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2020

AIDS Normalization

Alexandra Juhasz CUNY Brooklyn College

Theodore Kerr The New School

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This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] JUHASZ I have been making and writing about AIDS video since 1987 when I joined the fledgling ACT UP and volun- teered for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). This was the subject of my first monograph, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (1995), where I cov- ered dominant media, my own community-based video at the Brooklyn AIDS Task Force and GMHC, as well as that of my extensive activist media community. In this most recent decade—as was true from the mid-80s to 90s—my thinking and activism about AIDS cultural production has taken place in conversation and commu- AIDS nity. I recently coedited an anthology with Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant Shahani, AIDS and the Distribution of Normalization Crises (2020), and am a member of a New York City collective, What Would an HIV Doula Do?1 And, I have enjoyed six years of conversation, both in person and in written correspondence, with the writer and cultural worker Theodore (ted) Kerr, who is also a fellow Doula member. Ted recently edited an issue of OnCurating, titled What You Don’t Know About AIDS Could Fill a Museum.2 Our conversations began online in 2013 when I still lived in Los Angeles and Ted was working at the New York City-based arts organization, Visual AIDS.3 This bond formed as we were both noticing and trying to individually make sense of a sudden upsurge of cultural attention to AIDS after a long 1. What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD) is a period of chilling silence. community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis. They understand a doula as someone who holds KERR space during times of transition, and see HIV as a series of transitions that begin long before being tested or getting a The first instance where I felt diagnosis, and continue after treatment, and even death. aware of this upsurge was Alexandra Juhasz See http://www.hivdoula.work. 2. Theodore Kerr, OnCurating: What You Don’t Know About when I saw Sex Positive, Daryl AIDS Could Fill a Museum 42 (September 2019), https:// Wein’s 2008 movie about the and www.on-curating.org/issue-42.html#.XiH0gmRKhhA. 3. See Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr, “When creation of safer sex. It was the ACT UP is remembered … other places, people, and forms of AIDS activism are disremembered,” Visual AIDS Blog, first time I saw a movie attempt- February 17, 2013, https://visualaids.org/blog/when-act-up- ing to make sense of AIDS in Theodore (ted) Kerr is-remembered...other-places-people-and-forms-of-aids- activism; and Alexandra Juhasz and Visual AIDS, “I made my mourning productive, collective, and interactive through video production…,” February 5, 2017, https://visualaids. org/blog/i-made-my-mourning-productive-collective-and- interactive-through-video-prod#.USE0BujZriY. 63 Conversation AIDS Normalization Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr

the past. But, of course, it was not the 1980s and into the 1990s. We returned enough), PTSD, denial, decline of commu- by attending to who wasn’t being remem- first. This difcult subject was arguably in the 2000s in part because we knew we nity, continuing illness, getting better: bered and what was being valued.5 on your radar a bit earlier, Alex, when had lived through a productive, intense, if we all had our reasons for not engaging. JUHASZ you made Video Remains in 2005. Like awful, period of AIDS cultural production. Thus, even as work was continuing to be Our conversation—with each other, and James Wentzy’s video, Fight Back, Fight We were also only too well aware of so made and even shared during this period, in community—continued and developed, AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP (2004), Jean many friends and colleagues who did not there was rarely the large audience or culminating in this conversation here, hot Carlomusto’s Sex in an Epidemic (2010), make it through, hence my focus in Video lively conversation to receive it that had on the tails of our book manuscript sub- Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard’s Remains on Jim (James Robert Lamb), my defined the previous period. mitted to press in December 2019, We ACT UP Oral History Project (2002–15), best friend, who died in 1993 at twenty- KERR Are Having This Conversation Now: The Jennifer Brier’s book, Infectious Ideas nine. Our backward gaze kicked of a The AIDS community responded with Times of