If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past

270 Pages·2012·3.08 MB·English

by  Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed

If Memory Serves
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IF MEMORY SERVES
Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise
of the Queer Past
CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLIA and
CHRISTOPHER REED
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as Christopher Castiglia, “Sex Publics, Sex
Panics, Sex Memories,” boundary 2 27, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 149–75; and as Christopher
Castiglia, “The Way We Were: Remembering the Gay 70s,” in The Seventies: The Age of
Glitter in Popular Culture, ed. Shelton Waldrep (New York: Routledge, 1999), 206–23.
An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as Christopher Reed, “Imminent Domain:
Queer Space in the Built Environment,” Art Journal 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 64–70;
Christopher Reed, “We’re from Oz: Marking Ethnic and Sexual Identity,” Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 4 (August 2003): 425–40; and Christopher
Reed, “A Third Chicago School?” in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives,
ed. Katerina Rae Reudi and Charles Waldheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005), 163–75. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as Christopher Castiglia and
Christopher Reed, “‘Ah Yes, I Remember It Well’: Memory, Mass Media, and Will and
Grace,” Cultural Critique 56 (Winter 2004): 158–88. An earlier version of chapter 4 was
published as Christopher Castiglia, “Past Burning: The (Post)Traumatic Crisis of (Post-)
Queer Theory,” in States of Emergency, ed. Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 69–87.
Copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Castiglia, Christopher.
If memory serves : gay men, AIDS, and the promise of the queer past /
Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7610-1 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7611-8 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Gays—United States—History. 2. Gay culture—United States—History.
3. AIDS (Disease)—Social aspects—United States. 4. Queer theory—United States.
5. Gay and lesbian studies—United States. I. Reed, Christopher, 1961– II. Title.
HQ76.3.U5.C375 2012
306.76'60973—dc23 2011031750
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to the memory of our teachers and friends,
John Boswell and Vito Russo,
and to Simon Watney,
who continues to teach and inspire us.
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CONTENTS
introduction 1
In the Interest of Time
1 battles over the gay past 39
De-generation and the Queerness of Memory
2 for time immemorial 73
Marking Time in the Built Environment
3 the revolution might be televised 113
The Mass Mediation of Gay Memories
4 queer theory is burning 145
Sexual Revolution and Traumatic Unremembering
5 remembering a new queer politics 175
Ideals in the Aftermath of Identity
acknowledgments 217
notes 219
bibliography 241
index 255
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INTRODUCTION
In the Interest of Time
Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened
or couldn’t possibly have happened.
—oscar wilde
Unremembering
About the time we started talking about the ideas in this book, we were
getting ready to move for a year to Memphis, Tennessee. Looking up gay
life there, we found the most popular gay club in Memphis was called
Amnesia. Despite being heralded as “the Club for the new Millennium,”
by the time we arrived in Memphis, Amnesia had closed.1 Something about
the vast, empty building and the even vaster empty parking lot—gay space
in the process of reverting to generic mid- American sprawl—seemed
disturbingly apt. It’s hard to resist the allegory: offering flashy promise of
a guaranteed future (a club for the next millennium), A/amnesia produced
instead assimilation and loss in the place where a gay cultural life once
thrived. It’s uncertain, of course, whether a nightclub named Recollection
or a piano bar called Memories would have fared any better. What is cer-
tain, we argue in the following chapters, is that the sacrifice of spaces and
rituals of memory to the lure of amnesia has weakened gay communities,
both our connections to one another and our ability to imagine, collec-
tively and creatively, alternative social presents and futures for ourselves.
1