‘Half in love with easeful Death’

Abstract

ABSTRACT The title and introduction of this article draw on Keats's evocative line, “half in love with easeful Death”, taken from his “Ode to a nightingale”, a poem which is used as a point of entry for a discussion of the paradoxical contiguity between sex and death, Eros and Thanatos. Against the background of Romantic and Renaissance preoccupations with the sex-death dialectic, the article offers a contemporary perspective on this issue through an investigation of Louise Hogarth's recent documentary, The gift, a film which depicts the disturbing phenomenon among risk-seeking gay men, of “bare-backing” (unprotected sex), and of “bug chasers”, who actively seek “the gift” of the HIV virus at organized “conversion parties”. Using the theoretical underpinnings of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and, in particular, Judith Butler's feminist reworking of these, the article argues that the emergence of such sexual practices are, in fact, the outcome of a heteronormative culture which not only associates gay men with death, but which has, more alarmingly, resulted in the Aids virus becoming implicated with the gay man's self-definition. Conditioned into believing that they are indistinguishable from the Aids pathology, certain gay males have become complicit with the disease itself, even seeking transcendence through an eroticization of the virus.