Visions and Revisions: Coming of Age in the Age of AIDS

by Dale Peck

Overview

Novelist and critic Dale Peck’s latest work—part memoir, part extended essay—is a foray into what the author calls “the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic,” i.e., the period between 1987, when the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded, and 1996, when the advent of combination therapy transformed AIDS from a virtual death sentence into a chronic manageable illness.

Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s The White Album and Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday, Visions and Revisions is a sweeping, collage-style portrait of a tumultuous era. Moving seamlessly from the lyrical to the analytical to the reportorial, Peck’s story takes readers from the serial killings of gay men in New York, London, and Milwaukee, through Peck’s first loves upon coming out of the closet, to the transformation of LGBT people from marginal, idealistic fighters to their present place in a world of widespread, if fraught, mainstream acceptance.

The narrative pays particular attention the words and deeds of AIDS activists, offering a streetlevel portrait of ACT UP with considerations of AIDS-centered fiction and criticism of the era, as well as intimate, sometimes elegiac portraits of artists, activists, and HIV-positive people Peck knew. Peck’s fiery rhetoric against a government that sat on its hands for the first several years of the epidemic is tinged with the idealism of a young gay man discovering his political, artistic, and sexual identity. The result is a visionary and indispensable work from one of America’s most brilliant and controversial authors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616956448
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/22/2016
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dale Peck is the author of twelve books in a variety of genres, including Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout, and is the editor of The Soho Press Book of ’80s Short Fiction. His fiction and criticism have appeared in dozens of publications, and have earned him two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He lives in New York City, where he has taught in the New School’s graduate writing program since 1999.