AIDS Culture. To better under- (2009), or Avram Finkelstein’s thinking new period of cultural attention that is outpourings of remembrances and con- stand this reemergence of AIDS that was around AIDS 2.0 to name a few, you all itself worthy of attention. This is what versation, as well as critiques. As swift taking up so much space within the pub- and so many others were already trying to we have spent the last six years trying to as the Revisitation entered our lives, so, lic realm, we needed to situate AIDS not make sense of AIDS history.4 This steady understand. too, came the backlash. Most of the early just in our tempestuous present, but also and building stream of works of remem- KERR Revisitation work seemed to be casting more fully in its time(s). And we needed brance was happening as I, too, saw an We began together to flesh out what we the net rather close to home. That is, it to do that together because we also found upsurge of activity: fielding more calls could mean by AIDS Crisis Revisitation, a was about and by and perhaps even really that our own processes were modeling and emails at Visual AIDS from a cross phrase I had already begun using for this for gay white men, a community that activist engagements with the past that section of people (young, old, academics, surprising and growing body of work. had been and was continuing to sufer were intersectional, intergenerational, artists, activists) all interested in looking JUHASZ immensely because of HIV/AIDS. and present-focused. back at AIDS history. This was, at first, Together, we catalogued the ways that JUHASZ exhilarating and exciting. My whole adult well-known productions like Dallas It was an upsetting and exciting time. The life I had been involved in AIDS work in Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013), criticism was productive. It engendered some way, and had often been the young- How to Survive a Plague (David France, more media making, activism, scholar- est person in the room. There was this 2012), United in Anger (Jim Hubbard, ship, and a lot of community discourse, idea that young people didn’t care about 2012), We Were Here (David Weissman, online and of. AIDS and that older people didn’t want 2011), and even Philomena (Stephen KERR to talk about it. An emerging interest in Frears, 2013), as well as more indepen- The Tacoma Action Collective’s die-in AIDS disproved that. But then, I started dent work in the Revisitation vein, like at the exhibition Art AIDS America at to have mixed feelings about all the atten- Heart Breaks Open (William Maria Rain, Tacoma Art Museum in Washington in tion that was being paid to AIDS because 2011), Liberaceón (Chris Vargas, 2011), 2015, in response to the lack of Black art- it was primarily about looking back in When Did You Figure Out You Had AIDS ists, helped establish a more robust and time. This I found confusing. I believe in (Vincent Chevalier, 2011), and Bumming fully realized exhibition as it continued the power of history, but I was excited Cigarettes (Tiona McClodden, 2012) were to travel the United States; and Jih-Fei about having more people join me in feel- all looking at AIDS through the prism of Cheng’s “How to Survive: AIDS and Its ing and reacting to the urgency of AIDS past activism, sufering, and mourning. Afterlives in Popular Media”—a critical in the present. I feared that Sex Positive Until the 2010s, people hadn’t really dealt response to How to Survive a Plague—not and other films in this vein could leave with the losses, fears, and sufering expe- only named some of the issues that many audiences thinking that AIDS was a thing rienced during the preceding period of of us had with the Oscar-nominated doc- of the past: experienced, remembered, silence. We hadn’t been talking, which umentary, it also provided a roadmap on and mourned by those older than me who itself was a definitive aspect of what we how to watch AIDS video going forward had experienced firsthand the devastat- call the Second Silence. Sadness, grief, ing early years of the crisis. anger, shame (for living on, or not doing Theodore Kerr’s tote bag on a bike, New York, 2012. The bag was created by J. Morrison for Visual AIDS in 2009 as a JUHASZ 5. To learn more about Art AIDS America, visit http:// way to keep the AIDS crisis part of the cultural landscape. In this very way, the cherry-picked group artaidsamericachicago.org/. See also Theodore Kerr, “A Photo: Theodore Kerr. 4. Avram Finkelstein uses the phrase “AIDS 2.0” in a 2012 History of Erasing Black Artists and Bodies from the AIDS you list above have much in common. We article for ArtWrit (Avram Finkelstein, “AIDS 2.0,” ArtWrit, Conversation,” Hyperallergic, December 