“A Tenuous ‘We’ of Us All”: Performance, Identity, and Community in the Literature of the AIDS Crisis

Margaret Schnabel

All of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all. — Judith Butler, Precarious Life (2004)

In 1981, five young, previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles were diagnosed with a rare lung infection called Pneumocystic carinii pneumonia. By the end of that same year, the number of reported cases of severe immune deficiency among gay men had risen to 270, and deaths to 121.¹ The immune disease, eventually recognized as AIDS, was to sweep across America in epidemic proportions: by the end of 1984 alone, there were 7,699 AIDS cases and 3,665 AIDS deaths in the USA, figures that rose steeply throughout the decade and beyond.²

Though the disease affected a wide range of populations, the American medical community was quick to frame it as a problem of the gay community. “First termed GRID, for ‘gay-related immune deficiency,’” notes Monica Pearl,

the syndrome was defined and given the name AIDS by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1982 ‘when it was revealed that members of other groups—hemophiliacs, Haitian immigrants, recipients of blood transfusions, intravenous drug users, the sex partners (and sometimes children) of those carrying the virus, and millions of heterosexual men and women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—were also infected.’³

Defining an epidemic on the basis of a single social group may appear nothing more than an overgeneralization. Like all forms of discrimination, however, its effects are insidious; in forging so strong a link between queerness and illness, the American public depicated homosexual people as societal pollutants, outsiders, and wrongdoers. As Susan Sontag argues in Illness as Metaphor,

There is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien. A polluting person is always wrong. […] The inverse is also true: a person judged to be wrong is regarded as, at least potentially, a source of pollution.⁴

Such markers as “gay-related immune disease,” then, frame a highly personal problem—that of terminal illness—as political. Society, as Sontag argues, is encouraged to divide between “ill” and “well,” to quarantine and further alienate the polluter so as not to fall ill themselves. When an entire group of people becomes that “pollutant,” it is natural that social ruptures will follow—or, in the case of the queer American population, existing social hierarchies and divisions will be further justified.

“When you look at AIDS, God’s judgment because of the homosexual promiscuity in this land…,” televangelist Jerry Falwell famously declared during a 1983 broadcast, “[you see] the judgment of God upon moral perversion in this society.”⁵ How were queer citizens to mourn the loss of their friends and loved ones while confronting the inescapable publicness of their bodies—their inevitable treatment as political and moral lessons? How to claim pride in a community even as it is painted, time and again, as alien, polluting, wrong?

Examining literature written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, as it happens, reveals the opposite of what one would expect from a doubly marginalized population. “The growth of gay and lesbian writing and publishing—a veritable boom in the 1980s—coincided with the AIDS crisis,” notes Pearl.6 This literature, in reaffirming gay experiences, deepened and strengthened the gay community even as it confronted a crisis: “Gay literature reflected back gay culture to a gay reading public,” Pearl observes. “Such narratives, then, were able to constitute for isolated individuals an imagined gay community.”⁶

Indeed, the literary works of the AIDS epidemic demonstrate an extraordinary commitment to strengthening gay identity and community even in the midst of extreme loss. Three works centered around the mourning of gay friends or lovers affected by the AIDS epidemic—Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1991), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s White Glasses (1993) and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993)—challenge the social fracturing produced by the political response to the AIDS epidemic, creating an overwhelming sense of community responsibility. They do so, I argue, by self-consciously examining various modes of performance: the identity-confirming performances people in the queer and sick communities must enact, the counter-performances presented by members of the “general public” to assert their normalcy—and, indeed, the performances a text, film, or speech must undergo to meet genre expectations.

In Angels in America, Kushner’s characters enact various kinds of performances to affirm their identities, from performances of illness and health to queerness and heterosexuality. Prior, one of the play’s protagonists and a gay man diagnosed with AIDS, frequently performs a flippant, humorous role, a move that enables him to make light of the socially-damning labels of sickness and queerness. When showing his partner, Louis, his first lesion, Prior declares, “I’m a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion,” using a quick succession of puns to transform a symbol of fatal illness into the butt of a joke.⁷ This rhetorical performance symbolizes a dual attempt to reshape his fate: Prior first sheds the societal marker of “sick” and bestows upon himself a place in a powerful in-group (a “legion” akin to that of the ancient Roman army), enacting a shift from political weakness to political power. Secondly, by making light of his situation, Prior achieves a personal gain: he makes Louis laugh and eases his worry, strengthening their relational ties.

