RM

Before we really get into it, I want to do a bit of mapping. One of the reasons I wanted to engage with all of you specifically is to try to think through AIDS and its myriad cultural responses as a geographically expansive and temporally thick form of production. There are obviously a lot of simplifying mythologies and master narratives that have attached themselves to the way AIDS history is framed and circulated, which I’m sure we’ll get into. But, in order to take a stab at complicating some of those mythologies, it might help to first quickly sketch where each of us is entering into the conversation, both in terms of autobiography and geographic context. Could we start by plotting out some of those coordinates?

IHJ

Sure. I live in the East Village, New York City, where I've been for the last forty years. I'm a choreographer, curator, and writer. A lot of my work sort of came into its being during the AIDS crisis. I moved to New York from Philadelphia in 1980—I was 29 years old. I did several pieces that referenced AIDS in different ways, and I was greatly influenced by the pandemic at that point. I’ve continued to make work that references it. I just worked on a project with Miguel Gutierrez exploring the work of the choreographer John Bernd, who died of AIDS complications in 1988, and whose work I was a performer in. We did a fantasia of what John’s work would've become had he not passed away.

MBS

I came of age a bit later. For me, growing up and knowing that I was queer meant knowing that I was going to die of AIDS. The two were inextricably connected. I moved to San Francisco when I was 19, in 1992, to find a world of faggots and queens and dykes and gender-bending weirdos and whores and sluts and incest survivors and anarchists and vegans and direct-action activists. That’s when I joined ACT UP, which made the connection between fighting AIDS and fighting racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia—it was all intertwined. As a writer, my work started with publishing anthologies like That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, and novels, and then hybrid nonfiction works like The Freezer Door, and my new book, Touching the Art. My novel Sketchtasy is about growing up at a time where desire and death were intertwined, and my most recent anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, consists of thirty-two different essays from people coming of age in the midst of the AIDS crisis, with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalizing this trauma as part of becoming queer. Growing up in that context has impacted everything that I've ever created.

RM

The context of coming of age in San Francisco feels important here. So much of the historicizing of the AIDS crisis and the art made in response to it has centered around this mythology of New York as a master-site for both activism and the avant-garde. I imagine working against—or alongside?—that mythology from a different geographic vantage point is something that both Ron and John might be able to relate to as well, yeah?

RA

Yeah. I live in and am from LA. I tested HIV-positive in 1986—it’s been long ride. From 1990 onward—the era during which I was doing nightclub and fetish ball performances—I frequently went to Chicago, San Francisco, New York and London to perform, so I was aware of the activism happening those places and their artistic contributions. My background is rooted in music scenes, though. My first boyfriend was Rozz Williams, from the seminal death rock band Christian Death. He was 15 and I was 17, and he wrote an album called Only Theatre of Pain. My first performances were doing spoken word for his shows at the Whisky a Go Go! We were abject, angsty death-rock queens. We were super out, but in a macho post-punk LA/OC adjacent scene, holding our own. I was in a dual risk community—IV drug users and faggotry. I had Hep-C before HIV. So, to be here at 62 is cuckoo, and I take it for granted half the time.

The ’80s performance scene kind of gave me the creeps when I entered it. It was all monologue and spoken word. Even the pandemic related material— “I have AIDS, and I'm angry!” —gave me that feeling. I was hearing enough of that sort of stuff already in support groups and in activism circles and other forums. I didn't always want to be yelled at in a performance space—I needed sparkle.

I always felt like a singularity pulling out these overwrought theater images. I did directly deal with the issues of the day. I responded to the polarity of good girls versus nasty girls by doing actions that could be described as live sex shows—before Paul Preciado took the Annie Sprinkle concept and coined the term “post-porn”—within my shows, as a type of internal response. I think this is where I first began to understand how inside policing—I’m thinking of people like Randy Shilts—could be gnarlier than the religious Right. The religious Right never gets close enough to burn you. It is too overarching, relentless, dumb. Once you hear the script of, say, Jesse Helms, it becomes clear that the religious Right is all theater—making up stories about how you pronounce your name, or what you do, just to blow up this war on culture agenda.

Being on the outside of the art world, I didn't even know what arts funding was. I didn’t have a grasp on what it meant when I became a target for the culture wars’ attempt to dismantle the NEA, which was based on total misreporting—they made big deal out of “he said, she said” stories, but never presented any accurate facts. I had never applied for arts funding. And yet, this reportage, via the Associated Press newswire, put me in two-hundred newspapers in two months, and somehow it became my responsibility. I became a temporary spokesmodel on public arts funding. The irony is that because of that episode, all of the performance spaces in the USA where I could have worked became too afraid to present any sort of difficult work. I was essentially placed on a twenty-year blacklist in the US, except for pay-to-play gigs here and there. I won't get vitriolic right now, as I’m still slugging it out. [Laughs.]

RM

I feel like the vitriol is warranted! John, Randy Shilts is a figure that you were working through for a while too, especially with your film Zero Patience.

JG

It's all his fault, oh my god! [Laughter.] Randy famously accused Gaëtan Dugas, the Air Canada flight steward, as being “Patient Zero.” From my base in Toronto working, but also dipping into California and New York in terms of living and teaching through those '80s years, the work was very much coming out of ACT UP. But the Gaëtan Dugas “Patient Zero” story needed answering back to, and so Patient Zero became a musical—with Michael Callen, among other troublemakers—as a response deconstructing the “Patient Zero” myth, but equally as an attempt to capture on-screen some of the activism of that time. My home base has always been Toronto. Though I'm still negative, my partner Steven, who's also a fellow artist, has been positive since the early '80s. So, the work has always come out of both: the activism, but also the care teams and the surviving and thriving that's followed.

I'm currently working on a project called Viral Interventions, which is commissioning a new generation of artists around the world to make short works about HIV and AIDS. It’s very much inspired by the great work of Visual AIDS in New York, but also trying to mobilize different networks and just remind people that, of course, the AIDS crisis is not over. A million people still die every year. It’s a delight to be reminded of John Bernd, who was one of my first friends when I moved to New York in '81. Or to be reminded, Ron, of your great work with Catherine Gund on that film Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance.

AF

I'm from Brooklyn. I lived here periodically, and live here now. During the ACT UP years, I was living in Manhattan. Ron and John, the person I was building my life around was a musician too. In fact, Michael Callen covered a couple of his songs, and he was ascending—he was a musician's musician, let's put it that way. He began showing signs of immunosuppression in 1981 and died in 1984, which instigated, with a couple of my friends, the formation of a consciousness-raising collective that went on to design the Silence = Death poster, pre-ACT UP. I feel like I was born on the front lines of a war that, as Vito Russo put it, nobody knew about but us.

