Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds: Who Loved You Before You Were Mine.  Five deviant queers, their mythical beast secret identities, and all of their ghosts walk into a cabaret. The result is a show about yearning for ancestors, the empty spaces left by the first generation of AIDS deaths in fag/queer communities and the way the next generation is called to fill those spaces. What is the relationship between the loss of a generation of queer men and queens and the next generation’s expanding possibilities for transmasculinity? What is the relationship between a generation of dykes woven fiercely and intimately into ACT UP and support circles for dying friends and a next generation of dykes woven into radical faerie and transfag communities? In a culture based on chosen families, which of our desires are inherited?

In this re-interpretation of Yiddish theater classic The Dybbuk, the consensual possession of a lover by the ghost of their beloved is a model for acknowledging the collective loss we hold and reflect in our queer bodies. The cabaret is a love letter to the ghosts among us.

With three good friends working on Between Two Worlds, I saw an irresistible opportunity to start a dialog about collaboration among queer artists and activists.  Not to mention I was completely blown away by the show.  Shared obsessions: the persistence and evolution of subcultures over time, relationships, ancestry, history, personal connection and more.  Since ours is not a community of blood relations, I find myself committed to searching for and creating mystical, sexual, historical and cultural connections with my people.  These connections are enumerated in both the queer and supernatural in Between Two Worlds, and these three artists are certainly my people.

Following is a conversation with Emily Nepon, J. Dellecave and Niknaz Tavakolian.  Nepon, J and I corresponded over e-mail and Niknaz responded to my questions with a hand-written letter.  Following are excerpts from our correspondence.

Images by Nogga Schwartz


What inspired you to work on this project, what about it appealed to you?

Nepon: Well, I've been daydreaming about this project for years. I think the first thing that inspired me was visiting Olympia in 2000 while friends there were creating Nomy Lamm's rock opera “The Transfused,” although I just figured that out this very moment! I had been creating and performing in Purimspiels with Daniel Lang/Levitsky (DLL) and others involved in Jews for Racial and Economic Justice since 2004 and putting on those shows was always my favorite thing in my whole year, so I wanted to make a full show that wasn't limited by the themes of Purim or the needs of the organizations that produce the Purimspiels. I also wanted to make a star vehicle for myself so I could let all my art hero(ine)s now that I'm a star of the stage and screen and I can sing!

            This particular script was inspired by my experiences in ACT UP Philly, radical faerie community, traveling in Eastern Europe, and a lot of research about Jewish art/literature, Yiddishkeit, and the art/literature of the 1st decade of the AIDS epidemic. It was also an attempt to heal some of the trauma of touring the disgusting commercialization of Jewish trauma in Eastern Europe. It was, literally, a love letter to the ghosts among us.

J. Dellecave: Inspiration: A grad school lecture devoted to discussing embodied street protest during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s, early 1990s.  Many younger generation classmates began debating in this dry academic manner, and I had to raise my hand and emote.  I was outraged, I was shocked, I felt like I was going to burst into tears or vomit or scream at the top of my lungs. Yes… I was very moved by the ignorance I was hearing from a group of incredibly bright, incredibly educated, and very queer young people. The conversation went something like this: (insert an overly-dramatized, academic voice, with faux British accent and a holier-than-though affect)  “I just don’t think shocking people by lying down in the middle of church during a religious ceremony like mass is an effective way to disseminate information about people dying of AIDS. I mean maybe that went too far. I don’t think that could have worked.” (Several students had made this comment or a comment similar to this and it just going around in a circle without anything new being said).

            I responded by saying something to the extend of “I am appalled that we are even talking about the AIDS epidemic protests this way.” I remember my voice got all quivery and vulnerable – if I get that voice when I’m having an argument with a lover or friend, that is the signal to me that I need to take a break, and go take a walk, take a few breaths and come back to the conversation. “AIDS activists were struck with an urgency that I don’t think you are comprehending. Like if you took a group of ten gay male friends from that era, two of that ten are still living today.” Big pause. “It is not possible to debate whether or not these protests were effective, because today medication is available (at least here in the United States) that significantly prolongs the life of people who are HIV positive.  We can talk about it as a performance, but we cannot talk about this in terms of whether the performance was good or bad. It was effective, beyond debate, because people aren’t dying like they were in the late 80s and early 90s.” And as I stated before, this comes with the caveat, of at least not here.