In interactions with different characters, Prior enacts distinct rhetorical performances, manipulating his identity at will: when his ex-lover Belize visits him in the hospital, the two pepper their sentences with French phrases, drawing upon the sophisticated connotations of French to elevate themselves beyond their current social status. To Belize’s joke “save a tab or two [of your drug] for me,” Prior responds, “Oh no, not this drug, ce n’est pas pour le joyeux noël et la bonne année, this drug she is serious poisonous chemistry, ma pauvre bichette.” (2.5.43-4) The friends’ use of French enables multiple forms of escape from societal labels; primarily, the command of a second language suggests an elevated level of education and thus socioeconomic status, lending Prior and Belize an elevated societal standing. Prior’s choice to reference Christmas and the New Year (“ce n’est pas pour le joyeux noël et la bonne année”) as a substitute for “good feeling” or “good times,” however, demonstrates a limited command of the language, suggesting that the connotations of sophistication made available to Prior through French—that is, the attitude it enables him—matter far more than the semantic content of his expressions. Yet another form of aspirational identity-building is present in Prior’s use of female pronouns in “ma pauvre bichette,” which cast the two in feminine roles. This rhetorical performance thus enables Prior and Belize not only to shed the societal categorizations with which they may or may not identify (male, sick, queer, middle-class), but also, in communicating via a shared “foreign” language used in confidence between the two, again constitutes a form of relationship-building through performance.

It is not only Kushner’s sick and queer characters, however, who perform for social gain; characters not constrained within marginalized roles instead constantly enact performances of normalcy, affording themselves the privilege of an existence devoid of labels. “Now I want you to stop jabbering for a minute and pull your wits together and tell me how to get to Brooklyn,” demands Hannah, a white Mormon mother, to a woman out on the street in the Bronx:

Because there is no one else around to tell me and I am wet and cold and I am very angry! So I am sorry you’re psychotic but just make the effort—take a deep breath—DO IT! (3.5.80, emphasis added)

In diagnosing the Bronx woman as “psychotic” (an accusation supplemented by the verb “jabbering” and the imperative demands “pull your wits together” and “DO IT,” which place Hannah in a position of power), Hannah frames herself as rational and sane—the neutral, normal member of the “general public” that is interrupted, and perhaps endangered, by the “psychotic” Other. This diagnosis mirrors on a microscopic level the macroscopic societal practice of separating a “general population” from disease-carriers in times of epidemic, as Sontag notes:

Every feared epidemic disease, but especially those associated with sexual license, generates a preoccupying distinction between the disease’s putative carriers (which usually means just the poor and, in this part of the world, people with darker skins) and those defined—health professionals and other bureaucrats do the defining—as ‘the general population.’⁸

Illness thus acts as a means—or an excuse10—for segregating the population into in-groups and out-groups, which are, as Sontag observes, often representative of existing biases against “the poor” and “people with darker skins.” By diagnosing the Bronx woman as “psychotic,” Hannah is, in effect, euphemizing—or, indeed, justifying discrimination on the basis of—what she views as, but cannot proclaim, the woman’s other abnormalities: the color of her skin and her socioeconomic status. Hannah thus reasserts her own normality on the basis of the Bronx woman’s abnormality, enacting a similar performative process to, as Judith Butler outlines in Gender Trouble, a heterosexual person justifying their normality on the basis of homosexuality.⁹ Further, Hannah’s implicit performative utterances in the imperative commands “make the effort—take a deep breath—DO IT!” allow her to assume a commanding role; as theorist J.L. Austin outlines, performative utterances cannot be defined as true or false, as they simultaneously delineate and fulfill an action (in this case, the implied performative “I command you”).¹⁰ In other words, Hannah manipulates her speech to craft a new reality in which she holds absolute power; this performance of power thus works to bolster the existence of the imagined “general population” and to reassert the hierarchy between this population and the (lesser) ill population. This rhetorical performance, too, links political power with health; “Illness comes from imbalance,” Sontag notes. “Treatment is aimed at restoring the right balance—in political terms, the right hierarchy.”¹¹ By exposing the performance required to maintain an identity of “normal”—and the social discrimination necessary to that performance—Kushner exposes, too, the process by which the very political “hierarchies” we take for granted are maintained.

