Laughter filled with rage
Two AIDS writers divided by a common crisis

By Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore

IN "My Postmodernism," one of the essays included in The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003, video activist Gregg Bordowitz presents his coming-of-age story in nine sections, from "Identity" to "Intervention" (with seven other postmodern "I"s in between). "Identity" describes Bordowitz's immersion in the East Village of the 1980s, "a hodgepodge of cultures – punk, bohemian, queer, and druggie. No one I knew referred to himself as gay. That identity was reserved for clones – older homosexual men who wore mustaches and dressed alike in tight jeans and nylon bomber jackets, or in leather. I rejected this style as a kind of nonconformity." Later, however, Bordowitz recounts a visit to the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, in the West Village, in 1986, in order to get tested for HIV at the Community Health Project. He describes the free examination and sex education session as "a revelation: community is the space claimed and defended by people who need one another. On the steps of the center that day, I decided to become a citizen of the gay community, and I vowed to make a contribution to it."

In the preface to The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous, AIDS theorist Douglas Crimp responds to Bordowitz's description of the gay clone by admitting that "that would have been me ... the whole package." Crimp describes his friendship with Bordowitz as "an intellectual friendship with someone half my age and someone whose personal style was so unlike mine, in which I felt as much mentored as mentor." It was Bordowitz who first suggested that Crimp attend an ACT UP meeting, and Crimp reveals that at "about the same time Gregg found it OK to accept the designation gay, I began to discover the utility of the reclaimed term queer." ACT UP united queers in anger and defiance – a heady prescription for community-building. As Bordowitz and Crimp attest, one possibility that emerged was a generational reversal that challenged the ossified dynamics of gay male sexual culture and social interaction.

The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous covers a wide range of topics, from coalition-building to the disappearance of New York City as a home for the fringes, from art criticism to South African AIDS activism. At times Bordowitz adopts an austere Marxist/materialist criticism that builds a disturbing distance between ideas and action, but he always returns to the personal, where he merges his doubts and inconsistencies into a rigorous analysis. In "Dense Moments," which Bordowitz adapted for his 1993 movie, Fast Trip, Long Drop, he relates that he tested HIV positive on the same day, in 1988, as an ACT UP meeting where he'd planned to announce an upcoming protest for drug treatment and needle exchange; he decided to reveal his test results to the general meeting of several hundred AIDS activists. Though Bordowitz wrote this piece more than 10 years ago, its forthright insistence on disclosure and a holistic discussion of HIV prevention is refreshing today.

"I got infected," Bordowitz writes, "because I have a drinking and drug problem that has prevented me from being able to negotiate and insist on having safe sex.... I'm telling you this because I think a lot of other people in this room have had the same experience.... The connection between drug abuse and safe sex must not be left out of any discussion about AIDS and substance abuse."

If the title of Bordowitz's book evokes an AIDS-denialist politic (at least for those of us in San Francisco), it actually refers to Bordowitz's 1993 essay "The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous," about Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater. Ludlam, an actor and director, died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, but in Bordowitz's fantasy, Ludlam fucks him without a condom and passes on his brilliance through his come. Bordowitz divulges this post-seroconversion fantasy as a dream of intergenerational continuity through the immortality of artistic creation. If Ludlam's satirical theater is designed to make people laugh (and maybe cry), Bordowitz's AIDS-activist video is intended to make people angry (and force them to tears). Bordowitz links the two as queer strategies to fight marginalization and challenge the dominant culture.

"Unlike Ridiculous Theater," Bordowitz continues, "AIDS activist videos cannot sabotage all emotional effects.... The situation is obscene. It's ridiculous. The effect provokes laughter – the kind of laughter that forces tears and hurts the stomach, laughter filled with rage."

Nothing could be further from Bordowitz's relentless search for honesty than fellow ACT UP veteran Larry Kramer's vitriolic rant in The Tragedy of Today's Gays, a recap of Kramer's speech at Cooper Union University (in the East Village) five days after the 2004 presidential election. In the foreword, Beauty Myth avatar Naomi Wolf proclaims Kramer the heir to the humanist tradition, but this is hard to see when he declares, "We're living in pigshit, and it's up to each one of us to figure out how to get out of it. Crystal meth is not an answer. You must know that by now. And quite frankly, statistically it is only happening to so few of us that it is hard to get anyone worked up about that problem. Just as it is hard to get worked up about a middle-aged man with brains who seroconverts. You want to kill yourself? Go kill yourself."