Read an Excerpt

And in short, I was afraid.
1

My father liked Chris because he could tell she wanted me to fuck her, but when I wouldn’t she left me for someone who would; I think she held out two weeks. Becky was next. She waited nearly a year for the same thing, and if I hadn’t left for college I’d probably still be trying to work up the nerve to go to second base. In college there was Martina, who called me Spike, and Lisa, who was fat, and Shilpa, who always dated guys who turned out gay, and then there was Joy. We dated the summer after our freshman year and I wrote a story about that. Kelly was my last girlfriend. She was the hot freshman when I was the “bisexual” junior, and she liked the way I danced. At a gay disco—Traxx, RIP—I managed to knock her out cold with a well-executed but badly timed spin on the dance floor, and the bruise on her chin lasted longer than our . . . whatever it was. François was Brian’s ex. Brian wasn’t interested but
     François was, and he invited me over for Christmas; I stayed three days. A month later he passed me off to Marek, whose kiss had a chemical tang—not my thing. Brian (a different Brian) had been a professional masseur, and the massages were better than the sex; soon enough, though, his hands grew tired and my dick grew restless. Jean-Claude and I made it through all four seasons of the year, starting in spring and ending in winter. He broke up with me during my lunch break—oh, the drama!—but we got back together, and then I broke up with him on Thanksgiving day. He came over covered in fake blood from an ACT UP demo, showered, and then we sat on Tasha’s bed, he naked, I clothed, and ended it to the sounds of side two of Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise?, which scratched melancholically from Tasha’s old record player. Later we went to Bruce and Roger’s for turkey and Jean-Claude left in the middle of the meal, in tears; Bruce never forgave me for that. Damien was one of those shaved-head ACT UP clones who look simultaneously like a neo-Nazi and an inmate at Auschwitz; he told me he’d had sex with Terence Trent D’Arby in the Ramble, and that he, Terence Trent, had an enormous cock. Derek and I fucked almost every night for two weeks and then he went to Amsterdam; a few weeks later I was at David’s apartment having my hair dyed pink when Derek showed up: David’s mohawk was blue and Derek’s was green, and his roots didn’t need a touch-up. Dan lived with Charles and was having an affair with John; I was number three on that chain until Dan couldn’t take it anymore, and one by one broke it off with all of us. Dennis was the fourth D in four months: he lived opposite the Hells Angels clubhouse on East 3rd Street, and the lamp on his night table was shaded with X-rays of his skull. Then Eric: after two months during which we both gained weight, he took me to Film Forum to see Sunset Boulevard for my twenty-fourth birthday, and then, over gelato at Raffetto’s, he said, Well, Dale, it looks like our friendship is becoming a friendship. Patrick’s the only one I regret, but Tasha insisted we looked good together: his skin was so coated in freckles it was orange, like his hair, and orange has always looked good on me. Eventually I took him to the Bar to break up because I didn’t want to have sex first, went home that night with Frank, who’d also broken up with someone earlier in the day. John turned out to be the oldest (although François never told me his age); he had hair everywhere except his head. Barry was a palliative care nurse from Australia who just happened to be the first person to test positive Down Under—he’d helped design the nation’s pilot program. Scott was British, here on an internship, and when I made out with him on the subway he flipped. A fan of cottaging, he’d had sex in public restrooms and parks and at least one cemetery, but he’d never held hands with another man on the street, let alone kissed someone on a train. Will couldn’t eat food if it was served on a blue plate. That wasn’t why we broke up but it was still, you know, weird. A month later I went to England to promote Martin and John; met Robbie; ended up spending two out of the next three years in London. When I finally gave up and moved back to New York I had the sense that there was less of me than there’d been before. I was, what? twenty-seven? twenty-eight? If you’d told me it would be another decade until I’d meet the man I was going to marry, I’d’ve probably slit my wrists.
     Because this was how it worked: before I could have sex with a man I had to believe I could love him—forever. This wasn’t just fantasy, it was foreplay. The particular way a man looked and the first few words he said provided me with more than enough material to manufacture a life together. These visions, depending on the length of acquaintance, could be revised or abandoned; sometimes they turned into journal entries, sometimes stories; usually they were forgotten after I came. Looking back, I realize they were mostly a way for me to pretend I was looking for The One when what I was really looking for was The Next One. That sounds like residual Christian guilt and who knows, maybe it was, but I think it had more to do with the fact that, for a gay boy ten days shy of his fourteenth birthday on July 3, 1981, sex would forever straddle a nebulous line between meaninglessness and metaphor. “Sex with abandon”: that’s what Allen Barnett eulogized in The Body and Its Dangers, and that’s what I wanted. Sex that was anonymous, inconsequential, and available whenever and wherever I looked for it. But I knew I would never have it, and not just because of AIDS. Promiscuity had become a homosexual corollary around the time I was born, and by the time I reached puberty it was practically a moral imperative. But by 1991, or ’93, or ’95, it had devolved into a kind of last stand against the epidemic, and everyone and everything it had taken from us. It was all we had left. Oh, we had new things, sure. We had ACT UP. We had visibility. We had, God help us, our pride, and the targeted marketing campaigns from alcohol manufacturers to prove it. But sex was all that remained of what we’d had before. What we’d been before. Sex, a few books and even fewer plays, some pictures and paintings, a handful of movies; and as a consequence every back-room blowjob, every hookup, every flushed condom and sticky-dicked walk of shame was a refusal to renounce the behavior that formed the core of our personal as well as cultural identities.
     Still, for my first two or three years in the city, I obsessed over the status of ex-boyfriends and tricks, took an anxietyridden, morbid, but very real comfort in the fact that no one I’d slept with had died yet. Yet: though I never acknowledged it, a tiny voice at the back of my head was always asking: Who will be first? But once that question was answered, and once it happened again—and again and again—a more terrifying prospect raised its head:
     Who will be last?

Table of Contents

Cover,
Other Books by This Author,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
1: Visions and Revisions,
2: Thirteen Ecstasies of the Soul,
Almost Closed,
Acknowledgments,

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Visions and Revisions

A Flavorwire Best Nonfiction Book of 2015
A Bay Area Reporter Best LGBT Nonfiction of 2015 Selection

