Susan Sontag: Out and In
Susan Sontag was an Overwoman of the thinking life: inimitable, always swimming out beyond the flows and rips of regular intellectual currents, yet both worldly and engaged. Most writers, even the few whose view isn’t blinkered by dogma of some sort, temper what they say. They filter thought through experience, bevel the edges to avoid offense. Sontag didn’t bevel.
I picked up Sontag’s “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in 1989, just when I was beginning to question the humane value of the scientific study of the AIDS virus, a pursuit in which, as an epidemiologist, I had been pretty deeply involved. For me, the essay was an unexpected storm on a well-charted route. I felt it demanded a major course correction. I couldn’t agree completely or absolutely with her take on AIDS — that it was a disease burdened with political ploys and trailing intellectually empty cultural “meanings,” — but neither could I go back exclusively to science.
In Benjamin Moser's deeply researched book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, she's depicted not as the sui generis intellectual most of her readers knew, but as a coward. Moser has read all her work closely, it seems, so his view isn’t based on his lack of understanding. No, his depiction of her is shaped by an inability to shake off his devotion to sexual identity as a moral principle. Moser’s central indictment of Sontag is her failure to adopt the markers of gayness (she had sexual adventures, and relationships, with both men and women). He can’t forgive her for not publicizing her own sexual preferences. He really can’t forgive her for not making common cause with gay people in the early days of AIDS, a time when (he claims) her coming out publicly would have made a difference. To Moser, silence on one’s sexuality is more than just a choice; it’s unpardonable.
So careful a reader of Sontag could only take such a stance if he had a very serious axe to grind — because Sontag herself was so obviously skeptical of exactly that position. The “gay movement” gave her pause. The effort to consolidate all the outrage and ressentiment on the part of gay men seemed courageous to their allies, to the medical and public health communities, and even to some of the movement’s reluctant supporters. But for Sontag it was creating a quasi-ethnicity, a tribe. One “whose distinctive folkloric custom was sexual voracity,” she writes. The sexual license isn’t what troubles her (“appetite is supposed to be immoderate”). No, her position is clear: the trouble is ideology, the false awareness.
Always, with Sontag, the trouble is falseness. Banding together is good: it’s a way of opposing the dogma of consumption, the false promise that freedom can be attained through “personal fulfillment,” the assaults on language, the assertions of ethnic superiority from leaders of nation-states, and so on. But embracing tribal membership as if it were a self, at the cost of one’s own real selfhood — that is unfreedom.
Searching to understand why Sontag would be so heartless about gay plight, Moser decides that Sontag must have chosen to hide her sexual identity out of fear for her reputation. Her capacity to earn a living as a public intellectual at a time when same-sex intercourse was illegal in many states, and same-sex preference was profoundly stigmatized virtually everywhere, would have been impaired had she come out. Moser’s explanation posits that she was either more mercenary than she let on, or more cowardly. (In the New York Times, Vivian Gornick has a more sympathetic answer: Sontag just didn’t know herself very well.)
To depict Sontag as too self-involved to put her concern for the Have-Nots into practice is to miss the most fundamental point of her philosophy: the insistence on freedom from external definitions. She wrote the paired essays “Illness as Metaphor” and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” for two reasons. First, because the obligations of patienthood were anathema to her, especially helplessness. Second, because she understood that making things (in this case, ordinary diseases) mysterious was key to duping the ignorant. AIDS needn’t be, and shouldn’t be, called a “scourge” or a “plague”; cancer shouldn’t be a “battle.” Because we now know exactly what these things really are (and they are only things). To analyze her writing from the tribal standpoint is to miss the essentiality of her rejection of (all) received categories.
Moser’s mistake is misunderstanding the very tribalism he’s examining. His primary historical references are two journalists for whom AIDS embodied the plight of affluent, white, gay men: Randy Shilts, whose nonfiction novel And the Band Played On has unfortunately taken on a canonical cachet, and Michelangelo Signorile, a former New York Times reporter who campaigned for publicly outing officials who weren’t open about their homosexuality. Theirs was primarily a men’s movement; gay men at the time were sometimes openly contemptuous of gay women, and the fact that lesbians were less likely to be infected with the AIDS virus added some complicated survivor resentment into the mix.
Had Sontag come out, would it have made a difference? This claim doesn’t hold water. First, the humanitarian position of “AIDS and Its Metaphors” — her plea for AIDS to be seen as an “ordinary” illness — would have been impossible if she had joined the movement. Second, it wasn’t coming out that drew down the rates of AIDS deaths, it was combination therapy, i.e., the mix of pharmacologic treatment that became available in 1996. Moser is simply wrong on this assertion.
