus," Jones noted, "most of us were coming to New York City from outside New York City. Most of us, to the extent that we were Black and poor, it was more historical than it was current. We were probably somewhat closer to the level of ACT UP in terms of education and socioeconomic status than we were with the minority community who was affected by AIDS." ("Travis Jones" is a pseudonym chosen by an activist who did not wish to be identified by name.) Jones, interview by the author, 1993.
30. White gay men also suffer from the other types of oppression endemic within the lesbian and gay community, including gay bashing and antigay discrimination. My argument in this article is not intended to trivialize this level of oppression or to minimize the amount of suffering that white gay men, and the white gay male community, have undergone because of AIDS. I hope, however, that readers will recognize that to acknowledge the class privileges that structure a movement like ACT UP is not simultaneously to denigrate that movement or to cast aspersions on its participants (who, in fact, included myself). Neither is it to imply that the class privileges that many financially secure white gay men have experienced in their lives have managed to wipe out their personal experience of oppression. White gay men have experienced quite enough death in the past fifteen years to render such a claim ridiculous. For an excellent discussion of the effects of the AIDS epidemic on white gay men and the white gay male community in particular, see Eric Rofes, Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (Binghamton, NY, 1996).
31. Voices from the Front (prod. Testing the Limits Collective, 1991), videotape.
32. Peter Staky, quoted in ibid.
33. Quoted in Crimp with Rolston (n. 9 above), p. 79.
34. Ibid., pp. 76-83;
35. Voices from the Front.
36. Faced with the realization in the early 1990s that such a reform approach was failing to end the epidemic, ACT UP latched onto two significantly more radical programs: the AIDS Cure Project (a Manhattan Project-Style program geared toward ending the epidemic that would be run by the federal government) and the campaign for universal health care. See "AIDS Cure Project," World Wide Web http://www.actupny.org, January 1996;
37. and ACT UP/Network, Universal Health Care: A Handbook for Activists (Los Angeles, 1991).
38. Patton contrasts what she believes to be the position of gays as distinct minorities with that of drug users, whom she argues were understood within the category "addict," "a partial and highly pathologized identity which could succeed only in pressing for more treatment, and not for civil and political rights for drug users. Claims for these rights would come to the extent that drug users were members of ethnic or racial groups already identified under civil rights rhetoric." Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York, 1990), p. 139, n.24.
39. The fact that ACT UP/New York's general meetings functioned along a system of majority rule is crucial here, since it allowed the class style and the political priorities of white middle-class gay men to come to dominate the organization. When I asked Berna Lee of ACT UP/New York why she repeatedly referred to ACT UP as a group of all white men during our interview when women and people of color formed an important presence, Lee, a Korean American, responded, "A lot of the agenda is set by issues that concern white men. . . . That's the majority of it, and when you have a democracy, the majority rules." Other ACT UP chapters, such as ACT UP/San Francisco, operated under a system of consensus, which gave minority voices considerably more weight in the decision-making process. It is interesting to note, however, that in September 1990, a group of mostly white men split off from ACT UP/San Francisco to form ACT UP/Golden Gate, in part because of concern over ACT UP/San Francisco's consensus system and, in part, because of a feeling that some members of the group were assigning more importance to fighting racism, sexism, and other structural oppressions than to working for a cure. See Rachel Pepper, "Schism Slices ACT UP in Two," OutWeek (October 10, 1990), pp. 12-14.
