by Dale Peck
To offer the barest-bones outline of Bersani’s readings: from Gide’s The Immoralist, he built an argument against being “a good citizen” if you’re a homosexual—of, in fact, the very impossibility of being a good citizen, assuming we capitulate to a Gidean model of what Bersani called “intimacies devoid of intimacy.” In Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, with its extensive and uncritical exploration of the idea that male homosexuality is the condition of a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body, Bersani found a “dance of essences” in which “the multiplication and crisscrossing of gender identifications … defeats any cultural securities about what it might mean to be a man or a woman.” And finally, in Genet’s Funeral Rites, Bersani saw proof of the view of history that believes (pessimistically, if not simply conservatively) that any overtly political move replicates the institutions of power it seeks to overthrow with identically “oppressive conditions.” The evidence, then (selective as even Bersani admitted it was), seemed to argue in favor of the “revolutionary inaptitude” of homosexual desire for “heteroized sociality” that Bersani talked about back in 1987, although this came across not as tautological but as a kind of making good on an earlier bluff: Bersani had laid his aces on the table. But what prize was he claiming?
Taken collectively, Gide, Proust, and Genet’s novels formed the core of a canon that, in Bersani’s reading, offered glimpses of an escape from the tyranny of “the self,” which Bersani saw as “the precondition for registration and service as a citizen.” “Personhood,” Bersani told readers, is “a status that the law needs in order to discipline us and, it must be added, to protect us.” This self or personhood seems to bear the same relationship to consciousness as the puppet does to its invisible master—save that, in Bersani’s model, the puppet has the real power, by limiting the master’s expressions and actions to those he can transmit through his wires to the puppet’s facsimile of a body. Ostensibly nothing more than a middleman between society and the unquantifiable array of cognitive processes it was created to represent—i.e., consciousness, for lack of a more specific term—the self, like a modern multinational bank, has grown so large that its own concerns have come to dominate both the internal and external realities it mediates. Hence all psychic and social activity will ultimately be in its service rather than a community’s—selfish, in the simplest locution, rather than selfless. (And yes, I’m aware I switched from a fairly extended conceit about puppets to a second one about banking in the middle of that explanation: such are the prerogatives of the self, which cares not a whit for Aristotelian aesthetic unities.)
In his 1990 book The Culture of Redemption, Bersani rejected the idea of art’s redemptive power based on a Freudian notion of the origins of art, arguing that art should not be used to redeem the things of the real world for the simple reason that it cannot. Bersani’s notion of homosexuality, though “problematized,” as we said so often in the eighties and nineties, was equally, indeed resolutely, Freudian. For Bersani, homosexual desire is a turning away from the other toward the same, and an identity based on this turning-away must, by rights, be equally asocial. “Art perhaps knows nothing but such confused beginnings,” Bersani wrote with Ulysse Dutoit in Arts of Impoverishment, “and in pushing us back to them it beneficently mocks the accumulated wisdom of culture.” But as Tony Kushner pointed out in his opening address at OutWrite, in order to mock the accumulated wisdom of culture you must first be part of it. These tensions—between the desires to destroy and to create, between the explicit desire to be asocial and the implicit recognition that any work of art is inevitably social—produced the occasional shrill note in Homos, such as his pan of Angels in America, and these shrill notes, as I said, became revelatory to me, particularly the last and most significant of them, when Bersani asked his readers to contemplate Genet’s love of Nazism as a model for their own behavior. (Yes, you read that correctly.) In Genet’s Nazi worship, Bersani saw “an unqualified will to destroy” that created “a myth of absolute betrayal—the betrayal of all human ties,” and he arrived at this conclusion through an exegesis that must be experienced to be appreciated:
This is not a political program. Just as Genet’s fascination with what he outrageously calls the beauty of Nazism is in no way a plea for the specific goals pursued by Nazi Germany, Erik and Riton are positioned for a reinventing of the social without any indication about how such a reinvention might proceed historically or what face it might have. Funeral Rites does nothing more—but I think it’s a great deal—than propose the fantasmatic conditions of possibility for such a proceeding. It insists on the continuity between the sexual and the political, and while this superficially glorifies Nazism as the system most congenial to a cult of male power justified by little more than male beauty, it also transforms the historical reality of Nazism into a mythic metaphor for a revolutionary destructiveness which would surely dissolve the rigidly defined sociality of Nazism itself. Still, the metaphoric suitability of Hitler’s regime for this project can hardly be untroubling. It reminds us only too clearly that Genet’s political radicalism is congruent with a proclaimed indifference to human life as well as a willingness to betray every tie and every trust between human beings. This is the evil that becomes Genet’s good, and, as if that were not sufficiently noxious, homosexuality is enlisted as the prototype of relations that break with humanity, that elevate infecundity, waste, and sameness to requirements for the production of pleasures. ¶ There may be only one reason to tolerate, even to welcome, Funeral Rites’s rejection (at once exasperated and clownish] of relationality: without such a rejection, social revolt is doomed to repeat the oppressive conditions that provoked the revolt.
