The Personal Is Archival

Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era returns to the historical moment of the AIDS crisis and the emergence of New Queer Cinema to investigate the phenomena of queer biopic films produced during the late 1980s–early 1990s. More specifically, the book asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. While film critics and historian typically treat the biopic as a conservative, if not cliché, genre, queer filmmakers have frequently used the biopic to tell stories of queer lives. This project pays particular attention to the genre’s queer resonances, opening up the biopic’s historical connections to projects of education, public health, and social hygiene, along with the production of a shared history and national identity. Queer filmmakers’ engagement with the biopic evokes the genre’s history of building life through the portrayal of lives worthy of admiration and emulation, but it also points to another biopic history, that of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open up the potential for new means of connection and relationality. The book features fresh readings of the cinema of Derek Jarman, John Greyson, Todd Haynes, Barbara Hammer, and Tom Kalin. By calling for a reappraisal of the queer biopic, the book also calls for a reappraisal of New Queer Cinema’s legacy and its influence of contemporary queer film.

Broadway Dance

Acknowledging the 1980s HIV/AIDS crisis and the deaths of hundreds of would-be choreographers, this chapter explores the trauma experienced by the dance and theater communities as a defining moment in the history of Broadway dance. I examine the advent of Broadway outsiders, post-modernist Bill T. Jones (Spring Awakening [2006]) and physical theatre practitioner, Steven Hoggett (American Idiot [2010] [2012], Once [2012], The Last Ship [2014]) onto Broadway and assess the diminishment of systems created by de Mille and Robbins. I also analyze Broadway insiders Savion Glover (Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk [1996], Shuffle Along, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 And All That Followed [2016]), Andy Blankenbuehler (In the Heights [2008], Hamilton [2015]), Sergio Trujillo (Memphis [2009], Hands on a Hardbody [2013]), and Lorin Latarro (Waitress [2016]). I investigate how these four negotiate the systems of Robbins and Fosse while at the same time absorbing the influx of ideas coming from physical theatre Finally, the chapter looks at contemporary dance choreographer Camille Brown, who possesses an exceptional ability to discover fresh interpretations of time-worn dance vocabularies and to tell stories with invented movement. I contend that Brown is the latest choreographer using Broadway as a vehicle for inventive dance and setting a new standard of dance excellence and innovation in musical theater.

Conclusion: Speculative Futures

The book’s conclusion, “Speculative Futures,” revalues the biopic’s importance for contemporary queer and trans cinema. It, moreover, argues that the biopic genre provides a form for telling the stories of lives excluded from dominant history. Readings of Happy Birthday, Marsha! (Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, 2018) and Salacia (Tourmaline, 2019) illustrate the biopic’s ability to construct speculative personal histories. Moreover, such speculative constructions provide depictions of queer and trans lives where adequate archival sources do not exist. While this book begins at the AIDS crisis, it ends by recognizing that we still live in the AIDS era and queer and transfilmmakers continue to transform the biopic.

Invasion of the Child Snatchers: Pedophilic Seduction in New Queer Cinema

Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, American independent cinema began to engage the taboo of intergenerational intimacy as its animating provocation and ready-made narrative solution. This chapter analyzes two films associated with the New Queer Cinema that appear to challenge the conservative paradigms of erotic endangerment embodied by these films. By offering portraits of precocious adolescents whose shattering encounters with sexuality defy the norms of pedophilic representation, both L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta, 2001), and Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004) mine the potential of queer sexuality to transform dominant narratives of violation into ambiguous dramas of sexual awakening and kinship. Yet, in spite of New Queer Cinema’s promise to offer an alternative to the standard depiction of the monstrous pedophile, these texts fail to embody a genuinely counter-cinema practice, relying instead on a paradigm of “pedo-normativity” developed in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the War on Terror.

Promiske Sexualität oder monogame Beziehung?