40. B. C. Craig, personal interview by the author, 1993. All unfootnoted quotes from activists in the remainder of this article are taken from the interviews I conducted with ACT UP/New York members as part of my fieldwork in 1993. A brief comment on my interview methodology might be appropriate here. While the number of ACT UP members I was able to interview was only a small percentage of those who had been involved in ACT UP/New York, I attempted to make my interviews as representative as possible in a number of ways. I deliberately went out of my way to talk to current as well as former members, new members as well as those who had been involved for several years, women as well as men, people of color as well as white activists, and people involved with different committees. Because of the focus of the larger project from which this article derives, I also attempted to conduct as many interviews as possible with ACT UP members who were writers. Interviews continued until I felt that activists were beginning to repeat one another. Despite this level of intentionality in my choosing of narrators, in one respect I felt rather unrestricted in terms of my interview sampling: since I was not trying to construct a history of ACT UP, there were very few individual activists to whom I felt I absolutely had to speak. While I did have the opportunity to talk to some of ACT UP's most prominent and outspoken members, I also made a deliberate attempt to interview people who had had a minimal role in ACT UP besides attending weekly meetings, who had recently joined the group, or who had left ACT UP after a brief involvement that was not to their liking. Because they were easier to locate, however, the majority of my narrators were involved with ACT UP at the time I did my interviewing. For a discussion of the inherent limits of oral history interviewing, specifically as they relate to my own project, see the appendix to Peter F. Cohen, "Love and Anger: Literature, Activism, and the AIDS Epidemic" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1996).
41. Elbaz (n. 11 above), pp. 76-82. Elbaz discusses the relative politicization of men and women in ACT UP based on the survey he conducted in 1989 and interviews. His results confirm the more impressionistic evidence I gathered while interviewing activists in 1993. The story of Peter Staley's transformation from a conservative Wall Street trader to a fulltime ACT UP activist is frequently cited as the paradigmatic example of the politicization of men in the group. See Elinor Burkett, The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS (Boston, 1995), chap. 12;
42. and "United in Anger," NYQ (New York queer, December 8, 1991), p. 29.
43. Quoted in Dave Ford, "A.I.D.S.: Words from the Front," Spin (January 1989), p. 60.
44. Elbaz, p. 77.
45. Maxine Wolfe, personal interview by the author, 1993; Kevin Robert Frost, personal interview by the author, 1993; Wolfe, unpublished manuscript, p. 62. (I am grateful to Maxine Wolfe for allowing me to draw on unpublished sections of what would eventually become her essay "AIDS Coalition") I use the terms "inside" and "outside" throughout this section because these are the terms with which activists themselves described their differing tactical approaches both in print and during my interviews with them.
46. The phrase a "place at the table" has had particular resonance for discussions of gay politics following the 1993 publication of Bruce Bawer's controversial A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (New York, 1993).
47. Maxine Wolfe has suggested to me that the history of ACT UP/New York can be divided into three periods, ones which I would date as follows: an early period running roughly from 1987 to 1989, a middle period running from 1989 to 1991, and a later period beginning around 1992, during which the AIDS Cure Project was developed. In Wolfe's opinion, the ascendancy of a middle-class "class style" which I describe in this article is best located in the middle period, during which ACT UP changed both its mode of fund-raising and many of its priorities, as well as experienced its greatest growth. Before this middle period, ACT UP's relative lack of resources and access gave it a more traditional grassroots flavor. As I will discuss below, the departure of a number of key treatment activists in 1991 represented a substantial milestone for the group as well. Whether or not this periodization is correct (and much of the evidence in this essay suggests that a middle-class "class style" was evident in one form or another throughout ACT UP's history), it is important to keep in mind that ACT UP/New York was (and still is) a constantly evolving organization.
48. George M. Carter, ACT UP, the AIDS War, and Activism, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series no. 15 (Westfield, NJ, 1992), p. 2.
49. Mark Golden, "ACT UP Redux," QW (October 11, 1992), pp. 22-25; quote is from p. 24.
50. See, for instance, Wolfe, "AIDS Coalition" (n. 9 above), pp. 226-30; Crimp with Rolston (n. 9 above), pp. 76-83.
51. Nina Reyes, "ACT UP T and D Plans Spinoff," NYQ (New York queer, November 24, 1991), p. 9;
52. Burkett, The Gravest Show, pp. 333-41. TAG began as an affinity group of ACT UP, but eventually broke all ties with the larger group.
53. B. C. Craig (n. 23 above); Cathy Jean Cohen, "Power, Resistance and the Construction of Crisis: Marginalized Communities Respond to AIDS" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), p. 314.
