Not-about-AIDS

GLQ

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-28

  Román, David ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646712202     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-6-1-1     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Andrew Sullivan, "When AIDS Ends," New York Times Magazine, 10 November 1996, 1.
2. The title of Sullivan's essay shifts from the magazines cover title, "When AIDS Ends," to an internal title, "When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epidemic." Further confusion results from the magazines cover graphic, which highlights Sullivan's text and the phrase "the end of AIDS." Chip Kidd, who designed the cover, explains that "the prose was so strong that it became key" (Janet Froelich, "Cover Boy: Interview with Chip Kidd," New York Times Magazine, 10 November 1996, 51).
3. My reference to Sullivan's essay follows the magazine's cover title and byline "'When AIDS Ends' by Andrew Sullivan." For a full discussion of this image and Sullivan's essay see Phillip Brian Harper, "Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations of Public Exchange: Notes on Directions for Queer Critique," Social Text, nos. 52-53 (1997): 5-29.
4. Eric Rofes also discusses Sullivan's essay and the discrepancies in his title in Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Posi-AIDS Identities and Cultures (New York: Haworth, 1998).
5. Rofes points out that yet another phrase - "After AIDS" - is used in the layout of the printed pages of the essay. He also includes a discussion of Newsweek's "The End of AIDS?" cover image and article and responses to these essays from gay and lesbian writers whom I do not discuss here.
6. See Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe. This book is marked by a vision of gay culture that is much more expansive than that of most contemporary gay male commentators. Rofes considers the experiences of many of those who are often left out of the profile of what passes for gay male community: queer youth and queer elders, gays who live outside urban centers, and gay men of color.
7. Michaelangelo Signorile, "641,086 and Counting," Out, September 1998, 72.
8. Larry Kramer, "1,112 and Counting," New York Native, 14-27 March 1983.
9. See also Kramer's own account of this essay in Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), 50-51.
10. Signorile, "641,086 and Counting," 188.
11. While fear may force people to pay attention to AIDS in the short run, it has not been very successful as the basis of an HIV prevention campaign (see Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS [Durham: Duke University Press, 1995]).
12. Nevertheless, Signorile argues for the return of fear in a prevention campaign directed at gay men in "Don't Fear the Fear," Advocate, 13 April 1999, 51-55.
13. Harper, "Gay Male Identities," 8.
14. But see also Cathy J. Cohen's important new book, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), in which she argues that with the arrival of protease inhibitors a new racist discourse has emerged in the popular media around the question of access: "It seems that protease inhibitor therapies require great discipline, since a patient's medication must be taken, in some cases, every eight hours on an empty stomach. Further, without strict adherence to the defined regime with regard to the medication, it is possible that a virus resistant to these drugs might develop and spread. Thus the question of which patients or people with AIDS have 'enough discipline' to receive these new therapies is now a central part of a new generation of AIDS reporting. Journalists are openly discussing and writing about who should be allowed such treatment" (184).
15. Harper, "Gay Male Identities," 8.
16. In Love Undetectable Sullivan revisits his earlier essay, admitting that the hostile response to it from many gay men "took my breath away." In an effort to clarify his "When AIDS Ends" claims, Sullivan writes: "This end, of course, was laden with paradox. As the plague relented in one world, it was busy redoubling its might in another, in countries far away, and against people who had nothing with which to counter it" (Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival [New York: Knopf, 1998], 33).
17. Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe, 72.
18. Harper, "Gay Male Identities," 27.
19. Mario Cooper, "Two Nations under Plague," POZ, January 1999, 20.
20. Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness, 113.
21. Elizabeth Shogren, "Clinton to Boost Minority AIDS Funding," Los Angeles Times, 28 October 1998, A9.
22. See Liz Galst, "Check in the Mail?" POZ, December 1998, 42. Galst provides accounts from various ASOs on the decline in AIDS philanthropy.
23. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the Georgetown University/Johns Hopkins University Program on Law and Public Health and member of the advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quoted in Lynda Richardson, "Wave of Laws Aimed at People with HIV," New York Times, 25 September 1998, A1.
