Beginning with a contemporary text, Christian Frantz’s paper, “Left Melancholy and Historical Revisionism of AIDS and HIV in American Horror Story: NYC,” considers the resurgence in the representation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on television. This revision comes at a time that threatens to forget and erase the historical memory of AIDS and the epidemic, or more specifically, the U.S. government’s history of inaction. Their paper examines the revisionist account of the epidemic in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: NYC, which places the pandemic in a crime setting that seeks to reveal a mysterious serial killer attacking gay men. As the local authorities ignore gay men’s plea for help, the series turns to an emphasis on individual activist action, rather than collective power, as well as ignoring political and social change. Frantz contends that as an authorial presence, Ryan Murphy engages in a form of left melancholy, a self-insertion into a discourse of gay empowerment in the form of individual activist efforts. As Heather Love argues, left melancholy refers to a long-gone dream of class revolution, however this self-insertion rather appeals to a neoliberal subjectivity in Murphy’s work. AHS: NYC effectively communicates the appeal of individual resistance against the cultural hegemony over a sustainable effort of political change in the leftist tradition.
Danielle Shaw’s paper, “Excavating Queer Pleasure after AIDS in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine,” rewinds to the years just after the declaration of “end of AIDS” and examines Todd Hayne’s 1998 film, Velvet Goldmine, which he describes as a film about pleasure and history. In setting the present-day of his film in New York City, 1984 while fixating on queer sexual pleasure, Haynes’ rejects the homonormative forgetting of both the trauma of the pandemic and queer sexual pleasure. Through a temporal and historical reworking of glam rock, Haynes recuperates queer pleasure by historically grounding it in the past and “present” corporate dystopia of the film’s 1984. While the allure of homonormative politics in the wake of ARV medications is clear in the “unremembering” of so many queer films in the decade after 1996, Hayne’s embarks on an excavation of the past —both real and imagined, “[remembering] the things that money, the future, and a serious life made so certain I’d forget.” Haynes’ film insists on radical remembering, or in the words of Beth Freeman, “mining the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions.”
Leigh Boucher’s paper, “The ‘Australian Response,’ HIV/AIDs Etiquette and Their Troubling Supplements,” bridges the distance between the present and the past by exploring both oral histories of the pandemic alongside the national narrative of Australia’s response to HIV/AIDS. In Antipodean public life and scholarly histories, the ‘Australian Response’ to HIV/AIDs organises both the chronology and meaning of the first fifteen years of the epidemic. Boucher explores the ways this (homo)national took shape after 1996 and its subsequent impact on how individuals compose their memories of the epidemic. Drawing on interviews from a recent oral history project that investigated the ‘local’ history of HIV/AIDS in Sydney’s inner east, Boucher argues that an alternative history of queer joy and queer contest has been obscured by the homogenising tendencies of these narratives. It is through an engagement with individuals ambivalently placed in relation to the contemporary LGBTIQ+ political imaginary that a rather more rambunctious and unsettling chronology of the epidemic emerges. This history and its legacies, moreover, can help to explain why repeated attempts to construct a HIV/AIDs monument in Sydney’s inner East have failed. While the nationally framed story of the Australian response might iron out differences into a pleasing story about shared politics and collective grief, attempts to coalesce around a coherent story of the epidemic for a memorial have repeatedly been undone by remembered and continued political and social division.