Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (review)

Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. By David Román. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998; 344 pp.; illustrations. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

David Román's new book, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS, is a welcome and insightful study of the convergence of art and activism. Examining everything from candlelight vigils to street protests to Broadway sensations, Román engages multiple meanings of performance, theatre, and theatricality in an attempt to document and analyze the wide range of political interventions performed by gay men in response to the AIDS epidemic. He accomplishes this through a careful consideration of the social and historical contexts that help the reader understand how a performance responded to, reflected, and/or challenged contemporary understandings of AIDS. Román privileges the "liveness" of the theatrical event in a specific place and time. While he does engage in more traditional play script analysis, he always returns to the question of how a performance made an impact at that moment. He focuses on the effects--both documented and anecdotal--that were generated.

This is most apparent in a chapter entitled "November 1, 1992: AIDS/Angels in America." Román delivers a highly personal narrative, describing his trip with several friends to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to watch the two parts of Tony Kushner's epic, Angels in America. "We are five gay men who have lived to be thirty years old and beyond, an accomplishment we never lose sight of these days," he writes (202). The performance occurs just prior to the national presidential elections, and is imbricated in a complex production of hope that things will get better for people with AIDS and for the nation as a whole.

Hope permeates Román's book--hope mixed in with a profound sense of mourning for both the performers and the performances lost to AIDS. The use of an autobiographical voice in certain chapters underscores the author's political agenda and aligns him with the artists and activists he discusses. He does not pretend to take a neutral stance. An increasingly popular trend in minoritarian scholarship (inclusive of queer theory, African American studies, feminist theory, etc.) is the use of an autobiographical narrative, which explicitly positions the author vis-à-vis the subject being written about. Román's own activist work with ACT UP, the AIDS Prevention Action League, and other AIDS-related organizations informs his scholarship just as much as his close friendships with Tim Miller, Michael Kearns, and other theatre artists whom he discusses. Although Román is open to the critique that there is not enough critical distance between himself and his subject, the very intersection of art and activism lends itself to an approach that dispenses with the boundaries between a supposedly "neutral" academic position and one that is personally invested in the communities being written about. He makes a case for viewing performances with "critical generosity," which means there needs to be a consideration of what these performances accomplished (or intended to accomplish) rather than simply a judgment on aesthetics or literary merit.

While firmly believing in a community of gay men, a community of artists, and even a community of academics, Román is also aware of the exclusions inherent in any so-called community. His discussion of Pomo Afro Homo's Fierce Love (1991) demonstrates how the intersection of race and sexuality has often rendered black gay men invisible in dominant AIDS ideologies. Román's belief in community is inseparable from his activist stance that acts of intervention can be staged through collective action. That collective action may consist of gathering together in a theatre, a memorial service, or a political protest. In other words, he positions the ideal of community as a necessary foundation for articulating how these performances produce social and political effects.

One of the most important and refreshing things that the...