            For a minute there, I totally lost faith in academia to actually grasp reality, but soon was reaffirmed that people like us need to be in academic dialogues to voice how things were, perhaps even with a lot of emotion and outrage. Coming of age and coming out temporally close to loss and death in the queer community profoundly shaped the way that I relate to issues of social justice. And then there is my one friend who is twenty years my senior who lived through the epidemic as a young person. I should have ten friends his age and instead there is the painful gap of missing elders. He and the ghosts that are always with him were the inspiration to be a part of Between Two Worlds.

            More Inspiration: Multiple frameworks, seemingly incongruent inspirations, the idea of weaving, embodied ghosts, consensual possession, the Dybbuk, gossip, showtunes, glitter, productive rants, queers of the moment. The chance for Killer (a.k.a. Nepon) and I to collaborate creatively – we have a ten-year history of collaborating on productions and events, and this was the first time both of us focused on the creation. BTW was the first time we both filled the role of artist.

What role did you play in the production? How many people contributed to this work? 

Nepon: I originated the project, produced it, wrote most of it, and brought together the performers and crew. I moved to NYC with the intention of making theater with Daniel Lang-Levitsky, and a lot of the pieces of this show were part of my initial fantasy. Daniel and J were both powerful creative partners from early on. There were four other performers, Niknaz on the film projection, and Patrick on the accordion plus Casey was stage-manager, so all together there were 10 people involved.

           

J. Dellecave: Collaborator, director, co-writer, choreographer. We were very specific about how we delineated our contributions in the program, and for some reason now I just want to say I did a lot of work. Often I donned a timeline engine, always saying “we have to get blah, blah, blah done by blah, blah, blah time”…and I think my role was also partly to become hyper-excited about every detail.

Niknaz: My role in Between Two Worlds was the projection maker.  Killer, J and Daniel described what they were looking for as far as backdrops and I went off and designed and built what was projected behind the action. 

How was the labor divided, and how did you deal with any conflict or disagreement?

Nepon: The division of labor was initially imagined as me and DLL co-directing, with J as choreographer and part of the creative team. Then I got pneumonia and J's other show got canceled (sort of) by HOTFEST, so the division of labor shifted without much chance to discuss it and J took on a really strong directorial role. That caused some conflict near the performance date as we all were getting stressed out, because I hadn't given up creative control on purpose (too sick to leave the house!) but she had put so much work into the show that a re-negotiation should have been more explicit earlier on. There were some hard moments but I have to say that we all loved the show, loved working with each other, and really believed in the project in a way that carried us through with very loving and generous behaviors. We made space, at least on the “crew” level, for people to vocalize their frustrations and that helped us all to just say it and move on. In the end, we all understood that Daniel was the main designer, I was the main writer, and J was the main director – though we did all three of those things very collaboratively. I guess the main thing I noticed is that this collaboration wasn't exactly easy or uncomplicated, but it was way more fun, supportive, exciting, inspiring than challenging.

J. Dellecave: The labor was divided based on individual availability. Meaning if someone was out of town or busy with their other life or sick with swine flu (!), others picked up the slack or picked up where they left off. Unemployed and then having my Hot Festival performance cancelled at the last minute, I found myself extremely time available last summer. I am pleased to have been able to offer a lot, labor/time-wise, to the process and production. Amazingly the collaborators had very few conflicts. In fact, I would say we had only one conflict that had to be processed. (I am intentionally separating this from the small, simple gripes or functional bemoaning that didn’t warrant more attention than a few snide comments here and there). We did what all good queers do to process our conflict – we went to a coffee shop, and talked out our feelings. We even did it in the midst of a day that was filled with hours of rehearsals and meetings! We were very committed; in my opinion we worked exceptionally well together! Conflicts or disagreement amidst the cast, or amidst the collaborators and the cast also occurred only rarely or in a minor way. We were all very entangled in interpersonal ways (and the scary ways – like you’re best friends with the ex I don’t talk to anymore, or your housemate used to date my new lover) and I was surprised and relieved there wasn’t more drama.

What about the content demanded collaboration?

