ABSTRACT
This is an essay in which I want to stretch: to test and render more supple musculature a bit too habituated to routine, that is, to particular questions, rubrics, conceptual limits, and media. In particular, I want to test a coupling upon which I have relied in most of my published work, that is, queer documentary, through a single example, one remarkable in its richness and in the volume of questions it raises.1 My example is the “final episode” (more on that in a moment) of the television serial An American Family, an experimental documentary broadcast initially for twelve hours in 1973, revisited upon its tenth anniversary in 1983 in the aptly-titled American Family Revisited, and completed, as it were, in this final installment that enfolds the death of the series’ most disarming and celebrated protagonist, Lance Loud. Titled Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family, this hour-long piece chronicles Lance’s celebrity from the initial broadcast of An American Family in the early 1970s, through a musical career and long addiction to crystal methamphetamine through the 1980s and 1990s, to work in queer journalism and living with HIV/AIDS in the 1990s, and finally to his death from an HIV/ hepatitis C co-infection in 2001. Lance Loud! concludes with the arrest - ing and moving footage of his memorial service, punctuating the sense of an ending for An American Family.
