These are prefatory remarks written for the three panels upon which I sat at the recent Key West Seminar on "Literature in the Age of AIDS." I wrote each one about an hour before the panel; Larry Kramer called them "screeds" and that sounded right so I've used his title. The titles of each section are simply the titles somebody else assigned to the panels. I think everything I write sounds like a dramatic monologue, which isn't surprising; these monologues were written by and for the almost-entirely fictional character Tony Kushner, a playwright, who, as he said in the last of the three panels, spent the weekend feeling like the bastard child of Neville Chamberlain and Attila the Hun. There's a reference in the second screed to a struggle Sarah Schulman and I had over several instances of thoughtless exercising of privilege and exclusion. Better, I said, borrowing a lesson I've learned from my collaborator friend Kimberly Flynn, to be awkward in admitting a mistake than to be a totally irresponsible fuck-up: and this I think is in a sense the point of all that follows.
I can't imagine I'm the only one here--I certainly hope I'm not--who feels odd that she or he has benefited, even profited from the epidemic. This is an ugly statement and I hesitate to write it or utter it, but I've been haunted all weekend, and was anticipatorily haunted before coming here, and even considered not coming, up till the last moment, because of strong feelings of unworthiness, inadequacy, and fraudulence. I've acquired a habit now of confessing to these feelings before crowds of people, and I probably should have stayed at home and sought out the appropriate 12-Step program, Playwrights' Anonymous, instead of mortifying myself before artists and activists I admire so much--whose presence, I suspect, made the promise of suffering a really intense abjection entirely too tempting to pass up.
I didn't set out to write a play about AIDS, I set out to write a play about what it was like to be a gay, Jewish, Leftist man in New York City in mid-80's Reagan America. I really think I set out to write about Reagan. I'd seen a few plays and TV films "about" AIDS, and with one single exception they were all terrible, in my opinion, disease-of-the-week weepies addressing something manifestly monumentally of another order--an order, I felt, like the Holocaust, the scale of which was incommensurable with representation on the tacky-tawdry-showbizzy stage. The one (and without attacking other playwrights and screenwriters I'd like to stress this one) towering exception was The Normal Heart, of course, which galvanized its audiences like no play any of us--any of my generation of theater artists, certainly--had ever seen; and which--and I'm certain this was the least of its author's intentions, if it indeed it figured at all--awoke in theater people a long-dormant ambition to make popular theater that enters full-bloodedly into civic life, into immediacy, crisis, and public debate.
The Normal Heart, scene for scene, is a great American play. People have an annoying tendency to call it a polemic, but "1,112 And Counting" is a polemic--a historically significant polemic, that rare thing, a sermon that works; The Normal Heart is a great play. It has depth, complexity, symbolic and political and psychological and musical strata, strains which proceed, unerringly orchestrated with the gripping, terrifying narrative until all the pennies drop at just the right moment to move a large, impatient, distracted house full of people to terror, pity, empathy, reflection and outrage.
But the play set an impossibly high standard and we suspected, and we were not wrong in this, that its urgency and phosphorous brilliance were not exclusively the effects of its author's talents and technical skills, but also of his activist engagement with AIDS. As we have demonstrated with AIDS and every other human and political calamity, and with our passive acquiescence to the destruction of the National Endowment for the Arts, among theater folk the activist impulse is forever devoured, or rather eviscerated, by our fatal attraction to its inherent drama. We love the flash and thunderclap and are too impatient to do the work of constructing the bomb. We could not, and I think we have not, followed Larry's lead.
(In a way, this is just a 90's version of what grand old theater queens used to say to excuse appalling, inexcusable sloth or misbehavior, quoting Duke Theseus, usually in a tremulous voice when accepting your award at the Sarah Siddons Society dinner: The best in these are but shadows, the worst no worse, blah blah blah.)
We all know that there's been a lot of theater about AIDS, a lot of dramatic literature, and some of it is very good, even if it is only "dramatic literature" and hence a thing of indifference outside of annoyed envy at the size of dramatic royalty checks to many novelists and poets and scholars and book reviewers and (dare I say it? and I say it with the greatest respect) Keynote Speakers.