24. Sean Strub, "S.O.S.," POZ, December 1998, 13.
25. The cultural repercussions of this shift in the lesbian and gay movement as it relates to gay marriage are detailed by Michael Warner, for whom the most urgent concerns include attacks on queer sexual culture and the isolation of queer counterpublics from "national organizations, magazines, and publics." Warner claims in the end that "any argument for gay marriage requires an intensified concern for what is thrown into its shadow" ("Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage," GLQ 5 [1999]: 159). AIDS, I argue, is one of the issues thrown into this shadow.
26. See David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
27. See, e.g., Jane C. Desmond, "Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies," in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 29-54,
28. as well as the important essays in this volume by Susan Leigh Foster, Norman Bryson, and Randy Martin, who each argue the critical interdisciplinarity possibilities of dance studies. See also Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997);
29. Susan Leigh Foster, ed., Choreographing History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
30. Alberto Sandoval and I write on this process in "Caught in the Web: Latinidad, AIDS, and Allegory in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Musical" in Delgado and Muñoz, Everynight Life, 255-87.
31. My discussion of these works is based in part on performances I saw of Still/Here in 1994 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and of Not-About-AIDS-Dance in 1994 at the Kitchen, a theater in New York City. I also saw Greenberg's Disco Project at the Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica in 1995 and his complete trilogy, comprising these two works and Part Three, at Playhouse 91 in New York City in 1998. I saw Jones's We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor at Royce Hall in Los Angeles in 1998. I am indebted to the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company for photographs and press packets and to Dance by Neil Greenberg for photographs, videos, and press packets.
32. Bill T. Jones with Peggy Gillespie, Last Night on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 252.
33. Identity issues, as Gay Morris points out, have been evident throughout Jones's career ("What He Called Himself: Issues of Identity in Early Dances by Bill T. Jones," in Dancing Desires, ed. Jane C. Desmond [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming]).
34. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 194.
35. Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land was performed in over thirty-five cities, and Jones was never quite sure how these questions would be answered.
36. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 220.
37. Jones, Last Night on Earth, Ibid., 250.
38. The actual Advocate quote reads as follows: "Even now, I would like to have straight men in my company, but I worry if I could trust them. There's a stigma associated with our company because someone in it died of AIDS and because I'm HIV-positive. I want to get on with my life and deal with my artistic collaborators, but I still expect someone to scorn me. I find that most people are curious to know what AIDS is like, but they are scared too" (Douglas Sadownick, "The Dancer Speaks Out," Advocate, 27 February 1990, 38).
39. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that Jones's artistic success is due to his HIV status and his ethnicity. In a New Yorker profile Henry Louis Gates Jr. quotes a critic who states that "the reason he's getting so many awards so soon is that people aren't gambling on his surviving: they're giving it to him now." Gates further reports that "it is clearly a commonplace, albeit usually an unspoken one, that the fact that Jones is both HIV-positive and black has more than a little to do with his having received so many laurels so early in his career" ("The Body Politic," New Yorker, 28 November 1994, 124). In 2000 the irony of these claims is self-evident. In 1994, however, they conveyed the sense of urgency surrounding HIV/AIDS, even if the claim about Jones's success makes little sense. If HIV-positive black gay artists are the new darlings of the elite media, how is it that no other artists are named in Gates's essay or in the larger cultural discourse of the period? Leaving aside the implications of tokenism, such comments displace attention from the artistic work and set up Jones - and other artists with HIV - as undeserving of the critical acclaim they may receive.
40. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 259.
41. Arlene Croce, "A Critic at Bay: Discussing the Undiscussable" New Yorker, 26 December 1994, 54, 60.
42. For responses to Croce's condemning rhetoric see Richard Goldstein, "The Croce Criterion," Village Voice, 3 January 1995, 8;
43. Deborah Jowitt, "Critic as Victim," Village Voice, 10 January 1995, 67;
44. Frank Rich, "Dance of Death," New York Times, 8 January 1995, A19;
45. and, last but not least, letters from Tony Kushner, bell hooks, and others in the New Yorker itself, 30 January 1995, 10-13. For a context in which to place Still/Here see my collaboration with Tim Miller, "Preaching to the Converted," Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 169-88.
