David B. Feinberg - Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone

Table of Contents

PENGUIN BOOKS QUEER AND LOATHING

David B. Feinberg, a graduate of M.I.T., is the author of the novels Eighty-Sixed (Lambda Literary Award for Gay Mens Fiction and American Library Association Gay/Lesbian Book Award for Fiction) and Spontaneous Combustion. Stories, articles, and reviews by him appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Advocate, Details, Out-week, Tribe, NYQ, QW, Out, The Body Positive, Gay Community News, Art & Understanding, The James White Review, Diseased Pariah News, Poz, and both Men on Men 2: Best New Gay Fiction and Men on Men 4. Mr. Feinberg died in New York City of AIDS-related complications on November 2, 1994; he was thirty-seven.

Praise for Queer and Loathing

David Feinberg delineates and populates the vast, maddening, fascinating universe of being HIV-positive in our time better and more fully than virtually every AIDS novel Ive read. His feline ability to twist and turn into the best possible position when he lands after a fall of twenty-five floors is just one element of what makes the book such a wonderful read. His sense of optimism despite the crushingly depressing nature of the material is strangely joyous. And his pleasure in writing for you and to you, despite the cost to himself, is a delight.

Felice Picano, Lambda Book Report

Horrifyingly funny, profoundly human, and truthful to the point of murder. Its not just a good book, its an important book. I believe it will endure.

Michael Cunningham, author of Flesh and Blood

Queer and Loathing displays the combination of razor-sharp black humor and frustration with moral injustice that worked to great effect in Feinbergs novels. It is a moving testament to the authors indomitable spirit.

Michael Lowenthal, Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement

This wickedly funny, rollercoaster ride of a book is an important addition to the library of anyone concerned with the future of humankind.

In the Life

Fierce and unblinking, David Feinberg celebrates life by spitting in the eye of the alternative. A reader leaves these essays impressed by a brave voice at once outrageously hilarious and terribly vulnerable.

Michael Dorris, author of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

The amazing thing about Queer and Loathing is that Feinbergs bitterness and anger are some of the most life-affirming writing about AIDS we have seen so far. Queer and Loathing is a fitting and just memorial for us to remember Feinbergs courage, insight, and honesty.

Michael Bronski, The Guide

A shocking and bitter book about AIDS and for that reason an essential counterweight to the sentimental bilge that characterizes so much AIDS writing. AIDS has been pretty well domesticated, safe enough for Hollywood and with its own line of Hallmark cards undoubtedly in the offing. Queer and Loathing takes all that back. Theres something in it to offend just about everyone. Thats its triumph.

Michael Nava, author of The Hidden Law

Outspoken and outrageous, Queer and Loathing contains Feinbergs most insightful, intimate, and controversial writing. Queer and Loathing finally proves Feinberg is something more than a geniushe has now become a prophet of dark wit.

Jameson Currier, author of Dancing on the Moon

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1994
This edition with a preface by Tony Kushner published in Penguin Books 1995

Copyright the Estate of David B. Feinberg, 1994

Preface copyright Tony Kushner, 1995
All rights reserved

Queer and Loathing at the FDA: Revolt of the Perverts first appeared in Tribe;
Etiquette for the HIV-Antibody-Positive in Body Positive; Notes from the Front
Lines: Writing about AIDS, Direct Mail from Hell, and April Fools (as Getting
AIDS Absurd) in NYQ ; Tales from the Front and The AIDS Clone vs. the New
Clone in Diseased Pariah News; Sex Tips for Boys and Cocktails from Hell in
QW ; AIDS and Humor (as Is Humor an Acceptable Way to Deal with AIDS?)
in The Advocate; 100 Ways You Can Fight the AIDS Crisis in LIFEbeat concert
fund-raiser program; Waiting for the End of the World in Art & Understanding;
Memorials from Hell in Gay Community News; A Season in Hell (as HIV +
Me) in Details; and Death Be Not Proud (as Um Your Keep) in Out.

Queer and loathing: rants and raves of a raging AIDS clone/David B. Feinberg. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-16171-5

1. AIDS (Disease) 2. HIV infections. 3. Gay MenUnited States. I. Title.
RA644.A25F45 1994
362.1969792dc20 94-5074

In Memory of Bob Rafsky

Thanks to my friends
Wayne Allen Kawadler,
Jan Carl Park,
and John Palmer Weir, Jr.

Preface

The AIDS epidemic came along and ripped open reality, irreparably, irretrievably. All expectations have been violated, all guarantees of life-as-usual are declared null-and-void. Through this great gaping tear, through this wound, much pain, un-countable losses, and insuperable grief have issued; and also much rage, much courage, much hard-won intelligence, and even some wisdom. David Feinberg would have been an important writer even if wed all been spared the last ten years. His encounter with what we havent been sparedand we havent been spared muchhas produced work that holds its audience excruciatingly on the razors edge between comedy and horror. Feinberg makes you laugh from precisely the place inside of you where laughter really hurts. Theres a terrible, cumulative effect in reading these essays: coruscating, moving, outraged and outrageous, they chronicle the travels and travails of our own Jere miah, or better yet, our Amos, the soul-baring, self-exposing, unsparing moralista prophetic voice at any rate, with the added grace note of a blistering sense of humor, without which life in this charnel-house of a century is inconceivable.

Feinbergs bitter, finely titrated bile, his refusal to despair and his scrupulous recording of despairs many temptations, his witty observant eye, his compassion and his morality and his take-no-prisoners invective: these are some of the qualities that make him unique, and uniquely important, among the chroniclers of our plague. This is writing that refuses to offer any palliatives, that seeks to intensify what is already unbearable. This is the harshest, and most brave, and most necessary kind of art.

Tony Kushner
March 1995

Introduction

Ive been straddling the line between fiction and fact for quite some time now. In Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion I filtered my experiences through a fictional persona, B. J. Rosenthal. This mask allowed me to selectively reshape my past. Yet I found that the more I wrote, the fewer alterations of fact I made. I was moving closer toward the truth.