This is the 1970s adage of the post-Stonewall Western urban gay male communities: 'sex=life". "sexual desire is not the only dimension of the homosexual experience," writes John Clum, "but it is the core of that experience. It is sexual desire and acting upon that desire that puts the homosexual into conflict with dominant power structures."[3] Thus what binds gay communities is their sexual orientation. It has, consequently, become central to the identity of gay (male) life: celebrate your difference, celebrate your sexuality. It was, of course, also, to a certain extent, a sign of the times, but whereas in progressive heterosexual circles the newly gained sexual freedom is "put back in the closet" by the end of the 1970s, in gay communities the animal seems untameable. Homosexuality, being a transgression of the social norm per definition, seems to do away with the traditional idea of "healthy", monogamous sexuality, and Foucault, according to one of his biographers partaking in this revelry, lives his own philosophy, his gay science.

But then came a new time, a time in which sex was no longer linked to life, but from one day to another, to death. Foucault was one of the first to die of what was then still called the "homosexual cancer"; many would follow. AIDS came with a bolt of lightning and stroke particularly hard in the myopic American urban gay communities. Life would never be the same: AIDS had radically disrupted gay male identity and culture.

Gay drama can be categorised into three periods: pre-Stonewall, post-Stonewall and post AIDS. The first fissure concerns the watershed between the secretive and actively suppressed gay culture before the 1969 Stonewall-riots and the "proud to be gay"-era which followed this event. No longer hiding in or hidden by a heterosexual theatre world, gay-oriented artists were able to self-consciously explore the dimensions of their own sexuality and the dynamics same-sex relationships in an environment ostensively free from the hegemony of traditional, heterosexual, mainstream theatre.[4]

But half-way through this path, when the communities were still largely getthoized, the AIDS-crisis broke out. Whereas other minorities continued the movement towards emancipation, AIDS set the gay liberation struggle back for many years, not in the last place because it reaffirmed all the stereotypes that existed about (male) homosexual inclination to "perverse promiscuity", but certainly also because it had a devastating impact on the self-consciousness of the members of the gay communities. This can be illustrated by examining the literary response to the disease. "Generally, first generation [AIDS] works are traditional in form, sentimental in tone and assimilationist in aim," writes Therese Jones about AIDS dramas.[5] They are, like the AIDS novels which appeared in the 1980s, serious portrayals in which characters reject sex as the core cultural characteristic of urban gay life, affirm monogamy and reinvent the traditional family; they are mournful expressions of loss.[6]

The three phases that I just sketched roughly coincide with the three phases in which women's liberation is usually divided.[7] Before 1968 liberal feminism dominates debates concerning women's issues. They primarily demand for equal rights for men and women. After 1968 the movement that came to be called the second feminist wave emphasised the differences between men and women and its most radical branch pressed for a separate women's culture. A third phase, which slowly emerged in the early 1980s, reacting to this radical phase of an uncritical belief in female essentialism, broke free of the belief in Woman and instead emphasised the "singularity of each women", and beyond this, "her multiplicities and plural languages"─a phase more fitted to, as Julia Kristeva writes, "these times in which the cosmos, atoms, and cells─our true contemporaries─call for the construction of a fluid and free subjectivity.[8]

It is clearly in this phase that the two movements start to diverge. Whereas feminism reaches its so called "deconstructive" phase, the AIDS crises caused, I'm tempted to say, a reactionary phase in the gay-liberation movement. While in other minority movements the death of the subject remains a theoretical "loss", in the gay minority it can be seen literally. "Not only are men lost," writes John Clum, "but a culture is waning."[9] Thus what is lost besides actual (boy)friends, is the gay male identity built around the carefree enjoyment of erotic pleasure, and it is the grievance for these two "losses" that has become the leitmotiv of first generation AIDS literature.[10]

But besides sadness, there is also, as I said, fierce criticism of the culture which was primarily defined by sexual pleasures. Reading the drama-texts of the late 1980s one cannot fail to notice the assimilationist tone. As if the cause of AIDS was the irresponsible gay lifestyle of the post-stonewall era: narcissistic, decadent, and promiscuous, or as a character in an important AIDS-play from 1985 redefines the last term: "nondirective, noncommitted."[11] Isaac Julien has commented that "the basic hidden message of safe sex [is] in many cases […] no sex—an anti-sex message in a post-sex climate." [12]While Jouissance had become a fashionable word in feminist circles, AIDS-activism of the late 1980's had an anti-pleasure agenda. Erotic desire was equated with death.

