Lesbian Desire in the Age of AIDS: From the Head of Medusa Sprung

Abstract

In the age of AIDS, lesbians' sexualities were strangely protected from the epidemic spread of the HIV virus, even while many lesbians' social and political lives were deeply impacted by its catastrophic effects on the gay community. The “so close but yet so far” phenomenon defining lesbian experience during the AIDS crisis evoked mixed and complicated emotions unique to that sector of the gay community. This article highlights the manifold emotional experience for lesbians, which paralleled an equally complex web of identifications and disidentifications with gay men. Although this perpetuated a sense of invisibility for lesbians during the epidemic's crisis years, it may have contributed to opening a space for new possibilities of feminine sexualities and identities as the crisis receded.

Notes

¹It is important to highlight, though, that there are some in the trans community who argue for a disarticulation of trans- from postmodern/deconstructivist theories. See Gail Salamon's (2010) chapter “Boys of the Lex: Transgender and Social Construction” for references to this debate.

²In his book In a Queer Time and Place (2005) Jack Halberstam, still writing as Judith Halberstam, explicates the cultural shift in how time is sensed and lived because of the altering effects imparted by queer experience on traditional space/time axioms. He mentions the AIDS crisis as a significant example of “queer time” that “emerges … from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic” (p. 2).

³Here I employ “Hate” in the Bionian sense, as “H” (Bion, 1963): one of his three basic “links between objects” that does not preclude the presence of the other two links, Love (L) and Knowledge (K). From Bion's perspective, as with L and K the presence of H signifies passion and the capacity for relating: “an emotion experienced with intensity and warmth … passion is evidence that two minds are linked …” (p. 13). Likewise, I am attempting to introduce a potential for “linking” between lesbians, heretofore locked down by ungrievable loss and identity disjunction. I imagine that, given space to express the full range of their complex grief vis-á-vis AIDS, a fuller capacity for desire in lesbians could be unleashed. This is similar to how Bionian scholar Duncan Cartwright (2010) described these L, H, and K links functioning between analyst and patient: “to isolate broad emotional mediums through which objects … are linked. These links represent the ‘musical key’ in which two minds come together … . Regardless of whether the emotional link is L, H or K these links stimulate the containment system and the ability to think” (p. 18).

⁴See Salamon (2010, pp. 73–88) for a discussion on several such writers.