If you separated Bersani’s message from its “mythic metaphor”—which, while perfectly acceptable within traditional liberal discourse when acknowledged as metaphor, was also kind of distracting with its talk of “superficially” glorifying Nazis—what you had was a pretty straightforward (if almost decadently refined) act of interpretation in which art is used as the basis for an experience that inflicts the same kind of anti-epiphany on the self that Genet sought in sex. But lurking behind this professed love of destruction is the phoenix-like notion that from disintegration, reintegration always occurs, and that what is newly made will be in some way stronger than what it replaces. Art is, in other words, redemptive: there’s no other word for it. As it happens, I share this phoenix-like conception of both sex and art, but I also think that successful reintegration after disintegration is not a given. It has to be acknowledged, and this Bersani refused to do, perhaps because he realized that to undertake self-consciously the process of self-immolation is to risk dousing the flame before it’s burned everything away. By admitting that you don’t actually desire permanent disintegration, you may attempt to simulate it in the effort of sparing yourself the pain that is the inevitable and, unfortunately, necessary collateral of any serious attempt to recreate the self, let alone society.
But this, I think, was not the real source of the shrill notes in Homos. What really bothered Bersani—or, at least, what bothered me—was the unarticulated, unacknowledged, yet unavoidable conclusion that even a partial “redefinition” of sociality, let alone “a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself,” could only be accomplished at the expense of every person living with HIV and every person who might become infected before our old selves, both as individuals and as a culture, had been destroyed and remade, and possibly even after. It takes institutions to fight an epidemic: medical, scientific, above all political, but it was precisely these kinds of bureaucracies that Bersani’s “revolutionary” program sought to destroy. And what would a world in which “relationality” has been “rejected” look like? None of the authors Bersani cited gives us any real idea what to look (let alone work) for: “The Immoralist,” Bersani admitted, “has nothing to tell us about such a society,” and, similarly, Funeral Rites offers no “indication about how such a reinvention might proceed historically or what face it migh
t have.” Proust “does sketch the outlines of a community grounded in a desire indifferent to the established sanctity of personhood,” but all Bersani told readers about this “community” was that “the person disappears in his or her desire, a desire that seeks more of the same, partially dissolving subjects by extending them into a communal homo-ness.” In other words, Proust doesn’t tell us much either. It’s tempting to say that what this world most looks like is a gay sex club, but if that’s the case then it’s a club along the lines of Gabriel Rotello’s “AIDS killing grounds” rather than a haven of “brotherly” love. But even the idea of an institution in which all this self-destroying sex can take place would have botched the experiment—would, as such clubs did in 1975 and 1985 and 1995, albeit in very different ways in each of these signal moments, provide a psychologically safe space in which the flesh is mortified even as the psyche is given a respite from the relentless homophobia that exists beyond the clubs’ doors. In fact it seemed that what you really needed was a place like 924 N. 25th St., #213, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53233, i.e., the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer, in which twelve gay men found their personhood “partially dissolved” in a vat of acid before Dahmer flushed them down the toilet.