Another thing that might situate how I could contribute to this conversation is that my mother was a microbiologist who did cancer research in the '60s, and I was raised with the acknowledgement that there was never going to be a cure for cancer because it was too big a business. So, I entered into treatment activism and ACT UP with that understanding, which a lot of people didn't discover until years later after delving into how research is funded and how drugs get approved. I also wanted to say that NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was tasked with doing research on AIDS in America, was about the same age I was when the AIDS crisis hit. We think of it, or thought of it, as this hallowed institution, but compared to research institutions all over the world, it was relatively young. Anthony Fauci was a bureaucrat who seized this opportunity, and he was in over his head, NIAID was in over its head, and nobody knew which direction to turn to. But anyone who knew anything about the feminist health movement could easily understand what was happening with the AIDS crisis.

In terms of how I think about the historiography, I've written extensively about it and agree that situating cultural production as centered in New York is fallacious. I think it's based wholly on the circumstance of this being the seat of national press in America. As a consequence, a lot of attention was focused on what was happening regionally, but I never saw it that way. I don't think anyone I knew understood it that way. The last thing I'll say about it for the moment is that I encounter young queer activists, political activists, healthcare activists, queer artists and culture-makers who were born after the fact, or who were young when the AIDS crisis hit in New York, and I think the struggle for most people in a contemporary setting is trying to find a way into the narrative. That's part of what reinforces the historiography to begin with, that there has to be a narrative in order to find your way in. All of it is skewed. As a Jew born right after the Holocaust, we don’t struggle with the history of the Holocaust, with the idea of having to have been there to understand it. It's a part of our genetic, cellular memory of our own identities. I think the same is true for HIV/AIDS, barring the fact that there are over thirty million people still living with HIV in the world. It is the story of the world. Its history doesn't belong to New York. It doesn't belong to America. And it doesn't belong to people who lived through it.

RM

Right, how do you become personally implicated? What’s the relationship between self-identification and action? I guess I’ll officially out myself here as being a bit younger—surprise! [Laughter.] I was born in '95. My introduction to the AIDS crisis felt ostensibly divorced from any sort of connection to a larger gay or politically active social world. I first came to it through reading books like Close to the Knives—I had no idea what that book was about when I bought it, I just knew that some guy I thought was cute liked it and I wanted to impress him, or something like that. It took a while for AIDS to feel like something which was more than, on the one hand, a potential risk to navigate in my private sexual life and, on the other, a niche intellectual concern happening in certain small corners of academia and publishing. I think part of what's so central to this conversation is this idea of how we clock, internalize, and then act upon these linkages that run between a sense of sexual self-identification and a larger social world, right? What does that process of self-making or self-articulation look like, and how is it structured by sexual and social circumstance? I'm just throwing this idea out in the wind for whoever to pick up, but I'd be curious to dig into it. The way cities work feels so different now, everything feels much more privatized—even in terms of an urban sexual landscape, especially with the advent of apps like Grindr.

MBS

You brought up Close to the Knives. When I was 19 and moved to San Francisco in 1992, it was a moment where it felt like everyone was dying of AIDS or drug addiction or suicide. For me, as a nineteen-year-old coming of age within that, I found out about David Wojnarowicz in an obituary. That was how I found out about many of the first gay artists and heroes of mine. But, his work was the first time that I felt a sense of my rage at the world, and simultaneously maybe a little bit of hope in a world of loss. I was also drawn to his sense that desire is in the landscape, right? It’s everything, it’s how we move toward one another in spite of the risks of a world that wants us dead.

This was the same time when I was part of ACT UP in San Francisco. I was making a living as a hooker and realizing that I was sexually abused by my father and living in this culture of dropouts and druggies and queer kids who had escaped abusive homes and were moving away from places where they couldn't express themselves. So, our world was always a world against the dominant culture, because we knew that the dominant culture would kill us. And that could mean literally “kill,” and that could mean figuratively “kill,” or that could mean both, right? So, survival meant direct action through ACT UP and other groups that I was involved with at that time, but also survival meant thinking in terms of living in a household where we all turned out to be incest survivors. We were all like 19-, 20-, 21-year-olds. And we were surviving, or trying to survive, in spite of the families we were escaping, a government that wanted us to die or disappear, and cities and homes that magnified all of that violence. We were creating something in those margins and against the dominant culture, whether that be normative straight culture or a gay assimilationist mentality that just wanted everything to be covered up and papered over in order to become part of that same status quo that we were escaping. So, the potential of living in a city, for me, is about finding everything you never imagined—not just what you imagined, but also what could never be possible otherwise.

RA

I have to confess, it’s not always easy to roll with new developments. When I began to hear about PrEP in 2015, I had been living in my own sero-sorted bubble in London—I began to realize that the same drugs that I didn’t want to be on were now being used as a prophylaxis against seroconverting. I didn’t know how to—and didn’t know if I wanted to—process PrEP and its publicity campaign. I’m always nervous about being in bed with big pharma. I’m nervous about how much my drugs cost, how much the interferon therapy for Hep-C costs—a particularly intense example is that Epclusa, which finally did keep my Hep-C in check, was a $100,000, twelve-week treatment. I was put off by the publicity campaign behind PrEP—you know, social media shots of a bed wrapped in satin sheets, with some actor making a come-hither look with a PrEP pill on the tip of their tongue. [Sticks tongue out and places Biktarvy pill on it.] Immediately, of course, I was accused of slut-shaming for having a problem with the whole thing, which made me feel like a relic. Like, whatever we went through with AIDS is now being forgotten. [Takes pill with sip of coffee.] I take my pills with coffee, because I'm hardcore. [Laughs.] And yes, I believe in PrEP, but I don't believe in acting like it's healthy to take chemotherapy as a prophylaxis.

AF

There was an NYC Department of Health subway ad—Ishmael, you will remember this, it was probably about two years ago. It was a whole campaign about PrEP and how everyone should be on it. There were all these smiling, happy faces of people who were surviving with it. But, of course, the pernicious subtext, which has always been there about marginalized communities and care, is that it's up to people living with HIV to protect everyone who's not been exposed to it. It's completely backwards. It's so fucked up. The power differentials are so intrinsic. Ryan, where I feel differently from your prompts—and my experience is obviously different from a lot of people who are speaking on this panel—is that I don't think of sexuality and identities as necessarily being intertwined. I think that's how we're told we have to think about it. So, I think that everything about the way we're trained to think about AIDS is completely fucked up and systemically controlled. It's so outside of the facts, the fact of identity, the fact of historiography. Everything about it is so skewed. I agree with Ron, I was horrified with the positioning of PrEP as a pushing of responsibility away from society to the margins of this social environment. It's fucked up.