Larry Kramer's 1985 play The Normal Heart is a good example of this call for sexual abstinence, as are his editorials and letters during the 1980s. This and other plays are well meant, but nevertheless counter-productive for emancipation and liberation. Gays face a similar fate to the femme fatale in film noir: in the end they have to die. The femme fatale is not the stereotypical female object but rather a subject who takes her own life, and especially her erotic/sexual life, in her own hands. She is labelled "active" and this proves to be a fatal flaw for a woman. "The heroine," I quote here, "has to pay for the excesses of her desires."[13] The same goes for a play like The Normal Heart. In the end, the protagonist has to pay, so it seems, for the excesses of his desires, being, as I quoted before, promiscuous, nondirected, noncommitted.

There is however an important and paradoxical difference here, I believe. Where the actions of the femme fatale are labelled "active", or active for a woman, and one is tempted to say that the gay male of the 1970's was also irresponsibly overactive, the paradox is that he, the gay male, can, and has also been labelled "passive". It is clear that receptive anal intercourse belongs to the passive position of the active-passive binarism which organises the cultural perspective on sexual behaviour of dominant culture. But also in gay circles the question "who's the woman?" can be heard. But even the "active gay male" is in psychoanalytical discourse or in popular imagination depicted as a sissy narcissist, sitting in front of the mirror, making love to himself. Onanism for two, so to say. Whether "passive" or "too actively passive", the gay male is defined as object, as not a "real" man, and for this he has to pay with his life. And this idea is also inherent in an important number of those first generation AIDS-dramas. "It was our own fault". Thus, I would say, they subscribe the logic of dominant culture, a bourgeois humanism which promotes, to say the least, sexual asceticism. They seem to confuse the mode of transmission with the virus itself. They seem to blame, in short, the "passive" gay community for the epidemic. In a well known speech Larry Kramer declares that Vito Russo, who died of an AIDS-related disease, was killed by "25 million gay men and lesbians who for ten years of this plague have refused to get our act together."[14] This accusation mirrors the accusations which form the literal background of The Normal Heart, that is to say: graffities in the decor which condemn the politics of moderate gay groups and likens these politics to the strategy of the American Jewish Committee in de second world war, which can also be said to be passive.

It is all the more interesting that Larry Kramer stood at the cradle of ACT-UP, the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power. For where his plays and essays could be said to, as I argued, underscore WASP values, the queer politics of ACT-UP effectuates the opposite and swings us right back into the postmodern era. This is only to illustrate Gilles Deleuze's point that the vacillation between the molar and the molecular wich he claims to be an inherent feature of late-capitalist societies, can charge an essentially conservative action with a revolutionary power. Thus ACT-UP, and in its shadow the second generation AIDS playwrights, argue that desire does not lead to death, but on the contrary, as Blanch DuBois has said, desire is the opposite of death.

Around the turn of the decade, a second generation of AIDS-literature and drama materialised. Instead of lamenting and grave in tone, it is angry and funny. It marks a radical shift in theatrical representations of AIDS, writes Jones: "the multiplicitous comedies, multimedia performances, and revisioned folk dramas defiantly postulate an alternative discourse which opposes hierarchical structures, asserts subjectivity, and challenges cultural suppression of sexuality without, as one critic puts it, 'the whiff of the pathos or bathos that's dominated most AIDS drama.'"[15] Second generation AIDS plays and performances extend beyond what David Roman called the "tragic classical realist dramas that characterize the majority of plays about AIDS produced by gay men."[16] It offers, as Douglas Crimp said, "a critical, theorectical, activist alternative to the personal, elegaic expressions that appeared to dominate the art-world response to AIDS."[17] Jones called it a fusion of the carnival and the politics of representation.