As early as 1983, in "1,112 and Counting" (as article originally published in the New York Native, and later in gay newspapers across the country), Kramer called on gay people to prepare for civil disobedience in order to protest the growing number of AIDS deaths, and his 1987 speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center hastened the development of ACT UP, which brought thousands of people to the streets. While Kramer has long been one of the loudest and most effective voices to denounce US government complicity in the deaths of first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, and now millions of people with AIDS, he shares with the government a palpable discomfort with public gay sexuality.

"There is a growing understanding that we [gay people] created a culture that in effect murdered us," Kramer wrote in a 1997 New York Times op-ed piece, "and if we are to remain alive it's time to redefine homosexuality as something far greater than what we do with our genitals."

But in The Tragedy, Kramer goes further:

"I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of our plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend's death. I listed all the ones I'd slept with," he reveals. "There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick? It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know."

Unlike Bordowitz's touching, nuanced, and critical explorations of intergenerational yearning and learning, Kramer's model is limited to blame. At age 69, he discards the early AIDS-activist dictum that all people with AIDS were innocent, in order to castigate young and middle-aged gay men for "murdering each other." Kramer even holds himself responsible for the deaths of men he had sex with, presumably before he even knew that he was HIV positive. Though Kramer insists that he is not sex-negative, there is no other plausible explanation for his evident self-loathing.

When Kramer declares of gay people that "we have no power. Nobody listens to us. We have no access to power," he neglects the obvious: that gay people like himself can produce Hollywood movies, live in the same building as New York City mayor Ed Koch, and periodically write op-eds in the New York Times. While Kramer may have originally intended his speech for a gay audience, there is no question that when one of the largest publishers in the world (Penguin) stretched a hastily constructed essay into a book-length release barely five months after the original speech (complete with a cover illustration of Kramer standing prophetlike in front of the Stars and Stripes), the expectation was that straight people would get excited. Kramer's attack-queer shenanigans are intended to bolster his status in the blame game by harnessing straight fears about gay men spreading AIDS. Instead of acknowledging his minstrelsy, he interjects an insipid refrain of gay exceptionalism throughout the speech.

"I love being gay," he writes. "I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware. I do, I do, I totally do."

Then Kramer rails against murderous officialdom, but he neglects to draw a causal relationship between widespread hatred of queers and continuing drug addiction and seroconversion among gay men. Instead, he turns the blame around, asserting that conservatives "did not go off then to a disco, or to Fire Island Pines or South Beach, or into therapy, or into drugs." Kramer wants us to think that if gay men would just behave more like straight conservatives, then straight conservatives would no longer wield so much power – or, worse, that gay men deserve obliteration for refusing to conform.

Kramer comes closest to getting a grip when he writes, "We know who the enemy is and we just stand here letting them shoot us over and over again. We stand here and let them do it! All of the brains and abilities we have among us seem useless.... The ones who should help us and speak up for us refuse that responsibility."

Kramer's solution offers the most unintended humor in the entire speech: "We must," he writes, "find a platform that all of us can support without divisiveness and shame and guilt and all the other hateful weapons they will club us with."

Apparently, Kramer believes unity will arise from his politics of disdain. Bordowitz could very well be addressing Kramer when he writes, in "My Postmodernism," that "change is not simply a matter of developing better ideas and convincing others of their validity. Radical change is a matter of altering the entire culture's view of reality.... For those of us who've lost scores of people, the thought of another prolonged illness and death is intolerable. But there's an objectionable kind of moralism that's crept into the gay community. People who seroconvert now are viewed with suspicion.... If we give in to this kind of thinking, we neglect to acknowledge the violence perpetrated against our sexual lives by the epidemic itself, and the difficulties of remaining HIV negative."

Kramer would no doubt agree with Bordowitz that "community is the space claimed and defended by people who need one another," but his violent moralism attests to a different goal: social purification for the benefit of straight acceptance. This contradiction would doubtlessly create wonderful material for the Ridiculous Theater, but unfortunately Kramer demonstrates none of the self-awareness necessary to perform in a farce, only the misdirected rage to enact one.

Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is the editor, most recently, of That's Revolting! Queer Strategies of Resisting Assimilation. Contact Mattilda via www.mattbernsteinsycamore.com.

The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003

By Gregg Bordowitz. The MIT Press, 285 pages, $35.

The Tragedy of Today's Gays

By Larry Kramer. Tarcher/Penguin, 108 pages, $9.95 (paper).