Robb Hernández - Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

ARCHIVING AN EPIDEMIC

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations

Phillip Brian Harper

In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies

Many Merck

Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

Jos A. Quiroga

Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel

Gregory Forter

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan

Black Gay Man: Essays

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg

The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

Paul Morrison

The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater

Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM and Pornography

Ariane Cruz

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain

Christina Crosby

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenlogy of Transphobia

Gayle Salamon

Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

Melissa M. Wilcox

After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

Joshua Chambers-Letson

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Amber Jamilla Musser

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyongo

Queer Times, Black Futures

Kara Keeling

Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

Melissa E. Sanchez

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

Robb Hernndez

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

Archiving an Epidemic

Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

Robb Hernndez

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of CAA.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hernndez, Robb, author.

Title: Archiving an epidemic : art, AIDS, and the queer Chicanx avant-garde / Robb Hernndez.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Sexual cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059692| ISBN 9781479845309 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479820832 (pbk : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : Mexican American gays. | Gay menSexual behavior.

Classification: LCC HQ 76.2. U 5 H 475 2019 | DDC 306.77086/642dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059692

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Also available as an ebook

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

Introduction

How AZT Changed Aztln

I throw away your oxygen mask

Empty pills bottles and favorite hats

Remove the lint from the dryer

Thinking if I get rid of your death, Mi Amor

(Your Denim Shirt)

Then the virus that killed you

Wont live in my clothes

(Your Denim Shirt)

In my house, our house

Anymore

Samuel Rodrguez, Your Denim Shirt

Your Denim Shirt (1998) is a visual elegy on tape. However, intrusive memories frustrate his impulse to lay waste to pill bottles, clothes, lint, and an oxygen mask. The bedroom closet opens, transporting the narrator to another time. He holds an ordinary felt fedora and fits it on his head. The video emits the soundtrack of the couples first meeting set to the Chicano nationalist anthem Suavecito (1972) by the Bay Area rock band Malo. Photobooth snapshots document the shirt and the lovers chance encounter, bittersweet keepsakes that suggest a future that was imagined but never arrived. The young man washes and irons the denim shirt, and as the iron glides down the smooth fabric, Rodrguez intersperses erotic images conjuring visions of the lost lover with flashes of his bare back. Finally, the narrator returns the shirt to the closet.