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Skipping the life fantastic in a hard city.

Article Excerpt
Hard: A Novel. By Wayne Hoffman. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006, 345 pages. Softcover, $14.95.

On September 7, 1995, in the midst of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's crackdown on sexual commerce in New York City, the AIDS Prevention Action League (APAL) held an event called the "Save Our Sex Party." The gay men's sex wars were just heating up. "APAL decided that the generation of pleasure in the name of community would be a worthy end in itself," APAL member and ACT UP veteran Jim Eigo (2002), one of the event's organizers, recalled. For Eigo, the event was a form of prevention activism. "The fucking onstage, in defiance of a health code, was an education, and it spread its energy to the party-at-large: 450 men of different races, shapes, ages, and classes coming together in a model of supportive, safer public sex" (p.189).

The first scene in Wayne Hoffman's new novel, Hard, begins with a similar sex party cum civil disobedience situated within a crackdown on public sexual culture. The parallels between fiction and New York City cultural history in Hard are many. And Hoffman should know. The year after APAL's Save Our Sex Party, he was one of a group of scholar-activists from New York University's American Studies program who published a volume of critical essays, ethnographies, and historical pieces entitled Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (South End Press, 1996). The volume included "The History of Gay Bathhouses" as well as Hoffman's "Skipping the Life Fantastic: Coming of Age in the Sexual Devolution."

Policing Public Sex infused an ongoing debate about gay men's sexuality and HIV prevention with a much-needed dose of critical activist perspective. The work immediately found a place between Michael Warner's Fear of Queer Planet and Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet as a seminal contribution to the field of queer theory. In much the same ways as ACT UP's cultural activism helped inform Douglas Crimp's queer theory, Policing Public Sex embodied a critical theoretical perspective on AIDS prevention activism.

In the midst of this debate, a number of gay writers with a history of activism suggested that gay men had brought on the second wave of AIDS with their promiscuity, and therefore deserved to have their spaces for public congregation, such as sex clubs, shut down.

The result was a culture war over the meaning of queer sexuality at a time when effective treatments for HIV/AIDS were just beginning to really take hold. The debate would last for the remainder of the decade and well into the next. (1) Yet unlike the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and early 1990's, which resolved themselves with a series of court decisions (see Duggan and Hunter,...

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