Panel

Novelist and essayist Edmund White leads a discussion devoted to the impact of AIDS on the arts. Looking back on the artistic experimentalism and freedom of the late seventies, the panel considers the collapse of this fertile field after the onset of the epidemic. What artistic movements coincided with the emergence of Gay culture? Why was bohemianism central to Gay artistic history? What kind of artistic expression arose from the experience of AIDS? Are we really in an era of “new puritanism,” or is there a larger and more mundane shift away from experimentalism of all kinds in favor of an ephemeral pop culture?

Participants
Edmund White
Patrick Moore
Sarah Schulman
Brad Gooch