We all know that the form, the public forum, the instant community of actor and audience, collective attendance, catharsis, can in the right hands suit any subject of a vast shared grief and rage. We know that theater originates in the sacred, but we should also remember that the Church banished actors, once full-throttle mimesis, representation and narrative had insinuated themselves into the Mass; not because of a good actor's power to inspire idolatry but rather because the whole business started to smell of something dangerously cheap, risible, carnal: the ecclesiastical rapidly became the dialectical opposite of its Sacred subject. The proximity of the Divine and the Preposterous, the Infinitely Grave and the Infinitely Embarrassing, made the theatrical bits more exciting than the sacramental ritual and hence the theatrical became ripe for, and deserving of, anathema.
We come to the theater--and to literary conferences, which are also affairs of voices and bodies and flashes of excitement and lingering doubts and disappointments, mean and bruising and cruisy and fun--to be mortified, and to delight in the mortification of others, to suffer with those we see (and cause to) suffer and pay money to see suffer. Theater is always self-evidently political because it is always dialectical and always dialectical because this paradox, Inspiration Flashing and Modesty Blushing, simultaneously, is at its heart, it's what makes the engine go. All theater is a waste of time, which reminds us that our best and dearest dream for ourselves and for our fellow humans ought to be oceans of time to waste in a cozy seat in which you have (and here we see the difference between the theatrical and the literary) very little work to do to receive the best kind of pleasure: free of consequence.
I think what I'm trying to say is that it is theater's inappropriateness that makes it a likely place for the staging of scenes from a pandemic. To borrow an image used by Herbert Blau, Shakespeare, and Beckett, where else but the theater can we go to mourn, and mourn deeply, over a corpse, noting all the while that the corpse over which we grieve, oh beautiful, impossible sight! is breathing.
I did not set out opportunistically to write about AIDS because it's such great material; but it is, isn't it? And so am I not opportunistic? Am I not, as I have been accused of being, an AIDS profiteer? Perhaps I haven't heard this said because I haven't been at the panels where it's been said, or perhaps it's too despicable or vulgar or in some sense unnecessary to say, or perhaps survivor guilt is a sufficient rubric, but something has compelled me to make this declaration to the conference. I know my play has helped people and helped the cause. It has also made me comfortable. And there's something unbearable about that. Which, maybe, I ought to keep to myself, but, playwright, theater worker that I am, I am too much in love with the drama of declaration and mortification.
We've talked about a fear of using AIDS metaphorically, about comparing AIDS to the Holocaust, and this dilemma I think speaks to my theme: Using AIDS. Using AIDS to make art, to make a political point, to achieve a desirable goal. Of course we're squeamish. But I have always thought that the only point in remembering and then organizing memory into an event and then naming that event "the Holocaust" or "the AIDS epidemic" is to provide ourselves and the future with a standard by which comparison can be made. Otherwise, forget, for God's sake; do us all a favor.
But in this standard-construction business is implicit the notion that the Holocaust and the epidemic are for something, are utilitarian, can be turned into phenomena by which we might profit--morally, spiritually, and yes, materially. We must approach this dialectically, I suppose is my point: to use human suffering, whether it originates in viral infection or from malignant human agency or from a blending of the two--is necessary and appalling, neither more one than the other, always unbearable, always unavoidable, a terrible mandate, always both.
I struggle a lot with what I've come increasingly to describe to myself as a divide between Wisdom with a capital W, which I am reasonably certain I do not possess, and the something that I do possess--opinions? In my opinion, my opinions are the correct opinions to have, but having the correct opinions is not the same as knowing the truth, having Wisdom; some people have that, but I don't know where they got it any more than I know, really, why I'm gay. But I'm reasonably sure I'm gay and I'm reasonably sure my opinions are at least 65% right 70% of the time, which makes me cleverer than all of the Republican Party and 90% of the Democratic Party and a whole lot of others besides, and that really is all I know of truth and how to get it.
My favorite writer Melville loved those pearl divers, he wrote in a letter to his boyfriend, Hawthorne, who go deep down seeking the truth, rising to the surface again with bloodshot eyes, their pressurized, lachrymal stigmata indicating how hard a struggle it is to seek Wisdom. Some dark nights I can guess at what Melville meant, but I'm too afraid of the bends to try it myself; and why should I, really, when Wisdom doesn't work as well in the theater as having the correct opinions, and I can always get Wisdom seated in my armchair, reading novels?
