The Future of Next Wednesday Night: Douglas Crimp's Queer Planning in an Early Year of AIDS

This essay examines writer and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp and the optimism embedded in his weekly planners in the early years of the AIDS crisis. It focuses on Crimp's handwritten plans—for ACT UP meetings, study groups, social gatherings, hospital visits, and the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights—to explore how he imagined queer futures during an obliterative epidemic. The losses of the AIDS crisis led some to claim that no future was available to queer people. In response, others positioned queerness in a distant utopia. But Crimp's planning engages, the author argues, a queer future that is both physically and temporally proximate, insisting on a temporality of possibility amid mass death. The paper planner's handwritten plans document the movements of queer bodies and record Crimp's aspirations for futurity and relationality alongside a generation of queer activists.