Kevin Killian

Okay, I admit it. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, when Douglas Crimp was writing all these essays, one every five minutes or so it seemed, these intellectually rigorous essays on culture and AIDS, I might have been one who called him a "Stalinist." I don't have the space to describe the cogent reasons why we, the participants in the Against Nature show (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1991), agreed that its subtitle should be "A Group Show of Homosexual Men," but Crimp found our reasoning not only not cogent, but foolish to the point of evil. But try to understand—back then we bandied about the word "Stalinist" with unthinkable ease and zest to denote those who were merely definite . . . people who were precise, people who would, we knew, eventually be proven correct. Or not. Edmund White was a dear friend one minute, and then he said that humor was verboten in the war against AIDS, so he was a Stalinist; and then he backed off from his stance, and he was pal Ed again—all very clear to me! How could I have known that years later he, Crimp, would still be hurting about this—this slang?

"AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices." Crimp's manifesto "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism," unleashed in a 1987 issue of the journal October, seemed bafflingly mysterious and yet, so simply, true. "If we recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then the hope is that we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them." Crimp's arguments, early on, for a collective, activist-based art over a more "personal, elegiac" expression of loss and mourning struck the art and writing communities with tremendous force. He also gave praise to a few individual artists, notably the avant-garde filmmakers John Greyson and Isaac Julien, two fellows I resented for years after Crimp gave them his thumbs-up. "Fucking guys," I'd mutter, "so brilliant they're the equivalent of collectives all by themselves. . . ."

In Melancholia and Moralism (MIT Press, 2002), Crimp admits to finding value in both kinds of art, the collective and the personal, and even goes so far as to claim that activist art, which lives for the now, depends so completely upon contingency that it loses all meaning as time goes by. This I'm not so sure about. There's a value in agitprop that survives its originary, reactive moment. You might argue that John Lennon's work with Yoko Ono and Elephants' Memory, the reviled Some Time in New York City, has more value than his entire work with the Beatles. The pink and black "Silence = Death" stickers endure, while even as accomplished a painter as Ross Bleckner no longer seems to hold the imagination as he once did a few short years ago, when his personal, elegiac canvases, so elegantly composed of floating symbols of loss and grief, seemed then to signify the future of representation.

For time has moved on: James Cameron's Titanic couldn't have become the overwhelming box office champ without playing to the fears and fantasies of a world crushed by AIDS into a new form of displacement. Cameron's chilly, kitschy wake-up call of a movie, released simultaneously with a new power generation of AIDS drugs, cried out, "You are suffering from a loss so massive you have forgotten you have experienced it!" And now at every funeral you go to it's Celine Dion's spindly, anthemic "My Heart Will Go On" you hear, reaffirming the strength of memory. It's this displacement that Crimp addresses directly in the first and last essays of the book, a psychic state in which gay media mouths like Andrew Sullivan push a neo-conservative agenda that argues for gay marriage and gay service in the military as the burning issues of our time. In Crimp's hands, Andrew Sullivan becomes a straw man, given to pronouncements so ludicrous that it's a wonder anyone takes him seriously; and yet our predicament is that, indeed, yes, just as we all thought George W. Bush such a clown he couldn't be elected, he controls us all and so does, in a smaller way, Andrew Sullivan, too.

The glorious parts of the book remain Crimp's earlier takes on media representations of AIDS, from Nicholas Nixon's upclose portraits of people with AIDS, to Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington cavorting so ludicrously in Jonathan Demme's well-intentioned Philadelphia. He's merciless, takes no prisoners, when he treats the high-minded. Magic Johnson's 1991 withdrawal from the Lakers, his simultaneous disclosure of HIV-positive status, and his subsequent appearances with Arsenio Hall to demonstrate heterosexuality provoked Crimp to some of his most insightful writing. "Every queer remembers the incredulity, disdain, and disguised envy that met early accounts of gay men's numbers of sex partners. Now that the tables are turned" [for Magic had admitted to "accommodating" thousands of women as an NBA superstar and straight slut] "the envy comes out in the open, but it poses a new crisis." Crimp rightfully excoriates the late Randy Shilts, who offered the world the phantom figure of Gaetan Dugas, "Patient Zero," as the "man who brought us AIDS." Cleverly, he demonstrates that Shilts, affecting to write a journalistic non-fiction account of the first five years of the epidemic, was instead writing a television miniseries that borrows from the conventions of the bourgeois novel a villain as depraved as anything in Balzac. And with that French name, too—surprising that Shilts didn't attempt to blame AIDS on Foucault.

And yet Shilts, Arsenio, Jonathan Demme, Nicholas Nixon, all these names from the past are receding quickly into a gray vacuum of pastness. Why does Crimp stop now? It's been years since we've heard a good blast from him. Perhaps the mysteries of his own recent seroconversion have thrown him into melancholia? How does it happen that such a staunch, courageous fighter for AIDS education becomes HIV-positive? "Because I am human," he explains. "Because I have an unconscious." I don't blame him. It's hard to stay alert and righteous 24/7 more than 20 years down the pike, but the pathos of his acknowledgement gives this collected book a sad lambency, à la Walter Pater, a mopey resignation that makes you want to take the author by the neck, hug him, slap him, wake him up, return him to trampling those vineyards.

I want to know what Douglas Crimp makes of, for example, the recent canonization of the late Mark Bingham. Bingham died in the horrible Flight 93 last September 11, on the plane traveling from New York for San Francisco that was commandeered by hijackers and crashed into the ground in western Pennsylvania. Although the plane was San Francisco-bound, the odd thing is that only one passenger—the gay publicist and soccer enthusiast Mark Bingham—actually lived in San Francisco (the others were headed for further destinations or lived in Bay Area suburbs). Immediately, his friends and family guessed that he was one of the "heroes" who took control from the Al Qaeda terrorists. "He was just that kind of guy," they told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bingham's subsequent elevation to heroic status has been one of the most amazing spectacles of media representation I can remember witnessing. Without a scrap of proof, as far as I can see, the testimony of his mother and the staunch recollections of his friends and teammates as to his character have translated into accepted fact. America needs a hero, and gay America needs a gay hero, and so the legend of Mark Bingham was created every bit as facetiously as Randy Shilts once transposed the Canadian airline steward, Gaetan Dugas, into the grinning, maniacal "Patient Zero." The eagerness with which the gay community embraced Bingham's putative heroism, and the cynicism with which Bush and his minions allowed it onto the record, are equally preposterous. What institutions profit? Well, gay rugby, already a sensation of snob appeal in anglophile San Francisco, has gone through the roof here. And our homegrown bear culture (not for nothing was Mark Bingham known as "Bear Trap" among his intimates) and Log Cabin Republicanism ("He was proud to be a Republican," his mother has said) each have a new hero to display. It's just the kind of media event that would have once had Crimp ready with both skewers out—oh, boy, time for a barbecue!

Melancholia and Moralism is a handsome book, though the typos are incredible: Michael Jordon? Evil Knieval? Who copyedits university press books today? Obviously someone who doesn't follow the sports page. Or doesn't read People. The "Michael Jordon" blunder has got to go down as the most egregious instance of the violence of interpellation since theorist Judith Butler misspelled the name of Liza Minnelli in the pages of GLQ. But Butler made the handsomest of apologies—so we're friends again. She's no Stalinist either.

Kevin Killian is a novelist, art writer, playwright, and poet. The author of Argento Series and I Cry Like a Baby, he lives in San Francisco where he edits, with Dodie Bellamy, the long-running literary/art zine they call Mirage #4/ Period[ical].