Niknaz: First of all, I love working in collaboration.  To me, it’s like having a visual art conversation- a back and forth so to speak.  A call and response that leads to a collective idea (of sorts) so I was happy to be invited to play for this show.  At first I wasn’t sure what my contribution could be since the play was about a community I’m not a part of.  And while I did some activism around HIV/AIDS in the 90’s - it was nothing like what some of my friends were doing.  So I started the project in a place of “not knowing” which is a great place to start creatively.

            The aesthetical launching point for some of the projections was- well- it was an homage to Wojnarowicz.  One of the first inspirations they brought into the mix was Wojnarowicz’s sex series where solarized black and white images of buildings and structures are juxtaposed with circles of men having sex.  What we wanted to do was use this series as a springboard for contemplating poly, post-gender musings.  I don’t remember how the idea of having a wrestling scene play in one of the Wojnarowicz circles came about-- but it sounded beautiful and exciting and potentially political given the ghost of the past theme we were going for.  We set aside a day and invited some friends and videotaped the wrestling.  We kept the wrestling pairings random, which I think invited may possible representations in the queer community.

            One of the beautiful things about this play is that it really was a process from beginning to end that invited feedback and ideas.  There were writing sessions and idea sessions and of course rehearsals with tons of feedback.  I feel like we all felt some ownership over the process.

How do you feel the work is specifically located in NYC... this endlessly romantic and punishing city?

Nepon: Well, I was especially obsessed with locating the show partly at Coney Island because a) I'm obsessed with it and b) it used to be called “Sodom by the Sea” and was a site of sleazy underworld sexuality and queerness.  After the holocaust, Coney Island housed the largest community of survivors in the world. I personally think it's also full of ghosts of people who didn't survive but wanted to get the hell out of Europe and stay near their former community.

J. Dellecave: This work did a really funny thing. The work created (if only for a few months) a very strong community in the present by working through the past. The content of the work when viewed by the audience reflected the now NYC ‘community’. (Yet for anyone who lives in NYC, we know that really isn’t the truth or doesn’t represent the truth, and even some idea that there is some universalized truth is problematic). But it does represent some kind of utopian ideal or positivist slant on what our community can be. Since the production, I am beginning to formulate community as a transient and unfixed entity. 

            I know BTW was critiqued as valorizing a specific experience which inherently left out representations of certain voices. I am aware that this community we represented is not for everyone and cannot represent everyone. I think this it something we all grapple with and should continue to grapple with. NYC itself has this kind of build-in longing for betterment. You race, yet you never reach the better place. Part of living in New York seems to be that constant striving for something else. That is what is so great about NYC, and as you said Rocko, so punishing.

            Also, (and perhaps even off topic) making a work that talks about the ghosts of AIDS hedges on implying that the AIDS epidemic is over. All of us were very adamant about not wanting the idea of ghosting to represent that the plight of AIDS has in any way ended. Theoretically, ghosting functions to haunt unjust situations that deserve more attention and often go unrecognized. Perhaps AIDS not being over is what the ghosts of generation past are trying to illuminate.  

Why was it important for you to relate the queer community in the present to the peak of the AIDS outbreak and the Holocaust?

Nepon: Growing up strongly Jewish-identified and queer while AIDS appeared and decimated queer communities, AIDS and the Holocaust were the formative calamities that destroyed the cultures, queer and Yiddishkeit, that I come from. Jewish and Gay cultures have both moved towards (as you put it) valorization of the masculine out of fear for the vulnerability of “weak”, feminine, “sissy” images of our cultures. In the case of Jewish community it's a move towards idealizing the IDF soldier and away from the sissy scholar (“we fight back now”). In gay culture it's a move towards the butch gym queen and away from the femme (receptive, gets fucked, gets AIDS, dies). Both cultures have historical qualities that make me swoon, and PTSD responses to recent trauma that makes me miserable.

            The Holocaust is used frequently by Jewish queers writing about the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, for example Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust, Sarah Schulman's Rat Bohemia, and Eric Rofes' Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men’s Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic.

            It was important for me to link these stories to my own generation's struggles because I really believe there are deep cultural and spiritual shifts and struggles under the surface of the tensions we are dealing with. Why are there so many trans men in this generation? Why is transmasculinity so exciting for some communities, especially those that have been so brutally resistant to transwomen? When trans men start taking up space in fag cultures, who left those spaces empty? What's the history of queer women in these same spaces?

