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Visions and Revisions: Coming of Age in the Age of AIDs
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 has been assembled from over a dozen essays and articles that have been extensively rewritten and recombined to form 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 street-level 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.
Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s The White Album and Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday, Visions and Revisions has been assembled from over a dozen essays and articles that have been extensively rewritten and recombined to form 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 street-level 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.
1 pages, Audio CD
First published April 7, 2015
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354 people want to read
About the author
Dale Peck
41 books108 followersDale Peck (born 1967 on Long Island, New York) is an American novelist, critic, and columnist. His 2009 novel, Sprout, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Children's/Young Adult literature, and was a finalist for the Stonewall Book Award in the Children's and Young Adult Literature category.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 11, 2015
A mish-mosh of personal essays, critical theory, history, erotica, and prose poetry. Worth reading because when Peck is good, he's very good, but be prepared to wish some parts had been left on the cutting room floor.
February 4, 2023
It fluctuates between a mature, inspirational essay and an embarrasing confession: it's part thought provoking manifesto and part bodice-ripper. Still, I highly recommend it; I doubt it would leave anyone indifferent.
January 13, 2016
The very definition of narcissism. Could be used as a textbook by psychology majors.
August 22, 2016
A collection of non-fiction essays about identity, sexuality and HIV and AIDS, Peck's book is a look at a writer's life as he came of age during the 1980s and 1990s.
"I took Janet Malcolm at face value when she declared, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible"..." 99
"But regardless of its strengths and failures, this world's continued existence was made untenable by the outbreak of AIDS in 1981, which dragged gay men into the spotlight. No, that's not quite right: AIDS gave gay men no choice but to step into the spotlight or die in the wings; and in the late eighties, when the gay community recovered its strength and its voice, if not its physical health, the work of building a new culture began." 101
"History had acknowledges us, but it had also passed us by, by which I mean that the cultural and political response to AIDS made gay men more American, but it didn't make Americans more gay. Whether you regard capitalism as selfish or selfless, inspiring or greedy, an exporter of democratic values or an exploiter of the inhabitants and resources of the third world, the thing that will save the planet or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven remarkably flexible in assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them." 106
"...homophobic virulence in America has increased in direct proportion to the wider acceptance of homosexuals." 111
"But whether or not the political expediency of an innate gay identity will ever be justified by scientific fact, queers will always be defined (at least from the outside) not by their sexual desire but by whether and how they act on it. It's sex that makes you gay, at least in the eyes of the straight world, and it's gay sex that made gay culture, not the other way around." 111
"Foucault..."I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay life-style, not sex acts themselves...It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate." 112
Read the book a second time, forgetting I had read it before. Just as good on the second reading. An important book go anyone interested in queer history, writing and the experience of living through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
"Promiscuity had become a homosexual corollary around the time I was born, and by the time I reach 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." 6
"AIDS had blindsided the gay community in 1981. First the first several years it was all people could do to stare, and mourn, and die. But eventually grief moved beyond sorrow to anger, and in the second half the decade we began to fight back. Eight-seven was the key year-the year ACTUP was born, the year Crimp's issue of October appeared-and neither would have been what it was without the other. The particularly dense jargon favoured by cultural critics, which often read as though translated from the French with a Quebeckers hostility to English,.."9
"Because that's what we did in 1995: we ate lunch, and then we attempted to stem the spread of HIV, and afterward we went to the gym to work it out of our systems. By 1995 we had scheduled AIDS into our lives. " 49
"When I think back to the hothouse period
Between 1987 and 1996, which is to say, the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic which is to say, the years between the founding of ACT UP and the sudden and almost wholly unanticipated success of protease inhibitors and combination therapy..." 59
"What Janet Malcolm refers to in the journalist and the murderer as "soul murder": A crime not against the flesh but against the immaterial being of anyone whose life is subjected to the journalist's guillotine." 76
"Working more by instinct than intellect (which is to say, following their dicks and asses rather than their hearts or minds), gay men in The 1970s uncoupled coitus from its biological assumptions as well as the cultural baggage straight people had been piling onto it over the course of thousands of years. But what was most revolutionary about this behaviour was neither the number participants in a given encounter, nor the exotic accoutrements to same, but, rather, the underlying (often unarticulated and Unacknowledged) assumption that this kind of sex was fundamentally an individual activity rather than a communal one. It was a process of self-discovery premised on self-abnegation, A subterranean interrogation of identity that the anachronistically applied term "Anonymous sex "both hints at and obscures.., Anonymous leads us to think of the other person has the unknown, when in fact we are as nameless as our partners-not just to them, but to ourselves. Now as then, anonymous sex is a way to shed your civilized identity for a more protean being: to hook up with a stranger, but also, and more profoundly, to be a stranger to yourself." 79
