This is What Queer Resistance Looks Like: AIDS Gothic Art

This chapter considers the ways that, from 1981 onwards, AIDS has been read not only as a queer disease, but a Gothic disease. The chapter begins with a look at Jonathan Demme’s mainstream Hollywood AIDS film, Philadelphia (1993), which is not Gothic but utilises Gothic modes to make the protagonist with AIDS a Gothic monstrosity. Gothic is weaponised in Philadelphia in order to further a homophobic late-twentieth century Hollywood agenda that considers people with AIDS as less than human. From this example, the chapter moves to five artists with AIDS whose work resists normative narratives. They utilise their queer and sick embodiment to embrace their own perceived queer monstrosity. The artists and works explored in this chapter are Fire In My Belly (1986, 2010) by the late David Wojnarowicz (with Goth music and lyrics by Diamanda Galás); Ron Athey’s underground performance art that includes his own blood-letting and performance of himself as the martyred Saint Sebastian; the late Valerie Caris Blitz’s Vestement (1993) which is a hospital gown constructed with printouts of years of her bloodwork; Maxime Angel Starling’s queer erotic Gothic, Bestiality and Vampire Slut (2009); and, Luna Luis Ortiz’s Gothic drag Awards Ball klub kid face (2006).