Theatre, of course, is a genre in which performance is expected. Fittingly, Kushner takes advantage of this audience expectation to implicate the viewer in a community of witnessing, building community even as characters’ identities fracture. Kushner’s use of magic is a prime example of this community-building; what the audience hears and sees determines their connection to the other characters onstage, who either do or do not experience the same magical phenomenon. In one such instance, both Prior and the audience hear his nurse speak Hebrew; the nurse, however, denies this occurrence: “Hebrew? (Laughs). I’m basically Italian-American. No. I didn’t speak in Hebrew,” she promises (3.3.75). Here, by aligning the audience’s perception with Prior’s, Kushner gives us the power to relieve Prior of the diagnosis of insanity hinted at by the nurse’s “laugh.” This mutual witnessing shared between audience and actor allows for a corresponding shift in identity, from “ill” to “well.”¹² Kushner thus draws upon the genre expectations of theatre to create a shared—and politically powerful—community between the audience and the play’s characters.

The play’s visual spectacles, such as the sudden appearance of the angel, or, in Act 3, a book, further probe this relationship between performance, community, and belief:

Suddenly there is an astonishing blaze of light, a huge chord sounded by a gigantic choir, and a great book with steel pages mounted atop a molten-red pillar pops up from the stage floor. It opens; there is a large Aleph inscribed on its pages, which bursts into flames. Immediately the book slams shut and disappears instantly under the floor as the lights become normal again. EMILY notices none of this, writing. PRIOR is agog. (3.3.75)

Confronted with “an astonishing blaze of light,” the appearance of a “molten-red pillar” from nowhere and a book that “bursts into flames,” the audience, too, must be “agog”; when “EMILY notices none of this,” she, rather than Prior, is excluded from the majority.¹³

Indeed, Kushner’s use of magic throughout the play is one of the central ways in which the audience is encouraged to recognize its own status as a community—not only as a unified community of witnesses, as outlined above, but also as members of a faith community, not unlike the other species of faith (Judaism, Mormonism) considered in the play. As Kushner suggests in the introduction to the play, its magic can, and perhaps should, be imperfect:

The moments of magic—the appearance and disappearance of Mr Lies and the ghosts, the Book hallucination, and the ending—are to be fully realised, as bits of wonderful Theatrical illusion—which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.¹⁴

In specifying that “it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do,” Kushner suggests a preference for highlighting, instead of minimizing, the craftedness of the spectacle, intentionally breaking the audience’s absorbance into the fictional world of the play. In deliberately thwarting the audience’s suspension of disbelief, Kushner reveals our inherent expectation for the play: our desire to believe in the fiction of the theater. We are members, Kushner suggests, of a community of belief that watches a spectacle we know to be mechanically crafted (“wires show”) and nonetheless choose to maintain our faith in the magic, to be “thoroughly amaz[ed].” Such a revelation blurs the lines between the fictional world of Angels and the real world we live in, suggesting that the roles we fill as viewers—in, as outlined above, witnessing and validating the experiences of members of an out-group, in extending our empathy—might be filled in our daily life as well.

These moments of heightened and self-conscious performance are not unique to Angels; “White Glasses” and Blue manipulate similar techniques to create a sense of community responsibility. In the nonfiction essay “White Glasses,” Kosofsky Sedgwick instantly frames her speech as a rhetorical performance—but one that will not, she clarifies, fulfill genre expectations: “when I decided to write ‘White Glasses’ for this conference,” she describes, “I thought it was going to be an obituary for Michael Lynch. The best thing about writing it is that it isn’t—it’s an homage to a living friend.”¹⁵ Sedgwick’s chosen form—the eulogy, or in her words, “obituary,” “homage”—is inherently political, as Judith Butler notes in Precarious Lives:

I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy.¹⁶

The crucial difference between Sedgwick’s speech and an obituary printed in a newspaper, however, is that of origin; obituaries are written based on the decision of an authority that a life is “grievable”—that is, that it held public value and should be publicly mourned—whereas Sedgwick’s speech was written as a response to a personal connection. The opening of the speech—“The first time I met Michael Lynch, I thought his white-framed glasses were the coolest thing I had ever seen” (252)—is hardly a familiar reason for the public recognition of a life, and yet Sedgwick is committing to memorializing this life in the form of a public, and thus political, speech: “Memorials, dedications,” she muses: “places where you say as if to someone else the things you can’t say to the people you love.” (256)

