- Machine generated contents note: IX Acknowledgments
- 1 Melancholia and Moralism: An Introduction
- 27 AIDS: CulturalAnalysis/Cultural Activism
- 43 How To Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic
- 83 Portraits of People with AIDS
- 109 Good Ole Bad Boys
- 117 Randy Shilts's Miserable Failure
- 129 Mourning and Militancy
- 151 The Boys in My Bedroom
- 165 A Day without Gertrude
- 169 Right On, Girlfriend!
- 195 The Spectacle of Mourning
- 203 Accommodating Magic
- 221 Don't Tell
- 245 Rosa's Indulgence
- 253 De-Moralizing Representations of AIDS
- 273 Painful Pictures
- 281 Sex and Sensibility, or Sense and Sexuality
- 303 Index.
In Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp confronts the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the wider society. With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDS epidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rights movement would no longer have a reason to exist. Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics has never been greater.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
