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Gay Pride and Its Queer Discontents:

ACT UP and the Political Deployment of
Affect
Erin J. Rand
Version of record first published: 19 Jan 2012

To cite this article: Erin J. Rand (2012): Gay Pride and Its Queer Discontents: ACT UP and the
Political Deployment of Affect, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 98:1, 75-80
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638665

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Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 98, No. 1, February 2012, pp. 7580

Gay Pride and Its Queer Discontents:

ACT UP and the Political Deployment
of Affect
Downloaded by [Syracuse University] at 14:45 05 August 2012

Erin J. Rand

The 25th anniversary of the founding of ACT UP provides a moment to reflect on

the groups unquestionably profound effects on the management of HIV/AIDS, the
queer community, the history of social movements in this country, and even the
development of queer theory in the academy. But it should also encourage us to
consider the ways in which ACT UPs legacy is one of complicated affective
intensities*affects that produce individual feelings, but also those that drive cultural
histories and are directed toward political ends. As Deborah Gould contends,
various constellations of affects, feelings, and emotions, as they shifted over time,
decisively shaped the trajectory of lesbian and gay, and eventually queer, political
responses to AIDS.1 An affective history, or what Ann Cvetkovich calls an archive of
the emotions, of ACT UP attempts to capture activisms felt and even traumatic
dimensions, and challenges definitions of the political that would relegate affect
to the private realm.2 Remembering ACT UPs naissance, then, is an opportunity to
recognize the political stakes of recounting a particular affective history, and also to
cultivate a deep appreciation of the contradictions involved in deploying affect as an
activist tactic.
Especially salient to queer politics and scholarship today is the ambivalent
relationship between pride and shame that was forged through ACT UPs activism.
Contemporary queer theorists have suggested that alongside the notable accomplishments of gay liberation activism and gay and lesbian studies in the academy, the gay
pride movement has generated considerable dissatisfactions . . . [and] given rise to a
surprising array of discontents.3 Thus, in order to interrogate the usually
unquestioned choice of pride as an affect around which to rally, some queer
activists and scholars have launched a renewed engagement with a category that
represents, by definition, the very opposite of pride, at once its emotional antithesis
and its political antagonist: namely, the category of shame.4
Erin J. Rand is Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. She would
like to offer thanks to Charles E. Morris III for the opportunity to participate in this forum and for his always
insightful engagement with her work, and to the Maine writing retreat participants who provided feedback on
early portions of this essay. Correspondence to: Erin J. Rand, 100 Sims Hall, Bldg. V, Syracuse University,
Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. Email: ejrand@syr.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2012 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638665

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76 E. J. Rand

Given the continued relevance of and controversy around pride and shame, I want
to investigate the history of ACT UP in order to illuminate both the ways in which
the group deployed and produced affects, but also to inquire into the rhetorical
maneuvers and conceptual tensions of the contemporary turn to shame in queer
theory. Does the current debate about pride and shame depend upon a particular
affective history of ACT UP? To what extent does that history function to fix (perhaps
too facilely) the circulation of affect under the banners of gay pride or, alternately,
queer shame? Do pride and shame necessarily exist in a binary, oppositional, and
even antagonistic relationship to one another, or is this dichotomy strategically
produced in order to position shame as the radical alternative to an ostensibly
assimilationist pride? And when affect is so crystalized, what of its unpredictable,
emergent potential (the very reason for theorists interest in it) might be sacrificed? In
other words, does the celebration of queer shame require a catachrestic version of
gay pride that disavows the very ambivalence and rhetorical excess of affect which
might be glimpsed in ACT UPs affective history?
One of ACT UPs most evident affective interventions was their attempt to counter
the predominant representations of people living with AIDS as passive, shameful
victims with images of angry, defiant, and proud activists. Their SilenceDeath
logo, their ACT UP! Fight back! Fight AIDS! slogan, and their emphasis on anger
and urgency all contributed to this spirit of transformation. However, to imagine a
linear movement from shame and political inaction to pride and militant activism is
to ignore the intense affective ambivalence arising from gay sex, gay lives, and gay
deaths from AIDS.5 Indeed, shame played a significant role in the early years of the
AIDS crisis: mainstream discourses shamed gay men for their sexual practices
and claimed that HIV/AIDS resulted directly from homosexuality. These homophobic responses to HIV/AIDS were all the more injurious because they tapped into
feelings of guilt and shame about homosexuality and anxiety about social rejection
that already were present within the lesbian and gay affective landscape.6 Yet
accompanying this underlying shame were nascent feelings of pride and a critical
antipathy toward homophobic society, which developed into a powerful ethos of
caretaking during the AIDS crisis. Gay communities rallied to support those who
were ill or dying, to refute antigay stereotypes, and to develop preventative measures
such as safer sex practices and education. Gould points out that the proud rhetoric
of responsibility of this period, however, remained deeply ambivalent because it was
invested in a politics of respectability. Since responsibility was concerned with social
acceptance (motivated by the urgent need to gain a sympathetic response to AIDS
from medical, governmental, and other institutions), it was implicitly and intricately
linked to respectability. Respectability was defined, of course, in heteronormative (and
what would come to be known as homonormative7) terms, and thus the pride that
emerged during this period was premised, at least to a certain extent, on a disavowal
of gay sexual practices and cultures.8
This sense of pride in identity and community also developed alongside of
continued or even heightened feelings of alienation and dissension. Debra Levine
describes how acts of kindness and care among ACT UP members, often experienced