46. The bibliography on Jones is impressive. For the dance context see Marcia B. Siegel, "Virtual Criticism and the Dance of Death," in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 247-61;
47. Jennifer Brody, "Opening Sequences," in Desmond, Dancing Desires;
48. Morris, "What He Called Himself."
49. For studies that place Jones's work in African American cultural contexts see Maurice Wallace, "The Autochoreography of an Ex-Snow Queen: Dance, Desire, and the Black Masculine in Melvin Dixon's Vanishing Rooms" in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 379-400;
50. Sharon Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
51. Siegel, "Virtual Criticism," 249.
52. For an excellent introduction to Greenberg's career see Rick Whitaker and Don Daniels, "A Conversation with Neil Greenberg," Ballet Review, spring 1997, 1-12.
53. David Gere, "How to Make Dance during an Epidemic" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1998).
54. Leigh Witchel, "Neil Greenberg's Trilogy: A Survivor's Tale," Ballet Review, fall 1998.
55. Since then Greenberg has choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project and premiered This Is What Happened, a "dance-noir trio, set to Hitchcock film music by Bernard Herrmann," at New York City's Performance Space 122 in the spring of 1999.
56. In the summer of 1999 Jones collaborated with Jessye Norman in How! Do! We! Do! as part of the New Visions series produced at Lincoln Center, and he premiered Out Some Place, a full-company dance, at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Both Greenberg and Jones danced at these events.
57. Karen Campbell, "Dance: Choreographer Jones Sheds New Light on 'Visibility,'" Boston Herald, 31 May 1998, 39;
58. Lewis Segal, "Clarity of Vision in Visibility Was Poor" Los Angeles Times, 11 May 1998, F3;
59. Elizabeth Zimmer, "The Word from Bill T. Jones: He's Moving beyond Words," New York Times, 4 October 1998, sec. 2, 12.
60. Zimmer, "Word from Bill T. Jones," 12.
61. Rohan Preston, "Bill T.'s Exultant Adventure," Minneapolis Star Tribune, 25 September 1998, E1.
62. Jennifer Fisher, "Q and A: Bill T. Jones; Moved to Seek a Connection," Los Angeles Times, 6 May 1998, F1.
63. Preston, "Bill T.'s Exultant Adventure."
64. Fisher, "Q and A."
65. AIDS is not the only topic that Greenberg addresses in his solos. The second solo, for example, announces that "last summer I fell in love."
66. Greenberg has explained to me that he was running a fever during the final performances of the trilogy in 1998.
67. Ann Daly, "A Chronicle Faces Death and Celebrates Life," New York Times, 29 March 1998, sec. 2, 52.
68. Ann Daly, "A Chronicle Faces Death and Celebrates Life," New York Times, 1998, 52. Ibid.
69. Others in the performing arts are also exploring a new creative vocabulary. While this essay specifically concerns only two artists, Jones and Greenberg, I do not mean to present them as norms in terms of their health issues or artistic concerns or even their public responses to AIDS. Nor do I intend to position them against each other, as if the response of one were to be valued over that of the other. Instead, I am interested in the work that artists with HIV are creating. I discuss another dancer-choreographer, Paul Timothy Diaz, whose work Dia de los vivos (1996)
70. both conjures and revises Day of the Dead rituals, in my essay "Latino Performance and Identity," Aztlan 22 (1997): 151-68.
71. For a full-scale study of AIDS and dance see Gere, "How to Make Dance during an Epidemic."
72. Finally, my research focuses on gay male artists and AIDS; for new literature on women and AIDS see the excellent anthology Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS, ed. Nancy L. Roth and Katie Hogan (New York: Routledge, 1998).
73. Mike Steele, "Prolific Dancer Greenberg Comes with New Work," Minneapolis Star Tribune, 1 March 1998, F1.