The Ideology and Phenomenology of AIDS in Gay Literature
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Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2017 "Here There Is No Plague": The Ideology and Phenomenology of AIDS in Gay Literature Michael Alan Buso Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Buso, Michael Alan, ""Here There Is No Plague": The Ideology and Phenomenology of AIDS in Gay Literature" (2017). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 5291. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/5291 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. 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For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Here There Is No Plague”: The Ideology and Phenomenology of AIDS in Gay Literature Michael Alan Buso Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Dennis Allen, Ph.D., Chair Ryan Claycomb, Ph.D. Michael Germana, Ph.D. Melissa Latimer, Ph.D. Kathleen Ryan, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2017 Keywords: Ideology, Phenomenology, AIDS, Gay, Queer Studies, American Literature Copyright 2017 Michael Buso ABSTRACT “Here There Is No Plague”: The Ideology and Phenomenology of AIDS in Gay Literature Michael Alan Buso This project considers the social movements, historical memory, and politics of health to trace the way the literature of the AIDS epidemic both documents and discloses the lived experiences of a community struggling in the midst of an epidemic. It focuses on the literature of AIDS, analyzing the underlying ideologies of AIDS and articulating a phenomenology of AIDS that goes beyond the feminist or queer ones already considered in current scholarship. I argue that the literature of AIDS reflects various ideological fantasies about AIDS that, depending on political preconceptions and ontologies of identity, must, out of necessity, exclude certain ideas in order for the fantasy to work. Through both Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, I analyze how the ideological forces at work within the gay community are represented in the literature of the 1980s and 90s. My focus is on how, in the early days of the epidemic, these plays presented a specific ideological fantasy about AIDS, and my analysis identifies what things must be excluded or overlooked in order for the fantasies to properly function. Despite the extensive critical work focusing on the AIDS epidemic, there has not been a scholarly work that constructs a phenomenology of AIDS. And so, I move beyond current feminist and queer approaches to phenomenology to use Andrew Holleran’s novel The Beauty of Men and collection of essays Ground Zero to develop a phenomenology of AIDS. I argue that Holleran’s texts are less concerned with the political, historical, and ideological structures that brought about the AIDS epidemic and more concerned with how gay men lived within the disease—how they formed social/physical attachments to both people and places, and how their sensory experiences of the epidemic created their individual and collective subjectivities. The shared experience of AIDS becomes the foundation for the reemerging/restructuring gay subculture; in a phenomenological sense, the community gains an awareness/consciousness of who it is by examining more carefully what it no longer is. I conclude with an examination of 21st century young adult gay fiction—specifically Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan and Hero by Perry Moore—and how they paint rosy portraitures of gay life beyond the coming out stage to the neglect of a complex sexuality that continuously redefines a queer individual’s place within the greater social, political, and cultural structure. Yet the presence—the memory—of AIDS looms over these texts, and the novels still contain the trace of what AIDS was/did to the gay community that came before them. By creating worlds without AIDS, these novels attempt to create a new version of a “gay fantasia,” one that counters the stark realities and oppressive ideological structures of the gay fantasia presented by Kushner in Angels in America. Buso iii Acknowledgements I have to begin by thanking my dissertation chair and overall advisor, Dennis Allen, for the countless hours of guidance and assistance with this project. He has made me a better scholar, a better thinker, and this project all the better. The other members of my committee, Katy Ryan, Ryan Claycomb, Michael Germana, and Melissa Latimer, have all offered invaluable assistance with this dissertation and the many steps along the way, and I am so grateful for everything they have done. And though he was not on my committee, Lowell Duckert provided sound advice and a helpful point in the right direction, and I am thankful for his time and knowledge. I also want to thank Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Andrew Holleran, Perry Moore, and David Levithan, for writing such excellent texts worthy of study. Though this project took a long time to complete, I never tired of reading their words. My family, especially my mom and my sister, have been so supportive of me throughout the Ph.D. process, and I thank them for their encouragement and love. And I am so thankful for the support and love of the Bishop men, Mark, Noah, and Maddox. I have made a lot of wonderful new friends in my seven years here at WVU. There’s too many to name all of them, but I especially appreciate the friendships of Mark and Mikenna (during our long summer of coursework together), Teresa, Andrea, Jessica, Keith, Gregory, Katie, and of course, William (my groovy office-mate). Dr. Yvonne Hammond has been a wonderful friend, office-mate, confidant, and ally. Our long talks and our travels all over this crazy country of ours have meant the world to me, and I appreciate your sage and considerate thoughts and advice. And lastly, all my love and thanks to my husband Trey, who came with me many years ago on this adventure, and has been my rock throughout it all. I cannot imagine doing this without him, and there is no one I would rather spend my life with. Buso iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 “Ordinary Sexual Intercourse”: Ideological Fantasies of Homosexuality and AIDS Chapter One 38 “A Social Death”: The Ideology of the AIDS Epidemic in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart Chapter Two 62 “Everybody’s Got to Love Something”: AIDS Fantasies, Both Prophetic and Ideological, in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Chapter Three 82 “When No One Knew the Way Out”: Developing a Phenomenology of AIDS Through the Writings of Andrew Holleran Chapter Four 123 “If Anybody Notices, Nobody Cares”: The Trace of AIDS in David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy and Perry Moore’s Hero Conclusion 159 “The Legacy of AIDS”: The Paradox of Living With and Ending an Epidemic Works Cited 170 Buso 1 Introduction “Ordinary Sexual Intercourse”: Ideological Fantasies of Homosexuality and AIDS “If it is an epidemic, then what happens to all this?” Hank pointed to the street. “Everything we’ve gained has come out of this neighborhood and the others we have built across the country. We lose our political power. We lose our culture, our safety.” (Jones 198) In January of 1988, as the mainstream American media was at last writing more and more about the AIDS epidemic, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article by Dr. Robert Gould titled “Reassuring News About AIDS: A Doctor Tells Why You May Not Be At Risk.” Gould, a clinical professor of psychiatry and obstetrics/gynecology at New York Medical College, and the chairman of the committee on gay and lesbian issues for the New York County branch of the American Psychiatric Association, told his readers that as heterosexual American women they had nothing to worry about when it came to AIDS. “There is almost no danger,” Gould wrote to Cosmo’s readers, “of contracting AIDS through ordinary sexual intercourse,” an act that he precisely and narrowly defines as “penile penetration of a well-lubricated vagina” (146, emphasis his). Rough sex, he cautions, or the way “many men in Africa take their women in a brutal way” that might cause vaginal lacerations, is a “marked difference[] from the way [sex] is usually practiced in the United States” (147). Anal sex and IV drug use, he cautioned, are the only confirmed ways of transmitting the virus, even as anal sex, according to Gould, was “now becoming relatively rare even among homosexuals” (204). Gould’s assumptions posit an imaginary existence in which heterosexual American couples (and more specifically, those who Buso 2 read Cosmopolitan) never engage in rough vaginal or anal sex, and where all “normal” American women only engage in penetrative sex when their vaginas are well-lubricated.1 These assumptions form the basis of a heteronormative ideology, what Louis Althusser calls “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (256), that ignores the actual relationship of heterosexual American women to the world in which they live in favor of believing a false construct that relies on faulty logic and a sense of “othering.” Gould’s constant positioning of the gay community as different, apart from the norm (“out-groups” as he says), even foreign (the way African sex is), reinforces the heteronormative public’s false consciousness that gays are deviant outsiders, engaging in unnatural sexual practices.