ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993

The exhibition chronicles New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group, including Gran Fury, Silence=Death Project, Gang, and Fierce Pussy. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation’s discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition ACT UP New York provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

In October I went to Cambridge and saw the unprecedented exhibition ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993.   I took a lot of pictures in order to include them here as a treat for friends who are too far away or otherwise unable to make the trip.  I feel so grateful that I was able to visit and fortunate to know both co-directors of the ACT UP Oral History Project through my involvement with MIX NYC.  I am not sure that I would have been aware of the exhibit otherwise.

On the way to Cambridge I was thinking back to the time I called in to the Brian Lehrer radio show and talked to the woman who screened the calls that day, World AIDS Day.  I was not on the air, but I was telling her that Brian Lehrer has been talking for 20 minutes about whether or not the “stigma of AIDS” has decreased without once mentioning homophobia, without naming the fact that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was originally called Gay Related Immune Deficiency.  I was literally choking on the words, saying this was all wrong, historically inaccurate, an inexcusable omission.  Where else do we think that stigma came from?  She said she would let Brian know.  I am no expert on this history but at least I know what I remember...

A central theme of the exhibition is the intersection of art and activism, and much of the exhibit amounts to an archive of visual activism and oral history.  The exhibit spans two separate galleries. The first gallery contains the ACT UP Oral History Project and some large-scale visual art, including a fabulously wheat pasted women’s bathroom by Fierce Pussy.  The upstairs gallery has a timeline of milestones, films installed on a loop with a single bench to sit and watch, and a display of posters and stickers.  There are also some prints of the original posters available for visitors.  The film installation includes work by DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) and United in Anger: A History of ACT UP by Jim Hubbard, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project.

Upstairs, I got totally caught up in the film installation and found myself watching it in its entirety.  One of the films included an expose on the biased media coverage of the 1989 ACT UP and WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) Stop the Church action at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Watching this transported me back in time.  It made me realize that even within the incredibly homophobic coverage of the action, enough truth squeaked through to have a powerful impact on my life’s direction.  This is no overstatement.  I was a kid and learned about the die-in from TV, but even with this very condemning media coverage I still identified with the protesters.  At 15 in my parent’s house, I came to life for that brief footage. It was one of those pivotal life moments.  

At the exhibit here in the present, I learned that the media got this footage from a participating activist, edited the hell out of it and excised reproductive freedom entirely from their coverage.  But even in that limited, incomplete footage, I had seen my queer future, and shivered in my suburban closet.  Through the haze of media disapproval and selective reporting, I saw not only the commitment and integrity of the protesters but also what they were up against.  I was an angry teenage girl seeing people stand up to those sexist old fucks in the church, confronting Cardinal O’Connor as nothing more than a creepy old man who had so much say over the stories we tell ourselves about sex.  He had so much say over what little conversation there was about HIV/AIDS.  Seeing Cardinal O’Connor step over bodies was the perfect non-metaphor for what was happening.  This action was more than symbolic, it was literally true.

For context, three years prior to the Stop the Church action, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: “When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”  I heard a portion of that statement in one of the videos, and I felt compelled to track down the exact quote and read it a couple times in an effort to understand the depth of the immorality we were and are up against. 

A time line covers a full wall in the upstairs gallery.  Reading it filled in some gaps in my memory and many more gaps in what I even knew about in the first place.  This history is hardly collected anywhere and certainly not taught to anyone.  Seeing the time line was more than informative, it was powerful.  One of many new things I learned was how in 1992, ACT UP held a political funeral in DC and a procession of 11 people scattered the ashes of their loved ones on the White House lawn.  This event was noted on the wall and there was film footage too, and it really blew me away.  I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of a comparable moment in history.  The only image that comes to my mind is the Memphis sanitation worker strike where some carried signs that read "I am a man."  In both cases people were demanding their humanity be recognized and thereby confronting the deepest roots of the specific injustice at hand.

1981

1991

I watched some footage of a group decision-making process in the midst of an action. A group of protesters at City Hall was trying to come to consensus about whether or not to block traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Some were ready to go, others wanted to wait for more media to arrive to maximize coverage.  Showing even such a minor disagreement is critical to preserving a real history.  There was also some footage of non-violent civil disobedience training.  It was great to see this collaboration documented, to keep away the mythologizing of spontaneous demonstration when there is so much planning, training, debate, and plain old hard work that goes in to making art, protests and demonstrations.