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Gay Pride and Its Queer Discontents

77

while listening to one another speak or observing videos and photographs of the
groups actions, secured ACT UPs communal survival.9 Significantly, in Levines
account of forging relationships in ACT UP, feelings of fear, desperation, and
isolation were not replaced by feelings of collectivity and support; rather, they
coexisted, both necessitating and enabling a sense of community. Likewise, Ann
Cvetkovichs interviews with women who were involved with ACT UP reveal the
range of conflicting affects that shaped their experiences as activists. The respect,
comfort, and trust that some members discovered in ACT UP were always shadowed
by the accounts of those who disliked the star culture or cliquishness of the group
or felt discounted as women, as hetero- or bisexuals, or as racial or class minorities.
While some found ACT UP to be a space of shared values and validation, others felt
left out and that their needs were not being met, but as Catherine Gund puts it, they
were desperate, they didnt know where else to go, and they just felt shitty about
themselves all the time.10 The friendships, sense of community, and newly emerging
notions of queer identities and politics that many of Cvetkovichs interviewees
describe were central to the energy and force of ACT UPs activism, and the
importance of these affective bonds cannot be gainsaid.11 However, to the extent that
an affective network can be a source of collective power, it must also be understood
to have the opposite effect: to exclude, to divide, and to marginalize.
This indeterminacy of affects effects is the source of both its potential and its risk
as a basis for activism. Attending to affect illuminates our power to affect the world
around us and our power to be affected by it; affect can promise an increased
capacity to act, but does not guarantee it.12 Affect is thus best understood in terms of
potential or not-yet-qualified intensities; not consciously felt emotions but
rather the nonconscious, noncognitive, nonlinguistic, noncoherent, nonrational,
and unpredetermined sources of human motivation that are available for linguistic
interpretation and reinterpretation.13 The rhetorical process of naming the inchoate
intensities of affect, of marshaling them in the name and direction of a particular
emotion*and thus, toward the goals of a particular movement or cause*might be
understood as the principle challenge of any activism. The more powerful the affect,
the more transformative potentiality it may be able to produce, so shames depth and
power make it especially ripe for reinscription. Sally Munt argues that the peculiar,
latent potential of shame lends itself toward creative and critical exploration and
that it acts as a solvent or catalyst for transformation.14
It is this potentiality of shame that contemporary queer activists and scholars are
interested in mining. Activists first organized Gay Shame events in the late 1990s
and early 2000s to counter what some felt were the neoliberal, assimilationist politics
and corporate selling-out of Gay Pride. Jennifer Moon explains, Gay Shame, in its
original, activist form, is a queer-radical, anti-assimilationist, anticorporate, antiglobalization, pro-sex movement committed to exposing the hypocrisies of the
mainstream gay and lesbian movement and to creating a radical outsider queer
culture.15 Gay Shame celebrations thus perform a double movement through shame:
first, they affirm those who feel shamed by heteronormative and homonormative
discourses of identity and pride. What is cast as shameful and alienating about