"Peck offers a flinty-eyed look into the heart of the H.I.V. epidemic, from the late 1980s until the development of protease inhibitors and combination therapies in the mid-1990s. As we would expect, a portion of Peck’s narrative is told in the letters and stories of those claimed by AIDS—fellow activists, friends, lovers—and of course his work for Act Up is crucial. But the investigation of serial killers who trolled for gay men in London and New York provides perhaps the strongest elicitation of those years of ignorance, discrimination and fear . . . A compelling snapshot of the social activism that defined the era."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Peck shows himself to be a memoirist in Sontag’s mold."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Visions and Revisions is many things at once: elegy, cultural analysis, personal history, sexual diary and meditation on the meaning of art, community and self . . . [Peck] offers a personal philosophy grounded in trauma, collective struggle and a craving for language. "
—San Francisco Chronicle

"A coming-of-age tale for both the gay community at large and a nation coming to terms with that community’s place in American society . . . Peck’s sharp writing moves nimbly and restlessly between nostalgic tenderness and the stinging critiques that once moved Slate’s Laura Kipnis to call him 'the current laureate of critical evisceration.'"
—The Boston Globe

"A powerful testament."
—Out Magazine

"At times engrossingly easy to read and at times extremely emotionally difficult, Visions and Revisions is so intimate that it feels almost like reading someone’s diary. It is a powerful reminder of how far we’ve come in our treatment of and attitudes regarding HIV and AIDS. In addition, Peck’s smart, compassionate, insightful book reminds us that, though that journey has been long and hard, it is something to be remembered and to be proud of." 
—Metrosource 

"Although a relatively short memoir, Visions and Revisions comes to contain an indispensable mini-canon of cultural theory, essay, and reportage from the crisis. But that’s just a bland, aloof way of stating that, in almost every moment, Peck’s book asserts itself as a bold yet considered act of militant nostalgia—the filmmaker Thom Andersen’s term for intervening in the past in order to open up new possibilities for the future. Peck is revising our understanding of the crisis as much as reading its history aloud."
—Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire

"Both compelling and unsettling."
—Interview Magazine

"A brilliant memoir . . . Visions and Revisions gives us intense flashes of intimacy, revelations most writers wouldn't have the balls to put on paper . . . The best moments come when Peck's punchy genius fails, when a ghost suddenly steps into his writing room, when the know-it-all puts down his sword and admits he doesn't know how to say what he wishes he could say."
—The Stranger

"I devoured Peck’s memoir in two sittings. How could anyone, I thought, write a book that seemed such an unapologetic and deeply pleasurable blend of Kathy Acker and Theodor Adorno? The book’s mélange of theory and anecdote was bracing."
—Annie DeWitt, BookForum

"The breadth of [Visions and Revisions] demonstrates his skill as a journalist, social analyst, essayist, diarist, poet and novelist. The entire first 172 pages serve as a preface and footnote both to the concluding section, '13 ecstasies of the soul.' These final pages elevate the entire text from sociology to poetry, theology, and mysticism rooted in the physical experience of the body."
—Lamda Literary

"Illuminating . . . Peck has provided an intimate sense of a life and consciousness formed during years of epidemic and activism."
—A&U Magazine

“Dale Peck uses every weapon in his considerable arsenal, from criticism to journalism to memoir, in order to close the gap in our understanding of what it was like to live at the tail end of the time when AIDS was almost always lethal. Peck’s signature tightly controlled literary rage finds perhaps its worthiest target so far, and the result is a book that’s both necessary and exhilarating to read.”
—Emily Gould, author of Friendship

“History as clarion call, memoir as revolution; Visions and Revisions is a book powerfully alive with a story that needed not just to be written, but to be interrogated with honesty, courage and no small amount of defiance. Unforgettable in its detail, moving in its truth, acerbic at all the right moments and open at its very core: Dale Peck has made something extraordinary. I closed the book wanting immediately to read it again.”
—Belinda McKeon, author of Tender

“Dale Peck boldly returns to his own war, the terrifying plague years in New York, and accomplishes what few have attempted: he discovers mercy and absolution, where merited. And love. Visions and Revisions is a transformative work.”
—David France, director of How to Survive a Plague

"Raw and heartfelt."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Death is present throughout this intense narrative, but it appears as a theme with particularly dark power in Peck’s gutsy paralleling of the devastating impact of AIDS on the gay community with the horrors of gay serial killers of the era . . . Peck contrasts his findings about this tragic and frightening time of ignorance, discrimination, fear, suffering, and lack of compassion and support with today’s far more enlightened attitudes toward illness, health care, and LGBT people."
—Booklist

