Not-about-AIDS

Since the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, where the success of protease inhibitors was officially announced, there has been a great deal of talk in the United States about the end of AIDS, and much of it has implied that the need to talk about AIDS has ended as well. Reports both in the popular media and in lesbian and gay publications have suggested that we have reached the end of the AIDS epidemic. While acknowledging that most people across the world do not have access to the new drugs, these accounts put forward the idea that the AIDS crisis is over. In the absence of a cure or vaccine, this "end-of-AIDS" discourse is striking. In his controversial article "When AIDS Ends," published in the 10 November 1996 New York Times Magazine (fig. 1), for example, Andrew Sullivan writes: "A difference between the end of AIDS and the end of many other plagues: for the first time in history, a large proportion of the survivors will not simply be those who escaped infection, or were immune to the virus, but those who contracted the illness, contemplated their own deaths, and still survived." ¹ Cover articles in other major publications of the period further demonstrate this shift in AIDS discourse and share in its assumptions, from Newsweek's 2 December 1996 issue "The End of AIDS?" (fig. 2) to Time's 30 December 1996 selection of Dr. David Ho, a pioneer of this new AIDS treatment research, as "Man of the Year" (fig. 3), which indicates that an understanding of AIDS as a manageable condition rather than a terminal one has taken shape. In late 1996 AIDS returned to the forefront of U.S. culture only to announce its departure. Not surprisingly, the end-of-AIDS discourse soon led to a general lack of media interest in AIDS and to calls from gay figures for "post-AIDS" identities and cultures.

These developments have left me wondering what it means to continue to prioritize AIDS in discussions of contemporary gay culture and politics. How might we return our critical attention to AIDS in light of the shifts in the political, cultural, and sexual climate of the late 1990s? In this essay I explore two central questions: how might the "end of AIDS" itself be understood as an AIDS discourse [Begin Page 3] that tells us much about our current relationship to AIDS, and how have artists living with HIV/AIDS responded to the calls for post-AIDS identities and cultures?

In Dry Bones Breathe, which may turn out to have been the most telling book of 1998, Eric Rofes, a longtime progressive gay activist, argues that contemporary gay culture needs to disentangle itself from the dated AIDS-as-crisis model that characterized the gay community's response in the first decade of the epidemic. ² Rofes, unlike most commentators, is careful to explain that he is speaking specifically about gay male culture in America and that post-AIDS does not necessarily [Begin Page 5] mean the end of AIDS. "This admittedly controversial term," Rofes writes, "claims that the communal experience of AIDS-as-crisis has ended, [it] does not imply that the epidemic of AIDS is over" (75). Despite drawing such distinctions and making an overall effort to remain sensitive to those living with HIV/AIDS, Rofes suggests that "it may be time for gay men to abandon the acronym 'AIDS' altogether" (72).

While many commentators have questioned the concept of post-AIDS, most of their critiques are cast as expressions of concern about a new wave of infection among the very subjects who imagine themselves living in a post-AIDS world: urban gay men. Michaelangelo Signorile's Out article "641,086 and Counting" is typical. Signorile argues that "we are headed toward an unqualified disaster." This disaster, "in which a new generation of gay men become as immersed in the horrors of AIDS...