Truth is a matter of life and death and nothing proves that more than this plague; lies, as often as silences, equal death. Wisdom will save you, reliably, that's how you know it's Wisdom, or at least if it can't save you it will help you make sense of your demise. And it lasts: truth is the daughter of time. But I have been bewildered since 1981. Opinions work in the moment, if you're voluble enough, but they can betray you. Here are some of my false truths, opinions that betrayed me: In 1981 I thought AIDS was a distraction from the real struggle, which was for a lesbian and gay rights bill in New York City. In 1983 and 1984 I refused to be tested and encouraged others not to, certain that it was a mistake, a hysterical over-reaction, cooperation with an oppressive medical/political homophobic establishment--and maybe back then it was, who knows? I have held the opinion that AIDS was legionnaire's disease, swine flu, a monkey virus, and practically become a maintenance illness (on several occasions, which is why protease inhibitors make me feel glad but very cautious).
The illnesses, sufferings, nightmares, struggles, heroism, and deaths of friends and idols, such involvement in the movement as I can claim, reading, writing Angels--my opinions get corrected, but there's still so much I don't know and am afraid to know, and some of it may be life-and-death. Is it okay to suck cock without a condom? Should I or shouldn't I say that I do, sometimes? My bemusement is a luxury, which Amiri Baraka has defined as living in ignorance, comfortably. But it's also genuine un-knowing in the face of mysteries, and so I seek out my multicultural fallible rabbinate, for exegesis, for rescue. My chiefest wisdom, I think, is knowing myself to be unwise. I don't mean this to sound as bromidic as it does, it's not universally true, thank God. And it goes without saying you can probably hear it, that my greatest danger is my complacency. For agnostics, both of the secular and of the sacred order, complacency is the most venal sin. That, and having the wrong opinions. Lots of people have the wrong opinions and know them to be wrong and still act in accordance with their error, and every morning I thank God I'm not one of those.
I have a few truths, which I believe to be truths and not opinion, because I don't understand them fully or even partially after thinking about them for a long time, and in that quality of unfathomableness these truths resemble God as I intuit God to be; if God is anything at all, one thing S/He is, is unknowable. I know three truths: Democracy, because I can't imagine justice without it, nor can I imagine anything better; Socialism, because capitalism sucks; and Internationalism, or Solidarity if you will, because we'll never have the first nor the second without this third. It is almost always for a lack of solidarity that democracy and socialism (or whatever you choose to call a more sane and just way of organizing human economic affairs in the global community) fail.
It is very easy to say this and it makes me feel good to say it, but solidarity is immensely difficult, especially for the privileged--my friend Kimberly Flynn gave me a quote once from Gayatri Spivak about "the slow unlearning of privilege" being the necessary work of the privileged interested in participating in justice. Slow because painful. Sarah Schulman taught me a painful lesson in that unlearning today; learning hurts; I'm going to try to learn. I don't want my opinions to fossilize in the honey-colored amber of my ignorance, or cowardice, I don't want to start defending ignorance, which is always indefensible.
I think the cure for AIDS is Democratic Socialist Internationalism, or Internationalist Democratic Socialism, or Socialist Internationalist Democracy--help me out here. This may be opinion rather than Wisdom; but if it's Wisdom to despair, I'd rather be opinionated; if, as Larry Kramer seems to write in the program, it's a choice between opinion and artistry, I'd rather be opinionated. Activism and art about AIDS have run up against the wall of Economics; so has race, gender, homosexual rights, disability rights, immigrant rights--the whole rainbow of progressive causes has hit the Milton Friedman Memorial Firewall barricade, and balkanized. All await a decent answer to the pitiless capital-logic of the Balanced Budget; we must make this barricade budge. This is why I so thoroughly despise gay conservatism. They don't believe in regulation, they want to cut the capital gains tax, and cutting the capital gains tax is homophobic, preserving the capital gains tax a lesbian and gay rights issue. Cutting taxes is racist, sexist, homophobic: if it is any one of these it is all three. That's my opinion.
We people have two hedgehog questions, it seems to me: How much trouble are we in? And can we do anything about it? If the answer to the first question is "a lot!" and if the answer to the second question is "no," then it would be a kindness to die, the only decent thing, really. And if that's Wisdom, who wants it? If the answer to the second question is "yes," then a third question inevitably follows, my favorite: "What is to be done?"