"[Visions and Revisions] provides a unique bird's eye view into how one man coped with stigma and fear in the early days of a pandemic that still rages. As more and more people—infectious disease physicians included—have dimmer recollections of the horrible march of HIV in 1980 and 1990s America, immersing oneself in the early days of the plague with a colorful tour guide becomes increasingly more important."
—Dr. Amesh Adalja, infectious disease specialist writing on his blog, Tracking Zebra

Praise for Dale Peck

"Peck has galvanized his reputation as one of the most eloquent voices of his generation."
—The New York Times

"Peck is not only one of the leading literary voices of his generation, but also one of the few avant-garde writers of any age who is changing the rules for prose fiction. His novels simultaneously define and defy the genre."
—Los Angeles Times

"Few writers have Dale Peck's nerve. He writes without secrets, packing his novels with the intimacies of his life, his family, his sexuality."
—The Nation

"[Dale Peck] gives me what I look for most when I open a new book: a world that is our world and also full of things I didn't know, characters in scenes that are at once recognizable and indelible."
—Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

The interweaving of long essay, diary, poetry and lyric essay has an edgy, experimental feel, though readers familiar with Peck's novels will be neither surprised nor disappointed. That the timeline covers what Peck calls his "slutty days" is evidenced from the outset, though readers who are not squeamish about bodily functions or impatient with a young man's sexual obsessions will find a compelling snapshot of the social activism that defined the era.

The New York Times Book Review - Judy Blunt

03/15/2015
Chronicling the 1997 foundation of the AIDS Coalition through the 1996 emergence of the first successful combination of drug treatment therapies, a period the author dubs "the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic," novelist, columnist, and AIDS activist Peck (Hatchet Jobs; Sprout) examines this transformative and polarizing time in American history. The memoir is a compilation of a handful of previously published essays and straddles the line between literary narrative and journalistic exposition. Peck offers a humanistic albeit outspoken analysis of events during the rise of HIV diagnoses, public defamation and violence toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community; and the humanitarian obstacles American social revolutionists endured around the stigma of AIDS. The text is difficult to follow at times, frequently jumping from the author's personal reflection to larger societal AIDS-related events occurring in real time. VERDICT A powerful, gritty social commentary complemented by the author's coming-of-age story as a young adult during this tumultuous time. Recommended for progressive biography and memoir readers, human rights activists, and contemporary American history enthusiasts.—Carolann Curry, Mercer Univ. Lib., Macon, GA

Library Journal

2015-01-04
Witness to a transformative decade in gay history.By the time novelist and critic Peck (The Garden of Lost and Found, 2012, etc.) came out in 1987, a potent drug cocktail had emerged that controlled the course of HIV, lessening its likelihood to lead to full-blown AIDS and certain death. He recounts the effect of that discovery on gay culture, on America's attitudes toward homosexuality and on his own experiences. Woven through the book are references to serial killers of gay men, about whom Peck reported early in his career. Cobbled together from revised essays and articles, the memoir sometimes lapses into repetition and shows its seams. The author, who has honed a reputation for scathing critiques, offers a withering indictment of Andrew Sullivan, whose revisionist gay history demonized pre-AIDS gay culture "as a nonstop party" that he believed would be reincited by the development of combination therapy. Peck also dismisses some queer theorists whose "performative modalities…often seemed like experiments in egotism and anomie." He effusively praises Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham and Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America (2003) contributed to making gay activists "more visible, more capable of influencing the things said about us on a national level." As a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power when he was in his early 20s, Peck stood proudly among those activists, attending meetings and marches, helping out with mundane office work, preparing clean needles for addicts, and reading everything he could find written by a gay man, lesbian or transgendered person. Literature, he writes, "happened to get better in response to AIDS, at least for a while," since it reflected the visceral rage and despair of the time. He is despondent, though, about a tendency to normalize and distance AIDS. Instead, he calls for narratives that force readers "to find the existence of the epidemic unbearable." Raw and heartfelt—though uneven—Peck's hybrid memoir contributes to that goal.

Kirkus Reviews