If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past

(Paperback)

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The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians, commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future. But without memory there can be no future, argue Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in this exploration of the struggle over gay memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS.

Reviews

"If Memory Serves is a carefully argued case for the deep, albeit repressed, kinship between the rise of queer theory and the horrors of AIDS. This is a book that boldly seeks to prod sleeping collective memories of old school faggotrythat pre-AIDS sensibility which harnessed promiscuous sex to an unabashed declaration of queer identitytoward a new historical narrative that refuses to enlist our past only to reinforce the claims of our present." Jonathan Katz

"If Memory Serves is a brilliant and powerful argument for memory as an activist act, a refusal to live in the present as is, and a vital tool for reinvigorating queer theory." Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds

Author Bio

Christopher Castiglia is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University.

Christopher Reed is associate professor of English and visual culture at the Pennsylvania State University.