"But lest we forget: the real-the only-solution to the AIDS epidemic will not be imaginative but, rather, scientific and bureaucratic. It will be a cure, and, just as important, the means to get that cure into the bodies of people infected with HIV. "98
"It's sex that makes UK, at least in the eyes of the straight world, and it's gay sex that made gay culture, not the other way around." 111
"And so, just as World War I gave us the lost generation, AIDS gave us Generation X, and it's literary expression, new narrative. "153
"I took Janet Malcolm at face value when she declared, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible"..." 99
"But regardless of its strengths and failures, this world's continued existence was made untenable by the outbreak of AIDS in 1981, which dragged gay men into the spotlight. No, that's not quite right: AIDS gave gay men no choice but to step into the spotlight or die in the wings; and in the late eighties, when the gay community recovered its strength and its voice, if not its physical health, the work of building a new culture began." 101
"History had acknowledges us, but it had also passed us by, by which I mean that the cultural and political response to AIDS made gay men more American, but it didn't make Americans more gay. Whether you regard capitalism as selfish or selfless, inspiring or greedy, an exporter of democratic values or an exploiter of the inhabitants and resources of the third world, the thing that will save the planet or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven remarkably flexible in assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them." 106
"...homophobic virulence in America has increased in direct proportion to the wider acceptance of homosexuals." 111
"But whether or not the political expediency of an innate gay identity will ever be justified by scientific fact, queers will always be defined (at least from the outside) not by their sexual desire but by whether and how they act on it. It's sex that makes you gay, at least in the eyes of the straight world, and it's gay sex that made gay culture, not the other way around." 111
"Foucault..."I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay life-style, not sex acts themselves...It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate." 112
Read the book a second time, forgetting I had read it before. Just as good on the second reading. An important book go anyone interested in queer history, writing and the experience of living through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
"Promiscuity had become a homosexual corollary around the time I was born, and by the time I reach 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." 6
"AIDS had blindsided the gay community in 1981. First the first several years it was all people could do to stare, and mourn, and die. But eventually grief moved beyond sorrow to anger, and in the second half the decade we began to fight back. Eight-seven was the key year-the year ACTUP was born, the year Crimp's issue of October appeared-and neither would have been what it was without the other. The particularly dense jargon favoured by cultural critics, which often read as though translated from the French with a Quebeckers hostility to English,.."9
"Because that's what we did in 1995: we ate lunch, and then we attempted to stem the spread of HIV, and afterward we went to the gym to work it out of our systems. By 1995 we had scheduled AIDS into our lives. " 49
"When I think back to the hothouse period
Between 1987 and 1996, which is to say, the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic which is to say, the years between the founding of ACT UP and the sudden and almost wholly unanticipated success of protease inhibitors and combination therapy..." 59
"What Janet Malcolm refers to in the journalist and the murderer as "soul murder": A crime not against the flesh but against the immaterial being of anyone whose life is subjected to the journalist's guillotine." 76
"Working more by instinct than intellect (which is to say, following their dicks and asses rather than their hearts or minds), gay men in The 1970s uncoupled coitus from its biological assumptions as well as the cultural baggage straight people had been piling onto it over the course of thousands of years. But what was most revolutionary about this behaviour was neither the number participants in a given encounter, nor the exotic accoutrements to same, but, rather, the underlying (often unarticulated and Unacknowledged) assumption that this kind of sex was fundamentally an individual activity rather than a communal one. It was a process of self-discovery premised on self-abnegation, A subterranean interrogation of identity that the anachronistically applied term "Anonymous sex "both hints at and obscures.., Anonymous leads us to think of the other person has the unknown, when in fact we are as nameless as our partners-not just to them, but to ourselves. Now as then, anonymous sex is a way to shed your civilized identity for a more protean being: to hook up with a stranger, but also, and more profoundly, to be a stranger to yourself." 79
"But lest we forget: the real-the only-solution to the AIDS epidemic will not be imaginative but, rather, scientific and bureaucratic. It will be a cure, and, just as important, the means to get that cure into the bodies of people infected with HIV. "98
"It's sex that makes UK, at least in the eyes of the straight world, and it's gay sex that made gay culture, not the other way around." 111
"And so, just as World War I gave us the lost generation, AIDS gave us Generation X, and it's literary expression, new narrative. "153
July 22, 2015
I had to find out what all the fuss was about and read this book. It has landed a spot on my top 5 list for best memoirs. It's an intelligent, literate, thoughtful, no holds barred memoir from a man who fought in (was caught up in?) the AIDS war at ACT-UP when he was in his early 20's. Twenty plus years later he's still angry (who isn't).
