University Times

Gay culture has become prey to an intense version of amnesia since the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, argues an openly gay professor in the draft of his forthcoming book.

It’s not that AIDS destroyed gay culture, writes Chris Castiglia, liberal arts research professor of English and senior scholar in the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State. “Rather, the AIDS crisis became an occasion for a powerful concentration of cultural forces that made — and continue to make — the syndrome an agent of amnesia, wiping out memories not only of everything that came before, but of the remarkably vibrant and imaginative ways that gay communities responded to the catastrophe of illness and death and sought to memorialize our losses.”

Chris Castiglia

Castiglia was citing passages from his manuscript, “If Memory Serves: Remembering (and) Sexual Subculture,” which was the subject of a Sept. 23 Humanities Center colloquium. The manuscript was co-authored by Christopher Reed, Castiglia’s partner of 28 years.

The dichotomy for gays between the “sexual revolution” bath house days of the 1960s and ’70s and the post-AIDS era is more than a generational evolution of mores, Castiglia maintains. The amnesia, or “unremembering” in Castiglia’s terminology, has weakened gay communities both in their connections to one another and in their ability to imagine alternative social presents and futures, he says.

Advocates of this type of amnesia instead prescribe normalcy in terms of public safety, rationalizing the regulation and closure of spaces of openly gay sexual culture, such as bath houses, discothèques and gay-oriented bars, he writes.

But as the demands for equality and recognition associated with early gay activism shrank into an agenda of conformity to institutionalized authority — such as campaigns for the right to marry, to join the military or to “cure” gender dysphoria — “we began to wonder what model of ‘health’ such amnesia, in the end, procures,” he writes.

Castiglia told the discussion audience, “In writing the book, we were responding to the ways in which the exclusivity of a white gay male community became part of the post-AIDS mechanism for forgetting that white gay men were devastated by the epidemic, and trying to think about how to bring that picture back. By suggesting a particular experience of AIDS and memory, our hope would be that it could be shared, would be shared and would be developed.”

Castiglia acknowledged his nontraditional view of memory, which by convention is assumed to be transparent retrievals of directly experienced pasts. He says the act of distancing the past is a perpetual process, not a once-and-for-all forgetting.

“Like Lot’s wife, we are urged never to cast our eyes back,” but instead to embrace the dubious vision that normalcy equals progress, he says.

“Recent psychological studies have shown that memories are strongly influenced by subsequent events, which have the capability not only of highlighting experiences that seemed insignificant at the time, but even — and quite often — of fabricating what seem to be memories. Such creativity within memory is not pernicious, but rather is the way humans order the world to achieve a sense of coherence and meaning,” Castiglia says.

Thus memories of the sexual revolution are clouded by the AIDS epidemic, which overwhelmed memories of the gay community and alternative lifestyles. More recent accounts about the pre-AIDS era ignore the rich intellectual and political developments of the gay community, where sex often led to social ties rooted in trust, familiarity and shared knowledge among men, even those who met only briefly, Castiglia says.

By the 1980s, that gay culture had morphed into a cultural “skeleton in the closet,” when sex became the “Siamese twin of death,” he says. “Friends stopped going to bars and dances and started coupling up, feathering nests. If anyone still had tales of sexual adventure, he kept them to himself.”

Instead, the AIDS epidemic produced copious fear that now constitutes the substance of homosexual life, a kind of aversion therapy. “If you finally equate sex with death, you don’t have to worry about observing safe sex techniques, and sex itself will eventually become unappetizing,” Castiglia says.

He notes that memory can be a strategic tool. “The return to memory, then, is not a traumatized refusal to live in the present, but an active refusal to live in that present” as it is constructed currently, he says. “It is a determination to use the past to propose alternatives to current social and sexual systems,” Castiglia says.

“We wanted to re-orient the notion of what queer has become into the image of what gay had been in the sense that queerness has become a movement ‘against’; gayness in the 1970s was a movement that’s ‘for.’ Our critique does not say that the normative is wrong, it does not say that campaigns for marriage, or campaigns for other kinds of legal or financial rights are wrong. But there is a rich diversity of notions that need to be fixed in a culture that got narrowed to those. Those remain important struggles, but so are the other struggles,” he says.

“In part what we discovered when we went back to things like the rights expressed by the Gay Liberation Front were just these extraordinary catalogues relating to health care reform, racism, the rights of women, the rights of the disabled.

“All of these were being brought to the front under the category of gay liberation. Gays would not be liberated until there was a more generalized liberation in the culture. That’s the piece that gets lost in some sense in that narrowing of the agenda.”

—Peter Hart