RA

It feels strange to be recategorized as a conservative for taking that position. [Laughs.] Like, I feel like if you say that, you get smacked right in place. Again, if you're inevitably going to seroconvert, I think PrEP is a miracle that you can take that allows you to be you. But is everyone that person? And why must we always withhold information about the side effects? I mean, I know somebody that just came out of surgery because their bones are rotting from PrEP. They had an allergy to it. Yes, it's a smaller percentage of people, but it's not unheard of, and they never knew that going into it. They didn't read the fine print of that risk, or imagine that they'd be that body that didn't take to that med. It almost feels like a confession—like, “PrEP is scary, crap!”—from an older person that's been through every twist and turn, even the abandonment of logic that occurred when all the alternative healings came around from blood boiling onwards. There was always a new headline. In a different way, it fits there for me—I'm sideways looking at it.

AF

Eric Sawyer, who started Housing Works, has had four hip replacements. There's no long-term study of people who are taking protease inhibitors, and there never will be.

IHJ

In 2016, the choreographer and writer Will Rawls and I curated a two-month long platform. It was prompted by my memory of John Bernd's work. It was called “Lost & Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.” We wanted to re-contextualize the AIDS epidemic in our memories as to where the AIDS epidemic actually was and who actually has AIDS. Will is about thirty years younger than me, and I brought him in as a co-curator because I'm old and I don't know a lot of people. One thing that we wanted to dispel was the demographics of the gay white man being the person with AIDS as it was sort of pushed on us in the 1980s and '90s. We wanted to really acknowledge and really name that people of color, women, and trans people are people with AIDS and people that were not seen. We weren't on the posters. We weren't on the glossy magazine pharmaceutical advertisements. But, I was also really surprised that several of the younger people we brought in to either perform or speak or show film were in their twenties and were HIV-positive. For some reason in my worldview that wasn't happening. I confess that I was really surprised by that, that there were several thriving great artists and in their own work they've dealt with the fact that they were HIV-positive and that was sort of acknowledged as a blind spot for myself that young people are still getting AIDS. I wonder if PrEP has anything to do with that, actually.

RM

To what Avram was saying, there's this very pernicious narrative tied up with all of the aesthetics and branding around PrEP. It’s a narrative structure that compels us to place our full trust in the slow yet progressive mastery of the human body through pharmaceutical science. “Don’t worry, Big Pharma’s got you,” you know? Gilead lost its monopoly over the intellectual property of PrEP, as well as the profits it stood to generate off of PrEP in perpetuity, in 2020, when Truvada went generic. It’s no coincidence, I think, that within a year of Truvada going generic, GlaxoSmithKline rolls out a new, once-a-month-injectable form of PrEP, Apretude. By all metrics, if you're taking a PrEP pill every day, it has the same efficacy rate as a once a month Apretude injection. But, all of the sudden they're able to roll out this whole “trust the science” campaign couched in this sensationally optimistic narrative of, “Oh my god, look how much more effective Apreptude is when compared to generic PrEP pills.” Which, when you look at the early numbers, is technically true—Apretude tends to prevent seroconversion at a marginally higher rate. The quiet part which goes unspoken is that the difference in terms of efficacy has nothing to do with any sort of advancement or refinement in the drug compounds themselves. The answer has almost nothing to do with this pre-packaged narrative of higher quality medications: in reality, it’s just simply easier to get people to commit to a once-a-month injection than it is to get them to remember to take a pill at the same time every single day. Because of that, people on Apretude have a lower likelihood of missing a dose—with consistent, unbroken dosing obviously being the biggest determinant of PrEP’s general effectiveness. There’s no miraculous advancement in the realm of pharmaceutical technology, only a slight adjustment designed to cater to the way that people tend to actually live their lives. But that’s all glossed over.

It shouldn’t sound conspiratorial to suggest that there’s more than coincidence at play in the timeline. Apretude doesn’t appear until Truvada becomes a generic drug, or, in other words, a thing which can be aesthetically rebranded as outdated and ineffective. The focus is never on giving people something that might actually help them here and now, but rather on gamifying how long one can stretch out their unique possession of whatever intellectual property constitutes the “new best thing.” I don’t know if any of you have seen those new Apretude ads? They’re so cheery, in this way that probably feels extremely grim for anyone who knows much of anything about the history of these drugs. They’ve really mastered the art of dog whistling this sort of vague, twenty-first-century infatuation with symbols of intersectional sexual diversity. It’s always a fast-paced montage of different “types” of couples: here’s a straight white couple taking their kid to school, there’s a group of lesbians going whitewater rafting, here’s two Black gay guys eyeing each other from across the bar—the implication, however sweet, hangs in the air: “Are they going to fuck? Would they have fucked before Apretude? Did anyone fuck before Apretude?” It’s all such a far-cry from the AIDS activism of the ’80s and ’90s, which was fundamentally built around this project of developing a critical literacy that was able to question the language and semiotics of public health.

AF

It’s also a question of survival and participation and compliance. What you're describing is an ad campaign that intones, “Compliance is easier if you don't have to take pills.” But anyone with any disability or illness understands that the frailties of the human body and mortality are the one commonality that everyone has. Everyone, everywhere, no matter who you are, will die. I think that is part of what the AIDS crisis didn't teach us, because pharmaceutical interventions became sophisticated enough to allow us to perform sexuality. The part that we never dealt with is mortality, and the implication of that mortality. I feel like it's never going to be a factor where there'll be some systemic opening of a portal into understanding the complexity of mortality. The AIDS crisis disallowed it as soon as protease inhibitors replaced the idea of a cure, because there's more money to be made in the lifelong taking of pharmaceutical interventions than there is in curing AIDS. But that doesn't mean the technology for a cure couldn't exist. All of the research money was shifted into pharmaceutical intervention.

MBS

I think, Avram, that goes alongside the shift from AIDS activism being outside of the system to the current culture of “AIDS Inc.” For example, there's this national program, I believe, which says, “End AIDS.” There are four parts to that—"Get Insured, Get Tested, Get PrEP, Get Treatment.” But how can you end AIDS without a cure? Like, it's just obvious, right? [Laughs.] Anyone can realize that. But, to come back to what your mother said, about how there will never be a cure for cancer because it's too big of a business—that idea is really instructive here.