The style can be bombastic with details that will shock some readers but that is a very good thing. It's intended is to make you think about the death sentence that was AIDS. As much as anything though this book is about the death of gay culture as the GLBT community abandons its culture for assimilation into the mainstream. This is something I've thought about for years and Peck addresses it head on in prose that reminds me of reading Joan Didion. In fact I was reminded of reading Didion at numerous points throughout this book.
The style can be bombastic with details that will shock some readers but that is a very good thing. It's intended is to make you think about the death sentence that was AIDS. As much as anything though this book is about the death of gay culture as the GLBT community abandons its culture for assimilation into the mainstream. This is something I've thought about for years and Peck addresses it head on in prose that reminds me of reading Joan Didion. In fact I was reminded of reading Didion at numerous points throughout this book.
January 17, 2016
What I loved about this book were the cross-genre inclusions of material, how Peck seemed to work organically to thread together an actual fully-flushed experience of the AIDS epidemic, and the enormous impact it has had both culturally, and personally. I wish there had been less of a distant or "professional" tone or voice used in some of the essays. Still, this is admirable, and relatable, as one who was in the trenches, in NYC at the time AIDS first aired (early 1980s- those years Reagan couldn't let the word pass through his own lips) and through the 1990s, when the issues really ramped up. And through it all, severe loss. So many of my former friends are no longer here...
August 12, 2015
I came of age at a similar age as Peck and read his first three novels as soon as I could lay hands on them. This series of essays, part biography, part journalism speak in length to the face of AIDS and how it changed the world. I find his writing to be both visceral and honest in a way that few writers on this topic are able to muster. He mentions Larry Kramer as a hero --- for me, in my quest to discover my place in this world as a gay man of the eighties, the same word comes to mind. Hero. Dale Peck. You are one of my life long heroes. Thank you.
November 25, 2017
For someone who is about a decade younger, this book provides essential insight to what it was like living on the frontlines of the AIDS crisis. Not only with ACT UP, but also dating, loving and learning as a young man in New York City, San Francisco and London. The swirl of information – a pre-Internet daze of knowledge gleaned from fragments and pieced together to form some sort of almost-whole – is something that younger men and women aren't aware of and this document will remain an important milestone in documenting that.
April 23, 2017
Dale Peck is one of my all-time favourite authors. This is a collection of reworked essays, originally written in the 80s and 90s. I'm actually finding it quite difficult to decide what to write about the book. Maybe it is because he is about my age, and although at the time he was writing we had radically different experiences, there is a lot that he writes about that crossed my mind. Maybe I'll come back to this later on.
May 19, 2020
Maybe deserves a half-more star. The subject matter is certainly important, and there are incandescently bright spots in the writing that are truly evocative, provoking, arousing, and fascinating all in turn.
However, there is no connective tissue, even within single essays, sometimes. It feels a bit like being thrown about in a thematic ocean with a writer who is a bit too self-satisfied.
However, there is no connective tissue, even within single essays, sometimes. It feels a bit like being thrown about in a thematic ocean with a writer who is a bit too self-satisfied.
October 26, 2019
The author/narrator is so unlikable. Like that pretty boy who wouldn’t even give you the time of day in a bar.
I read this book to better understand gay history, particularly surrounding the AIDS epidemic. But. This was mostly written to stroke the author’s ego.
I read this book to better understand gay history, particularly surrounding the AIDS epidemic. But. This was mostly written to stroke the author’s ego.