31, 2015, https:// Title page: Alexandre Juhasz, Video Remains, 2005. Video all had been active in AIDS culture in the December 2012, http://www.artwrit.com/article/aids-2-0/); it hyperallergic.com/264934/a-history-of-erasing-black-artists- stills. DV video, sound, 55 min. Courtesy of the artist. was republished in POZ Magazine in 2013 (Avram Finkelstein, and-bodies-from-the-aids-conversation/; and Julia Bryan- “AIDS 2.0,” January 10, 2013, https://www.poz.com/article/ Wilson’s review of Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The avram-finkelstein-23355-3691). More in-depth thinking about Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, in Artforum 54, no. 10 the phrase appears in his book, After Silence: A History of AIDS (Summer 2016), https://www.artforum.com/print/201606/ through Its Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, susan-e-cahan-s-mounting-frustration-the-art-museum-in- 64 2018), www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv1xxx03. the-age-of-black-power-60081. 65 Conversation AIDS Normalization Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr

KERR then-mysterious and escalating health We developed what we call the Five Times crisis. of AIDS: a chronological way of under- JUHASZ standing the crisis as it ebbs and flows But their work was done primarily in iso- through culture, as well as bodies and lation, with federally coordinated eforts communities. blocked by the Reagan administration JUHASZ and abetted by an apathetic or unin- We ofer our five times not as a prescrip- formed media and public. The result was tion, but as a lens, a way of seeing and that a once possibly manageable health being in time, history, and the future with crisis within contained communities our primary commitments being in and became an epidemic. for the present. Of course, time cannot KERR be standardized. Which leads us to the third period on our KERR timeline, AIDS Crisis Culture, from 1987 We know from our own experiences that to 1996. From the ACT UP poster to the it is felt diferently by individuals, by the community produced video you made two of us, as well as internally within and wrote about as well as art in every any person. So, we celebrate the bound- medium all connecting to historic levels aries and interconnections of our times, of direct action, this is a period of mass because we ourselves and, also, we cultural production and discourse leading together know them as porous, loose, to social and medical breakthroughs. Ben Cuevas, Reinserted: Show Center, 2019. Giclée print, featuring the archive of Annie Sprinkle, interdependent, and co-constitutive. JUHASZ 60 × 40 in. Courtesy the artist. JUHASZ I grew into an adult during (and making) Periodization has helped us to under- AIDS Crisis Culture. What became clear as stand and learn from what is otherwise we looked at AIDS through our five-time KERR and stay the course, by accounting for experienced as both a confusing and framework is that the majority of what AIDS Crisis Culture, coming from within our varied experiences of the very same overwhelming past and present. the culture holds up and enshrines as a period of mass death, mass action, and periods. KERR AIDS culture comes from this period. This massive representation, was followed by KERR To do so, we start before AIDS. Pre-1981. is what is revisited in retrospectives and its stunning opposite: the fourth time AIDS went on within the Second Silence. JUHASZ remakes, on T-shirts and in memorials. of AIDS, the Second Silence from 1996 People were living, dying, and surviving; We call this AIDS Before AIDS. We estab- But the amazing work from that period to roughly the 2010s. The introduction AIDS culture was being made; activism lish that there is a history of HIV’s impact is rooted in the specificity of its time. Our of lifesaving medication in 1996, highly was getting done. But what was diferent before the much acknowledged start of periodization is one way to stay mindful active antiretroviral treatment (HAART), was that, within the silence, all of these the epidemic in the 1980s. A longer view of the diferences, changes, and rhythms resulted in better health for many but disparate eforts were not connecting as helps us to both make space for unnamed of AIDS cultural production. Any moving, also a linked decline in the space HIV/ they once had, so recently, during AIDS death, but also chart the impact of HIV recognizable image from this time is cer- AIDS took up in public. But, needless to Crisis Culture. They were harder to find. within the many communities where tainly a testament to hard-won visibility, say, HIV-related activity was ongoing JUHASZ it has