The other piece to me has to do with the shift from communal care to individual responsibility. There was always a tension between that within AIDS activism, even from the beginning. But the individual responsibility angle now is so dominant. For me, the more tools people have, the better. So, making PrEP accessible for anyone who needs it is a crucial tool. But then there’s this idea that everyone who is negative should be taking PrEP, regardless of your health status, and regardless of your behaviors. I think people are attached to seeing PrEP, in some ways, as a cure, or as a way to no longer fight for a cure. That means abandoning anyone who is HIV-positive, right? It also means enforcing one narrative for everyone. For example, so much of the rhetoric about PrEP is that condoms don’t work, but what about all the people who have stayed HIV-negative for decades because of condoms? I’m one of those people. Many of us are alive because of condoms. It comes back to the question of communal care. We need multiple strategies in order to survive and take care of one another.

I think we see that also with COVID, where at the very beginning, we were all in it together. And there was that moment. It was the moment of absolute fear, that fear that we were all going to die. But at the same time, everyone seemed to understand that, in order to live, we all had to take care of one another. Within several months, of course, that shifted very fast. The way that structural abandonment creates interpersonal abandonment happens so fast and is so unquestioned. That goes alongside that shift from communal care to personal responsibility, which is so entrenched in that corporatized mentality, whether it be the AIDS industry or gay culture as a whole.

AF

Ding, ding, ding! To go back to John's questioning of Randy Shilts: Shilts was responsible for the Gaëtan Dugas myth, sure. But, the idea of the carrier is so built into the way we think about our social selves—it is opposed to thinking of ourselves as being connected by mortality, our one commonality.

JG

For the last three or four years the project I'm part of, Viral Interventions, has been commissioning six films per year about news stories about HIV today. We were very active in terms of saying, “We want to hear your PrEP stories, your prison stories, your safe injection stories.” Instead, the artists, perhaps because artists are always guaranteed to curve ball us with some new response that you weren't expecting, were predictably focused elsewhere. We got no proposals around PrEP, which still surprises me. We got a lot of personal stories, and those are inevitably the strongest and also the most idiosyncratic projects that we have. For instance, this Nepalese AIDS educator, who's been living with AIDS for twenty years, decided to climb Mount Everest as his public education project. What I've found in our monthly workshops is that one of the things people share across geographies and regions and experiences is a nostalgia for, often, an activism they were never part of in a community they were never part of. That is the single biggest thing that seems to define our HIV communities today. We have many amazing networks of ASOs and service organizations and support and treatment and public awareness, etcetera, etcetera, up to certain points and within limits. What we lack is that collective energy of activism that truly kept us alive through the '80s and '90s when nothing else was going to.

AF

I think that relates to the previous comments made by Mattilda. As you're talking about it, John, I'm thinking, “Holy fuck.” Like, in the height of the AIDS crisis in New York, younger gay activists were nostalgic for the idea that you could have sex without a condom at a certain point in time and that if they could only do that again everything would be okay. And then PrEP came along and now we're in a situation where younger people are nostalgic for the communal idea of coping with trauma. Of course it makes perfect sense that whatever is missing is what we're nostalgic for, but there's such a huge rift between wanting to have unprotected sex and wanting to have an activist community. Those are on other planets, aren't they?

IHJ

I was thinking of my own personal, artistic timeline with AIDS embodied in one piece. In 1986, along with the writer Dennis Cooper, who was a very polarizing figure in the gay community, and noise composer Chris Cochrane, I did a piece called Them. I based the piece on a dream that my friend Richard Elovich had. In the dream, he woke up in bed with his own dead body and he kept trying to throw it out and it kept coming back to him. Richard also doesn't remember telling me this but...

AF

Richard doesn't remember anything! [Laughter.]

IHJ

Dennis Cooper's writing is very transgressive, it’s very queercore. Chris's music is very loud—I love his music. I brought us together because I heard Chris play at some club, 8BC on the Lower East Side, and I heard Dennis read shortly after he moved from the West Coast to New York, and his writing scared me so much that I asked him if he would work with me. That piece famously has this scene in which I wrestled with a dead goat—a goat carcass—and got a lot of walkouts. I got the most negative review I've ever gotten from the gay press. The New York Native excoriated it, just sort of tore it apart, which I was very proud of. We revived the piece in 2010 at Performance Space New York, and people were throwing roses—people were applauding, giving it standing ovations because of the distance that now existed. They were applauding because it wasn't happening right in the middle of the crisis, in the middle of people dying, which we wanted to express because that's what we were feeling. We were feeling that rage, that fear, that anger, and wrestling with a dead goat on a mattress, especially when the scene before was two guys who had not been wrestling, was really important for us to say. We didn't want to make it an "AIDS piece." We didn't want to make a gay piece. We wanted to make a piece about what we were going through individually—Dennis, Chris, and I—at that time. When we revived it thirty years later, with the distance, people were able to feel it or respond to it as an art piece. I was just sort of awed by the difference in that timeline.

AF

Up until the AIDS crisis, if you lived in New York, Robert Wilson was it. It was all about Robert Wilson. Then, all of a sudden, he seemed anachronistic, drained of meaning. And Diamanda Galás was relevant, because Diamanda Galás was talking about what you've just described, which is rage. But, of course, to go back to the idea of being nostalgic for communal response to AIDS that Mattilda was talking about, the unifying force there was rage. That's what your piece was about. And, I guarantee you, if people walked into a room full of the rage that was ACT UP New York, they would walk right out. It wasn't like wrestling with the dead goat, but it was pretty close. So, I think the nostalgia is also part of the construction of historiography and social meaning. As artists, I think John named it well, we don't want to be told what our work should be about. We will decide what it is. The idea that historiography needs to be attached to a social event, to a political event, or to a creative movement is part of capitalism. It's not a part of how we live our lives, I don't think.

MBS

I think nostalgia always creates this false idea of a golden age. It's always this idea that, “Oh, things were so much better, if I could only have been around at that time.” When we're nostalgic, it prevents us from creating that golden age. When people are nostalgic for, say, the early '90s, that moment in the AIDS crisis, they're forgetting about mass death. The work and the communal possibility came out of that. You make a great point, Avram, when you say that that shared rage is so absent from the nostalgia. I think that there are plenty of things going on, just as many things are going on right now that people could be enraged about—people could be creating that same kind of activism, or newer kinds, or different interventions. I feel like nostalgia always glosses over that idea and creates a shinier or more consumable version that really destroys the potential to articulate our lives in all their complications. So, to me, the opposite of nostalgia is truth. By articulating our lived experiences, fears, failures, the devastation and the possibility, the desire and the loss, the intimacy and the utter devastation—all of it exists together. So often, nostalgia prevents those interventions from taking place, whether those be personal interventions or political, intimate or structural.