Downstairs, the ACT UP Oral History Project is set up with 14 monitors each displaying a different set of full-length interviews for a total of 102 interviews, many over an hour long.  Each monitor is set up with 2 pairs of headphones and two seats.  The arrangement lends itself to listening with a friend.  The set-up itself seems to request that you share the interview and enter into a conversation, rather than passively listening or keeping what you hear to yourself.  It suggests not only learning but also engagement.

The interviews contain personal stories and the larger story of collective action making a difference.  In one interview I was watching, the person being interviewed recalls a specific action at a Republican fund raiser.   Off-screen interviewer Sarah Schulman, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project, asks questions like, "Who else was there, what were their names?"  With this line of questioning, we are hearing not only one individual’s history but also learning our shared history, who we lost, what they did, what ideas they had, what art they made.  And we witness their grief.

The oral histories are now available to students to use in their research projects and available for scholarly study through Harvard University.  And I have some hope that the attention of this particular school has the potential to act as an intervention into academic amnesia about the HIV/AIDS crisis, or maybe even staunch the flow of our history from being drained away by the likes of national public radio.  Maybe amnesia is not the right word, it is more deliberate ignorance of both recent history and the current crisis.   The preservation of these oral histories is in direct defiance of the way our lives and realities are so often ignored. In this way, it seems to be a direct continuation of the work of ACT UP in demanding to be seen, acknowledged and recognized as people.

The protest posters and other art in the exhibit detail a clear connection between healthcare, AIDS activism and reproductive freedom.  The connection is rarely made explicit today, so it was very refreshing to see it plainly demonstrated that when the state attempts to control our sexuality through the restriction of any form of healthcare or information related to sex, we are NOT free.  One of my favorite aspects of the politics represented here is the refusal to compromise on how everything is connected to everything else.  The fact that so much of the art was created by collectives speaks to this sense of connection.  In many different ways the artists and activists declare that our lives, our bodies and our sexuality are deserving of respect, honor and care.  Not just some of us, not just the wealthy ones, not just the monogamous couples, not just those of us with kids.  This message of connection and inclusion could not be more relevant to the current healthcare legislation that would exclude funding for abortion. 

In the words of Gran Fury, “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference make AIDS a political crisis.”  ACT UP could have taken up any one of these strands to fight against, but chose to go after all of them and more, all the while exposing the racism, sexism and homophobia at the center of the crisis.  All the art and documentation in this exhibit points to the possibility of working on the details and the big picture all at the same time.  The group affected changes in both the law and the culture.  I was really struck by how the activists could see and define the roots of a crisis in real time, right as it was unfolding.  ACT UP took on not only the church, not only the government, not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also the belief systems in our culture that perpetuate and permit the deaths of huge numbers of people at the so-called margins.  All these documents, posters, interviews and stickers comprise a legacy, a legacy of values like responsibility, loyalty and commitment.


The feeling I took away from the exhibit was nothing less than a moral obligation to continue to work in the same way, by identifying the root causes of injustice and going after them while at the same time not losing track of the real world details that need to be addressed on a daily basis.  The feeling mirrored the time I saw the Stop the Church action on the evening news 20 years ago, but this time there was also a rare sense of external recognition of my cultural identity as queer person.  The disapproving lens was gone, temporarily lifted to reveal a space full of visible, audible expressions of who we are, what we do and how we love.  The exhibit provides a mirror where we actually show up as a community with some shared values and shared history, demanding to be fully recognized as human beings without any qualifications, without trotting out today's tired argument that we are fully human because of how similar we are to straight people, because we have jobs and go shopping, etc.  No "because" at all.  Just respect.

National Equality March

During the 1993 gay March on Washington, I was just finishing high school and knew I was queer but was years away from coming out. My history class had a trip to DC immediately after the march and I remember stealing furtive glances at all the queers who were still lingering around town. My class went to observe congress and I set off the metal detector with my steel toe boots. Jesse Helms was on the floor of the Senate and I already despised him, for his contempt for people with AIDS and for generally being a racist shit. At the time, it seemed like more than half of everything in the media about queer people were quotes from Jesse Helms, railing against Robert Mapplethorpe and fighting against funding for AIDS research. Those are the two things I remember from my high school class trip to DC, Jesse Helms and homos.