Theodore Adorno wrote a really great essay called "On Commitment," which I think reaches the wrong conclusions but lays out pretty much the same dialectic we struggled with last night, and I think we've struggled with it through much of this conference, at least the parts I've attended. Adorno, as I recall [and I didn't have the essay here in Key West to refer to, so if I misconstrue, and anyone here knows better, don't bust me], writes of art which moves in its urgency right up to its audience, or at least towards it; and art which almost seems to retreat from its audience-"reticent" art, to borrow an apt word Robert Dawidoff used on Friday--but for all its reticence, still committed, still purposeful, art which persists in indulgence in a grand and necessary luxury, the hope and faith in human beings that whatever it was that compelled them to pick up a book, a poem, go see a play--that this same impulse will get them moving when they cease to be consumers and spectators of culture and return to the social world and its demands for action, for agency.
Of these two aesthetic stratagems, one which addresses you aggressively and one which demands of you exertion by virtue of its flight from you (we might choose to call one political and the other literary, or accessible and difficult), Adorno prefers the reticent, the literary, and the difficult, while recognizing that each contains elements of the other, and both seek different means to engage in public, political struggle. But this doesn't mean his essay is a kind of "I'm OK you're OK, I say potato you say rutabaga" affair. He writes: One is better than the other. He reaches a conclusion about committed art many of us have reached: that the faith in one's audience or reader to perform empathic leaps (empathy perhaps being art's most sublime gift and function) must be matched by the artist's embracing a rigorous discipline of non-partisan (to the extent that it is possible) observation, self-investigation, eschewing of pretentiousness and metaphysical, rhetorical posturing--to become the constantly-retreating horizon point upon which the wayfarer, the reader, expects to find redemption, wisdom, peace, succor, epiphany--the future.
Adorno, because he thinks dialectically, and does not feel the need we Americans seem to feel to pretend that we don't struggle, or to pretend that the struggling, the wriggling, isn't Life, and isn't Infinite as long as there is a species and unceasing unto our deaths and, who knows? perhaps beyond. Adorno, inarguably an elegant writer, a great stylist, is comfortable with difficulty; indeed he revels in it, even in the scars difficulty can leave. He doesn't do something I think a lot of us do. He doesn't announce his mastery by clobbering the dialectic, he doesn't get sere, or vatic; he doesn't say, "I personally know how to do this impossibly difficult thing, and so I no longer struggle." He says, "I know what is best" but he leaves open the possibility, dangerous to him, that in 1997 a gay 40-year-old Jew facing four more years of Speaker Gingrich and Bill "Bipartisan Compromise" Clinton, young friends and family with AIDS and breast cancer because the world is poisoned and the whole endless catalogue of it, who is frightened by the whole endless catalogue of it, the greed and the bigotry and the terrible death, because last year one of his secular rabbis from whom he has come to expect hope and marching orders told him, in a confidence he now compulsively betrays by sharing it, that in one hundred years he is certain that there will be no life left on earth--Adorno's fidelity to dialectics forces him to forsake the burnished glow of "the solution" and offer up the very tools with which this frightened queer American Jew in 1997 might conclude that Adorno is a very great thinker who finally--Brecht was right about him--finally was in some regards a compromised paid state intellectual talking out of his hat.
I guess what I'm saying is that truth is dialectical. Which does not mean that it politely nods to the opposition, which nods and winks back signaling brandy & cigars in the back room after the rubes have been fooled by witnessing a sham fight. A live model for this sort of false opposition might be the House Republicans and Democrats, and now the Ethics committee's Primate Parody of justice in calling the tax thief Gingrich to an utterly zipless account.
Dialectics should be the opposite of polite, or reassuringly relativist. Neville Chamberlain was not a dialectician. Dialectics is messy. A dialectically shaped truth is a heated argument, and it should be three things: first, outrageously funny, because puzzles are fun and because, faced with the improbability and impossibility life's contradictions present us with, what else is there to do but laugh; secondly, absolutely agonizing, because faced with the above, what else is there to do but feel terrible pain, fear, pity?, because a proper dialectics will make us face something most of us can't, namely the probable truth that suffering, as E. H. Carr writes, is indigenous to history, and that's horrible; and, thirdly, a dialectic should move us forward. Don't, in other words, lose sight of the fact that you are probably almost as wrong as you are right but knowing, if it is given to you to know, requires the courage to combine your contemplation with your action and act--Praxis, in other words, movement; because we are, after all, bodies on this earth and it is as much a chalkboard and a laboratory as it is a temple, and always remember what Robert Duncan once said in an interview: Symmetry is what life resists arriving at; symmetry is stasis; symmetry equals death.