AF

I think so much of it is tied into the question of whose rage it is? Who is raging? I think about the ways in which Black Lives Matter was buried underneath Trumpism in America—I realize I'm talking about America way too much, because there is a world and Trump is part of the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world, not just in America—but, I think Black Lives Matter was the most brilliant social movement of the twenty-first century so far. So, the idea that we should be nostalgic for the AIDS crisis in New York, and not living in the twenty-first century where there are other issues to engage with—actually, they're the same issues, they're about marginalization and power and access. There's nothing to be nostalgic about. Our fingers are soaking in it, to hearken back to an old ad where Madge the manicurist is having her client soak her fingers in Palmolive. The idea of the past is a function of capital.

RM

At heart we’re talking about a sort of theatrical spectacle, yeah? It can be overwhelming in this very totalizing way—to riff on what you were just saying, Avram, we could push it even a step further and talk about how that backwards-oriented gaze can become guilt-inducing to the point of paralyzing inaction, or to the point of dissociating from the world happening just outside your door. I hope this doesn’t sound too “Woe is me” or anything, but I think about that a lot as a younger person doing work around AIDS: do I deserve to join in the conversation? What am I able to say in the absence of being able to speak to the sensation and the spectacle firsthand? To reference another big obelisk in AIDS art history, I keep on thinking about a line that recurs throughout Angels in America, about existing at “the threshold of revelation.” That line kind of says it all, right? It props up this notion of a point in which all of this rage and all of this urgency hyper-condenses, creating a new condition for transcendence, or for political action, or for accessing the meaning of one’s mortality. That threshold is always, as you’re saying Avram, an aesthetic function of capital, of the powers that be—it doesn’t exist in real time, it’s only accessible retroactively. There’s a fine line to thread when reading through these histories: how do you engage with all of that rage, all of that action, all of that urgency, but without allowing it to boomerang back onto you in the form of this pacifying sense of guilt or inadequacy?

JG

I think one thing social media is contributing, ironically, is historical memory. For instance, when the recent Jewish Voice for Peace action around Palestine at Grand Central Station happened, immediately there was Gregg Bordowitz posting, “Remember thirty years ago, we were here, just like we’re here again today.” Likewise, I was marching in our local Toronto Action for Palestine at the 100 Days March yesterday, and was remembering as we marched down Yonge Street, “Oh, we did a banner drop there.” We did a banner drop at the height of AIDS ACTION NOW!, at the height of the pandemic. It's interesting how, I think, as much as social media tends to erase memories, it can also, if we choose to, be used to historically jog memories and educate folks who weren't there at the time.

MBS

I think that action is a really good example of intergenerational activism. The fact that it took place at Grand Central wasn't coincidental. It was because people were deliberately reenacting, or reimagining, the ACT UP action that had happened decades before. And also people who are currently in ACT UP now were part of that JVP action and aware of that history and that legacy. Another thing that nostalgia prevents, actually, is that intergenerational possibility. If we’re always looking back to something else that may or may not have ever existed, then we can't actually create those bonds.

AF

The whole point of queerness as a social threat is real, because we are a threat. They should be afraid of us. Part of it has to do with the ways in which close-knit communities, or even remotely knit communities, have a genetic cellular connection. An ability to have intergenerational, but also interracial, cross-gendered conversations about the same thing, is not something that we're encouraged to have. So, queerness is a threat. They're right. They should be threatened by us because if they paid attention to us, the world would change much more quickly. And they don't want that. [Laughs.]

RM

Where does the role of the artist fit into this? We’re dancing around this idea of art as a space to explore the more convoluted and contradictory feelings around the body, around fear, around risk, and how these feelings mash up against desire and collectivity. You say that they should be afraid, Avram—is art’s role in this struggle one of transgression, or perhaps subversion? Is it a way to play with that fear, a way to throw it back at the structures of power that produce it?

IHJ

This is interesting. I have an almost a self-deprecating joke I often tell about myself. I was writing out my CV once, and all the titles of my pieces in the 1980s were Dead, The Undead, Them, Without Hope, and Prologue to the End of Everything.[Laughs.] It wasn't by design. It was that those were the issues I was dealing with. The best art, or the art that touches me, is the art that can be transformative, that can transform both myself as the artist and transform viewers, and make them angry or sad, or make me engage in my rage, engage in my sadness, engage in my failure. Ron's work was really pivotal when he brought it to New York for exactly those reasons. I was angered and moved by it at the same time.

RA

I was in my own corner working with images inspired by the dying, and then overlaying that onto images from lives of saints via esoteric Christianity. I was not an in-the-street activist. To be honest, I easily feel tyrannized by activism. I feel tyrannized by its absolutism—tow the party line or be excluded, erased. I have a bit of a complex, coming from an uneducated, outsider background and involved in dodgy lifestyle choices. There are other corners of life that do the hard work. Less than a year into dealing with HIV, I became—by necessity! —a circuit speaker at drug recovery houses. I’d be at House of Uhuru on 81st and Figueroa talking to three-hundred people, with not enough clean time experience under my belt, and not enough understanding of the infection in me, but lots of strength and conviction that I, and we, could still survive and change reality. I come from a number of really different backgrounds, especially the Pentecostal one. This experience makes me push away from absolutism, fundamentalism, any pressure to uphold someone else’s ideal instead of telling the truth, even if unpleasant. I was trying to cope with people I love being broken, dying, splitting your time between hospital rooms…going to some of the best and worst funerals and memorials imaginable! But, above all else, trying to be present.

Regarding this fantasy of constructing a tight community: nothing makes a community like a fucking disaster. Even if you go outside here in California after an earthquake, everyone's crying on the front porch with a blanket. It's wonderful. [Laughs.] We've pulled together, we need each other. The roles fill in really quick. Whereas this queer utopian idea of having a community and being mad at people for not getting on board in the right way, or in the way that you think the politics should roll out—again, I find myself outside that. There's always trouble in utopia.

