Nietzsche, autobiography, history: Mourning and Martin and John

How might gay and lesbian literature be read not as a mimetic representation of homosexuality, but as an activity linked to problems of subjectivity and historiography? Reading Dale Peck's novel Martin and John alongside passages from Friedrich Nietzsche's "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" and Sigmund Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," this essay argues for an understanding of Peck's text as an attempt to link two apparently different processes of import to contemporary gay male subjects in particular: the writing of what Nietzsche terms "critical history," and the mourning of those lost to HIV disease. It concludes by linking Martin and John to feminist critiques of identity and traditional historiography, as well as noting the connection between these two critiques.