If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (review)

“Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (24). The statement, written not by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed but rather Lauren Berlant, goes some way in articulating the most troublesome aspect of If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. The “problematic object” to which the authors cling is in the main the traditional, some might say clichéd, gay male popular culture of post-Stonewall, liberationist America—what Jack Halberstam would surely designate, with a sneer, the culture of white homo-patriarchy. In the first three chapters the cultural artifacts praised by the authors include the films Longtime Companion (dir. Norman René, 1989), The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), and Milk (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2008); the novels Like People in History (Felice Picano, 1995) and The Golden Age of Promiscuity (Brad Gooch, 1996); the renovation-chic architecture of San Francisco’s Castro and Chicago’s Boystown neighborhoods; and the television sitcom Will and Grace. With the enthusiasm and hopefulness of a John Fiske, Castiglia and Reed celebrate popular texts they believe transmit to younger gays and lesbians the social memory and affective power of the liberationist and AIDS activist eras. In this they do an admirable job. They even convinced me, a despiser of Will and Grace, that by creating a forum for variously identified audiences to share in a camp aesthetic so fundamental to American gay male identity the show “realized the sitcom’s potential to both reflect and create a ‘real world’ of sexual subculture deeply rooted in the dynamics of gay memory” (118). Although, in my view, the arguably subcultural codes communicated through the program remain thoroughly steeped in a contemporary patriarchal/homosocial mind-set (Jack the sissy foil to Will’s uptight man-child, the anti-lesbian misogyny, etc.), I was happy to be transformed occasionally from surly queer critic to affirmative gay spectator.

While the authors’ readings are at times enlightening and their “glad to be gay” spirit refreshing in an age of anti-identitarian queer thought, Castiglia and Reed’s attachment to liberationist sensibilities and artifacts might in fact be an obstacle to the project’s stated aim: to refashion the gay past as a “potent tool for inventive sexuality, expansive sociality, and creative activism in and for the present” (37). If anything, If Memory Serves is a preservationist project; but is it also perhaps a conservative one? Michel Foucault, for one, harbored a deep skepticism for liberation movements that founded ethical and political practices on a pseudoscientific conception of sexual identity. An affirmative “reverse discourse” that seeks to wrest semantic control of “homosexuality” from the scientia sexualis is, for Foucault (1990), a necessary step in achieving Castiglia and Reed’s “expansive sociality,” but it is never an end in itself. By reinforcing the more insidiously anti-emancipatory link between sexual desire and self-truth, liberationist discourses by and large fail to understand the strategic usefulness of sexual identity tout court in the biopolitical administration of life. In my reading of Foucault, “sexuality” itself must be overcome before any truly “inventive sexuality” can emerge: if we understand the discursive link between sexual desire and self-identity as a tool of social control that ultimately works to suppress movements of collective revolt, then any sexual revolution worth its name will take as its goal the severing of this link. Put another way, rekindling the social idealism of the liberationist era becomes an exercise in cruel optimism if it requires us to remain ensnared in a discursive game that has been rigged from the get-go.

Seeking an alternative to, in his words, the modern “monarchy of sex,” Foucault looked to antiquity to envision a future beyond sexuality. Even so, when asked if he longed for a reactivation of classical ethical principles, principles not erected on a concept of...