IHJ

When I was looking for material for the catalog for the “Lost and Found” platform, I was rummaging around all the mess that's my apartment, and I found this schedule we had for taking care of John Bernd. It's like basically a list of the names of fifteen artists. One day someone was taking him to the doctor. Next day, someone was cooking him dinner. The next day someone was doing his laundry. Someone had just written out the schedule with our names, DanceNoise, Jane Comfort, like people from the dance community, people not from the dance community, Meredith Monk. It was all on this scrap of paper I found. It was just the most poignant thing, because John was—in the Downtown dance and performance scene, at least—one of the first people we knew who got sick. He went to the hospital in '81 before AIDS and HIV were identified. He had “GRID.” He was the first person that we knew to get that diagnosis. It was just really amazing, his response. His piece in 1981, “Surviving Love and Death,” which was about both AIDS and his breakup with Tim Miller, was this pivotal piece, which we sort of recreated in the fantasia Miguel and I did.

AF

I think you touched on something that all of you have reminded me of, which is the way in which artists interrelate or relate to their practice. Frequently, what's most resonant for us is completely behind the scenes. No archive where our papers are, no institution that is interested in our work from the past, can ever explain that members of fierce pussy and Gran Fury and Gang were all fucking each other, and also working with each other. You could never, as a researcher, understand what the communal response was. Because the finding aid is only talking about the work that made it into institutional holdings, rather than the way those communities functioned, which, if I were an academic writing about the AIDS crisis, I would want to know. But soon, Ishmael, we will be dead. Ron, you'll outlive all of us, I guarantee you.

RA

[Laughs.]

AF

No one will ever know that members of fierce pussy worked with members of Gran Fury, or that David Wojnarowicz was in a Gran Fury video, as was Nan Goldin. Like, all of the outtakes from those videos paint a more accurate picture of what Mattilda is describing in terms of communities of care, or Ron is critiquing as the tyranny of communities of care. [Laughs.]

RA

My huge inspiration was Reza Abdoh’s 1991 play Bogeyman at Los Angeles Theater Center. It was the perfect, perfect piece for that moment of apocalypse culture manifest. There was a William Burroughs-esque character—and, of course, a good bit of techno. Embrace the ugly. There was an upside-down AIDS hospital room where the nurse and the person in bed were suspended from the ceiling of Hollywood Square Number 3. And then my friend, Cliff Diller, had these green extensions and got drowned in a tank over and over again. Our late great local legend, The Goddess Bunny, played the grandmother and fairy godmother—irreverent and a stroke of genius. The work contains some kind of psycho-neuro aspect. It was a way of sharing everything, the horror, the high-highs and low-lows. I think that's what happens on the edge—enhanced experience. That inspired my practice too. To think beyond message. To go deeper than message.

RM

Something both of you are getting at, in a sense—Ron with this idea of enhanced experience, Avram with the shortcomings of archives—is this idea of the failure of literalism, yeah? Or, the failure of historically accurate literalism. There’s only so much you can accomplish by getting all the facts of the matter down on paper. At the same time, that form of literalism has really taken on this sort of premium in terms of how we are taught to think about the communication of history. There’s a certain pitfall that gets exposed when we hoist up documentary realism as this singular hallmark for what constitutes “serious” art, or “serious” intellectualism. There’s a tendency to deride what falls outside of those formal limits as frivolous, or ineffectual, or decadent, or transgressive for transgression’s sake.

JG

I always try to start my critique of documentary realism by waving the flag for the great docs that have been made, especially about activist history. I also think of larger projects, like Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman’s amazing ACT UP Oral History Project. Those works are essential in terms of helping, say, fierce pussy survive in living memory into the year 2050. But I also think that one of the wonderful things about history writing is the eruptions we don't see coming. I'm working right now with a grad student who's not a part of queer culture at all. She came to René Highway's story through Indigenous dance history. René was this legendary figure and queer Indigenous dancer in Toronto in the '80s, who, inspired by Chip [Samuel] Delany's great Dhalgren, came up with a piece, Mirror Prism Lens, which was lost to history because of his death. He was working on it in the final year of his life. But now Cara's doing a very experimental reconstruction with oral history and memory and scratchy VHS. Chip Delaney just responded to an email—thanks to Loring McAlpin [Gran Fury member], in fact, for connecting us—and he's going to chat with Cara about how this strange passing of the baton from Dhalgren to Mirror Prism Lens to René, this iconic figure who we lost, like so many. I will say as well, a shout out to REDCAT, who re-staged Them, which I was so thrilled to see. It shook me as much in 2012 as it did originally. These institutions are stepping up now and then and doing the right thing and remembering how important this work is.

IHJ

Thank you.

AF

John, I agree that the ACT UP Oral History Project is invaluable, but it's also flawed, as oral histories often can be. It also reifies a whole set of ideas. For instance, I can quote people from 1956, but I realized when I was working on my book, I asked a couple of people, like, “Who was in the van when the t-shirts were stolen that first year that ACT UP was at Pride?” And nobody remembered. So, I started plowing through the AUOHP and found inaccuracies and misremembrances. Then, on top of it, they never really archived the ACT UP Oral History. So, you would have to listen to all of it, or read Sarah's synopsis [Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993], and I think it's a synopsis that was long overdue, but it only focuses on certain aspects and overlooks other aspects, as is true for histories and archives.

JG

And, of course, also inevitably gets rewritten by new twenty-first-century agendas around wanting to remember ACT UP as being maybe a bit more diverse than it was.

AF

I think, conversely, what would be lost in just about every account of ACT UP New York is how influential your work was, John, when we all viewed Patient Zero. I can't remember if it was Gregg Bordowitz who brought it to our attention. I don't really remember how it happened, but I remember how influential you were on ACT UP New York, or how influential Marlon Riggs was. I think the idea that we were all completely balkanized is an inaccuracy. It invisiblizes the activists of color and the women activists in ACT UP New York by saying it was all white gay men. It was largely white gay men, but there was tons of, however inept it may have been, coalition work going on. I think it's easier to level the critique that wasn't exact—for instance, David Francis' first article about ACT UP in the Village Voice critiqued it for being mostly white gay men, but of course, How to Survive a Plague focused on white gay men and ignored the women's Caucus and the Majority Action Caucus and the Latino Caucus. None of that made it into that story because there's certain stories that are just easier to tell. In the same way that privilege is a reflection of power, so too is memory, and history, and academia, and documentation.

JG

In a word, I think you've just demonstrated the ongoing failure of realism, and the necessity for other tactics like poetry and hybridity.

