Rethinking Sexuality in Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats

Far from apologizing for their promiscuity as a failure to maintain a loving relationship, far from welcoming the return to monogamy as a beneficent consequence of the horror of AIDS, gay men should ceaselessly lament the practical necessity, now, of such relationships, should resist being drawn into mimicking the unrelenting warfare between men and women, which nothing has ever changed.

Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”

. . . it is our promiscuity that will save us.

Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic”

In “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic”—the final essay in AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism, an influential collection of essays originally published in 1987—the writer and activist Douglas Crimp announces the beginning of a “new phase in gay men’s responses to the epidemic”: “Having learned to support and grieve for our lovers and friends; having joined the fight against fear, hatred, repression, and inaction; having adjusted our sex lives so as to protect ourselves and one another—we are now reclaiming our subjectivities, our communities, our culture. . . and our promiscuous love of sex” (270).¹ Intellectuals like Crimp and activist organizations like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which was founded in March 1987, sought to correct the idea of AIDS as a gay disease and preserve gay sexuality against attempts to fight the AIDS epidemic by policing the promiscuity that was believed to have caused the spread of the disease among gay men. Crimp recoils from the connection drawn between AIDS and homosexuality in both popular culture and the rhetoric of AIDS activism because it stigmatized homosexual behavior, implying that the epidemic was a punishment for gay lifestyles. To reverse this trend, it became necessary to develop an understanding of AIDS as a construction of language, a phenomenon existing primarily in its representations and in the cultural practices that “conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it” (Crimp, “AIDS” 3). AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism asserts in its very title that cultural analysis could be a form of cultural activism. In another essay in this collection, Paula A. Treichler argues: “The name AIDS in part constructs the disease and helps make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look ‘through’ language to determine what AIDS ‘really’ is. Rather we must explore the site where such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language” (31). By reclaiming the discursive models in which AIDS exists, artists and intellectuals writing about AIDS could alter the way people think and speak about AIDS and thereby counteract the stigmatization of homosexuality and vindicate what Crimp refers to as “our promiscuous love of sex.”

This essay reads The Man with Night Sweats as a response to this moment in the history of AIDS activism. Although Thom Gunn did not publish The Man with Night Sweats until 1992, he composed the poems about AIDS collected in that volume between 1984 and 1988 (Campbell 51). The medical, scientific, and political vocabularies of the AIDS crisis are pointedly absent from the collection. When Gunn’s speakers refer to the epidemic, they use historically and culturally universal terms, like “time of plague” and “year of griefs” (Collected Poems 463, 487). Clearing away the conventional language of AIDS, Gunn intervenes in language to find a new way of thinking about AIDS. I do not mean to oversimplify Gunn’s poems by interpreting them as merely putting into practice the program for cultural activism articulated by Crimp and Treichler. Rather, by placing The Man with Night Sweats in this specific historical context, I aim to expand our understanding of the relationship between this book of poetry and the historical calamity with which it is usually associated. The Man with Night Sweats was published in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, and critics seldom discuss the collection except in relation to AIDS. Yet the cluster of poems that deal most explicitly with AIDS is relatively short, the fourth of four sections in the book. Viewed together, the poems collected in this volume offer a complete picture of the community...