Sontag wasn't drawn to write about AIDS because she was (sometimes) homosexual, but because she had been thinking about disease, including her own, and the ways it is talked about. Or, more often, not talked about. With AIDS, the language was uncertain and rapidly changing, but not primarily because people didn’t care. It’s true that the Reagan Administration wasn’t very interested in discussing it, but many government agencies were on the ball. The federal Centers for Disease Control was immediately active: a CDC task force that had been studying hepatitis B virus, spread by sexual intercourse and frequently reported among gay men in the 1970s, switched over to the new disease (then as yet unnamed) in early 1981. Epidemiologic study at research institutions in America’s major cities was funded by the federal government beginning in 1984. Could federal funds have come sooner? Yes. Would it have made a difference? Absolutely not. We didn’t know enough to use funding effectively.
In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration was engaged in much more invidious, and proactively murderous, offenses: conducting secret commerce in drugs and arms to support the Contra opposition to the socialist regime in Nicaragua; running US training camps for the El Salvadoran military, which was waging war on the poor of their own nation; assaulting the American working class through union busting and tax “reform”; ramping up Nixon’s War on Drugs in a way that, eventually, effectively moved much of America’s black male population into the supervision of the correctional system. These efforts were carried out silently, or they were announced in language that was managed and manipulated to disguise truths.
AIDS itself was contentious, and often neglected in the scientific and medical world. There was astonishment that contagion was making a comeback in the wealthiest country in the world, right after the celebrated rollout of vaccines against famous scourges and decades of self-congratulation about the conquest of germs. AIDS wasn’t easily appreciated by a public health apparatus that was retooling to take on cigarette smoking and diet as its focus. The connection of AIDS with sex made the disease fascinating, but also repulsive. Both the link with gayness, and the new disease’s appearance as a kind of vogue in New York and San Francisco, made it frightening to many. So did the possibility that it could be transmitted to the doctors who cared for the patients. Some refused.
The scientists couldn’t agree on language. Numerically, it wasn’t really a very big public health problem at first, and the causes, manifestations, and patterns of spread were puzzling, defying consensus. The title itself, “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome,” when it was advanced by CDC in 1982, seemed to bend the language by calling the disease a non-disease — a syndrome — and inviting the paradoxically cheery-sounding acronym. The media couldn’t agree on a language for this syndrome because they were engaged in selling a product to an America that thought of itself as middle-class, straight, and hopeful, while the people who were getting AIDS were manifestly unstraight and, more and more, poor and nonwhite.
Surely this is what Sontag was responding to: The misuse of language; the non-use of language; the inchoate fear. What most concerned her was thinking, or its lack. It was false knowledge. It was the over-attention to the facts of history without appreciating the content of history. It was the distortion of language that reduces the self to a persona. Shame, she foresaw, might make people coalesce into a tribe in order to ease stigma. But stigma wasn’t the deep problem. There was a disease that killed people, fixing the language was essential, but even more so was to find a cure.
As for the tribalization, the solidarity, the civic bonding, Sontag had no illusions. It’s not only that (sloughing off the stigma as you may) your identity remains spoiled because the powerful don’t let go of power. It’s that this bonding together into an ethnicity, a religion, a “class” — its purpose isn’t just to repel the stigmatizing; it’s also to repel fear. We join our cults and perform our “identities” in hopes of warding off terror. Sontag had her terror (of death, because it meant the end of her work). But she didn’t share the need to adjust herself to a fixed identity — gay or bisexual or whatever it is Moser wishes to claim her as. And however much she felt herself to be inadequate, she was uncommonly respectful of the authentic self.
While AIDS was a grave threat to American gay men in the 1980s, it was also a new and indispensable stage on which gay identity was performed. Yet, all identity remains (to use Erving Goffman’s word) spoiled, because fundamental sensibilities around differences of “ethnicity” and “orientation” haven’t shifted, only the concession of some rights to some groups. To take advantage of civil rights, even where they are extended genuinely, your selfhood must be tied to the group that has won the rights. But, for Sontag, external identities shouldn't be a distraction from the internal identity, i.e., knowing the self.
Sontag knew this. All social interaction is a drama, a dance, a kind of game. She knew that any selfhood that is saturated with imposed identity, that depends on a special personhood created by others (sociologists might say “constructed”) isn’t selfhood at all. If identity depends on affiliation, then the truth of identity is at best a partial one.
Philip G. Alcabes is Professor of Public Health at Hunter College, CUNY and author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics. His research and commentary on AIDS and related public health problems has appeared in numerous medical and public health journals. He has published essays and reviews in The American Scholar, The Chronicle Review, Consequence, and other publications. He is working on a book on the intersection of consciousness, healing, and psychiatric diagnosis.