When the 2000 March came around, I was out of the closet and living in a queer household in Philly, preparing to move to NYC with my two girlfriends. The “Millennium March” was organized top-down by the conservative and assimilationist Human Rights Campaign. It was lacking a clear political agenda and had corporate sponsors out the ass. Notice how even the name “Millennium March” describes neither the people marching nor the reason for the march. The main event was a huge concert to raise money for HRC. There was no question in my mind that I would not be in attendance. I wrote and circulated a zine criticizing the whole thing as a distraction from our real movement, our local work, and the connections and intersections between queers and other marginalized people.

And now 2009, another gay Equality March on DC. HRC was just one of many participating group this year, so I briefly considered going. I even felt kind of guilty about not going. Maybe I missed something historic. From what I read in advance about the National Equality March there was a lot going on and even though HRC was present, lots of smaller groups were also hosting workshops and many individuals were scheduled to speak. The platform included multiple issues, and activists I respect were involved. So I felt favorably about the March, at least more than I had in 2000. Maybe it would have been inspirational and refreshing to see committed activists from around the country.

Then I saw seven pictures from the March featured in the NY Times. Two of them really hit me hard. The first shows marchers with home made signs bearing the message: “Just like you! Equality Now!” This depresses me because sameness should never be the qualifying factor for being considered equal. Equal does not mean identical. “We worship and parent. Just like you!” What if we don’t? I do not worship and I do not parent. “Just like you” is an inherently unfair and dehumanizing measure, like “normal” or “regular.” And who exactly is the “you” here? The “you” is some imaginary idealized person living in a fictional family structure that is a reality for only a tiny minority of people in this country, gay, straight or otherwise. The “you” is some person who only exists on TV, but hardly even there anymore. Liberals talk about valuing diversity, a word boils that down to diverse, as in diverge, as in differ, as in different as in NOT just like you. Respect for differences... A revised sign: Nothing like you! Equality now!

A second picture from the NY Times featured a guy with a sign that read “Obama- Where’s MY change?” This guy snapped me out of my anger at the people in the pictures and made me realize I was actually angry at the newspaper itself. The Times must have been searching for the single most asinine message at the March. When they found this guy, they took his picture and featured it as one of just seven images selected to represent the day. The Times has an enormous power in choosing which images are seen and thereby influencing how we are represented and perceived. They first chose a message of assimilation and followed it with a message of self-centered entitlement. The accompanying article was no better, quoting a few folks from the crowd, failing to mention the many workshops, caucuses and speakers at the event. I was taken in at first, falling into my routine critique of the mainstream LGBT movement for aiming low, for mistaking marriage for progress, for being exclusionary, self-centered, entitled.... Until I saw this picture and became severely pissed off by the media representation of my people! This time I am not buying it, I do not believe the closeted/apologist “Just like you” and I do not believe the narcissist “Where’s My Change” dude. Sure these folks are real, but the NY Times trivializes our larger struggle by spotlighting only the most superficial messages. The editors show queers their opinion of us through what they select and what they exclude from being fit to print, and we should hold them accountable for the absence of substance in their coverage of our movement.

Imagine that the Times had quoted Urvashi Vaid’s speech as the message of the March.Imagine that instead of the where’s-my-change guy, the Times used Urvashi’s words to represent us. Here is the movement I know and love: “I'm not just here to stand up as a lesbian. I'm here as a woman. I'm here as an immigrant. I'm here against racism. I'm here for health care for all. I'm here for freedom of expression. I'm here to change the status quo."

Considering Bruno

The film Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen generated so much heated discussion. I saw it the day after it opened, and found it hilarious to see scare stories from my childhood made real. This was the perverted, unnatural, ungodly gayness I had been warned against, and it was portrayed with gusto. And I enjoyed the parody of our current celebrity magazine baby fascination too.

Many reviews have described Bruno as a stereotype, but that is not exactly accurate. He IS homophobia in the form of a sassy, sexualized man. Bruno creates a spectacle, a comedic nightmare of our deep fears, right down to a drawer full of gerbils. The movie functions like a catalog of our culture’s gay panic buttons, like the fear that gay guys will try to seduce straight guys by appearing naked in front of them, or emasculate them with questions and suggestions of cock-sucking lips, or adopt children and be atrocious parents. What we make of that spectacle is very revealing.

