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If you
didn’t get a chance to attend Dr. Michelle Abates talk on Wednesday, February
20th at SDSU’s Love Library, then you missed a great talk on queer
futurity and “queer retrosity.” Dr. Abate began her talk, “Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of
the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past,” by first situating
the novel in queer young adult genre and then in the history at the center of
the plot.
The author
tells us, “It was hard to be gay in the 80s. It wasn’t safe to be gay in the
80s.” Abate clarifies misconceptions about the AIDS crisis by underscoring
America’s response to the many lives lost as the government failed to act. She
notes that “AIDS was a pivotal social issue in 1987.” While politicians such as
Pat Buchannan blamed the victims of this crisis with judgmental comments,
“Those poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is
exacting an awful retribution,”
organizations like ACT UP moved to educated America.
Abate notes that while the AIDS epidemic is a
central part of the time in which Sáenz’s novel is set, to make it the focal
point opens Aristotle and Dante Discover
the Secrets of the Universe up to what Sedgwick defines as a “paranoid
reading.” Therefore, according to Abate, a reparative reading of Sáenz’s novel surprises us by imagining a more utopian past through what she calls
“queer retrosity.” She goes on to say that the novel “upends our preconceptions” and therefore,
Ari and Dante are “liberated from history.”
