"The Past is Not a Foreign Country": John Weir's AIDS Fiction

In John Weir's 2006 novel, What I Did Wrong, the narrator, Tom, a CUNY creative writing lecturer now in his forties, recounts his performance in a school play called Impromptu. Before he even delivers his first line—"Who are you? What do you want of me?"—a fellow pupil in the audience starts to jeer: "Shut up, faggot."¹ A chorus of invective follows, a cacophony of "queer bait" and "gay boy." It is clearly a traumatic memory—he returns to it several times—but it is also a dramatized moment of self-awareness in which the narrator realizes that his queer subjectivity will invariably oscillate between stage fright and the safety of theatrical distance. Though the line is addressed to another character on stage, it comes across both as a fourth-wall-breaking provocation to the audience—an invitation for the other boys to do their worst—and a self-questioning, transposed into the second person; or, as Tom glosses it, "a real moment […] taking place in somebody's actual life in the guise of a performance about people searching for real moments in their actual lives" (96). It is an episode he will still be analyzing years later:

I'm thinking, There's my gay body. It's my first postmodern moment. My classmates aren't just hectoring me, they're turning me post-structuralist, theoretical—French! I'm a "body" caught in a "contact zone," the "site" where seven hundred fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds discover their power. […] I'm thinking, Aren't they tacky? Instead of fighting back, I'm critiquing them. Maybe that's what gay means: "Critic." My body is a text. I read it in the aqueous light of public display.

(97)

Tom is not claiming to have had a teenage epiphany about the semiotics of embodiment here. Rather, he is applying to a primary "site" of trauma the theoretical frameworks he has since learnt and taught. How is this experience, as remembered, postmodern? Or, to put it another way, how might the memory itself be so? Weir appears to conflate several versions of the postmodern here, several idées reçues about what a "postmodern moment" might constitute, but whether or not these can be adequately or accurately ascribed to the "postmodern" may be a moot point. The term here acts as a kind of shorthand for various theoretical commonplaces: body-as-text; subjectivity constituted through ideological interpellation; and a quasi-Foucauldian or quasi-Kristevan sense of identity formation, in which the self-identification of the homophobic audience depends upon the abjection of the boy on stage and the reassertion of binary or hierarchical power relations. It also plays with another textbook postmodern trademark: virtuality. There is nothing but representation here. Tom is a player, "wearing greasepaint and powder, eye shadow, eyeliner, lip liner, and rouge, straining and hot under the stage lights" (97). His "gay body" is a production, a projection, both subject and object. He is also an audience of one, watching the spectators watching him, caught in a web of relational performances with no original referent.

What happens next in the text might help the reader reinterpret its apparently postmodern positions or poses. Tom recounts,

I watch my gay body float.

But it isn't my body. I mean, it isn't only my body, it's also Zack's body, exposed and naked in the bathroom light, skimming the surface of the bathwater like a spindly-legged water bug, eighteen years from now, two weeks from death.

(97)

Zack is Tom's best friend, dead from an AIDS-related illness, who interjects at many points in the present-day narrative. Tom's train of thought, then, connects an apparently bodiless body—his own, distanced and numbed—to the wasting frame of the person with AIDS (PWA). The "gay body" exposed to harm is, twenty years on, the HIV-positive body, lesioned and skeletal. Furthermore, it seems to belong to both Tom and Zack ("it isn't my body […] it isn't only my body"); one body is literally incorporated...