From the NY Times: “An early sequence that graphically shows Brüno and his lover exerting themselves in various positions and with the assistance of, among other things, a Champagne bottle, a fire extinguisher and a specially modified exercise machine, derives its humor less from the extremity of their practices than from the assumption that sex between men is inherently weird, gross and comical.” Whose assumption is that? For me, the sequence derived its humor from the joyous defiance of the kind of sex typically shown in movies and from the wild abandon demonstrated by the characters.

The NY Times article mentions 3 times that the humor in the film comes from laughing at people, people the reporter refers to as “dumb rednecks” and “dumb losers.” Who thinks who is dumb here? The Times shows its own various prejudices by publishing these terms as if they were unproblematic. The people in the movie were not merely “targets of the film’s humor” as the reviewer claims, but rather participants in a spectacle, witnesses to Bruno. Sure there is some reality-TV style humor in watching people in outrageous situations, but it is the Times calling them dumb, not Bruno.

In a statement from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation: "Some people in the gay community will be as troubled as GLAAD is that the movie doesn't decrease homophobia, but decreases the public's comfort with gay people.” On what basis were we looking for this film to increase the public’s comfort with us? Thus GLAAD reveals exactly how un-ambitious they are about gay rights. Comfort is antithetical to progress, we do not learn and evolve by becoming more comfortable.

More from GLAAD: “Scenes like that don't help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children," And what has GLAAD done to help America understand the hundreds of thousands of queers who live in close affiliations, tribes, chosen families and intentional communities? How about the childless, the unemployed, the homeless, the single? The wealthiest among us may live this way but certainly not all of us. And certainly not all straight people live that way either.

The scene they were decrying showed sex. GLAAD is supposed to be against defamation, not sexuality. Their statement describing gay life reads a lot like an order, dictating how we are to be gay in order to make the public more comfortable. Carpools and children may be GLAAD’s picture of homosexuality, but they are going to have to take a deep breath and learn to tolerate different lifestyles. And I do mean styles of life, ways of living that are outside their narrow image of normalcy. Maybe the folks at GLAAD could use some diversity training.

Brad Luna, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, warns the movie should come with disclaimer. "We strongly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen and UNIVERSAL PICTURES have a responsibility to remind the viewing public right there in the theater that this is intended to expose homophobia." In this single sentence about a comedy, HRC is controlling, intolerant and condescending. Even more so than GLAAD, they want to control messages in the media about gays. They want the messages not only to depict us in a way that makes conservative people comfortable, but also to tell us directly how to understand what we are seeing. HRC has worked tirelessly to re-brand the queer liberation movement as a struggle for gay marriage, so it is no surprise that they want to re-brand Bruno. It seems that HRC gays do not think highly of gays or anyone else, at least not highly enough to allow us to form our own opinions. I wish GLAAD and HRC would consider that never in the course of history has telling people what to think been an effective strategy for change. Their dictation of monolithic lifestyles and opinions just breeds silence and resentment on all sides of the issue.

I have saved the best for last... On “The View”, Barbara Walters called the movie “almost as pornographic as any pornographic thing that I’ve seen,” adding that unlike porno flicks, you can catch this flick around the corner in your neighborhood movie theater. Walters: “I don’t like seeing close ups of anal sex.” I don’t remember any close ups, but Bruno certainly references anal sex. What is the one thing GLAAD, HRC and even the NY Times do NOT want you to think about when you think about gays?

ANAL SEX. One of our culture’s worst fears is getting pleasure from the business end; it’s the very definition of dirty. Castrated queers fit more comfortably into the culture. Better to do the carpool and rush home than to make jokes about getting fucked in the ass. Better to be seen as mocking heterosexuals, better to be seen as looking down on people than to be seen exuberantly fucking. Better to have national organizations that are supposedly fighting for our rights talk about making people more comfortable with us rather than talking about changing the status quo. Better to simply tell people the “right” interpretation of the film than let them experience it themselves. Bruno was certainly not a serious exploration of queer sex. It was just a silly comedy with a lot of jokes about queer sex. And I think that’s how it triggered the NY Times, GLAAD and HRC into showing us just how far they are willing to go in order to avoid acknowledging queer sexuality or as Barbara Walters so vividly and salaciously intoned: CLOSE UPS OF ANAL SEX.