created destruction over its long but may not serve as well as a represen- for people and communities. During the Well, here’s the thing about silence: it is history. This is what you do so critically tation of other definitive experiences Second Silence, living with AIDS became not absence, it is not lack. Silence is full, in your work on Robert Rayford, a Black of AIDS, like those from the period that less connected and less visible. It was in powerful, and present. It has wreaked teenager who died of AIDS in 1969.6 would immediately follow, for instance. this period that I first cut my teeth as an havoc within all the times of AIDS. KERR artist and an organizer. KERR The second notch on our timeline is 1981 JUHASZ Silence inspired the changes that brought to 1986, what we call the First Silence. One of the core diferences between us. us together. The norms of AIDS were being In the early 1980s, medical staf and We began to learn more about time and rewritten again. By 2012, PrEP, an HIV impacted people—the ill and their loved 6. In 1968, Robert Rayford, a sixteen-year-old Black inspiration, about how individuals enter prevention method, had been approved by teenager who lived in St. Louis, Missouri, checked himself ones—began to take action around a into the hospital. Less than a year later, he died. Tissues from his body were saved. In 1987, tests were conducted that concluded Rayford died with HIV, making him the earliest confirmed person to die with the virus in North America. See Theodore Kerr, “AIDS 1969: HIV, History, and Race,” Drain: AIDS and Memory 13, no. 2 (2016), http://drainmag.com/ 66 aids-1969-hiv-history-and-race/. 67 Conversation AIDS Normalization Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr

the FDA, and the term and lived experi- includes reenactments of videotaped ence of the undetectables (U=U, describ- records of ACT UP meetings and demon- ing those living with HIV whose viral load strations, all the while putting Black was suppressed—that is, there is no trace trans women at the center of the narra- of HIV antibodies in their bodily systems) tive. Revisitation, but diferently: respon- was about to become a game changer. sive, inclusive.8 In fact, it was in talking JUHASZ about Pose while writing a draft of our For a while, cataloging the AIDS Crisis book (and an essay for the journal, First Revisitation, the fifth time of AIDS, in Mondays, set to come out later in 2020) and of itself was exciting and challenging. that we came up with a possible sixth “Look, Ted! There’s AIDS in a novel! On time, AIDS Inclusive Culture (2010–ongo- Broadway! On cable TV!” For a few years, ing), which we think is about the ways each appearance came as a delightful in which AIDS moves beyond neglect or or curious surprise that we had to note, spectacle. Perhaps this time is a point in write about, and analyze. AIDS history where the inclusion within KERR the national narrative can be, and some- Until we didn’t. Our analysis and crit- times is, respected and intersectional. icism, as well as that of so many of our JUHASZ peers also reckoning with AIDS cultural And while we are still deep in conversation production, was engendering conversa- about where we are now and where we will tion, critique, and also more AIDS culture, be going particularly in relation to our including in this very publication. One of thinking around AIDS Inclusive Culture, my favorite pieces of writing to emerge what is clear is that the Revisitation was out of the Revisitation is Dont Rhine’s producing its own corrections. Which 2013 X-TRA essay, Below the Skin: AIDS led to a new question for us, given our Activism and the Art of Clean Needles primary focus on the Revisitation: could Now.7 There is not enough cultural pro- there be contemporary AIDS culture that duction about drug use, Los Angeles AIDS didn’t revisit? I thought no. But then activism, or the positive contributions of we saw a play together on World AIDS active drug users. Dont’s piece has all of Day 2019, with our fellow AIDS cultural that and more. It is a personal account worker Alex Fialho. In one in two (2018), of a life changing time about lifesaving Donja R. Love, an artist living with HIV tactics that is full of details and names. for a decade, explores the experiences of Reading it, I could mourn, learn, and Black queer men living with HIV in the think about how to apply what I was era of PrEP and U=U. Before I saw the reading to the present. play I had gone to the mat (with you) JUHASZ arguing that every piece of AIDS culture As more and more AIDS culture entered must be part of the Revisitation because the world, and that began to seem less and no one can escape AIDS history: whether less important in and of itself, we found space to wonder about new things: where and when does the Revisitation stop and 7. Dont Rhine, “Below the Skin: AIDS Activism and the Art of some new phase begin? Clean Needles Now,” X-TRA 15, no. 3 (Spring 2013), https:// www.x-traonline.org/article/below-the-skin-aids-activism- KERR and-the-art-of-clean-needles-now. Right. For example, much was being made 8. For two of many articles about Pose, AIDS, and of the fact that season two of the ground- representation, see Mathew Rodriguez, “Decoding Pose’s breaking TV show Pose (2018–present) Depiction of HIV/AIDS History in Season 2’s Premiere Episode,” TheBody, June 12, 2019, https://www.thebody. com/article/decoding-poses-depiction-of-hiv-aids-history- in-season-2s-premiere-episode); and Elena Gross, “No Resolution: Toward the End of the End of AIDS,” Art Practical, Donja R. Love, one in two, 2018. Performed by Leland Fowler, Jamyl Dobson, and Edward Mawere; December 18, 2019, https://www.artpractical.com/feature/ directed by Stevie Walker-Webb; produced by The New Group at The Pershing Square Signature Center, 68 toward-the-end-of-the-end-of-aids/. November 19, 2019–January 12, 2020. Photos: Monique Carboni. 69 Conversation AIDS Normalization Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr we acknowledge or even know the past contemporary claims paper over how of HIV, it haunts our daily experiences AIDS stays present (even when undetect- through encounters laced with afect able), and simplifies its presence to merely or acts organized by stigma, desire, or being a matter of medicine or biology. pride, for example. JUHASZ KERR Even after a cure, AIDS will be with us as But I wanted to leave space in our imagi- loss, anger, fear, oppression, and culture. nations for the possibility of AIDS culture KERR that could be fully, firmly rooted in the You suggested that this ever more com- present. This was inspired by two things: mon and casual mention of a disappear- A Strange Loop (2019), a play by Michael ing HIV might be an example of AIDS R. Jackson that had its world premier at Normalization, made possible by a ramp- Playwrights Horizons in New York, last ing into visibility via Revisitation. On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, installation view, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, September 28, 2019–January 19, 2020. © Kristine Eudey, 2019. Courtesy of the Leslie- year, in which the main character was JUHASZ Lohman Museum of Art. Photo: Kristine Eudey dealing with the reality of being a Black We couldn’t go from Silence to Norm- Queer person in the age of hookup apps, alization without a good long look back, a Tyler Perry, and HIV; and the 2015 AIDS- review, if you will, as well as a long-over- JUHASZ for many queers and our sex-positive related storyline on Shonda Rhimes’s ABC due reckoning of how we got to this point But, in watching the play, together and allies, the dangers and harms, but also the drama, “How To Get Away with Murder,” in history as it relates to AIDS, how all within our community, it was impossible cultural empowerment AIDS demanded, that so deftly handled AIDS in the twen- that felt, what it did and does, and what not to put Love’s present-focused work in initiated many of the artists here into ty-first century. Both Jackson’s play and it meant that we are still here, as is AIDS. conversation with the past. voice and community. Rhimes’s show feature characters wres- KERR KERR KERR tling with the impacts of HIV, not loaded And I think that is why Love’s one in two Right. But I think what we are learn- As the show so clearly documents, AIDS down by the past as a means of justifica- was so important for us. The three Black ing right now, in real time, is that was part of why and how radical sex work- tion. HIV is considered in the context of gay male actors are playing a game where Normalization does not have to be sepa- ers began to make claims and demands the twenty-first century, within the real- a rule is that one of them will end up with rate from Revisitation (or Inclusion). No about their labor and culture. ity that people are still being diagnosed HIV. I liked that the play was pushing time is a tomb, and, in fact, our times of JUHASZ and also dying with HIV in the present. back against the tyranny of statistics by AIDS live alongside each other. Maybe The impact of AIDS is rife, understated, JUHASZ refusing to have two people on stage, but part of Normalization is not just that AIDS and present across the show. One of When we first started talking about this rather troubling numbers by adding a can stand on its own within a present day so many examples is the