Melancholia and Moralism

[A] history of recent activism written with critical intelligence...

Lambda Book Report

...Crimp is one of our greatest voices and Melancholia and Moralism demonstrates importance of his role in the AIDS crisis.

Afterimage

[F]or all its fiercely and finely argued points, Melancholia and Moralism is a deeply sympathetic book.

The Nation

Readers of these classic essays will surely conclude that Douglas Crimp is the paragon of an intellectual activist. His personality, his physique, and his conscience are all part and parcel of the lucid motion of his mind.

Andrew Ross, New York University

Crimp's essays document the struggle of the AIDS decades with an intelligence, courage, and poignancy that is rare during these times. His insights are relentlessly political, but not predictable, and he brings people together across all kinds of barriers. This is queer scholarship at its best: urgent, brilliant, and unrelenting.

Judith Butler, Maxine Eliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, author of Undoing Gender and Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence

Douglas Crimp's writings about the politics of HIV/AIDS have taught several generations how to combine cultural analysis and cultural activism. Eloquent, incisive, compassionate, uncompromising, rigorous, and humane, Crimp continues to provide us with sure intellectual and political guidance through the mazes of our weakness, perplexity, and fear. In an era of moral retrenchment and erotic impoverishment, when we need more than ever the courage, the wisdom, and the ethical imagination that a vibrant sexual culture has to offer, Crimp's writings, collected here, acquire a new urgency.

David M. Halperin, W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, author of One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Saint Foucault

The critical insight with which Douglas Crimp pierces through the public fantasies surrounding AIDS reveals, in this collection, an emotional intelligence whose calm and lucid humanity is simply unparalleled in contemporary writing.

Kobena Mercer, Middlesex University, London

When Douglas Crimp first presented 'Mourning and Militancy' at Harvard in '89, it pierced the hearts of everyone in the room. Not unlike Vito Russo ten years before him, Crimp urged us as activists to look at our succumbings and fight for our pleasure. Clearly, this vital collection of Crimp's essays outranks any chronicle of AIDS activism in its rigorous breadth and intelligence. But what is astonishing is how, sadly, even a decade following that ensuing sense of catastrophe, his unflinching critique of gay complacency and conservatism, his search for common ground between theory and action, and his tireless dissection of systemic dissent and denial seems more prescient—if not more piercingly radical—than ever before.

Todd Haynes, Director of Velvet Goldmine, Safe, and Poison