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The Erotics of Place and the End of the Archive: Locating the Gay Beach in the Age of AIDS.
Susan Knabe, Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University
| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
Midway through Part II of Tony Kushner’s epic play, Angels in America, lovers Louis and Joe sit side-by-side on the sand dunes of Jones Beach in New York. Louis attempts to explain to neophyte Joe (a married Mormon lawyer) the complex erotic history of the gay community in the following way:
Louis: There used to be guys in the dunes even when it snowed. Nothing deterred us from the task at hand.
Joe: Which was?
Louis: Exploration. Across the unmapped terrain. The body of the homosexual human male. Here, or the Ramble, or the scrub pines on Fire Island, or the St. Mark’s Baths. Hardy pioneers. Like your ancestors.
Joe: Not exactly.
Louis: And many have perished on the trail. (2: 72)
What I hope to do in this paper is examine the ways in which it is possible to read the historical narrative Louis alludes to in the above passage, a narrative which is steeped in an erotics of place, specifically of the beach and the beat, as part of an archive which AIDS necessarily has placed under threat of erasure. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of the apocalyptic legacy of nuclear annihilation as the point at which a destruction of the archive of human history, of literature, becomes imaginable, I would like to explore the ways that HIV/AIDS within gay and lesbian communities, both here and in North America, makes the destruction of a specific erotic archive imaginable. As Louis indicates, this archive is both historical and corporeal: it is both a matter of reading the body as text and experiencing the body as terrain. In this context, then, I would like to look at how the erotic legacy of the beach is mobilized within representations of HIV/AIDS as a highly cathected site where memory, pleasure, desire and death intersect.
