From Spectacular to Speculative: The Shifting Rhetoric in Recent Gay AIDS Memoirs

The palpable shift from pathology to prevention of AIDS throughout culture manifests a gradual alteration public opinion recent years. By distinguishing between spectacular and forms of discourse, this essay traces a parallel rhetorical shift exemplary forms of gay AIDS memoir. It is that errancy I seek / Within myself to turn and find / world was really there.--Thomas E. Yingling, Something, AIDS and National Body (1997). We've learned how not to talk about epidemic as a plague. Now let's try to talk about it, for a while, without language of terror, of panic, of death, of resurrection, of apocalyps. These bold and timely words were those of one of Canada's foremost gay-rights and AIDS activists, Michael Lynch (81). And they seemed almost perfectly to describe spirit of 1996 International AIDS Conference Vancouver, where so much of deliberation was focussed on preventative side of AIDS pandemic, rather than (see Rotello 30). Lynch, however, an associate professor of English at University of Toronto, was not writing 1996--he died of an AIDS-related illness 1991--but, prophetically enough, eight years previously, a paper prepared for Modern Language Association Convention 1988. I begin this essay on one important species of life writing, gay AIDS memoir, with that same year, and work through to time of Vancouver Conference, and beyond. Although Vancouver meeting was international scope, I restrict my commentary here to gay AIDS memoir as a largely North American phenomenon--my exempla are all American-authored--inviting others to hypothesize about gay memoir's generic shapes and rhetorical contours from European point of view (the work of Derek Jarman and Christopher Coe may be suggestive here), or perhaps from a multinational perspective (in cross-cultural contexts, for example, of Thom Gunn and Harold Brodkey, among others). I commence my analysis and around 1988, not, however, because AIDS memoir by that time had moved very much past language of terror, panic, and death--the tacky theologies of guilt and retribution as anthropologist Eric Michaels, dying that very same year, puts it his own AIDS d iary (107). To contrary, I think it's perhaps only this decade that AIDS memoir has lived up to Lynch's prophetic words, catching hold of what John Glum, writing 1993, detected as the of a response to AIDS, that of fighting for a future for PWAS [Persons with AIDS] [...] [as] a counter to anguished, passive responses [...] which endurance [was] only available strength (219). The discursive shift gay AIDS memoir, from a spectacular to a more form of rhetoric, I contend, is a literary and artistic registration of this second wave response to AIDS. For some, however, remove from spectacular to may appear to be belied etymologically by continuance of a certain mirroring rhetoric from one term to other. Speculation about feminist discourses as an alternative to more spectacular forms of phallogocentric thought within dominant philosophical traditions of West appears especially fraught this way, as Luce Irigaray argues, when woman serves as the foundation for specular duplication, particularly in her role of mother [where] she will facilitate repetition of same, contempt of her difference (54). At outset, then, I should signal that I use speculative a deliberately open-ended way, unleashing more loosely colloquial sense of word a measure resistant to epistemological protocols for encompas sing world and making it entirely knowable as a reflection of rational investigation and (hu)manist penetration. Instead, speculative, as case of treatment of AIDS itself, so I contend, becomes marker of an unencompassable pathological phenomenon, premier signifier of uncertain existential outcomes and unpredictable semantic possibilities. …

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