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78 E. J. Rand

particular bodies, identities, and practices can instead be figured as the source of a
collective resistance to normativity (a tactic with which ACT UP was intimately
familiar). Second, Gay Shame also wields shame offensively, redirecting it onto other
gay groups or individuals. For instance, the call for nominations for San Franciscos
2003 Gay Shame Awards asks people to submit the names of institutions and
individuals who should be ashamed of their disservice to the queer community,
progressive politics and social justice, adding that they are particularly interested
in the ways some gays and lesbians have traded their movements radical roots for
a place at the table.16 The Gay Shame celebrations and awards thus illustrate the
fickle nature of shames utility in promoting an activist collective. When certain
radical practices, bodies, and politics are shamed by mainstream hetero- and
homonormative discourses, that shame is said to produce a resource for resistant
collectivity. But when that resistance takes the form of shaming, in turn, normative or
assimilationist practices and politics, it presumably does not involve an equivalent
potential for recuperation or redeployment of affect.
Queer theorys turn to shame is similarly premised on developing a new
grassroots queer collectivity founded on principles of resistance to normalization,
and considers the possibility that shame moves us, in Sedgwicks oft-quoted terms,
toward painful individuation, but also toward uncontrollable relationality.17
Perhaps shame has the capacity for a kind of queer world-making by articulating
collectivities of the shamed, or for what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls social
holdings: the social solitude of people who are set, in some deep measure, apart
from each other*but in an apartness they create together and in which they are
held.18 However, queer theorists treatment of shame also displays the same
inconsistencies of affect that are evident in Gay Shame activism: the apparent
potentiality of shame (the affect) is circumscribed by the disciplinary border-policing
of shaming (the practice). Academic discussions about the constraints of pride and
the promise of shame often result in debates about the politics of identity and
inclusion and about the specific sites of privilege from which scholars can begin to
explore shames fecundity rather than merely being mired in its degradation.19 There
is an unsurprising tendency for these conversations about shame to become
increasingly didactic and moralizing, and ultimately to involve the deployment
of shaming techniques against perceived adversaries (who are inevitably, so to speak,
playing for the same team).20 Whether or not the internecine shaming discourses of
queer theorists are felicitous (or deserved), the attempts to induce shame are usually
perceived to foreclose, rather than activate, the very potentiality of affect that
generated the dispute.
Why is it, then, that the internalized homophobic shame of queers can be
understood as containing transgressive affective potential, while shaming discourses
activated by queers do not? And more pointedly, must the agency available to a
collectivity created from the chastening bonds of shame always involve unleashing
that shame onto ever evolving targets? Approaching these questions and those posed
near the beginning of this essay, I suggest, requires attending to the rhetorical
construction of the affective history of ACT UP and pausing the debate about shame

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Gay Pride and Its Queer Discontents

79

to consider more carefully the production of its terms. If shame is provocative

because it disrupts the normativity of pride, it is important to notice the ways in
which that normativity is rhetorically constituted through a strategic blindness to
certain complexities in the history of queer activism. We would do well to remember
the rich ambivalence that marked ACT UPs affective work*the inseparability of
solidarity from alienation and of pride from shame in queer lives and politics*
before moving too quickly to reify gay pride or to understand queer shame as its
radical foil. Just as ACT UP members shared feelings of isolation became a source of
collectivity, so too did they result in further disunity; just as emergent feelings of
pride produced a new sense of responsibility and community, so too did they
reinforce hetero- and homonormative discourses of respectability. This is not to find
fault with the work of ACT UP; rather, it is to highlight the capricious nature of
deploying affect as a political tactic. Shames radical uncertainty and volatility is
its productive potential for activism, to be sure, but also its peril.21 Thus, even as we
explore the prospects of recasting affect we should also remain aware, as Heather
Love warns, of the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics.22
Crafting an affective history of ACT UP, then, should involve a politics of
remembering that embraces rather than evades affects volatility, and that is unafraid
to plumb the wounds of shame without reinflicting its injuries. Too hastily
attempting to fix pride and shame in relation to each other and to activist and
academic practices risks not only flattening our representations of ACT UPs legacy,
but also mak[ing] it harder to see the persistence of the past in the present.23
Indeed, if shame is to offer any sort of productive conceptual leverage to activists and
scholars, the affective tension that continues to define the relationship between pride
and shame must be preserved rather than neatly resolved.
Notes
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]

Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UPs Fight against AIDS (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 10.
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 167, 157.
David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, Beyond Gay Pride, in Gay Shame, ed. David M.
Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3.
Halperin and Traub, Beyond Gay Pride, 3.
Gould, Moving Politics, 70.
Gould, Moving Politics, 712.
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007), 2.
Gould, Moving Politics, 889.
Debra Levine, Demonstration of Care: The ACT UP Oral Histories on Video, GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 442.
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 170.
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 173.
Michael Hardt, Foreword: What Affects Are Good For, in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the
Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

80 E. J. Rand

[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]

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[19]

[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]

2007), ix; Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010), 1213.
Gould, Moving Politics, 23.
Sally R. Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2007), 103, 203, 216.
Jennifer Moon, Gay Shame and the Politics of Identity, in Gay Shame, 360.
GAY SHAME Seeks Nominations for Annual Shame Awards, Gay Shame San Francisco,
http://www.gayshamesf.org/awards2003.html.
Halperin and Traub, Beyond Gay Pride, 9; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 37.
Douglas Crimp, Mario Montez, for Shame, in Gay Shame, 72; Kathryn Bond Stockton,
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 27.
For a particularly pointed criticism of the kinds of privilege enacted in discussions of shame,
see: Judith Halberstam, Shame and White Gay Masculinity, Social Text 23, no. 34 (2005):
219233.
Halperin and Traub, Beyond Gay Pride, 25.
Munt, Queer Attachments, 87, 102.
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 14.
Love, Feeling Backward, 19.