By setting up and immediately contradicting our expectations of a eulogy, Sedgwick is able to make salient the roles we expect both sick and queer members of the community to play. “So much about how to be sick—how to occupy most truthfully and powerfully, and at the same time constantly to question and deconstruct, the sick role,” she notes, “had long been embodied in [Michael]“:

I have sometimes condensed [these skills] to myself in the unbearably double-edged performative injunction, ‘Out, out—.’ As if the horrifying fragility of a life’s brief flame could somehow be braced and welded, in the forge of the signifier, as if orthopedically to the galvanizing coming-out imperative of visibility, defiance, solidarity, and self-assertion. (261)

In drawing a parallel between the expected queer performance of “coming out” (“the galvanizing coming-out imperative”) and the performance of “the sick role,” Sedgwick calls into question what sorts of performances are necessary for marginalized people to be recognized by society. Do we demand of sick and queer people similar things—public “visibility” and “self-assertion” of a singular, defining characteristic by which we group them, which we must see performed and fulfilled in order to to say “x is sick,” “x is queer”? Is there a certain satisfaction—however sympathetic we claim to be—in seeing this role successfully filled? “As a mode of relation,” Butler notes, “neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another.”¹⁷ The labels we call “identity” serve far more social and political functions, Sedgwick suggests, than personal. Kushner’s Roy Cohn would agree: “Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order?” (1.9.31)

If Sedgwick’s speech refuses us our rhetorical subject—the dead queer man—Derek Jarman’s Blue takes yet a more direct approach to thwarting performance: the film lacks any visual dimension whatsoever, remaining fixed, throughout the entirety of its seventy-two minutes, on a flat blue screen. (One thinks of the old term for films—“moving pictures”—and laughs.) In the absence of visual data, the audience depends entirely upon the speaker’s narration for our “sight”; Jarman thus creates an audience-narrator relationship that fills a perceptive lack, much as the audience-Prior relationship in Angels does. (Perhaps, Jarman suggests, we need the perspective of others in order to fully witness tragedy.) This crafted “blindness” deepens the relationship between the audience and the speaker yet further as the speaker loses his own vision; “my vision will never come back,” he mourns: “I have to come to terms with sightlessness,” and later, “I resign myself to my fate. Blind fate.”¹⁸ Such “blindness” allows Jarman to avoid a potential pitfall of using art to document the progression of sickness; encapsulated into the neat narrative of a film, which progresses forward in time, the deep uncertainty and fear inherent to a slow-progressing illness like AIDS is at risk of being erased. If we, like the speaker, however, are “blind” to whatever comes next, we can better experience that uncertainty.

In calling attention to—and then thwarting our expectations of—various modes of performance, the texts analyzed above call into question, too, our expectations of queer and sick identity. However private acts of mourning may be, these authors reach beyond the personal and towards questions of politics, social perception, and community, revealing what Butler observes as the political dimensions of mourning:

Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order […] bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. (22)

Indeed, as these authors highlight, the process of grieving reveals just how much our own senses of self build upon those of others—whether a sense of normality constructed in opposition to a “psychotic” other (as in Kushner’s Hannah), a collective identity shared with others who have been similarly marginalized (Prior and Belize), or, indeed, the mutually dependent relationship between the witnessing community of the audience and the individual speaker or narrator. We are not, as these authors reveal, the faceless and blameless “general public” we pretend to be; we demand from those around us that they perform the social roles we bestow upon them, and we are implicated, too, in their suffering.

Bibliography

Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words, ed. by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1962.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. 1990.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. 2004.

Jarman, Derek. Blue [DVD]. Zeitgeist Films. 1993.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millennium Approaches. London: Royal National Theatre. 1992.

Pearl, Monica. AIDS Literature and Gay Identity: The Literature of Loss. London: Routledge. 2013.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ‘White Glasses’ in Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press. 1993.

Sontag, Susan. “Illness as Metaphor” in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Penguin. 1991.

Zorn, Eric. “22 Years Later, the Follow-Up Question.” Chicago Tribune Blogs. 31 March 2005, accessed 21 March 2020.