Is this—to use one of Bersani’s favorite words to describe an argument he considers to have been pushed to a kitschy extreme—“bitchy”? Probably. But how was one supposed to respond rationally to a call for queers to cease caring for one another as a first step toward a utopian project that the author himself couldn’t or wouldn’t describe? This was 1995, remember: a year in which 50,000 Americans died from AIDS and 200,000 more were trying not to. A year in which AIDS activism had run of out of ideas, AIDS fatigue had become entrenched in queer life, and AIDS research appeared from the outside to be at a standstill. And, for me, it was also the year in which I came to understand how completely AIDS circumscribed the body, not just as a material entity, but an imagined one. It was in 1995 that I finally realized that to write about sex without mentioning AIDS was merely that: to write about sex without mentioning AIDS. AIDS was still there; it was merely unsaid. To set a work of fiction in some pre- or post-AIDS utopia was as much a comment on AIDS’s stifling power as anything else, and the same held true for a work of nonfiction that derived its ethos from “the glorious pre-AIDS years” of the first half of the twentieth century while simultaneously casting its gaze forward, to a twenty-first century in which AIDS was magically absent—which objective was also at play when groups like Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists did everything they could, not to promote safe sex, but to eliminate sexual contact between HIV-positive and HIV-negative people, and talked about AIDS “dying out” as the incidence of infection decreased. And though I know that Bersani was aware of these mundane yet crucial truths, it was still clear that he had set them aside. He had failed—like those “good Germans” with whom he admonished Edwin Meese in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” who by their silence provided tacit approval for the Holocaust—to find AIDS unbearable. He had, unintentionally or otherwise, given in to the creeping thanatos that after fifteen years, not just of plague but of “innocuously … significan[t]” cultural production about the plague, had spread from the individual to the cultural level. Bersani had offered a novel and in many ways appealing strategy for a revolution to dismantle the oppressive systems of patriarchy and capital. All we had to do was fuck our lives away.
12
When I wrote the first version of this section of this essay, in 1995, I closed it with:
One wants at the very least to be able to write about AIDS as Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the bombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five: “It begins like this: Listen,” and “It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet?” But we don’t have our befuddled anthropomorphized bird, confused by the things humans do. We don’t have the words “It ends.” Our bombs have not yet stopped falling.
As it turned out I was wrong about that too—at least according to Andrew Sullivan, who, in an essay entitled “When Plagues End,” which appeared in the Nov. 10, 1996 issue of the New York Times Magazine, proclaimed “the end of AIDS,” and dismissed with beneficent condescension those who “find it hard to accept that this ordeal as a whole may be over” (my intentionally cunty italics). For Sullivan, AIDS was—pardon me, had been—a gay plague, “a quintessentially homosexual experience,” and though he acknowledged that “the vast majority of HIV-positive people in the world, and a significant minority in America, will not have access to the expensive and effective new drug treatments,” their suffering was, as a whole, of a different order to that of the gay friends whose capsule biographies punctuate his essay. AIDS, Sullivan informed us, had been “a natural calamity, singling out a group of despised outsiders by virtue of a freak of nature” rather than a straightforward viral epidemic whose appearance in the gay community had been foreshadowed in the outbreaks of a plethora of STDs throughout the 1970s, and whose initial impact was magnified a thousandfold by the homophobically motivated disregard of the government, media, medical establishment, and general population. Of the pre-AIDS, pre–safe sex lifestyle that served, quite literally, as the breeding grounds for disease, Sullivan seemed only obliquely and then disparagingly conscious: “Responsibility,” he wrote, is not a word “one usually associated with homosexuality”:
Before AIDS, gay life—rightly or wrongly—was identified with freedom from responsibility, rather than with its opposite. Gay liberation was most commonly understood as liberation from the constraints of traditional norms, almost a dispensation that permitted homosexuals the absence of responsibility in return for an acquiescence in second-class citizenship. This was the Faustian bargain of the pre-AIDS closet: straights gave homosexuals a certain amount of freedom; in return, homosexuals gave away their self-respect.
