queerness and (the end of) time part 1: no day but today
tfw dying in america, at the end of the millennium
I have been meaning for a long time to talk about Lee Edelman’s No Future. I did a modern languages degree and, as such, got a very passing familiarity with a wide range of queer theory at something of a breakneck pace. So I’ve known about Lee Edelman’s No Future for years, and as soon as I started thinking about this project, it was one of the academic references I knew I’d want to address. And I will. But not now. Because as soon as I started thinking about No Future, I started thinking about how 🎶 there is no fu-utuuuure / there is no paa-aa-aast 🎶. And at first I thought, well, I can’t write about that until I’ve gone back to Edelman, it won’t be proper unless it has an academic backbone. And then I thought, no, fuck it, what’s the point of dropping out of academia if you’re just going to shut yourself back in? So. I’ll come back to Edelman. But, you know, queerness disrupts linear time, right? So I’m going to write about Rent first, without the academic backbone. Because I want to.
Rent is about time. I’m confident I’m not the first person to notice this. The first sung line sets it in a specific time and place: ‘December 24th, 9pm, Eastern Standard Time’. The musical’s most well-known belter, Seasons of Love, is about measuring time, and how the traditional measures of time fail to capture something essential about it: ‘525,600 minutes’ isn’t adequate to account for a year. You need daylights, sunsets, midnights and cups of coffee. Not lines, but cycles: seasons. Love.
In the reprise - Seasons of Love B - the metrics of time turn darker. Diapers, report cards, spoked wheels and speeding tickets, contracts, dollars, funerals and births. Why all this worry about time? Seasons of Love B is more explicit about the answer than its more popular counterpart: ‘how do you measure our last year on earth?’. Because Rent is about running out of time. To AIDS, of course, and to other things - gentrification, automation, a brief window of time where it was possible to dream about making art for a living, the brief deal Mark and Roger made to live rent-free. This latter point is a reason some modern audiences scorn Rent - the musical asks us to accept the bitterly quaint notion that young people would expect clemency, or be surprised at eviction, when they couldn’t make their rent. And even worse, when they’d chosen a career which doesn’t pay. It’s a plot which depends on the beautiful (or laughable) naïveté of people expecting to survive while following their vocation. La vie bohème may have been under threat in the 90s from evil sellout yuppies, but in the 2020s it’s too absurd to contemplate. Days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing? Really? In this economy?
Perhaps we can say there are two existential threats in Rent - untreatable AIDS, and the total collapse of post-war social safety nets. It’s interesting to think about how both those have changed since Rent’s off-Broadway première in 1993, and how they interlink. According to stage directions for the song Life Support, where members of an AIDS support group introduce themselves by name, the cast and crew of any given performance should insert the names of their own friends and loved ones lost to the disease. Because in 1993, there will have been enough names to go around: everyone will have known someone. For performances of Rent in the US or UK in the 2020s, this stage direction is a historical relic. Miraculously, and perhaps unimaginably to the characters in Rent, HIV/AIDS is now treatable, making it chronic rather than fatal in countries with the wealth to make it so. According to the UN, ‘most people in western Europe and North America living with HIV are accessing treatment and living long and healthy lives’. A cast of young performers in the US or UK is unlikely to know a single peer who has died of AIDS, let alone enough to fill the song.
And yet there is still so much resonance in the parts of Rent about AIDS, even in countries where it is mercifully no longer fatal. ‘Will I lose my dignity? Will someone care?’ is a lyric about fearing the onset of AIDS-related infections and cancers, but 30 years post-Rent it could be about virtually anything - any illness or misfortune which might befall us as social safety nets collapse beyond recognition. People are freezing, starving, working four jobs, dying of preventable disease, while billionaires fly to space and politicians drop any pretence of caring and decide to let the world burn on purpose. Dignity? Really? In this economy?
That’s not to say, of course, that the existential threat of AIDS is in the past. It is still a pandemic, with 37.6 million people living with the disease across the world, and 690,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2020. Two thirds of these cases, and nearly half of the deaths, are in southern Africa - with Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Eswatini, Zambia, and Zimbabwe worst affected. In the US, around 43% of new HIV infections in 2017 were among Black people, who make up only 13% of the general population. AIDS, then, is not an existential threat which can be safely confined to history, filed with the other nostalgic specificities of Rent. Much like COVID is now, the prevalence of AIDS is unequally distributed, with access to preventative and mitigating healthcare concentrated (and sometimes very intentionally hoarded) within wealthy and powerful nations, and in wealthy and privileged communities within those nations. Apocalypses are time-bound, place-bound - the end of the world depends on who gets to have a world in the first place.
