AIDS Literature and Gay Identity This book discusses the signifi cance of late twentieth century and early twenty fi rst century American fi ction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick—and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project—lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sex- ual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respec- tively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancho- lia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation. Monica B. Pearl is Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 1 Testimony from the Nazi Camps 10 Before Auschwitz French Women’s Voices Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Margaret-Anne Hutton Landscape of Inter-war France Angela Kershaw 2 Modern Confessional Writing New Critical Essays 11 Travel and Drugs in Twentieth- Edited by Jo Gill Century Literature Lindsey Michael Banco 3 Cold War Literature Writing the Global Confl ict 12 Diary Poetics Andrew Hammond Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 4 Modernism and the Crisis of Anna Jackson Sovereignty Andrew John Miller 13 Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change 5 Cartographic Strategies of Race, Sex and Nation Postmodernity Gerardine Meaney The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction 14 Jewishness and Masculinity Peta Mitchell from the Modern to the Postmodern 6 Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics Neil R. Davison of Consumption Eating the Avant-Garde 15 Travel and Modernist Literature Michel Delville Sacred and Ethical Journeys Alexandra Peat 7 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema 16 Primo Levi’s Narratives of Jason Borge Embodiment Containing the Human 8 Gay Male Fiction Since Charlotte Ross Stonewall Ideology, Confl ict, and Aesthetics 17 Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Les Brookes Lightness The Utopian Imagination in an 9 Anglophone Jewish Literature Age of Urban Crisis Axel Stähler Letizia Modena 18 Aesthetic Pleasure in 27 Literary Ghosts from the Twentieth-Century Women’s Victorians to Modernism Food Writing The Haunting Interval The Innovative Appetites of Luke Thurston M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David 28 Contemporary Reconfi gurations Alice L. McLean of American Literary Classics The Origin and Evolution of 19 Making Space in the Works of American Stories James Joyce Betina Entzminger Edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop 29 AIDS Literature and Gay Identity 20 Critical Approaches to American The Literature of Loss Working-Class Literature Monica B. Pearl Edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk 21 Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders Edited by Ana Cristina Mendes 22 Global Cold War Literature Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives Edited by Andrew Hammond 23 Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction Ursula Kluwick 24 Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism Edited by Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout 25 Locating Gender in Modernism The Outsider Female Geetha Ramanathan 26 Autobiographies of Others Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction Lucia Boldrini AIDS Literature and Gay Identity The Literature of Loss Monica B. Pearl NEW YORK LONDON First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Monica B. Pearl to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pearl, Monica B. AIDS literature and gay identity : the literature of loss / by Monica B. Pearl. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in twentieth-century English literature ; 29) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. AIDS (Disease) in literature. 2. Gays’ writings, American—History and criticism. 3. Loss (Psychology) in literature. 4. Gay men— Identity. I. Title. PS169.A42P43 2012 810.9'3561—dc23 2012030406 ISBN13: 978-0-415-80887-3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-09861-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced paper by IBT Global. This book is dedicated to the family I grew up with, and in memory of my father. Arnold J. Pearl Sylvia Dombey Pearl Bettina Pearl Contents Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction: Gay Grief 1 2 Mourning, Identity, and Gay AIDS Fiction 24 3 Queer AIDS Literature: The Hybrid Text 55 4 Queer AIDS Literature: Ontology, Melancholia, Fetishism 81 5 Survival and Marriage 112 6 Conversations and Queer Filiation 143 Notes 165 Bibliography 185 Index 197 Acknowledgments There are two people who were especially instrumental to the production of this book: Erica Carter, my mentor and superlative guide in its most crucial inau- gural stages. I can only imagine writing competently now without her guid- ance, because there was once a time I didn’t have to try. And Michele Aaron, who was its and my muse for many years, and who continues to invigorate and enable my work in innumerable ways. Thank you also to early guides and mentors John Fletcher and Maud Ellmann. Thank you to Gregory Woods. Others who gave life-sustaining support and encouragement from early on include Philip Myall, Cynthia Rothschild, and Nadia Valman. Thank you to friends and colleagues in Manchester who have provided support, interest, and endless provocation, conversation, and wine. Thank you especially to Daniela Caselli for showing such generous and loving support and enthusiasm for me and my work, and to Michael Bibler for his encouragement, the constant example of brilliant close reading, and a very helpful late reading of a fi nal draft. Particular thanks go to Janet Wolff for reading an early draft and off er- ing encouragement, always—for this project and all of my writing. To Nicole Vitellone for immensely productive and moving discussions about melancholia and aff ect. And to Jackie Stacey, an early interrogator of this work, for an ever-evolving and very sustaining friendship. For encouragement and several boosts along the way thank you to Rob- ert Eaglestone, and to Ann Cvetkovich. Thank you to my ACT UP/New York comrades, dead and alive, who, at a formative time, taught me, and continue to teach me, an enormous amount about resistance, persistence, and courage. Thank you particularly to Deb Levine for a careful and caring reading of a late draft. Immense and immeasurable thanks to my father Arnold J. Pearl, my mother Sylvia Dombey Pearl, my sister Bettina Pearl, my niece Gabby Heb- den Pearl, and my darling daughter Vita Aaron Pearl. xii Acknowledgments And to my dearest ones Jeff rey Busch, Julie Bolus, Christopher Fray, Pidge North, and Elizabeth Doak. Louise Sylvester is the most astute reader—of all my writing and also all my thoughts, enunciated and not. I’m not even going to try to thank her —what’s the point? (But as we have come to know, nothing goes without saying, so thank you, Louise. Thank you.) I am grateful to the journals Textual Practice and Auto/Biography for permission to reprint previously published material.