Disss-Co (A Fragment)

Disss-Co (A Fragment) is Douglas Crimp's fragmentary memoir of gay disco culture in 1970s New York, a personal counterpart to the criticism that made him one of the era's most influential voices on art, sexuality, and AIDS activism.

Subtitled From Before Pictures, A Memoir of 1970s New York, the essay was published by MoMA PS1 in 2016 as part of the reader series edited by Jocelyn Miller accompanying the fourth iteration of the museum's Greater New York exhibition. In brief, tactile fragments, Crimp recalls nights at downtown discotheques, recreating the ecstatic, anonymous release of the dancefloor in prose as precise as his art criticism.

Crimp (1944-2019) was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester and the author of On the Museum's Ruins and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. This first-person fragment extends the same attentiveness to bodies, desire, and loss that runs through his critical writing into memoir of pre-AIDS gay New York.