And here Deleuze, I believe, can be written into this history. Not that he is the theoretical hero of the queer nation. If there was to be any, it would be Foucault, whose aesthetics of being, his call for a truly gay lifestyle, with which I have started this piece, parallels the return of humour and self-consciousness in gay theatre, and seems to legitimatise, as Lee Edelman calls it, the narcissism inherent in gay culture. A Dutch doctoral dissertation focuses on the relation between Foucault's philosophy of being and AIDS, and it is telling, I would say, that the illustration on the cover of this book contains the word: "performance", the most important form of queer aesthetic activism. Deleuze never directly dealt with the theatre as art-form—let alone as site of political action, but his book, Anti-Oedipus, written in collaboration with psychiatrist Félix Guattari, can and has been seen as a scholarly reaction to the street activism of 1972. And this could be the link, because gay aesthetic activism started in the 1990s with a return to the street. An important theatre critic wrote in 1989:

What has happened in the few years between 1987,and 1990, between the year that ACT-UP started its actions following a spirited speech from Larry Kramer and the abovequoted observation? It seems as if, what we can define, or Deleuze and Guattari have defined, or, in fact, Antonio Negri has defined, as the new machinic enslavement, has come under attack. What started with a frustration resulting from the long procedures of the American Food and Drug Association, frustration about the all too slow reaction from the American government, has led to an, I'm tempted to say, anarchistic sort of movement which not only questions but frontally attacks things like the authority of the medical world, the power of the multinational drug-companies, and even leads to a denunciation of any kind of medical treatment by a significant group of AIDS-patients, or rather, people with AIDS, because they are patients no longer. This is very Foucauldian of course.

AIDS-activism before ACT-UP had stood for serious political action, but not for political passion. Worse it was opposed to passion, opposed to pleasure. The AIDS activist constructed his subjectivity in a dialectic with the "demonized faggot."[19] The faggot, then was, as I explained before, passive and narcissistic and refused, as Lee Edelman puts it, to leave the mirror. It's a narrow concept of "politics", a concept, furthermore, which, I think, is counterproductive. I think one of Deleuze's important teachings is that dialectical opposition is effectually no opposition at all, or is at least recuperable. And maybe that is what happened in this short span between 1987 and 1990: the AIDS activist was recuperated by his less funereal counterpart and rediscovered the tongue-in-cheek, overironised forms of political activism that were employed by gays during the 1970s.

ACT-UP demonstrations were playful theatrical performances. Think of infiltrations of shopping malls and straight bars. Think of kiss-ins. And in the shadow of these highly publicised events, alternative theatre groups performed outside of the traditional theatres--in café's, in so called performance spaces. They produced plays with titles like "AIDS, the musical". Performance art, solo performance art, boomed. It was a time in which gay artists, both HIV-positive and HIV-negative, had to reconnect themselves to their dying bodies, to the bodily pleasures which they were told to be afraid of. They had to be deschizophrenised alongside the lines Deleuze and Guattari had scetched in their Anti-Oedipus. Gay individuals desired, no doubt, but were at the same time afraid to desire, and thus they restrained their desire, preventing it from going jusqu'au bout, just as Hegel or Freud would have had it. The seemingly untameable gay desire was axiomatised by fear. The idea that it "was somehow their own fault" was internalised. Effectually, the gay community was, we could say, castrated. The theatrical representation of this castration emphasised the feeling of loss, as I have pointed out before.

