Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (review)

In publishing a volume of collected essays, a writer has the opportunity to look back, reassess, and revise. If he or she is in a generous mood, such a writer might also express a few regrets in hindsight, which is perhaps why Douglas Crimp's introduction to Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics—the only essay written specifically for his book—is ultimately the collection's biggest disappointment.

Crimp expresses many regrets throughout the republished chapters of Melancholia and Moralism, spending much (some might say too much) time rehearsing arguments made in earlier essays and talks in order to explain how his thinking has evolved. For instance, looking back on his 1987 manifesto calling on artists to produce a "critical, theoretical, activist alternative to the personal, elegiac expressions that appeared to dominate the art-world response to AIDS" (40), Crimp comes to acknowledge the important role that mourning can play in activist practice, even arguing that the failure of AIDS activist groups like ACT UP to confront their collective grief caused a meltdown of the movement around 1993.

Such thoughtful reassessments, which make reading these essays at one time a true pleasure, are few and far between in the introduction. Instead, in a critique that might have been welcome in the mid- to late 1990s but that seems tired and dated today, Crimp spends most of his opening comments denouncing several prominent pieces by Andrew Sullivan, most notably Sullivan's 1996 shot-across-the-bow "When Plagues End," a blindly optimistic announcement of the end of AIDS. When Crimp finally does get around to expressing some regrets in his introduction, it's in a single footnote—if he could change anything he wrote over the past fifteen years, it would be his criticism of Lee Edelman's essay, "The Plague of Discourse."

Here, Crimp does himself a real disservice, and not only because his disagreement with Edelman seems trivial at best, especially in a book that has much bigger fish to fry. Rather, in privileging a minor debate remembered by only a handful of academics, Crimp practically concedes his own intellectual irrelevancy, thereby answering his question as to why Sullivan gets press in the New York Times while queer theorists in the academy have largely been ignored. (Looking at where some of the essays in this book were originally published provides another piece of the answer; for instance, an eloquent essay on Magic Johnson was originally buried in an obscure volume published by Harvard's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies and is unlikely to attract many more readers with its republication in this collection.) Toward the end of his book, Crimp reprints a thoughtful essay he sent to the New York Times in 1998 and uses the Times's rejection of his piece to ask how practitioners of queer theory can best make their ideas "knowable to legions" (301). But such a substantive treatment of this question merely makes Crimp's tiresome introduction all the more maddening.

For readers who are able to push past the introduction, the rest of Crimp's book is a gem. These are essays about AIDS and queer politics, no doubt. But as befits a collection by a professor of visual and cultural studies, there are also essays about representation and art—art and activism, art about queers, art by queers. The politics of representation is everywhere in these essays, and the role that artists have, can, and should play in addressing AIDS and homophobia is a recurrent theme. So too are the limits that artists encounter while engaging in these fights, limits stemming from the role played by the unconscious when we encounter art.

Not that there's nothing to disagree with in these essays. Crimp's continued insistence that AIDS activism failed to come to...