three covers aspect of contemporary AIDS culture, I third. This seemed like a structural way context, but, more so, an ongoing reckon- of Black Lace Magazine (1988–94), an was trying to make sense of how Trump to indicate a challenge to the stories we ing with AIDS can and should be a normal, “erotic publication, created by and for had so casually mentioned his aim to customarily tell about HIV. Near the end included, and expected part of culture. Black lesbians,” displayed in a row in a 9 end AIDS during his State of the Union of the play, when the plot seems to be bar- JUHASZ vitrine. The first one obscures the face of address in 2019. Perhaps there really was reling towards a lead character having to Of the past and the present. And this is its subject, although the figure has black an emerging form of AIDS representation make a choice between assimilation or so powerfully rendered in On Our Backs: skin and a few long dreads catching a flare rooted in our newfound representational annihilation, we are saved from such a The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, of light, and instead makes most visible abundance, and how all this new work scenario and the game stops, and a new curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s her “Silence = Death” shirt. The second aligned with another chapter in this his- way forward, a new plot— Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which cover features a close-up of a strong Black tory, one also being expressed often and JUHASZ was on view from September 2019 to femme and the third centers the figure loudly: a (perceived) closing down, in the A new story. January 2020. of a Black butch. AIDS is incidental, the form of the much-heralded “end of AIDS.” KERR KERR point, connected and connecting, contex- KERR —is ofered. So here was a play that was But the exhibition is about sex work. tual, motivating, and yet unnamed. The “end of AIDS” is something that splits actively not looking back, and instead JUHASZ KERR AIDS activists as a goal or even near- was figuring out a new way to be in the And so much more, including HIV, since What I liked about these magazine covers term possibility. While we all yearn for present (and future) with HIV. the AIDS crisis so deeply impacted and in the exhibition is that they exemplify this as a future, we suggest that these impacts this community. And, as is true something we have been writing about,

70 9. As described on the exhibition label. 71 Conversation AIDS Normalization Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr

most specifically in our piece, “Who are life of Richard Berkowitz, who was at the the Stewards of the AIDS Archive? Sharing show’s opening (!), the subject of the film the political weight of the intimate.” 10 We Sex Positive I mentioned earlier as the center cultural production that is rooted first example for me of the Revisitation. in the everyday, complicated, hard-to- In his memorabilia, we see the early capture experiences of the most silenced labors of a white gay man—a much-in- individuals and communities. demand dom in his day—who, because JUHASZ of AIDS, was working to teach johns how Yes, we’ve been eager to learn from repre- to treat sex workers with dignity, and sentations of AIDS history and culture that then, along with Michael Callen (and Dr. foreground women, people of color, trans Joseph Sonnabend), took on another criti- people, poor people, and sex workers: cal project: how to see community, mutual communities so hard hit, so activated, and afection, and care as harm reduction still so under seen. With Jawanza Williams tools during the period we name as the and Katherine Cheairs, as members of the First Silence of AIDS. What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective, JUHASZ we co-curated Metanoia: Transformation Seeing his papers and sex paraphernalia through AIDS Archives and Activism, on alongside the work of other pioneering sex view at The Center in New York in the workers, like queer feminist friends and spring of 2019, and until late April 2020 at colleagues Annie Sprinkle or Carol Leigh, the ONE Gallery in West Hollywood. We for example, is an exciting intersectional use holdings from the ONE National Gay & model for how to do AIDS cultural work Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries and as Normalization. The LGBT Community Center National KERR History Archive to explore AIDS activism When multiple histories, identities, and accomplished by Black women, such as experiences come together, there is less Joann Walker and Katrina Haslip, that of a burden placed on any one group or changed the world and AIDS, all done moment to represent the