If Memory Serves This page intentionally left blank 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. This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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