In Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp confronts the conservative gaypolitics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s.He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militantresponse, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerousidentification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the widersociety.With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it becameclear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had beendisplaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to servein the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDSepidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rightsmovement would no longer have a reason to exist.Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determiningrole in queer politics has never been greater. AIDS, he demonstrates, is therepressed, unconscious force that drives the destructive moralism of the new, anti-liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay writers as LarryKramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as Sullivan. Crimpexamines various cultural phenomena, including Randy Shilts's bestseller And theBand Played On, the Hollywood films "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," andMagic Johnson's HIV infection and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He alsoanalyzes Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's AIDSmusical "Zero Patience," Gregg Bordowitz's video "Fast Trip, Long Drop," the NamesProject Quilt, and the annual "Day without Art."