“Freedom from responsibility” in a world in which one’s sexuality was illegal and one’s right to assemble and express oneself was routinely denied? “Liberation from the constraints of traditional norms” when exposure as a homosexual could mean the loss of one’s job, one’s home, one’s liberty, one’s life? “Homosexuals gave away their self-respect” because they found a way to have fun (and sex) in a manner that wasn’t sanctified by a revisionist interpretation of Judeo-Christian norms? Even in 1996, Sullivan’s version of gay history seemed based almost entirely on the “murderous representations of homosexuals unleashed and ‘legitimized’ by AIDS” that Leo Bersani had deplored nine years earlier—based not on the events of the previous fifteen years, but on the “stigma and the guilt and the fear” Sullivan told readers he felt about being gay, and the “shame” he felt at having contracted HIV. In sharp contrast to the writers Bersani accused of idealizing pre-AIDS gay life, Sullivan swung the opposite direction, demonizing it as a nonstop party that, in the wake of combination therapy, he saw being “repeated as farce” in the form of circuit parties and “as tragedy” in the form of sex clubs. Thus the reason that “many of us find it hard to accept that this ordeal as a whole may be over” was because “we may now be required to relent from our clenching against the future and remember—and give meaning to—the past.”
This analysis of the “psychological roots” of gay men’s response to the advent of combination therapy said in essence that the first fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic had no “meaning” other than what might retroactively be ascribed to it, and went on to tell readers that giving “meaning” to the past is merely a question of representing it with the future in mind—or rather a future, the one that Sullivan was attempting to conjure into being with his words. Here, then, was the right way to write about AIDS—not by bucking the trend of familiarization, but by accelerating it. Not by urging readers to work for the end of the epidemic, but by informing them that—thanks to their efforts!—it was already over. In Sullivan’s revision of the American plague, TAG is a group whose only quality is its “skepticism,” while ACT UP is nothing more than a “dark, memorable flash of activism” born of “decades of euphemism and self-loa
thing.” The “end of AIDS” had been initiated not by these AIDS activists but, rather, by America (and by “America” Sullivan clearly doesn’t mean its queer citizenry): “America might have responded the way many Latin American and Asian countries responded,” Sullivan wrote of the nation whose president didn’t mention the epidemic in public until Sept. 17, 1985, whose acting press secretary regularly chuckled when asked about AIDS, and whose executive branch, in 1987, banned HIV-positive people from entering its borders (which prohibition Sullivan lived in violation of until Barack Obama repealed it on October 30, 2009): “with almost complete silence and denial.” But perhaps the most startling thing about the “meaning” Sullivan ascribed to the (now vanquished) epidemic was the magnification of the gay plague in America—which by the time Sullivan wrote had already been revealed as a footnote to a global catastrophe—into the central fact of the epidemic, whereas the “vast majority of HIV-positive people in the world” were mere statistical phenomena, lives and deaths to whom was denied the redemptive, revisionist “meaning” with which Sullivan privileged his own experience.
In his 1994 review of Schindler’s List, J. Hoberman wrote: “Leave it to Steven Spielberg to make a feel-good movie entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience.” Sullivan achieves what I would have thought was a similarly impossible feat in “When Plagues End,” somehow making me resent the quote-privileged-unquote status of the western gay man with AIDS, and the ownership some gay men took of the epidemic—without which the “expensive and effective new drug treatments” that, eighteen years later, still remain out of reach for “the vast majority of HIV-positive people in the world, and a significant minority in America,” would likely not have existed until many years after they did. In 1990, in The Body and Its Dangers—the only book he lived to write—Allen Barnett surmised that the world would be divided into “HIVs” and “HIV-nots.” It turns out, however, that the camps are, as they’ve always been, the haves and have-nots: almost two decades after Sullivan made the case that the life of a gay American man (or gay Brit living in America) is worth more than the life of a straight African, or straight African-American for that matter, the western world seems to have acquiesced to his view of the situation. About which one more quote: “The record of humanity is a record of sorrows.” This is the hapless cuckold John Dowell in The Good Soldier, whose maxim is given in willful ignorance of another truism about history, namely, that it’s written by the victors, whose privilege it is to give “meaning” to the past—to, in the final analysis, decide when the past is indeed passed. If the bombs won’t stop falling, change the channel on the war.