The question of whose apocalypses matter is central to Rent itself, not just the post-Rent history of AIDS. If you’ve seen a stage production, or listened to the full Broadway cast recording, you’ll hear plenty of songs and interludes from a chorus of unnamed Homeless People. One of these interludes, On The Street, has Mark, Collins and Angel trying to protect a character named Homeless Woman from some cops by filming with Mark’s camera. Homeless Woman doesn’t consent to the filming, and shouts at Mark:
[HOMELESS WOMAN]:
Who the fuck do you think you are?
I don't need no goddamn help
From some bleeding heart cameraman, my life's not
For you to make a name for yourself!
[ANGEL]:
C'mon, easy, sugar, easy
He was just trying to -
[HOMELESS WOMAN]:
Just tryin' to use me to kill his guilt!
It's not that kinda movie, honey!
Let's go - this lot is full of motherfuckin' artists!
Hey, artist... you got a dollar? Huh! I thought not!
Mark is shaken by the encounter, and Angel and Collins comfort him. To cheer him up, they sing one of the musical’s most soothing songs - Santa Fe. As an audience, we are clearly meant to feel compassion for the Homeless Woman, perhaps to feel challenged and corrected by her intervention. But we are also clearly meant to feel for Mark, and his good intentions. Angel, mediator between Mark and ‘the street’, speaks up for him, and then Angel and Collins lull him with a dreamy song about escaping New York. ‘Anywhere else you could possibly live after New York would be… a pleasure cruise.’ The grim, grubby New York sung about here is epitomised in the Homeless Woman - thanklessness, ingratitude, never being appreciated by these Homeless People we’re defending (without their consent).
In La Vie Bohème A, evil Bennie the Landlord sings ‘do you really want a neighbourhood / where people piss on your stoop every night?’. But Bennie is not so different from Mark, really. The aesthetic problem of homelessness bothers both of them - Bennie’s profit margins, and Mark’s sense of his own goodness. The Homeless People of Rent are not really People but set dressing, scene setting, mood. They are people who have no arc, no trajectory, for whom time has already run out. The MacGuffin of Rent’s entire first act is the threat of eviction hanging over Mark and Roger - the threat of being like the Homeless People. But they are saved from that at the last minute by Bennie’s vain generosity - much to their humiliation - and this doesn’t lead to any change in relationship with the people out in the lot. We are still given to understand that Mark and Roger are different kinds of people from the Homeless People - people who have tragic arcs, chances at redemption, a world still to save.
If Mark and Roger are set apart from the Homeless People, Mark is also doubly set apart by being one of the few characters who doesn’t have HIV. In Goodbye Love, a song from the second act where the group of bohemian friends is disintegrating after Angel’s death, this topic of Mark-as-beleaguered-witness comes up again, more explicitly, as Mark and Roger have a song-argument about each other’s moral failings. Mark scolds Roger (who - if you’ve inexplicably made it this far and haven’t seen Rent - has AIDS) for fleeing his problems. And Roger hits back angrily that Mark is just as avoidant:
[ROGER]: Yes, you live a lie! Tell you why You’re always preaching not to be numb when that’s how you thrive You pretend to create and observe when you really detach from feeling alive! [MARK]: Perhaps it’s because I’m the one of us to survive. [ROGER]: (beat) (scathing) Poor baby!
Again, we are not supposed to feel untempered sympathy for Mark here. The poor baby! - performed as almost feral growl by Adam Pascal on the cast recording - is enough to exclude that possibility. And yet, between this and the On The Street episode, and the fact that Mark is the narrator of the entire musical - a straight HIV-negative guy, with the terrible burden of having friends who aren’t - you’re left with an odd feeling that you should be feeling some sympathy for him. Isn’t it so terribly hard for him, having to watch all this unfold? This is a problem of time, too - Mark gets to keep living in a straight line, gets to choose between ‘selling out’ or ‘following his art’, gets anguished phone calls from his stifling but affluent nuclear family. Roger and Mimi and Angel and Collins must live on different timescales, outside their control - must embrace having no future or lose all hope.