54. Maxine Wolfe, personal interview; Kevin Robert Frost, personal interview; Wolfe, unpublished manuscript, p. 62.
55. "Trina Johnson" is a pseudonym chosen by an activist who did not wish to be identified by name. Johnson, interview by the author, 1993.
56. Wolfe, "AIDS Coalition," p. 244, n. 18.
57. Elbaz (n. 11 above), pp. 481-82.
58. B. C. Craig, personal interview.
59. Burkett, The Gravest Show, pp. 317-18. Except for the expenses associated with the 1990 International Conference on AIDS, all amounts listed here are 1993 figures.
60. I have chosen to discuss this particular crisis because it occurred during the time I spent with ACT UP/New York in the summer of 1993. As such, I was able to follow the crisis closely, as well as to attend a number of emergency finance meetings that were held in its wake.
61. "ACT UP Treasury Report January 1, 1993 to June 1, 1993," personal archives.
62. Both the collapse of the art market in the early 1990s and the fact that no one had the time or energy to organize a fund-raising event of a similar scale meant that the kinds of money that the famed art auctions had pumped into ACT UP in 1989 and 1990 were no longer available.
63. B. C. Craig (n. 23 above), who had an extensive history of involvement in previous activist movements, commented on the way such a reliance on money distanced ACT UP from its predecessors. ACT UP's approach to activism, according to Craig, "teaches people a lot about activism is money, and without money you can't be a good activist. Whereas people have been fighting for years out of their living rooms with stolen Xerox and magic marker signs. We [ACT UP] would never dream of doing such a thing!"
64. On the exceptionality of uprisings among the poor, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, 1979), pp. 6-14. Cathy Cohen offers an extension of this paradigm to the AIDS movement itself. "The type of political activity that has been exhibited in parts of the white Gay community," she notes, "may never be replicated to the same degree in the Black community. . . . The general resources afforded to each community to engage in political battles are in no way equal." Cathy Cohen (n. 34 above), pp. 481-82.
65. Paul Monette, Afterlife (n. 1 above), p. 222. All further references will appear in the body of the text.
66. As Jean Baudrillard has written, "The whole discourse on consumption, whether learned or lay, is articulated on the mythological sequence of the fable: a man, 'endowed' with needs which 'direct' him towards objects that 'give' him satisfaction. Since man is really never satisfied . . . the same history is repeated indefinitely." Jean Baudrillard, "Consumer Society," in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA, 1988), p. 35. For a historical approach to the built-in limits of consumption, see the introduction to Fox and Lears (n. 2 above), esp. pp. vii-xii.
67. Sonny fails to learn this lesson, continuing to evaluate lovers based on their wealth. Sonny is evocatively described early in Afterlife as being "in the market again" (p. 6), and his search for a lover ends in degradation and defeat as Sean Pfieffer cuts off their short romance, giving a shocked Sonny an envelope containing $2,000. Sonny reaps what he has sown, of course - in viewing potential lovers in terms of their spending power (a process Mark and Steven increasingly eschew), Sonny sets himself up to find the tables turned, his hopes for a permanent relationship reduced to a cash settlement.
68. As Marx points out in Capital, commodity fetishism is a process in which imagined relationships between objects (commodities) come to occlude the real social relationships that exist between people (their producers), and in which commodities are invested with lives of their own. Thus, in abandoning commodities for human relations, Mark and Steven reverse this fetishistic process. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. from the 3d German ed. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1887; reprint, New York, 1967), pp. 71-83;
69. and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 100-101. On the "transcendent" nature of the commodity, see Marx, 1: 71.
70. In a related argument, John Clum has discussed the nostalgic remembrance by older gay writers of an affluent, carefree, pre-AIDS existence. His argument includes a discussion of Monette's poetry, as well as some of the other AIDS-related texts in which consumption and commodities play a central role. See John Clum, "'And Once I Had It All': AIDS Narratives and Memories of an American Dream," in Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis, ed. Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier (New York, 1993), pp. 200-224.
71. Christopher Coe, Such Times (New York, 1993). See also the texts mentioned in Clum.