December 1, 2021
3.5
Essay autobiography on HIV, sex, identity and LGBTQ+ activism history. Not a bad read for World AIDS day
Essay autobiography on HIV, sex, identity and LGBTQ+ activism history. Not a bad read for World AIDS day
June 26, 2015
Visions and Revisions is a beautiful attempt at telling the story of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s. For me, the problems with the book were mostly formal. Namely, Peck wanted to give a memoir but instead mostly gave reporting; he wanted to show feeling, understanding, and empathy, but mostly he just told the reader a lot of different facts and ideas without exploring much in the way of what motivated the feelings and stories he was laying out.
Partially, I think the formal problems present in Visions and Revisions are compounded by problems inherent in the themes Peck explores: How do you write about disease/an epidemic/a period in a way that is honest and coherent but doesn't resort to cliche? How do you write the story - the beginning, middle, and end - of a crisis that hasn't ended? I don't think it's always the author's responsibility to answer every such question, but these questions felt like they often overwhelmed Peck's text.
All that being said, Visions and Revisions suggests some interesting ways to try tell this story - some ways being more successful than others. In addition, I thought this book was strongest when Peck was writing about writing.
I would recommend this for someone interested in a story about narrative or someone looking for ways to think through a difficult subject, but not necessarily someone looking to learn about this epidemic for the first time (since I think Peck assumes his reader has a lot of background knowledge on the subject already) or someone looking to read a classic memoir. 3.5/5
Partially, I think the formal problems present in Visions and Revisions are compounded by problems inherent in the themes Peck explores: How do you write about disease/an epidemic/a period in a way that is honest and coherent but doesn't resort to cliche? How do you write the story - the beginning, middle, and end - of a crisis that hasn't ended? I don't think it's always the author's responsibility to answer every such question, but these questions felt like they often overwhelmed Peck's text.
All that being said, Visions and Revisions suggests some interesting ways to try tell this story - some ways being more successful than others. In addition, I thought this book was strongest when Peck was writing about writing.
I would recommend this for someone interested in a story about narrative or someone looking for ways to think through a difficult subject, but not necessarily someone looking to learn about this epidemic for the first time (since I think Peck assumes his reader has a lot of background knowledge on the subject already) or someone looking to read a classic memoir. 3.5/5
July 2, 2015
Dale Peck's Visions and Revisions is part memoir and part historical and cultural analysis written in a fierce, tight and poetic style that brought me right back to those horrible and life-changing days before protease inhibitors. While not a full history of ACT UP it gives an excellent sense of what it was like to organize when it was a matter of life and death and there was nothing to lose. While sometimes it seems as if it was so long ago and that the communities that was created, especially in large cities, have moved on, I still see remnants of it in #BlackLivesMatter or in Occupy Wall Street (and of course the biggest debt also goes to the Civil Rights movement) or in the organizing in the Trans community. I love Peck's bold style and his ability to write about his sexuality in a raw and unapologetic manner and his rage at a government that did not care whether gay people lived or died. The last part of the book "13 Ecstasies of the Soul" knocked me flat out (and I agree with the reviewer who said it reminded him of "Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog) and I confess I wept and then began reading the book again. Thank you Edelweiss for allowing me to review this book for an honest opinion.
June 12, 2023
I was really excited for this - it sounded so promising and interesting but,
what the hell was that writing? It felt like reading a person's text draft where they try to be at their most pretentious. It reads like a narcissist's diary that find himself to be the only interesting topic on earth.
I also didn't like how the essays were messily organised and didn't connect whatsoever (except for a super large theme).
what the hell was that writing? It felt like reading a person's text draft where they try to be at their most pretentious. It reads like a narcissist's diary that find himself to be the only interesting topic on earth.
I also didn't like how the essays were messily organised and didn't connect whatsoever (except for a super large theme).
October 7, 2015
This is the closest thing we have so far to a book about being HIV- in the era of AIDS. A good writer thinks hard and shares his thoughts with us; the downside is that unfortunately those thoughts are limited to New York City, not the center of the world.
February 5, 2016
Love the style of his works. Don't we all wish we could go over things we wrote or did and rethink them. Part memoir, part essays, part philosophical analysis of bsdm behavior, examines queer theory with references to Bersoni, Foucant, and Kushner, part history of AIDS.
August 30, 2015
I need to read more queer theory.
August 8, 2015
a powerful memoir/treatise on growing up and coming to terms with the AIDS epidimic...thoughtful, angry, sentimental, caring, theoretical, intelligent, and moving.
September 25, 2016
Required reading for gay Millennials, as we stand on the shoulders of giants.
June 29, 2015
4.4/5
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews