The Explanation For Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

3. End Pleasure

3 End Pleasure Life magazine, September 1985: “AIDS was given a face everyone could recognize when it was announced that Rock Hudson, 59, was suffering from the disease.” Some twelve thousand of the already sick (by the official 1985 count) had to find representation in that face; for the six thousand already dead (and still counting), it was too late. And today, that face denotes only AIDS: The faceless disease now has a face. But it is not the ruggedly handsome face of Giant or Magnificent Obsession or even Pillow Talk that will be Rock Hudson’s greatest legacy. Instead, that legacy will be the gaunt, haggard face of those poignant [for whom?] last days.1 This might seem homophobic enough, but it does scant justice to a “legacy” that denies even the “instead,” the caesura between the “ruggedly handsome” and the “haggard” face. The contemporary response to the spectacle of Rock Hudson’s once normative masculinity—the love scenes are now met with knowing laughter and smirks—argues a haggard face that retroactively structures the handsome one, a culture that alleges to see the gay death skull beneath the youthful skin. AIDS is not, then, simply the cause of Hudson’s death, but the belatedly revealed truth of his life: the role Hudson can no longer play, 54 if only because he once played it with such dexterity, is that of a heterosexual. The laughter is the purely defensive response of a homophobic culture to the knowledge that here (as elsewhere) its normative spectacle of heterosexual masculinity was (and frequently is) a gay man. The “legacy” of Rock Hudson is still with us, a decade and a half later, and it presupposes a cultural context in which AIDS continues to be received—its changing demographics be damned—as what D. A. Miller calls “the narrative of gayness ,” subjective and objective genitive.2 More precisely, AIDS is received as the revenge of narrative on gayness, the assimilation of the “homosexual” to the fully satisfying teleology that, in a Freudian technology of self-fashioning and selfknowledge , he is said to resist. It was once conventional to speak of AIDS as “an epidemic of signification”; Thomas Yingling, for instance, characterized it as “profoundly unimaginable, as beyond the bounds of sense . . . an epidemic almost literally unthinkable in its mathematical defeat of cognitive desire.”3 And, in one sense, so it is, so it remains. But this is to assume—and it is an assumption in which gays and lesbians participate at their own peril—that our culture finds genocide unthinkable, little less unpracticable, and that it construes the lives of perverts as nonexpendable. AIDS is related to a phenomenon “almost literally unthinkable in its mathematical defeat of cognitive desire,” but in the mode of resolution or reconstitution. The pandemic has resolved, rather than occasioned, a crisis in signification, the crisis that has always been gay sexuality itself. Consider the discrepancy between the medical formulation and the cultural phantasmagoric: AIDS is defined clinically as the appearance of specific opportunistic infections “in a previously healthy individual,” but to contract AIDS, as Cindy Patton notes, is to relinquish any claim to a prior state of psychosexual health.4 Susan Sontag distinguishes between the poetics of cancer, which “is first of all a disease of the body’s geography,” and AIDS, which “depends upon constructing a temporal sequence of events.”5 Yet if the latter evinces a “natural” or “proper” affinity, as Lessing might say, with the temporal art of narrative, it is for reasons that are fully ideological, not simply prognostic or epidemiological. The cultural function of AIDS has been to stabilize, through a specifically narrative or novelistic logic, the “truth” of gay identity as death or death wish. Every gay man living with AIDS is Dorian Gray come again, and the pandemic realizes the promise of Wilde’s novel, of the novelistic itself. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily,” and the final fulfillment of the ethical distinction is written on the face. AIDS is somatic outing, the final, fully legible spectacle of a hitherto occluded depravity. END PLEASURE 55 Or if not somatic outing, then ersatz heterosexuality, virtual normality: every gay man is threatened with the face he deserves, but for that reason alone the pandemic provides the occasion for reflecting on the errors of their ways, the lethal wages of their...