Nationalizing the Gay Body: AIDS and Sentimental Pedagogy in Philadelphia

There is only one scene in Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme's widely acclaimed 1993 film about AIDS, that alludes to the war of position against Reaganism in which militant AIDS activists engaged throughout the 1980s. The scene opens with a close-up of a demonstrator holding a poster with the virulently homophobic caption "AIDS Cures Homosexuality." As a policeman on a motorcycle pulls up in the background, the camera tracks to the right,revealing more demonstrators who, separated by police barricades, shout angrily at each other. Underscoring how deeply divided the demonstrators are over the issue of homosexuality, the camera then tracks the policeman as he walks between the barricades to the courthouse, where opening arguments in the antidiscrimination lawsuit on which the film centers have just ended. Appropriately, on the right are demonstrators with posters that allude to Reaganism's homophobic cultural politics. Their captions, "AIDS Cures Homosexuality" and "Got AIDS Yet?" exploit the association between homosexuality and disease that lesbian and gay activists had managed to overturn in the 1970s but that AIDS revived. On the left are demonstrators who assert their views no less vociferously. Because they occupy what is symbolically an oppositional political space, one might expect their posters to evoke the sophisticated graphics created by ACT UP and other militant AIDS activist groups precisely to counter the sort of genocidal fantasies expressed by the other demonstrators. But their posters make reference neither to AIDS nor to homosexuality; instead, they have the politically opaque captions "Human Rights for Everyone" and "We Are Not Victims." Clearly designed to avoid controversy, the posters make these supposedly left-wing demonstrators appear much more reasonable than the right-wing ones whose views on homosexuality seem extremist by comparison.

In having the benign-looking demonstrators on the left stand in for the militant AIDS activist movement, whose confrontational, in-your-face political style alienated even many lesbians and gays, this scene makes legible the film's political unconscious. Its representation of the political struggle that erupted in the 1980s over gay rights in the wake of the AIDS crisis remaps the terrain on which that struggle was carried out. It represses the militant AIDS activist movement that emerged partly in response to the scapegoating of gay men on which Reaganite nationalism depended so heavily and puts in its place a discourse of civil rights that is less threatening to the liberal pluralistic framework of American political culture. This substitution suggests that AIDS militancy functions as the film's "absent cause," or that which it cannot acknowledge without disrupting its own narrative logic. ¹ The form of activism developed by AIDS activists, which I examine below, not only competes with the judicial activism offered by the film as the most effective response to Reaganite homophobia, but its example threatens to reveal the inadequacies of a strategy privileged by liberals since the civil rights era. That the film's ideological project does indeed necessitate repressing the AIDS activist movement becomes clear at the end of the scene when the film's protagonist, Andy Beckett (Tom Hanks), emerges from the courthouse and a group of reporters with microphones and flashing cameras descends on him, clamoring for an interview. Insinuating that his lawsuit is politically motivated, a reporter asks if heis a gay activist, but he is quick to disavow any relation to the demonstrators visible in the background: "I am not political. I just want what is fair, what is right." One of the purposes of the scene, in other words, is to locate the film's representation of AIDS in a space beyond ideology. In mediating the conflict between AIDS activists and Reaganite conservatives, which deeply divided the nation, the film supposedly transcends the politics of the epidemic. It takes a position neither on AIDS nor on gay rights and so should be seen as "fair."

In what follows, I elaborate this symptomatic reading of the film to...