RM

Your point about balkanization feels essential. The balkanized narrative of these histories erases all of the back-and-forth debate that was happening across different locales, and the ways in which those debates fueled so much of the individual critical thought and creation to come out of these different geographically distinct moments, yeah? I’m thinking, for instance, of something like Douglas Crimp’s critique of the 1989 LACE exhibition Against Nature, which a number of you have cultural ties of one sort or another too—John as a participant in Against Nature, Ron as someone who was regularly performing at LACE around the same time, Ishmael as a close collaborator with Dennis Cooper, who curated Against Nature. Obviously, between the Pictures Generation and October and ACT UP, Crimp has become so closely associated with the mythos of ’80s and ’90s New York. And yet, his essay about Against Nature is one of the clearest expressions of how Crimp was thinking through these concepts of political correctness, art world corruption, and trans-national gay collectivity. Those ideas aren’t coming to him through his life as a New Yorker, they’re being fleshed out in real time through a cross-coastal critical dialogue.

IHJ

I was thinking about archive, and who gets archived. I mean, it's this thing I came up against in doing the platform with Will Rawls, “Lost and Found,” because there was this woman, Maryette Charlton, who was the mother of the photographer Kirk Winslow, who had come to all of our shows. I always describe her as an older woman, but I realize when I say that that she was probably younger than I am now. But, she would come to all of our shows and get all of our materials and send them to Harvard, to the library. When I was working on the reconstruction, or the fantasia, of John Bernd's work, we had an intern—we had institutional help from Danspace Project in New York. We sent our intern up there, and she photographed all of his archives—he was a prolific writer on legal pads, there was just like, tons of writing. We had all this material to work with. And all of his videos are at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. But, in the context of curating the platform, we had a lot of artists of color. There was this one duo, called Brother(hood) Dance! [Orland Zane Hunter and Ricarrdo Valentine].

They're two young people—at that time in their late twenties—both HIV-positive and doing dance. They said to me, "It's really great that John Bernd's work was archived at the Harvard Library. Our work is not being archived." And I realized after the platform, several of my friends—Keith Hennessy, in particular—in the Bay Area, said, "Did you include Ed Mock?" And here I am, the big ass curator who pretends to know everything—not true, obviously—but I had never heard of Ed Mock, because he was on the West Coast. He was in the same time period that I was working with, and he was an HIV-positive experimental choreographer. I had never heard of him, not only because he was African American, but also because he was an African American on the other coast. I was embarrassed that I had zero knowledge of him. But how does the archive work? Who gets archived? Who gets chosen and who gets placed? It's very central. Who gets excluded and who gets chosen to be archived? I think it's really an important issue going forward.

RM

It’s also a question of who gets archived in relation to which historical lineages, right? Who gets remembered in terms of their engagement with AIDS? Forgive me for harping on Against Nature again, but so many of the artists involved went on to have quite successful and well-known careers—not just Dennis and John, but also Nayland Blake, Gary Indiana, Kevin Killian, Vaginal Davis, the list goes on and on—and the show caused a stir in the moment, and yet, not only is it a rare sight for any of those people I just listed to be categorized as “AIDS era” artists, but also the show has been largely forgotten. Crimp’s essay is the only well-known surviving testament to it, and it’s hardly a well-known essay of his—for a younger generation that didn’t experience it firsthand, Against Nature functionally starts and ends with Crimp’s writing on it. That said, Nan Goldin’s Artists Space group show Witnesses opens the same year, and engages with many of these same themes of grief, anxiety, horniness, and disconnection, and becomes a cause célèbre within the annals of AIDS activist history. It’s not just that certain things are forgotten while others are remembered, but that overlapping moments in a shared history become compartmentalized and siloed into these different historical registers—perhaps they are both remembered, but that remembrance is not the same, it doesn’t exert the same force upon the present in equal measure. They don’t get stored in the same linguistic container.

AF

I think it is reifying in the extreme, not just in terms of who is archived and who isn't but also in terms of what happens within an archive. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had from archivists or academics or institutions wanting to talk about remaking work with technology that is obsolete. I remember the conversations around that Nam June Paik show at the Whitney—they were jumping backwards through flaming hoops over how they were ever going to find cathode ray tubes to rebuild that work at this Whitney symposium. All of the artists are looking at each other. So, I raised my hand and said, "Well, what if your work is not meant to be salvaged? What if it's meant to decay? What if the value in it has nothing to do with your institutional holdings, but rather the original intention of it?"

There is no answer to that question, because institutions base their power and their meaning on their holdings, not on the meaning of the work that's in their basement that they never show. But that is a part of what makes them the richest institutions in the world. I think Ken Gonzales-Day has done this amazing survey of the basements of every major institution and the reifying, stereotypical, vestigial ideas of race that exist in every institution, that are part of the hegemonies of Western European culture. But they’re in the basement—you'll never get to see them. It's fucked up. Ron, you're not the only punk here, but there is no end to how fucked up everything that we are involved in touches. There's just no end to it.

RM

How have the possibilities for engaging with this history changed over time? Are there certain feelings, thoughts, or expressions that might have been inaccessible—or even unthinkable—in an earlier moment that now feel available?

MBS

There's this narrative about the passage of time that I think is false, because I think all of us are speaking to an AIDS crisis that is continuing today, right? It shifts over time, but I think there's this generational narrative. I'm struck, actually, when people are talking about the archive—the archive is about what's dead, right? It's about preserving what's dead so that it can be alive for us in the present. But if we were only trusting the archive, then let's say, Ishmael, when you were creating “Lost and Found,” you wouldn't have found these dancers in their twenties who are HIV-positive making new work now. And so I think, similarly, there’s this generational narrative that we're told that we've reached this moment in the AIDS crisis where some people will say it's over or some people will say it's stabilized or some people will say it's a manageable condition. But for whom?

For me, this notion of generations becomes kind of stagnant. There's this idea that there's one generation of people who grew up and experienced sexual liberation and then watched as all of their friends died of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. Now, that's true, that's a true generational narrative. But then there's this idea that there's one other generation that has grown up with effective treatment available and is unable to imagine the loss, right? And so that erases an entire generation between, and that's the generation that I'm a part of, right? The generation that grew up with AIDS and desire intertwined. There is no before. And I think in every generation there are multiple generations. And I think this question about who is archived is also related to who is allowed to speak.

So, for example, when I was recently working on my anthology Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, there's that idea that there are only these two generations, that they're very fixed, and this idea that people cannot possibly talk to one another, right? But there's this whole generation in between that has experiences of both. Maybe that's a way that we can all talk to one another. And that generation is complicated by where you grew up, by race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, religion, HIV status, and all the other markers of identity and experience in our lives. I wanted to foreground the stories that, in some ways, puncture that progress narrative. The progress narrative only serves the people who can actually survive, or that have the most privilege in a certain sense.

