The Art of Forgetting
Historical amnesia in the Gay Rights Movement
Histories
Queer rights are under attack. Of course they are. Somehow, these attacks are unprecedented. Despite the murders and massacres of the past 30 years, despite AIDS, despite the Defense of Marriage Act passed without opposition in 1996, despite the witch-hunts of the 1940s and ’50s, we are to act as though this is a surprise.
Collective memory has moved on from the horrors of the last century. A great silence has descended; no longer does Pride commemorate the fallen who died in the second greatest disaster of American history. If we are to assume only half of those who died of AIDS are homosexual, over 350,000 queer men and women died due to deliberate government policies, made all-too-explicit in the political response to the pandemic.
Where did the history of AIDS go? When will we remember that the United States government remained complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens? And what of the many dead long before? The tens of thousands purged from the federal government and private employment lists? Do we speak of the suspicious number of suicides of the Lavender Scare?
