Reading and Writing "Immunity": Children and the Anti-Body

Abstract

Reading and Writing "Immunity":Children and the Anti-Body Robert McRuer (bio) "Whatever else it may be," Paula Treichler writes, "AIDS is a story, or multiple stories, read to a surprising extent from a text that does not exist: the body of the male homosexual. It is a text people so want—need—to read that they have gone so far as to write it themselves" ("AIDS" 42). Treichler's analysis of the construction of AIDS in its first decade provides a thorough account of the strategies used by science, the media, and the "general public" in their panicked attempts to locate and control the story of AIDS. In 1987, when Treichler's article was first published, the mysterious, exoticized gay male body had indeed become the site on which fears and fantasies about AIDS were inscribed. And yet, in the second decade of the epidemic, the cultural mandate to write the text of AIDS on the gay male body has been forestalled. People continue to write the story of AIDS, but that story has now moved into arenas traditionally off limits to gay and lesbian bodies. In children's literature about AIDS, particularly, the paradox plays itself out: the story of AIDS may demand the text of the gay male body, but that body is an "anti-body" as far as children's literature is concerned. In the mid-1980s Jan Goodman noted, "As far as young children know, there's no such thing as a gay person. Lesbian and gay characters are as good as invisible in books for preschool and early elementary-age children" (15). In the late 1980s, the establishment by Alyson Publications of the Alyson Wonderland series for children remedied the situation somewhat, and yet, that a series of gay and lesbian books for children had to be produced by a lesbian and gay publishing house suggests that the exclusion of gay men and lesbians from mainstream children's literature is still an unspoken imperative. In fact, even the most domesticated representations of lesbians and gay men are heavily policed: according to the American Library Association, throughout the 1990s Daddy's Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies, two books that do little more than depict children with gay and lesbian parents, have been among the most censored books in school and public libraries (Gallagher 44-45). In New York City alone, five communities banned portions of a multicultural curriculum called "Children of the Rainbow" simply because the curriculum included these texts ("Alternative-Lifestyle Lessons" 64). In Oregon, children's literature containing representations of gay and lesbian people was used in 1992 to rally support for initiatives designed to abolish legal protection for lesbians and gay men (Egan 1; Gleason 8). Apparently, to supporters of the Oregon initiative, representations of gay men and lesbians in children's books were self-evidently inappropriate. Lesbians and gay men had overstepped a boundary, and the books in question provided both evidence of the transgression and justification for measures designed to contain gay and lesbian people. But the exclusion of gay male bodies from children's literature about AIDS in particular results from an additional, very different, paradox that emerges from shifts in AIDS discourse in the 1990s. The liberal reinscription of AIDS, from the late 1980s on, as "everyone's disease" ironically functions within the text of children's literature—as it has elsewhere—to make gay men living with AIDS invisible. This liberal discourse may no longer deny the gay man with AIDS his own voice by objectifying him as the quintessential, and stigmatized, "AIDS victim," but it silences him nonetheless. In fact, the discursive shift to understanding AIDS as everyone's disease justifies, or rationalizes, the proscription of gay male representation in children's literature. The exclusion of gay male bodies from children's literature is thus redoubled, this time under the liberal guise of not reinforcing stereotypical equations of gay men and AIDS. Ironically, the idea that AIDS is everyone's disease emerged in the late 1980s as a result of AIDS activist successes. At that time activists, objecting to the portrayal of AIDS as only a gay disease or to the implication that AIDS and...