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Derek Jarman and the Queer Eighties M AT T C O O K In Will Self’s novel Dorian (2002), the eponymous hero takes perverse delight in transmitting the HIV virus to as many as possible while himself remaining both youthful and healthy. Self deploys the structures, characters, and themes of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891), to give a particularly nihilistic account of gay London in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He weaves selfishness, deceit, malicious infection, and a decadent hedonism into his fictional account of the early years of the AIDS crisis. It is a clever, gripping, and deeply disturbing novel, written in a social and cultural context very different from the one in which the novel is set. By the time Will Self was writing, combination therapy had given new hope to many people living with HIV and AIDS, and sex and relations between men had gained a new (though certainly not universal) acceptability. In Britain, virulent homophobia and the intense collective anger of the gay community had abated by many degrees. In this changed context, it was possible for accounts of the AIDS crisis to be less polarized and for Wilde’s life and work to be deployed somewhat differently in relation to it.₁ Such an observation begs the question of how Wilde was being used in the 1980s and early 1990s—prior to this partial recession in homophobic rhetoric. 285 11 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. The diaries of one of the most well-known, controversial, and vocal AIDS activists of the period—the filmmaker, artist, set designer, writer, and gardener Derek Jarman—provide us with a partial answer. The ways Wilde was written in and out of Jarman’s story of himself, his art, and his politics demonstrate what it was about this period that made certain appropriations of Wilde possible and others much more problematic. Contexts Wilde, an omnipresent and controversial cultural figure throughout the twentieth century, achieved particular prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with an unprecedented outpouring of writing about him.² This phenomenon often went beyond the need to justify or deride the dead playwright or to replay his story as the classic tale of “gay doom.”³ Instead, it frequently explored Wilde’s significance in terms of identity and sexual subjectivity.⁴ Both Wilde and Wildean strategies were increasingly seen as ways of thinking about the constitution and malleability of homosexual identity in the 1880s and 1890s and also as a means of self-invention, affirmation, and endurance in the present. This perspective on Wilde owed much to the postmodern and poststructuralist debates of the 1980s and after about the fluidity of subjectivity and the instability of supposedly essential identity categories—debates that clearly also informed Jarman’s work.₅ Wilde himself grappled with the idea that the self might be (in Chris Waters’s words)“something one creates or makes up,”and he explored the power of shifting perceptions and contexts on subjectivity.₆ This was part of his particular appeal in the late twentieth century to scholars researching discourses of homosexualityand to queer activists who were keen, as Waters observes,“to celebrate new modes of performative selfhood that owe[d] little to earlier conceptions of an innate homosexual condition—an innate condition which could all too easily be labelled sick or perverse.”⁷ This theorizing of identity came in part through the emerging fields of gender studies and lesbian and gay studies in which we started to explore deconstructively the coordinates of masculinity and femininity and of gay, homosexual, and queer sexualities. This project involved not only reclaiming the gay past and gay forebears—the gay lineage that had likewise been important to Wilde and his contemporaries—but also thinking about how we might use and deploy that history and those figures. In this intellectual environment , it became increasingly apparent that Wilde did not have to mean 286 Matt Cook You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. one thing, and thus a space opened up to claim his life and works in different and complex ways. The second key context...

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