I had to get Apple Music to listen to the whole Rent Broadway recording for this piece. I’d listened before (endlessly) on Spotify, but the full Broadway cast recording disappeared from there a couple of years ago - around the time Fox made a remake (starring Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical fame, among others). For the last couple of years, the only versions of Rent you could get on Spotify were the movie version, the new Fox version from 2019 and a Best of Rent compilation - essentially the original cast recording, but with about half the songs cut. That is, to be fair, plenty of editions of Rent to be going on with. But I’m fascinated by the repackaging of a musical into a more marketable version.
The compilers of Best of Rent made some interesting choices. Some are predictable - Seasons of Love is there, of course. Seasons of Love B - which is darker, and asks how we measure our last year on earth not just any year - is not. (The Fox version also cuts Seasons of Love B, interestingly). On the Street is missing totally, as is Goodbye Love, and all the interludes which include the Homeless People. There are also some cuts to parts of popular songs. La Vie Bohème is there, but cut in half. One of the verses cut is a section I found one of the most electrifying when I saw a live production. The main characters are announcing each other as performers at an imagined soirée, coming up with silly acts for each other to perform. And then Angel announces Collins:
[ANGEL, spoken]: And Collins will recount his exploits as anarchist, including the tale of the successful reprogramming of the M.I.T. virtual reality equipment to self-destruct, as it broadcasts the words: [ALL, spoken]: "Actual Reality - ACT UP - Fight AIDS!"
In this moment the entire cast breaks the fourth wall, turns to face the audience, and shouts. It’s a jarring moment, a depiction of direct action which is a kind of direct action in itself - and it’s not in the Best Of. Another piece of Collins’ direct action - his reprogramming of an ATM to give out free money - is also gone, along with the whole of Finale A (where Mimi is found nearly dead on the street). The Best Of does give us What You Own - Mark and Roger’s rather Green Day-ish duet about the vapidity of consumer capitalism - but safely detached from any actual threats to the capitalist order of things.
I know a Best Of has to cut somewhere, but I find it very interesting that most of the challenging parts of Rent - the parts that trouble us, make us feel awkward, and pin Rent in a specific political time and place, beyond just December 24th, 9pm, Eastern Standard Time - are gone. The full version of Rent may ask us to feel too much sympathy for Mark and his burdens as a witness, may centre his pain as a witness more than it does the pain of those he witnesses. But at least it makes us feel a little awkward about it, a little challenged in our position as witnesses, a little interpellated to ACT UP and FIGHT. The Best Of takes away the problem entirely by pandering to us as witnesses, lifting our burden completely: a safe and sanitised legacy of show tunes. AIDS without AIDS activism is a tragedy that exists independently without human intervention: it is something that’s happening (that happened) to someone else, safely contained, safely Not Us. The same goes for anti-consumerism without anti-capitalism. In an album of Rent showtunes, these apocalyptic threats are consigned to Rent’s nostalgic world, where you can still claim a right to housing (imagine! throwback!) and the technological intervention freaking everybody out was answerphones. There is no need to worry that we might have been complicit - might still be complicit now - in ignoring other people’s worlds collapsing.
All right. Why am I spending so much time on the fact that there’s a Best Of Rent? Partly because I think it’s weird and sad that a musical about creation and not selling out to the man has been so parcelled up and marketed so cynically. I know, I know, Broadway musicals are products from the start. But like a fool, I thought I would keep being able to listen to the full cast recording, complete with awkward bits and anarchism, by virtue of my Spotify subscription. This was a silly piece of forgetting. As Mark and Roger say, I don’t own emotion [or music], I rent. I pay a monthly subscription so that I can have the illusion of owning music, apart from when Fox decides it doesn’t want me to - oh, and nobody gets paid for it properly. The selling out, the commodification, the CyberArts-ification of art that Mark and Roger were so frightened of - it all happened, and then some. We’re all alienated witnesses now. Poor babies. In that respect, the world did end. And yet we persist, somehow. We have to. There is no future, and yet it comes anyway. As Collins would have it, ‘the powers that be must be undermined where they dwell.’