I generally live in Seattle, but I'm in New York right now for the beginning of my book tour, and on the street the other day I reached down to give someone who was asking for spare change a dollar. At first I saw what I thought was a rash all over his body, and then I realized, "Oh, those are Kaposi's sarcoma lesions." This is someone who is dying of AIDS now, on the street in the West Village. We're told that AIDS is over, but it's all based on access and also about who is allowed to survive—it’s not just survival of narrative, right? It's literal survival, on the street. What would it look like to come back to the idea of communal care, not as something abstract or something institutionalized, but something that we experience every day in our lives, in our art, in our relationships and in our experience of the world. What might that make possible.

JG

It seems to me the best way to trouble a dominant capitalist narrative of HIV today is to do what we've always done best, which is tell our own stories and work with others to make their stories accessible as well. The stories remain as idiosyncratic and surprising today as they've ever been. One of our artists in Viral Interventions is an Iranian HIV-positive trans man living in exile in Ecuador. He’s working with a fellow Iranian filmmaker, making a diary of what it's like to be on the ground in Ecuador, without knowing how to speak Spanish, navigating a new world of health care and trans identity. And I've already mentioned the Everest climber, and then Jessica Whitbread's making a very personal film about how to come out to her kids. She's been out to them as an AIDS activist, and as someone who's queer, but has never come out to them—they're six and eight—as HIV-positive. So, she's using the video as her coming-out project. These surprises, these curve balls—we've all got to keep making sure these stories get told, in opposition to the corporate dominant narrative that seeks to reduce us all to a PrEP ad.

IHJ

I am wrestling with hope and despair at the same time, in equal measure, actually. One, I'm involved in academia, which has become this shit hole in terms of censorship and what you can and cannot say. I keep coming up against that. I teach in the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU, and I am told what I can say in front of students—and this is like, the most radical studio in the drama department at NYU. I won't go into detail, but it's crazy. Every year the list gets longer of things that can’t be discussed, how they can be discussed, and it drives me fucking crazy.

Slightly off topic, but when I was at a recent pro-Palestinian and pro-ceasefire in Gaza march, I was sort of struck with this memory. I was remembering in 1982 there had been an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in Lebanon, and I was marching on the Israeli Consulate in New York. And this is part of my despair. Does anything ever fucking change? It's like, it's just one hellhole of a cycle that I'm caught up in.

In terms of HIV, I think art is the only thing I have. I can teach art, I can make art, I can present art, I can do art, and I try. I recently did a piece in San Francisco called TRY, actually, with Keith Hennessy and a very diverse group of other people, where we were talking about how we were all born male—identified as male at birth, AMAB—and we were all different in the ways we expressed that. Keith Hennessy says he's coming out as gay now, and he's rejecting queer, and he's going to come out as a proud gay, which I thought was kind of interesting. And we also were talking about land—one of the people was Indigenous—and we were really talking about our relationship to land and this whole sort of land acknowledgement, what does that mean?

There's all these intersections of who I am. In the '80s, I went to Nicaragua during the war and taught contact improvisation to Sandinista soldiers. What was I thinking? It's kind of nuts. And the only time I've ever gotten tear-gassed was when I was marching against the Klan in DC. So my life is a lot more, and all these elements of myself are intersecting, and in all of our lives. I mean AIDS, HIV is not all of who we are, it's not all of our identities, even those of us who are positive, those of us who are not positive. There's much more. There's deeper intersectionality going on in all of our identities, and I fight every day to resist the despair, and look for the hopefulness, look for incremental change that can possibly happen, and that I can possibly help happen, and I try.

RA

I want to talk about the experience teaching in higher education in the current climate. I never went to school, but I kind of carved my own way and learned so much about art, performance and theory from collaborations. I've been doing these ten-day performance and art workshops called “Darkness Visible” in Athens, Greece. They're self-produced, include a lot of body-mind-spirit exercises, and also include field trips to important esoteric sites. Afterwards, it takes like, three months to come down from it. I collaborate with up to seven facilitators, specializing in deep hypnosis, somatic therapy, yoga-based warm-ups, ethics, body fluids. The thing that I'm the most excited by is creating space where there aren't these stodgy restrictions that are increasingly embraced by institutions.

AF

I'm so derailed by how many ideas you have all filled me with, that I'm not really sure I remember what the prompt was. But I will say I agree with Ron, the thing they don't tell us about teaching is that teaching is actually learning, and it's very much a part of ongoing vitalization of engagement and social justice. I will also say that as somebody who made some of the work that people hold up as examples of efficacious communication of complex ideas in public spaces, I'm also aware that those things have cast a giant shadow, and they shouldn't. They should be seen as irreproducible artifacts of a certain time and place. There can never be another Silence = Death poster, because that happened when Reagan removed the Fairness Doctrine, and the 24/7 news cycle was born, and all of a sudden you didn't have a problem as a journalist or a producer pitching an idea to your editor because there was all this news cycle to fill. That was new. It's part of what happened. It's part of what made the idea that New York was the center of everything happen. It was the center of journalism in America.

I'll say one last thing about it, but the Silence = Death poster was made before ACT UP formed. It was meant to be the first in a series of three posters that would eventually call for riots during the 1988 presidential election in America, but ACT UP happened literally a few weeks after the poster hit the streets in New York, and we folded in in coalition with ACT UP. It became the ACT UP “slogan,” but it was meant to be an object of resistance, and it still is an object of resistance, and its meaning comes from people who respond to its call, not from what we put into it, or the fact that we worked a whole year on it. That isn't where its meaning comes from. Its meaning comes from its use, which is why it's part of the public domain, why it was intentionally placed there, so it wouldn't be something that people could own or be restricted from the use of. I also think that’s the thing about witnessing and memory, again.

I'll end this conversation by reminding everyone I'm a Jew and we sleep with one eye open. It's like my people have been chased all over the globe for centuries and came pretty close to extinction just before I was born, so I think that the idea of witnessing and memory are actually all we have. I think that memory is an object that casts a shadow. When we don't talk about that, we are avoiding the implication of mortality, and I think as activists, as social justice warriors, as artists, we're constantly endeavoring to force the question—the question of the implication of our connectivity, our humanity, and the documentation of it. We're forcing the hand of power structures to figure out ways to circumnavigate power and privilege, and that's what culture making is, I think.