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Disclosure 137 ABriefHistoryofHIV/AIDSDisclosure If HIV and AIDS have a history, so, logically, does their disclosure. The hypothesis may sound absurd, but if AIDS had remained completely and consistently undisclosed it would not have a history. This suggests that we cannot separate the history of AIDS from that of its disclosure and that the latter is not simply a marginal detail in the epidemic. The HIV/AIDS coming out is a genre inscribed in a chain of other, preexisting genres—­ the confession, the news announcement, the legal disclosure, and naturally, the gay and lesbian coming out with which, for obvious social reasons, it shares more than its performativity. Because of its generic lineage, the linguistic act of coming out is relational, not just because it must involve at least one interlocutor, but also because it indexes and recycles all these preexisting genres. The meanings of HIV disclosure rest on contextual contiguity, in a synchronic fashion. But I want to propose the idea that meaning emerges and varies diachronically as well. What a disclosure of HIV-­positive status means depends on what it (has) meant and what one imagines the future will bring.Yet because past and future always remain out of reach, they cannot possibly provide a firm foundation on which to build anything lasting. (The same goes for the present, naturally, since it has no tangible existence and, like a boundary, acquires the appearance of existence from the pull of what it divides.) Coming out can therefore never perform steady identities, which would find themselves undone from within by the always unstable process that would seek to bring them into being. (I call this process unstable in that it necessarily involves relating to something other, which it evokes or references or reuses.) A performative statement is always supposed to constitute a first in the sense that it ushers in something that didn’t exist before, but if it generically conjures earlier statements, it is at the minimum a second. If a statement is not original, how, I ask you, can it possibly be originary? But the HIV/AIDS coming out has a history of its own, as well as generic ancestry. For one thing, even though I, as a gay man, have experienced the disclosures of my HIV status after and through those of my homosexuality , I am aware that “coming out” may not provide a conceptual framework that can fit everyone’s needs.Furthermore,as the realities of living with HIV have changed, so have the identities and cultural relations performed by the disclosure of one’s status. I start there and roughly outline four periods . The term, however, may be a slight misnomer, since these“periods”have 138 Disclosure overlapped and often coexisted in ways that signal how AIDS,a pandemic of historical proportions, continues to resist all easy inscription within the disciplinary categories of history and geography. My purpose is to give a sense of a process by which certain social attitudes came to occupy the social forefront and to produce dominant AIDS discourses and marginalize others. In the very early years of the epidemic, coming out could be extraordinarily difficult; that is to say, it was necessary. People with AIDS were often spoken for and spoken about, usually in unflattering terms, to say the least. They were diseased pariahs, patients different from other patients, medical mysteries, punished by God, potential murderers, poisoners of wells, modern-­ day Dorian Grays, Draculas, and Mr. Hydes. Harking back to previous centuries, these categories said very little about actual people with AIDS and a great deal about the fears, anxieties, and self-­ perceptions of the cultures that produced such identities in history. In France, for example , where ambivalent anti-­ Americanism and rationalism have been time-­ honored national pastimes, some dominant cultural voices emerging from political, scientific, and intellectual circles made a point of producing countercategories to the ones perceived to saturate public discourses of AIDS in the United States or Africa, the regions most identified with the disease at the time. The French public was soon told that people with AIDS were not pariahs, not different from other patients, and certainly not punished by God, since France is, as we all know, a staunchly secular republic steeped in the belief that reason and science can solve all our problems and where God has no legal powers to punish anybody. The good thing was that, as early as the mid-­ 1980s and thanks to this sort of rhetoric, France had made...

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