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Journal of the History of Sexuality 11.3 (2002) 533-536



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Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity. By SIMON WATNEY. London: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xii + 282. $85.00 (cloth); $25.99 (paper).

Most American gay men know more about the comings and goings of the British royal family than about the lives of ordinary British queers. That [End Page 533] we know anything at all about gay life in Britain can be credited, in large part, to Simon Watney. A longtime cultural and art critic, art historian, and director of the Red Hot AIDS Charitable Trust, Watney is the author of dozens of influential books and articles, many of which have been published in the United States, about gay life and AIDS on both sides of the Atlantic. Imagine Hope is Watney's second collection of essays about AIDS and a welcome addition for readers who may have had difficulty keeping track of his many writings. His first collection, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS, included pieces written between 1986 and 1992. Imagine Hope ostensibly takes us through the 1990s, although only four of the thirty essays, including an introduction and conclusion written specifically for this volume, appeared after 1996.

Much transpired in the lives of British and American queers between 1992 and 2000, as Watney's volume makes clear, and his collection focuses on several recurring themes, not the least of which is the role AIDS has played in the transformation of gay identity, especially among young people. Watney pays particular attention to the successful effort by gay activists to "regay" AIDS, a move necessitated by poorly designed educational programs that targeted an imagined "general population" instead of the especially hard-hit gay male community, and he critiques the tendency among some activists to reduce years of thinking about the "politics of representation" into the belief that AIDS activism might begin and end with eliminating offensive expressions such as "AIDS victim." Other essays decry the disproportionate media attention afforded to "cranks" (112) who insist that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and the book repeatedly criticizes the early 1990s movement of American AIDS activism away from treatment work and toward a general left-wing politics geared to lessening the oppression of numerous constituencies.

While he needed no excuse to publish his generally engaging essays, Watney announces in the introduction to Imagine Hope that the collection responds to a growing consensus that the epidemic is essentially over, given an imagined drop in the number of infections, the presumed discovery of a cure, and a relatively unscathed heterosexual population. He identifies the prolific journalist Andrew Sullivan, well known to American readers of the New York Times Magazine, as an especially dangerous proponent of such hype. Sullivan, he notes, "routinely reports his own comparatively good health as if this represents the course of the entire global epidemic. No wonder public opinion has been so confused, as reflected in a 1999 MORI [Market & Opinion Research International] poll which suggested that one in five British adults think there is an available cure for AIDS" (4).

Academics also come under attack in Imagine Hope, nowhere more so than in "Lesbian and Gay Studies in the Age of AIDS." Originally published in a 1998 collection, the essay takes the field of queer studies to task [End Page 534] for a number of shortcomings, including what Watney claims is its general aversion to research on AIDS. Watney's argument here seems a bit exaggerated, as a number of excellent books on AIDS and culture have appeared over the last decade; nonetheless, his insistence that research on AIDS education, prevention, treatment, and epidemiology should be considered an integral part of gay and lesbian studies—and should be read by scholars claiming to be queer studies practitioners—will come as a surprise to some, given the dominance of the field by humanities faculty working on theoretical topics.

Watney reserves his harshest criticism, however, for what he views as a queer studies community "increasingly hostile to the very idea of community-based lesbian and...

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