Summary of Chapter 5
Warner calls the last chapter of The Trouble With Normal a “Conclusion,” but it is less of a summing up of the previous chapters and more a chapter in its own right. Here, Warner discusses at some length an entirely new issue in relation to a sexual politics: HIV prevention. The AIDS crisis and the activism that responded to it in the 1980s have been discussed in previous chapters. Here, Warner discusses the ongoing importance of this activism as well as the lessons activists have taught us about sexual shame.
Warner begins by noting a trend in both gay and lesbian politics and in mainstream American society: the idea that the AIDS crisis is over. The early 1990s did indeed see the invention of drugs that radically reduced the mortality rate of people living with HIV/AIDS, and more recently, the rate of new infections has decreased. But AIDS is still a crisis that claims thousands of lives each year in the United States along. How could there be a sense that the crisis does not need attention anymore? Warner thinks part of the answer, within the gay and lesbian community, is a sense that AIDS is beginning to primarily affect people of color rather than queer people per se. This creates a sense that it is not a “queer” issue. Warner argues, in this chapter, that AIDS is, on contrary, very much a queer issue. That’s because at its core, it is a question of sexual shame.
Because HIV is a sexually transmitted virus, it comes with a great deal of sexual stigma and shame, even if a person contracts the virus by means other than sex. This shame has consequences for preventing and treating HIV/AIDS. On the one hand, people are reticent to disclose their status and seek treatment, for fear that they might be perceived as gay, for instance. On the other hand, the shame attached to queer sexuality may also lead to people pursuing unsafe sexual practices. Warner says this is because planning to use condoms (for instance) forces people to acknowledge the sex they desire, whereas having unprotected sex gives a sense of it “just happening,” providing distance.
In general, Warner observes a general decline in the culture of safe sex. As discussed in the previous chapter, queer spaces, including spaces like bathhouses in which men came together to have sex with men, were spaces in which a culture of safe sex flourished. That’s because people could share information about safe sex; it was like a community of experts, everyone educating everyone else. Without these spaces, there is no longer a concentration of people coming together to share information, or to create a culture in which safe sex is the standard.
Without queer spaces to promote safe sex, queers have to rely on straight culture. But straight culture, too, fails to provide good information about safe sex. One reason is because of its fear of any kind of sex. Safe sex ads often hide that they have anything to do with sex, for instance, and therefore miss their target audience. They are too steeped in innuendo to be effective. In the United States, there are also laws prohibiting federal money being spent on anything that seems to “promote” homosexuality. This has meant a cut in ads targeting gay men in particular. Politicians argue that promoting safe sex within the gay community is promoting homosexuality itself. They choose censorship over public health and safety.
As a result of deciding against all these ways of promoting safe sex, the United States has instead turned to criminalizing HIV. For instance, it is a crime in most states for a person with HIV to have sex with someone else without disclosing their status. Instead of teaching people to have safe sex, the United States has made some sex itself illegal. Once again, hysteria develops around sex, rather than what people should actually be concerned about, which is HIV. This has also led to a surge in “abstinence only” sex education programs, which do not teach people safe sex but instead teach people that all sex is dangerous and to be avoided. These moralistic programs do nothing to prevent HIV. They just police sex.
The solution Warner advocates is a move in the opposite direction. Instead of censoring queer sex and eliminating queer space, we should promote queer culture. In the face of AIDS, queer people learned and spread safe sex practices. They were grassroots advocates that worked toward prevention. We should promote spaces in which people can access information about safe sex without being shamed. Moreover, removing some of the stigma around HIV will open up doors for people to feel free to access prevention and treatment services, as well as for HIV-positive people to disclose their status. Instead of criminalizing status, thereby stigmatizing it more, we should make a society in which queer life is promoted and nourished.
Analysis of Chapter 5
A key to understanding this chapter is figuring out why it is called a “Conclusion,” even though it explores a new subject, at some length: HIV prevention. What makes this a conclusion, however, is that HIV prevention becomes an issue in which all the previous strands of thought in the previous chapters comes together. At the same time, it is a fitting conclusion because of the seriousness of the issue. To Warner, HIV prevention is literally a life or death issue, which brings into focus the stakes of the whole discussion of sexual politics to begin with.
HIV prevention, in other words, also shows the shallowness of the belief that the 1990s are a “post-liberation” moment for gays and lesbians. The ongoing AIDS epidemic, with new infections disproportionately affecting queer people, as well as the ongoing stigma of being HIV-positive, indicates that the queer community still has many pressing issues to focus on. Moreover, gay marriage, the “grown-up” political issue of the gay rights movement, has no direct relation to HIV prevention or treatment. This shows the extent to which a politics based on rights is inadequate in addressing the resources people need in order to be healthy enough to exercise those rights in the first place.
HIV prevention is also intimately connected with the other strand in The Trouble with Normal dealing with queer space. As Warner argues, queer space promotes HIV prevention and therefore should be supported. Shutting down queer space is not just an exercise in sexual moralism, but also a real way of endangering people’s lives. If HIV is a public health crisis, it requires public solutions. The focus on privatization in gay rights politics—the private right to marry, for instance—is a move in the wrong direction.
This chapter also echoes the first chapter in its discussion of shame. In the first chapter, Warner discussed how people fail to acknowledge the shame they experience in sex, and they respond instead by shaming others. In that case, repressing shame ends up hurting other people. But in this chapter, Warner has gone full circle to now argue that failing to acknowledge one’s shame also puts one’s own life at danger. This is because Warner thinks people who pursue risky sexual encounters, including unprotected sex that could lead to HIV infection, often do so out of the shame they experience in their desires. This is why it is important for there to be queer spaces in which people can encounter and think about their own desires, avoiding the movement from shame to risky behavior.
Although this chapter is grim because of its critique of how both gay rights programs and the federal government work against HIV prevention, the conclusion also ends on a positive note. This is because the book ultimately moves from critique to a more positive, even utopian tone. For Warner, queer world-making, or the process of nurturing queer public space, is a solution to many of the problems addressed in the book, including the repression of shame and the spread of HIV. In promoting queer culture, Warner has an eye to the future and a society in which stigma is not a barrier to accessing resources. It is this project of building a world that Warner directs his readers to undertake.