Niknaz: While I was doing research I was reminded over and over that Reagan sat back and wanted to watch the gay community disappear.  Whatever his impetus was, Larry Kramer’s response was one of the most important actions for our community. ACT UP and GMHC.  Thanks to both of those organizations, we have drugs that keep people alive.  I mean, for a certain demographic anyway.  I would love to see the queer community get back involved with the present state of the pandemic with the same fervor, join forces with communities that are also being devastated by HIV/AIDS with 25+ years of wisdom and experience.  But I guess it’s easy to speak on that podium from the safety of my apartment, behind the computer, and a bit disengaged from all of those communities.  It totally inspired me to think about where I am when it comes to the queer community and activism.  I think what inspired me the most was doing research on ACT UP and reliving some of those actions and the fervor of the activism then.  I could talk about this for much longer.  But I won’t.

For me, there was a lot about this sense of possibility in the work, the possibility that we are closer than ever to the inclusive community we have always wanted, the possibility that identity will stop being such a pain in the ass... what about the present moment gives you a sense of possibility?

J. Dellecave: That distinct sense of the generational or temporal gap that I experienced so strongly in the class I wrote of above. These gaps create spaces for us to interject utopian imaginings and endless possibilities.

Niknaz: I hope our issues of identity will be resolved soon, although I’m not so hopeful for myself.  My identity is so deeply tied with longing and home that I can’t imagine how it can possibly resolve.  Gender aside, queer aside, my Iranian identity creates such a disjointedness for me that it feels finding a community that encompasses all of this challenging.

Nepon: In some ways, I was writing these interwoven characters as a representation of our real community, and in some ways it was a wish. I wish we could all be lovers across bodies and sexualities and identities in the way that these characters are. It happens sometimes, but it still feels rare to me.

            On the other hand, we did this whole show about HIV/AIDS and gender identity and sexuality and it turned out that people were really not able to make assumptions about who in the show had what serostatus, body parts, or desires. It was excitingly surprising.

            It gave me a feeling of possibility that people responded to so strongly to the idea that our generation of queers is interwoven with the ghosts of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. I was especially moved by presenting the show at Short Mountain sanctuary to a group that was probably 85% people who lived through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, ACT UP members, people with HIV/AIDS who have lost so many of their loved ones. I think my generation of queers has really suffered from a lack of elders and the perspective of intergenerational relationships – because our elders were in large part murdered by the epidemic. Doing the show at Short Mountain seemed like the beginning of opening a conversation.

Abigail Ottoman

Sloan: How old were you when you came out?

Abigail: I was always attracted to boys and girls, and for a while I thought everyone was like that. At eighteen, I knew I was queer, but I only came out to a few people. I had my first girlfriend at nineteen and came out to my family. It was horrible; my parents cornered me and asked me lots of questions. My mom was really disappointed and things were tense for a while, but she and I have continued discussing sexuality for the last fourteen years, and she’s come a long way. Now I take her to queer film screenings and Gay Pride.

SL: What was it like to be queer then?

AO: Since I was under 21, I wasn’t able to go to gay bars.  The only other way to meet queer people was through activism, so I joined this social/political group at the William Way center call Grass Roots Queers. The people were at least a few years older than I was, so, I didn’t really make friends but everyone was very caring toward me. I usually ended up collecting tickets and doing this and that at events. They wouldn’t let me drink at the parties, so I was very conscious that they saw me as a kid, but they were very supportive.  There wasn’t any way to look for people my age who were queer except at school, and I went to a commuter college in the suburbs that was pretty straight, though I did meet my first girlfriend there.

SL: Coming out and becoming an activist are almost inseparable experiences for me too.  Was there a gay student organization at your college? 

AO: There was a listing for a gay organization in the campus directory, but when I tried to find out about meetings, I found out it was inactive.

SL: It was the same at my college.  There would be a table set up for the gay group at campus events, but no one would stand behind it or even near it.  How did you go from being a young queer activist to being a professional dominatrix?

AO: I was looking for some kink and glamor. I did it because I felt like it, and had no idea that I would continue doing it for so many years. It just seemed like something fun to try.

