Repetition and difference: Julia Bryan-Wilson on LTTR.

"IT IS OUR PROMISCUITY that will save us," AIDS activist and art theorist Douglas Crimp asserted in 1988, defying the media's brutal vilification of gay sex--in which a devastating health crisis was portrayed as punishment for pleasure--by arguing that gay men's sexual flexibility would help them adapt to safer sex. While the AIDS crisis continues, albeit cushioned for some by the effects of life-extending drugs, it is nevertheless difficult to render Crimp's claim intelligible today. The value of promiscuity considered literally, as Crimp did, seems impossible to imagine given…