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

Now appears to be a timely moment to reflect upon the queer past. Every month, the media seems to herald another “historic” achievement for the gay and lesbian rights movement. Depictions of the queer past increasingly appear in public spheres, spaces, and screens few observers would have expected even a few years ago. Academics and artists have also become preoccupied with the queer experience of time, as concepts like temporality, futurity, feeling backwards, the death drive, and public memory continue to prompt intense intellectual investigations. It therefore seems appropriate that in If Memory Serves, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed bring together a selection of their previous work on queer memory with new and revised chapters especially for this project. Within the book’s pages, readers will find moments of impressive historical, cultural, and theoretical synthesis, as well as pointed challenges to many of the most basic assumptions of contemporary queer culture and scholarship.

At its core, the book puts forward two central claims. First, the authors suggest that in the wake of the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic in the gay community, “gay neo-cons” successfully called for the “de-generational unremembering” (10) of the promiscuous and experimental sexual culture popularized during the 1960s and 1970s. Characterizing this era as immature, whorish, and ultimately responsible for the virus and its destructive effects, the neo-cons encouraged gay men to reject the now-past sexual revolution and focus on building a more mainstreamed gay future marked by conventional goals like marriage, adoption, and military service. Second, the authors posit that this forgetting has done great harm to generations of gay men whom now live detached from their collective past and its communal values. As such, Castiglia and Reed argue that returning to memory and consideration of the pre-AIDS past may help ease existing traumas within gay life by inspiring alternatives for belonging and queer worldmaking in a new century.

In advancing these claims, the authors are largely successful. By analyzing a broad range of artifacts (films, novels, and visual culture) over several chapters, Castiglia and Reed demonstrate the pervasive nature of de-generational discourses. The authors also take a case study approach to investigate queer uses of the built environment, architecture, art, and camp dialogue, illustrating memory’s potential to suture persistent pains caused by the severing of queer generations. Throughout the book, the authors’ ability to skillfully navigate and synthesize dense theoretical arguments from queer theory and temporality studies is noteworthy, providing a relatively accessible point of entry to a conversation many readers might otherwise find impenetrable. Likewise, the authors continually attempt to engage both “high theory” and popular culture in their analysis, cognizant that the lines between these two areas of cultural criticism have increasingly blurred. In addition, the book itself functions as a queer archive, pointing to earlier discourses many readers may not have previously encountered.

One of the strongest contributions of the project is the concept of ideality politics, identified by Castiglia and Reed as an alternative to discredited identity politics and the pervasive pessimism they see in much of queer theory. Turning to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of acedia, the authors posit ideality as a tool that fuses loss and idealism, defying the cynicism directed at each term individually. As such, ideality encourages “creating ideal images to forestall losses that have not yet happened,” through memory (184). In this way, returning to the past no longer needs to be traumatizing and the ideal need not be dismissed as mere utopia. Instead, preserving and protecting the past against (potential) future losses offers opportunities to make remembering a productive and rewarding undertaking.

Nonetheless, for all that is to be commended in this book, some glaring concerns arise as the reader moves through the chapters. One of the most prominent is, ironically, time itself. At moments, the book feels outdated and...