AIDS and American Apocalypticism: The Cultural Semiotics of an Epidemic

2. Exile of the Queer Evangelist: (In memory of Michael)

Chapter Two Exile of the Queer Evangelist (In memory of Michael) This film scene is iconic for American popular culture generally and for gay culture, hypericonic: Miss Dorothy Gale of Kansas, having fled the black-and-white provincialism of her home, seeks a place where she and her companion are understood and accepted. She awakens to Technicolor, looks around her, and in a classic example of rhetorical litotes says to her little dog, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” In the years since its 1938 production, The Wizard of Oz has become a kind of sacred text for American gay culture largely because its structure and themes, turning on exile and quest, have spoken to the life situations of many queer people who likewise have sought a land of color and eccentricity in which they feel “normal” or “at home.” In addition, the character of Dorothy Gale is enmeshed in the life of the actor portraying her, Judy Garland, whose gay icon status is legendary, so much so that her death and her wake at Frank Campbell’s funeral home in New York are mythologically associated with the Stonewall riots in June 1969. Further, Garland’s best known song from the film, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow ,” has become a kind of queer national anthem, and during the postwar regime of the closet, the phrase “friend of Dorothy” was a code to indicate one’s queerness. A popular post-Stonewall postcard shows Dorothy anxiously clutching Toto in a leather bar saying, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Dorothy’s cinematic exile and quest have represented for many late twentieth-century gay and lesbian people an image of their own search for identity and for a community where their desires might be honored 29 30 AIDS and American Apocalypticism and fulfilled. But no amount of ruby slippered heel clicking could return them to idyllic “homes” or families of birth. As many of those who developed AIDS discovered, their birth families were often as censorious about their dying as they were about their living: life-companions and friends excluded from medical and funeral arrangements or those too ill to take care of themselves remanded “home” or in some cases the dying simply abandoned by families of birth. Even today, queer folk often feel like exiles or “strangers in a strange land” among their blood kin and only feel at home when they have left their birth families to establish other households and families of affiliation.1 In this chapter I will explore exile as an apocalyptic sign, the trope of the speaking subject in crisis. In particular I will look at issues around performance and performativity, including the construction of space as a component of performance. Discourse about AIDS is imbricated with spatial figures, some of which I examine here in order to account for the material conditions of physical space. Finally, this chapter will discuss three pieces that represent “performance art”: Tim Miller’s My Queer Body, David Drake’s The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, and James McCourt’s Time Remaining. The first two, composed and performed by gay men in their twenties, are actual solo performance pieces, perhaps the defining genre of queer activist literature in the 1980s and 90s; the last, a stylistically complex novel written by a gay man in later midlife and published by a mainstream press. As I will show, those genre distinctions signify both different generational identities and material conditions.2 Stephen D. O’Leary reads apocalyptic texts as “dramatic enactment” with either tragic or comedic “frames of acceptance.” O’Leary’s emphasis is different from my own. He is interested in the thematics of apocalypticism (constructions of time and evil), whereas I am more concerned with its cultural work (composing individual and communal identities). Nonetheless , his analysis illuminates how the cultural work produces its effects. In the two “frames of acceptance,” the tragic plot, thematically constructed around sin and guilt, isolates the evildoer as a victim, while the comic plot, concerned with error, misunderstanding, and ignorance, exposes the evildoer’s fallibility and incorporates the evildoer into the community. While such a strict binarism is reductive, it does suggest an interpretive register for performative practices, especially those of queer theater art.3 Such performative practices constitute the social rituals that compose social identity , the naturalized spectacle in which we are all players. Apocalypticism is conspicuously spectacular, and its first act is often exile. [18...