A question that was and remains central to the history of homosexualities is how relationships and sexuality are interlinked. Through discussions around heteronormative relationship norms, the West German gay1 (liberation/rights) movement engaged in heated debates around the question of how sexuality could and should be lived out. This article outlines that debate, starting with the release of Rosa von Praunheim’s film »Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt« (»It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives«; 1971) and proceeding to examine the convulsions of the AIDS crisis. As the debate went on, its focus shif ted from morality to responsibility as the central topic. The increasing visibility of lived sexuality brought about by AIDS and the development of safer sex in reaction to HIV/AIDS in particular contributed to establishing the concept of responsible sexuality. This concept could in turn be positioned against a coupling of relationship and sexuality predicated on moral imperatives.

Infecting the Welfare State – The Swedish Play Kurage and the “AIDS Crisis”

The article focuses on the Swedish documentary theatre play Kurage (2020) in which three protagonists look back on how Sweden handled the “AIDS crisis” in the 1980s. In doing so, the play challenges the narrative of exceptional social conditions in Sweden and delivers a queer perspective on welfare state politics. Specifically, in the aesthetic conception of the play, the complex relation between welfare state and illness comes to the fore. I argue that Kurage not only builds on persistent metaphors of illness in literature but also expands epidemic narratives and thus exposes mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization in the welfare state. Finally, the article investigates in what ways pathology, medical institutions, or in a more general way: the understanding of medicine as a “neutral” science play a part in eliminating bodies, writing them out of the body politic and thus allowing for suffering and disappearing.

Det syge USA

Acknowledging the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic as an exacerbating factor for precarious US communities, this article reads Tony Kushner’s critically acclaimed play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992-95) and Michael Henson’s collection of short stories Maggie Boylan (2015) alongside Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor), Jasbir Puar (The Right to Maim) and Lauren Berlant (“Slow Death”). The play and the short story collection represent examples of critiques of a deep-rooted disorder that characterizes the precaritizing American social and political system. From the severely mishandled AIDS crisis in Reagan’s conservative United States to the equally disastrous management of the opioid and meth epidemics in the 21st century, American society and politicians are failing their citizens, a failure reflected in and critiqued by literary texts. Whereas Angels in America is an overtly political drama, in which marginalized people come together to respond to political erasure and violence with imaginative countercultural utopianism, Maggie Boylan traces the gradual decay and corruption of a contemporary American community, functioning as a microcosm of the Unites States as a whole. This society is plagued by several crippling “epidemics” and “crises” that leave bodies broken and communities in tatters. Despite glimmers of hope, Kushner and Henson paint a grim picture of a sickness at the core of American society.

Health Justice, Activism, and the Crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

The political economy of the AIDS crisis in South Africa’s past can be understood in terms of the concept of health justice. In particular, health justice can help us interpret the history of AIDS in South Africa according to the intersecting manifestations of socioeconomic inequality in the country, including the migrant labor system, the apartheid-era health system, with its racial segregation and inferior service provision for black people, the feminization of poverty, and, legal and institutionalized homophobia and transphobia. We can also use the overarching concept of health justice to understand the histories of public health and progressive health advocacy in relation to the epidemic over three periods. First, early in the history of the disease in South Africa, health injustice was manifest in the socioeconomic phenomena behind its arrival in the country in 1982. Secondly, its subsequent entrenchment in the country in the pre-1994 period can be related to South Africa’s late-apartheid political economy. Thirdly, in the postapartheid period, the Nelson Mandela (1994–1999) and Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) administrations exhibited deficits in political will in the development of effective AIDS policies, most notably evident in Mbeki’s AIDS denialism. In response to this, in 1998 the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) emerged from the AIDS advocacy of various strands of antiapartheid activism. The last section highlights how the TAC’s activism influenced global health politics from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. This history points to the TAC’s valuable legacy of activism in addressing AIDS and general health injustices. Interpreting the socioeconomic and political history of AIDS is of wider relevance to important historiographical bodies of literature in relation to South Africa, including those around medicine and health, gender and sexuality, black politics and social movements, and, South Africa’s role in world history. The topic is therefore especially deserving of sustained study.