Therefore, we could say, second generation AIDS-performances, and AIDS-politics are almost a form of schizoanalysis, the vague programme Deleuze and Guattari proposed in their effort to overturn the Oedipal internalisation of guilt, fear and restraint. The schizzo, Deleuze and Guattari's romantic "hero" in their battle against capitalism and psychoanalysis, knows nothing of castration, it lacks nothing and forms free multiplicities. Its goal is to do away with the axiomatised fear, to reconnect gays with their bodies and their desire. To do away with the traditional family-values which had invaded the gay community. Its form is solo performance, is an outing of the desire which was trapped in the unconscious. Traditional, realist theatre--the theatre of representation--exemplified by such plays as The Normal Heart, is, arguably, by definition reactionary. It is conventionalised by the bourgeoisie, and it is politics are therefore almost without exception the politics of bourgeois individualism. The Normal Heart stages a gay marriage. This seems revolutionary in the US, but is in fact of course a very heterosexual convention which can, nevertheless, as we have seen, not prevent the death of its protagonist. Realist theatre, so it seems, offers literally no representational space for gay or lesbians. Thus the form the protest takes is performance, a form which is said to "defy specific symbolic structures that characterise theatrical practice."[20] It has the power to at least question the theatre of representation but it aims at overturning it, and in that sense it is a schizoanalytic practice. I quote from Anti-Oedipus: "To overturn the theatre of representation into the order of desire-production: this is the whole task of schizoanalysis."[21]

The politics of gay AIDS drama of the 1990s, of gay AIDS performance, then, is to redefine the gay identity. To make it really gay, as Foucault insisted, undoing it of the petty fascisms that surround our everyday lives. But this does not mean to fix an essentialist gay identity or subjectivity. Rather it aims to define a free and fluid subjectivity which is open to the different and ever changing manifestations of "gay culture". It aims to determine new collective arrangements, a collective subjectivity, which does not so much counter stereotypical representations, but rather the principle of representation as such. It aims to reconnect gays to their sexed bodies, not an essentailised body but rather a body as a surface on which different forces interact. It reaffirms the possibility of gay desire. It aims for an affirmation of difference without being reduced to the Other in relation to healthy male subjectivity. ACT-UP has demanded access to the places of enunciation, and have done so rather successfully.

In recent years however, ACT-UP has fallen apart in various smaller, more specified sections which focus on specific issues such as housing for AIDS-patients and availability of drugs rather than seeking large scale media-attention. The little that was heard from ACT-UP in the latest presidential race is telling in this respect. While undeniably productive for results on the specific issues focused upon, the important side-effect of shaping gay representation has been absent from the centre stage for some time now. Tolerance being a strange sort of legitimation, mainstream representation of gay sexuality has increased, but this representation is alarmingly similar to the gay self-representation from the early years of the AIDS-crisis, that is to say desexualised. Many sitcoms and soaps have introduced the "gay best friend", a homosexual locked in a heterosexual world without, by and large, any contact with other gays, thus remaining desexualised and single, hence a failure (about whose misfortune we can have many good laughs). Obviously this has positive effects. For one thing, at least teenagers who might feel they are the only gay in the world have some examples to identify with. Nevertheless it is totally unproductive for gay emancipation. At the time the gay community is getting more and more diverse, the consequent disintegration has the paradoxical side-effect of reinstalling a monolithic image of gayness in the public eye.

The real challenge for the gay arts, and thus for gay theatre and performance, is to counter this monolithic re-essentialisation of representation. In a time when the ideas of postmodernist thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari are subject to a new moralism which first oversimplifies and then denounces postmodernism, we should go back to the core texts which lay at the basis of postmodernism. We should, as Deleuze and Guattari insist, take what is usefull from them and use this to counter the tendencies which might threaten the gains of the last twenty years. The gay self-identity is deschizophrenised but the schizophrenic attitude towards gay people in the minds of the heterosexual majority still exists. "Don't tell, don't ask." We should continue to question and counter the theatre of representation and find forms of theatre which are more suitable for our goal and our age. The twentyfirst century can do with some new forms of representation, and it is the political and social reality of everyday lives of individuals from which these new directions might arrive.