SOURCE: "AIDS Writing and the Creation of a Gay Culture," in Confronting AIDS Through Literature: The Responsibilities of Representation, edited by Judith Laurence Pastore, University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 36-54.

In the following essay, Denneny views AIDS as a catastrophic event of central importance to both gay literature and social history.

In the Preface to The Birth Of The Clinic Michel Foucault writes: "It may well be that we belong to an age of criticism whose lack of a primary philosophy reminds us at every moment of its reign and its fatality: an age of intelligence that keeps us irremediably at a distance from an original language.… We are doomed historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about discourses and to the task of hearing what has already been said."

It is perhaps unfair to continue an argument with a man after he is dead, but...