Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis (review)

264 BOOK REVIEWS Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier, eds., Writing AIDS: Gay Literature , Language, and Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 352 pp. Clothbound, $29.50. Writing AIDS is the most recent volume in Columbia University Press's series titled Between Men —Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies. The goals of the series are "to contribute to an increased understanding of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men" and "to provide through that understanding a wider comprehension of culture in general" (p. [v]). The fourteen essays in this book range widely in their approaches, from deconstructionist analysis to traditional literary criticism to journalistic commentary; in their subject matter, from teaching about AIDS in college composition classes to parallels between pre-World War II German novels and present-day attitudes toward aids in Germany; and in their attitudes, from endorsement of aids writing that does not actually mention the word aids to disapproval of the same writing because of its failure to do so. Overall, they tend to contribute more to the first of the series' goals than to the second. Although it may not have been the goal of the book, Suzanne Poirier's comment, in the introduction, that writing about aids and writing about aids writing are both political acts captures the effect of the book. It is very much about the politics of conceptualizing AIDS, primarily in American culture, but also in German and French culture. To the reader who is neither gay nor particularly fluent in gay political writing, these essays may seem fevered and overreaching, operating much of the time on the assumption that Jesse Helms represents not just the typical but the only nongay American view of aids and homosexuality generally. For example, Timothy F. Murphy, one of the book's coeditors, seems to accept unhesitatingly "the notion that PWAs [Persons with aids] are beyond the moral community—are both unloving and unloved" as the final view of "the media" (p. 310). To the reader who has been attentive to aids from the health-care or bioethics perspective, these essays may seem peculiarly distant because whatever meaning aids has to the various essayists, that meaning is not located in or concerned with hospitals or relationships between patients and health-care professionals. To the reader who is a literary critic, much of the writing will seem infinitely more interested in cultural politics than in Uterature. To the cultural analyst, much of the writing will seem myopic in its very close focus on gay culture, as if it exists not within American or Western culture but as an alternative and competing culture. Michael S. Sherry, in writing of war metaphors in the Book Reviews 265 discussion of aids, notes that war metaphors are common in the larger culture and that gays have become caught up in them—even if such language does them few favors, as they are Ukely to turn into the enemy against whom the war is conducted. He seems surprised that gays would partake of the main cultural metaphors and seems to think they should derive their language from a different culture, from a gay culture that has no ties to the "dominant" culture. To the reader interested in aids writing in Hispanic or African-American subcultures, the book is silent. Only in Philip Brian Harper's chapter on the death from AIDS of Max Robinson, the first African-American news anchorman on American network television, does the reader have any sense that the black community has been touched by this disease. And this essay focuses primarily on why Robinson's friends, at his death, were so committed to convincing the public that Robinson's death did not mean he was gay. On the other hand, for any reader, the essays are largely accessible, lively, and—with respect to the culture or subculture that these writers represent—informative and provocative. They made me want to read more of the Uterature they are talking about and convinced me that I will understand these and other pieces of gay literature better for having read this book. If the book does not tell much about aids per se, it does tell a great deal about how (some...