Beyond the AIDS Quilt

Last year marked the "twentieth anniversary" of AIDS, a grim occasion, to say the least, that put major US newspapers in an unenviable predicament. Any assessment of the epidemic was bound to be an indictment, and not the sort we generally like to read about, in which the guilty are few and absolutely so, and the innocent many and untainted. Any writer willing to connect the dots would conclude that the systemic political response to AIDS has been a signal failure. While the advent of antiretroviral therapy has dramatically lowered the number of AIDS-related deaths in Western nations (in the United States from over 51,000 in 1995 to just over 15,000 in 2001), the vast majority of HIV-positive people now live in the developing world and have little or no access to treatment. In the United States, AIDS is the leading cause of death among young black men, and racial minorities account for more than 70 percent of new infections. The current demographics of AIDS, marked as they are by severe economic and racial inequality, were not preordained. AIDS is a preventable and treatable disease, and it exists as it does because it was allowed to unfold this way, through the same kind of gross political negligence that permitted the disease to become an epidemic in the first place.

Into this damning context rushed the most beguiling of narratives, one that began with "How AIDS Changed____" and, with minor variations, depending on what filled the blank (pick one: America, New York, San Francisco, Art, Literature, Medicine, Culture, Sex), presented AIDS as both a natural and redemptive phenomenon. We couldn't really do anything about the fact that people got AIDS and died from it (and still do), so the story went, but it sure made us better writers, artists, doctors, scientists, philanthropists, a better and more humane people. This is hypocrisy and denial at its most pathetic and, because it instills a sense of powerlessness and feckless optimism, at its most dangerous. It is precisely in this moment of danger that reading one of the AIDS movement's most prolific and astute writers is vital--as diagnosis, to begin with, and, may I suggest, as political curative too.

Trained as an art critic and historian, Douglas Crimp edited the 1988 anthology AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism and co-wrote (with Adam Rolston) 1990's AIDS Demo Graphics, an account of ACT UP's activism through its graphic propaganda. Groundbreaking books, they started, along with Cindy Patton's Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS and Simon Watney's Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, the still-small field of AIDS scholarship and made key contributions to cultural studies, queer theory and science studies.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.