“How did you get into this?” is something that everybody has asked- clients and acquaintances alike. I think the question is more interesting than the pat story I’ve told hundreds of times, so I’ll spare you. While everyone’s origin story is unique, there are basically two types of story: I took up sex work from a place of empowerment and curiosity or I took up sex work out of desperation and powerlessness. People want to know which category my story fits into so that they can either comfortably ask for titillating details or feel scandalized and superior. It isn’t a neutral question.

SL: Good point.  Tell me about your shows at Charlie’s Dream?

AO: Charlie’s Dream was a sex emporium, where you could buy movies, magazines, sex toys in the front, then in the back you could see girls in a peep show, and there was a bar with a stage for sex shows, and then there was a theater where we did our show on stage.  It was small stage with theater seating.

Our shows were very dramatic, each one had a very specific role play theme and yet usually ended the same way, with some sort of dildo action whether they began as I would be wearing a diaper being baby sat by a mean babysitter or I would be a patient in some sort of sex hospital or what have you.  Office and school scenes were my favorites.  It was me and another woman who is still in the business and we did our show on Saturday afternoons for about six months.  Our last show was a vampire theme.  We used red lights and I was covered in fake blood and I drank all these shots of vodka before the show.

SL: I loved Charlie’s Dream. I will never forget that place. I think it was kind of my dream too.  But while that show lasted 6 months or so, you spent years doing sessions with clients in various venues.   What is something you learned from this larger experience?

AO: One of the most important- and least talked about- parts of sex work is doing consultations with prospective clients. For me, it involved walking into a tiny consultation room, sitting down across from a complete stranger, and starting a conversation that was intimate yet professional. I had a few minutes to find out (or figure out) a client’s fantasy and immediately match his enthusiasm for it, while expressing professional competence, confidence, and sexiness in a way that was calculated to appeal to that particular client. Being able to communicate well by listening, making eye contact, asking questions, and smiling is more important than knowing intricate bondage or how to use every piece of equipment possible. Expertise is important for maintaining a regular clientele, but you have to have communication skills first and foremost.

SL: What was the work itself like for you?

AO: I did dirty things all day and intermittently hung out with a bunch of other women who were into hanging out and doing dirty things.

I was just thinking about this today-- I collaborated with people on creating situations in which they could focus solely on sexual pleasure. I got to be with so many different people while they were having an orgasm, which is a really special time to have with people. I didn’t have to deal with any other aspects of their lives or emotions, just their desire for and expression of pleasure.

I was very choosy about the kind of clients and sessions I wanted, and I was lucky enough to make enough money that way.  I preferred some clients to others and some activities to others, but I was very aware of that. I was lucky in that I was able to be choosy enough to tell clients that I didn’t think I was right for their fantasy if I didn’t want to do what they wanted. Of course, it wasn’t always so simple; sometimes I needed to take clients I didn’t like or connect with, but I was careful about making compromises I could live with, which I imagine is part of every job. I got to sit down with people and talk about how to create the most fulfilling hour of their day, and then carry out the plan. To spend my workday that way was amazing.

SL: What kinds of things happened in your sessions?

AO: Fetishes, fantasy role-play, bondage, dominance and submission, etc.  I did things that are as weird, disgusting, sadistic, and humiliating as anything you can think of, but I was always focused on honoring my clients’ wishes as respectfully as possible.  Sometimes it also meant doing very silly or vanilla activities.

There are so many ways to explain what professional BDSM is. People always want to know if it’s prostitution, and every dominatrix says no, but it’s actually a really challenging question. There’s a judicial checklist of financial and physical situations that in various combination are illegal, but the items on the list are extremely vague, so one session you might be doing something that is considered prostitution and the next you may merely be committing tax evasion.

I could give you a long list of alternately titillating and disgusting activities, but I’d rather say that I worked with clients on negotiating and fulfilling their (often secret) desires. Feeling pleasure may be easy, but expressing the truth about what you desire- talking about what you want, how you want it, and what kind of person you want it to be with, can be very difficult for people. We’re taught that a very narrow range of feelings, thoughts, sensations, and activities are acceptable. Everybody is turned on by something that others might find strange.

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.