complex assem- from within prison walls. What we learn blage that is the ongoing AIDS crisis. A from Heller’s show and our own experi- multiplicity of HIV-related experience, ence with Metanoia is a focus on the pol- cutting through and connecting some of itics of living gets us both inside of and our periods, is on view with great beauty beyond questions of racial representation. in the Through Positive Eyes project cur- Looking at AIDS through the cultural pro- rently showing at The Fowler Museum duction of women in prison or sex workers at University of California, Los Angeles are thematic, political approaches that (UCLA). Over ten years in the making, it forefront marginal, if radical and pow- is both a book and an exhibition, co-cu- erful, experiences and politics of the cri- rated by David Gere, UCLA Professor of sis that include those of gay white men, World Arts and Cultures, and photog- even as theirs are not the primary point rapher Gideon Mendel. In the version I of view. saw, selfies, portraits, short videos, and KERR text provided as many examples of life Right. Thus, aside from the magazine with HIV around the globe as there were covers, for me, some of the most moving faces in the exhibition. Texts on the wall artifacts in the show come from the early include people talking positively about bareback sex; young people sharing their HIV coming-out stories to their parents

10. Eds. Angela Jones, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, and Joann Walker, The Name of the Game, c. 1990s. Flyer for the Coalition to Support Women Prisoners Michael W. Yarbrough, The Unfinished Queer Agenda After at Chowchilla, designer unknown. Ink on paper, 8 1⁄2 × 11 in. Judy Greenspan Papers, The LGBT Community Marriage Equality (London: Routledge, 2018), https://doi. 72 Center National History Archive, New York. org/10.4324/9781315151106. 73 Conversation AIDS Normalization Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr only to find out that they, too, are liv- dreams and writing. Do you know my ing with the virus; middle-aged people story about the Gaiety, Ted? reflecting on the stigma they have KERR endured at the doctor’s ofce; and so I don’t think I do. much more. Through accumulation, the JUHASZ stories provide a network of AIDS. A form You know that while I became an AIDS of Normalization emerges, less attached activist almost as soon as I arrived to to normative behavior or similar experi- New York in 1986, the death of my best ences or times, but rather to connection friend and first love James Robert Lamb at across diference. twenty-nine in 1993 cemented my com- JUHASZ mitments, broke and motivated me, and Specificity alongside multiplicity makes has kept me responsible to AIDS history it possible for people to locate themselves and activism for all the decades following. and their times within a complex cultural KERR experience. Carol Leigh was one of the I do know this. three advisors on the exhibition (along JUHASZ with Yin Q and Ceyenne Doroshow.) I I’ve also told you that Jim was a sex worked with Carol in the 1980s for GMHC’s worker, on and of, as well as being a cable access show, Living with AIDS (my go-go dancer, and also a member of the early volunteer work mentioned at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. But beginning of this conversation). I feature when I was still a girl, maybe twenty-one, her art and activism in my second half- and pretty much unaware of sex, let alone hour show for the series, “Prostitutes, homosexuality, sex work, or AIDS, I spent Risk and AIDS” (1988). On Our Backs a romantic weekend with Jim in a beauti- gives space to many feminist sex workers ful apartment that he rented for us on Jane who, like and along with Carol, came into Street in the West Village. I was a senior their radical intersectional sex-positive in college in western Massachusetts but feminist queer politics through the indig- he had dropped out and was living in New nities and inconsistencies exacerbated York. On one night of our getaway, he told On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, installation view, Leslie-Lohman Museum of by AIDS. me he had to leave to go to work in Times Art, New York, September 28, 2019–January 19, 2020. © Kristine Eudey, 2019. Courtesy of the Leslie- Lohman Museum of Art. Photo: Kristine Eudey. KERR Square. I knew so little of New York City. I like that moment of personal connection. We went to school in New England and I JUHASZ was from Colorado! By that point, I did My own histories and connections across know he was working as a stripper. But to a heavy woman at the door. She gave part of himself never available to me. The the times of AIDS felt