“Go-Go Dancing on the Brink of the Apocalypse”: Representing Aids: An Essay in Seven Epigraphs

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GO-GO DANCING ON THE BRINK OF THE APOCALYPSE”: REPRESENTING AIDS AN ESSAY IN SEVEN EPIGRAPHS PE T E R DICKINSON University of British Columbia in memoriam Mark B. and David P. Epigraph #1: The past four decades have witnessed unprecedented success in con­ trolling infectious diseases, an achievement that has created great confidence in medicine’s ability to conquer sickness. Yet in only a few years, the epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) has shaken this confidence and revived fears at least as old as the medieval plagues. - American Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, “Introduction,” Confronting AIDS: Update 1988, 1 ^V ith the AIDS pandemic well into its second decade, and with the mil­ lennium drawing to a close, the initial dis-ease surrounding the disease has given way to a whole new industry of discursive inquiry. This has resulted in the production and proliferation of a number of competing AIDS discourses, many of which are characteristically apocalyptic in tone: from the dire pre­ dictions of biomedicine to the sensational headlines in the media; from the calls for mandatory testing and quarantine on the part of Jesse Helms and other right-wing politicians to the holocaust imagery and graphics employed by Larry Kramer and like-minded gay activists; from the meta-critical in­ terventions of intellectuals like Susan Sontag to the arresting visions created by artists like Tony Kushner. However, the problem with abstract theorizing about AIDS is that it fre­ quently lacks a subject, a body, a corpus, a corpse. This would seem to be even more the case when theorizing AIDS as apocalypse. As Jacques Derrida states in “Living On: Border Lines,” with “[a]n apocalyptic superimprint­ ing of texts: there is no paradigmatic text. Only relationships of cryptic haunting from mark to mark. No palimpsest. ... No piece, no metonymy, no integral corpus” (136-37). In this sense, then, the discourses enumerated 227 above potentially threaten whole groups of marginalized peoples—specif­ ically, persons living with AIDS and HIV—with erasure, if not complete annihilation. And yet, AIDS is not only a condition, resulting from HIV, that attacks the cells of the immune system and impairs the body’s ability to defend it­ self against viral, fungal, bacterial, protozoal, and parasitic infections, but also, in the words of Paula Treichler, “an epidemic of signification.” As Douglas Crimp states, “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it” (3). Neither does apoca­ lypse. To quote Derrida again: “What I write here is related to reading, writing, teaching as apocalypse, to apocalypse as revelation, to apocalypse in its eschatological and catastrophic sense” (“Living On” 125). Reading, writing, teaching as apocalypse. Reading, writing, teaching AIDS as apoca­ lypse. Perhaps I would do well to locate myself, initially, in this particular apocalyptic moment. Recently, during a trip to San Francisco, I came across an article by Gregg Taylor in the San Francisco Bay Times. In this article, from which I have appropriated the first part of my title, Taylor argues that it is the responsi­ bility of young queers to practice “naughty, pro-active hooliganism” in the name of social advancement and change: Our predilection as the generation of the Apocalypse is to be contentious rather than content. Because our world has been informed by sound bites [sic] and infomercials, rather than history and analysis, our ingrained dis­ trust of authority has geared us to base our futures in hope rather than expectations. (36) Sound rhetorical advice, especially for the practice/praxis of queer ac­ tivism. But how does this translate into the present context of academic theorizing? For it would seem that, in writing this paper, I am immedi­ ately confronted with an ethical dilemma. That is, given my own status as a sero-negative gay man, how can I abstractly theorize a retrovirus (HIV) that inscribes and transcribes itself at the micro-cellular level of antibodies without effacing the very material bodies ofthe persons living with AIDS and HIV in which this virus resides? Can I legitimately equate the call for speak­ ing out as a sign of resistance on the...

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