October 43: AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism

October Books

by Douglas Crimp, Joan Copjec, Rosalind E. Krauss (Editor)

The literature on AIDS has attempted to teach us the "facts" about this new disease or to provide a narrative account of scientific discovery and developing public health policy. But AIDS has precipitated a crisis that is not primarily medical, or even social and political; AIDS has precipitated a crisis of signification the "meaning" of AIDS is hotly contested in all of the discourses that conceptualize it and seek to respond to it. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism is the first book on the subject that takes this battle over meaning as its premise.

Contributors include Leo Bersani, author of The Freudian Body; Simon Watney, who serves on the board of the Health Education Committee of London's Terrence Higgens Trust; Jan Zita Grover, medical editor at San Francisco General Hospital; Suki Ports, former executive director of the New York City Minority Task Force on AIDS; and Sander Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology.

Also included are essays by Paula A. Treichler, who teaches in the Medical School and in communications at the University of Illinois; Carol Leigh, a member of COYOTE and contributor to Sex Work; and Max Navarre, editor of the People With AIDS Coalition monthly Newsline.

In addition to these essays, the book contains a portfolio of manifestos, articles, letters, and photographs from the publications of the PWA Coalition, an interview with three members of the AIDS discrimination unit of the New York City Commission on Human Rights; and presentations for the independent video documentaries on AIDS, Testing the Limits and Bright Eyes.

Douglas Crimp is coeditor of the journal October, art critic, and AIDS activist. An October Book.

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, Queer, College, Sexuality, Gender

Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Douglas Crimp (b. 1944) was an American writer, curator, and art historian. He was professor in art history at the University of Rochester.

Reviews

[Sawyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, every essay in here is a carefully written response to the 1980s media coverage of AIDS. (Largely US media, with the exception of Simon Watney and John Borneman.)

Some highlights from me:

Jan Zita Grover's "AIDS: Keywords": A riff on Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Society, used to chart the evolution of words used repetitively through the early stages of the crisis and contest the assumptions imbued into them. (Ex: "AIDS virus" conflates HIV infection with the terminal stage, equating infection with death.)

Carol Leigh's "Further Violation of Our Rights": Leigh was a member of COYOTE ("Call off Your Old Tired Ethics, a sex worker's advocacy group) and ACT UP. This essay is about the perception of sex workers as vectors for disease, and how the state used this to further encroach on their rights. (At the time mandatory HIV testing for anyone convicted of prostitution had been passed in several states, with some making it a felony for sex workers who are HIV positive to work, even if they are using safe methods, like manual stimulation.

Leo Bersani's "Is the rectum a grave?": This is the essay a lot of scholars point to as being the origin of queer theory. It's dense, funny, and a bit confounding. Impossible to summarize in a few sentences but the part that interested me most was when he talked about MaKinnon and Dworkin, anti-porn feminists, and mocked their rhetorical tactics but also agreed with them that sex is inherently anti-nurturing, anti-communal. For Bersani the ugliness of sex, the anti-egalitarian nature of it, is a boon: "But what if we said, for example, not that it is wrong to think of so-called passive sex as "demeaning," but rather that the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it?"

Douglas Crimp's "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic?": There is a very detailed takedown in here of both Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On) and Larry Kramer (founder of GMHC and playwright of The Normal Heart. At the time this was published Kramer was not associated with ACT UP). Kramer is a trickier figure with a more complicated legacy than Shilts, who was an influential journalist with, unfortunately, a lot of internalized homophobia that he leveraged to become a media star. Both men were very loud critics of gay promiscuity, which is a point of contention for Crimp because it places the blame of HIV on individuals, rather than the government. Crimp would again spar with Larry Kramer in the 90s when he joined the advocacy group Sex Panic, which Kramer maligned in the media by misrepresenting their stance and saying they advocated for unsafe sex practices. (They did not. Sex Panic was a response to conservative 90s gay writers who railed against promiscuity and advocated for gay marriage as a mitigating tactic for disease. Sex Panic's primary goals were education and compassion toward people who had HIV.)

Crimp also outlines, in great detail, how the media's scandalized response to safe sex advocacy in the 80s (they preferred the sex negative, fear-based approach) made it much more difficult to reach people through compassion, where they were more likely to listen.

I think all queer people should read this, of course, and I think you should also pick up Douglas Crimp's Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Crimp's perspective has really moved me, he was an excellent writer and a boon to AIDS activism.

[Vampire Who Baked · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very useful time capsule, equal parts fascinating/grim/infuriating, that serves as a record of how the AIDS epidemic was seen/acted on/reacted to *at the time it was happening*. decades later, now that AIDS is mostly manageable at least in the west, much of the narrative we have is one of grief, resilience and tragedy, and maybe a few ACT UP posters that show up on t shirts now and again. but things were very different when the crisis had just started/was in progress, and it was very illuminating to see how the social and political reaction started with denial, govt reaction was minimization (until heterosexuals started getting infected), led to a solidarity between gay men and lesbians (who used to be more often at odds), and how the community fought back. the book opens with the idea that "AIDS is not a disease" which sounds provocative but what it means is that it was treated societally not as a disease, as a medical/epidemiological issue, but more as a religious program, an inquisition focused on sin and purity rather than health.

on the other hand, the disparate impact of the crisis in the US vs london and other equally dense cities also highlighted how the gay male community itself also made mistakes -- the govt initially focused *only* on safe sex and promiscuity, which led to a justified backlash in the community, but that soon metastasized into the idea that *any* suggestion that people be more disciplined/conscientious in their personal behaviour is morally outrageous and akin to victim blaming and slut shaming. this idea persists within large sections of the gay male community till today in ways that are actively harmful (and also very unique to men -- other parts of the LGBTQIA spectrum do not have this angst at all).

reading this in 2026, the parallels with covid are the best part of the book. there are the usual suspects of govt ineptitude and the initial sense of denial, not just in the administration as well as in society itself, followed by fear and ostracism of patients, etc. especially the fact that social isolation was the first layer of defense against both AIDS and covid.

however, i couldn't help but notice how the political script had flipped -- unlike the 80s when it was a right wing govt pushing for personal responsibility and discipline, and a grassroots left-wing outrage pushing back against it, during covid it was a left wing govt promoting social distancing and isolation (even to a point where it was totally unnecessary, e.g. meeting outdoors) with a right wing grassroots pushback against govt overreach, including the refusal to wear masks as a political act (rhyming with the refusal to use condoms also pushed as a political act?)

overall, somewhat unnecessarily academic at times (which is what humanities grads were trained by derrida et al to be, unnecessarily obfuscatory) but it's a very interesting read.