so resonant and evi- what I understood of this was vague and me a wry once-over. I walked in and saw room was tawdry, the men wanting, and dent on the show’s many walls—another naive. It didn’t include the sex that was for just what is recorded there in that real- Jim was centered. reason why intergenerational interaction sale in the Kick Of Lounge next door to ist rendering by Angus, who, like Jim, KERR about AIDS culture is so critical. Diferent the main stage (and pictured by Angus). died of AIDS (in 1992) before the cocktail What did he think about you watching things will move us, speak to us, be res- This is how he made the money to aford could save either of them. I saw the tat- him? onant. I was actually stopped cold by dreamy vacations with me in the big city! tered seats and isolated men. I saw that JUHASZ one image that seemed to have emerged KERR speckled ceiling and dirty walls. I saw my I never told him I was there. Or, actually, I from my own memory, as if spit out from How did you find this out? best friend dance and strip. He was really didn’t until 1993 when he was dying. a magical 3D printer... The show includes JUHASZ sexy. He was acting, playing the buf col- KERR a realistic painting, Hanky Panky (1980) About an hour after he left our room, I fol- lege co-ed. Thighs and abs built to per- Why not? by Patrick Angus. The painting depicts lowed him to Times Square and climbed fection, eyes demure and then engaged, JUHASZ a place with which I held only a passing the rickety steps that led to the now-in- on his rhythm. He was in control, in his My ideas about AIDS, sex work, homosex- familiarity but it has haunted my own famous burlesque theater. I paid my entry body, in that room, showing a diferent uality, the closet, they were all live there,

74 75 Conversation AIDS Normalization Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr in that room, and then in my memories— and they still are, although diferently, as I’m now a world-weary fifty-five! A woman who grew into this knowledge through time, and AIDS, sex, sex work, feminism, queer art, and Jim’s untimely death. And this is all there in that painting, and the art show. AIDS: Central. Formative. Named and not. When I watched Jim dance, he didn’t yet have HIV and I wasn’t an AIDS activist. It wasn’t live for us internally or visibly or politically. And yet, I know that it framed all encounters that humans could have with each other in those times, with those we loved, with the world. As it does now. KERR And here we are now, decades later. Jim is still with you, with us. You don’t need art or culture to remember him. Yet, I must say, I am grateful to Patrick Angus’s painting, and Alexis Heller’s curation, for creating the opportunity to share that story about you, Jim, the past, and the present. How we can know things about ourselves and the world is often as important as the facts themselves, no? JUHASZ Yes. KERR And when we share stories, when we look at art together, when we encounter his- tory as a collaborative project of shared knowing across diference, we are creat- ing new invitations to know and learn, Patrick Angus, Hanky Panky, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, and know and learn better. Implicit in our 40 ½ × 54 ¼ in. Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Theodore (ted) Kerr is a writer and orga- relationship as writers is invitation. You Courtesy of the Estate of Patrick Angus. Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, nizer. Kerr teaches at The New School are someone who often invites collabora- City University New York (CUNY). She is in New York, and is a founding member tion, and I am one of the lucky people you a longtime AIDS activist videomaker as of What Would an HIV Doula Do? extend invitations to. Inspired by that, well as the author and editor of schol- together, we invite each other to think conversation and working against calcifi- arly books, including the forthcoming about AIDS now: What does silence mean? cation. Alexis does this in her exhibition: My Phone Lies to Me: Fake News Poetry What are the parameters of Revisitation? a cultural production about AIDS that is not Workshops as Radical Digital Media For that I am grateful. bound by time or even AIDS. It expresses Literacy (The Operating System, 2020); JUHASZ people, tactics, relationships, politics, and and AIDS and the Distribution of Crises I am grateful too, and the way we can loves between the past, the present, and (with coeditors Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant pay each other back is by extending the the future. Shahani, Duke University Press, 2020).

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