The Contemporary Journal are cut, as are the philosopher’s various interactions with participants at the seminar. All the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ are trimmed away. ‘Hush Now’: Terre Laughter is evacuated; silences vanish. Thaemlitz and the The cover of the posthumous Fearless Speech book shows Foucault holding up a megaphone Languages of at a protest on the streets of Paris in 1969, and heroic images of the philosopher wielding a Silence bullhorn tend to reappear whenever his work on parrhesia is evoked – but Foucault himself drew Amelia Groom no clear or final equation between amplification and empowerment.[1] His History of Sexuality begins with an analysis of what he calls ‘the incitement to discourse’ in European modernity, where sex is subjected to new discursive regimes of demographic observation, criminal classification, judicial intervention, clinical scrutiny, pedagogical regulation, theoretical elaboration, and so on. October 1983, the UC Berlekey campus in The Victorians may have ushered in Northern California. Michel Foucault is about unprecedented prudishness and unspeakability, an hour in to the introductory session for his but within what is usually characterized as a seminar on parrhesia, a word usually translated rule of silence, Foucault identifies an age of from the Greek as ‘speaking truth to power’ or ‘immense verbosity’ where sex is forced into a [2] ‘fearless speech’. He is responding to a question discursive existence. about parrhesiastic friendship, when suddenly Through such a framework, ‘speaking up’ the bells of the university’s clock tower start to cannot be characterized simply or only as a toll. There are just a few dongs at first, and he necessary counter to imposed silence. As tries to keep going – but as the bells get louder Foucault puts it, silence is ‘less the absolute there’s a momentary breakdown in the limit of discourse, the other side from which it philosopher’s speech, and a momentary is separated by a strict boundary, than an breakout of laughter in the room. element that functions alongside the things The sonic interruption of the bells, and the said, with them and in relation to them within [3] somatic eruption of the laughter, are both over-all strategies.’ There are many ways of absent in the transcripts of the seminar saying and many ways of not saying – and there recordings that were published by Semiotext(e) are many ways in which both silence and as a book called Fearless Speech (2001). discourse can be enforced from above or Foucault’s speech in the recordings is erudite deployed from below. Foucault again: but often gently hesitant, with occasional ‘Discourse transmits and produces power; it uncertainty about English words and reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes pronunciations, and several moments of it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to laughter. As tends to happen, when the voice is thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy pinned to the page it becomes more stable, are a shelter for power, anchoring its more authoritative, more isolated. Repetitions prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and

The Contemporary Journal ‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of [1/7] Sonic Continuum Silence - Amelia Groom provide for relatively obscure areas of word silence in Theamlitz’s reappropriation of tolerance.’[4] the iconic graphic was obviously not about returning to the historical condition of silence In what follows, I attempt to tune in to some of that the Silence=Death slogan had addressed. the protective and confrontational silences that Silence around HIV/AIDS remains deadly, and have been deployed in the work of Terre since it was launched in 1993, Thaemlitz’s Thaemlitz, a Kawasaki-based artist, writer and website has featured an ‘HIV/AIDS 101’ guide self-described ‘nuisance’ who has released providing information on terminology, music and audio projects under various aliases, transmission, testing and prevention.[6] In her including G.R.R.L., K-S.H.E, Miss Take, Social Love for Sale essay of 1998, and in the album of Material, Terre’s Neu Wuss Fusion, and, most the same name which was released on CD the famously, DJ Sprinkles. Writing in defence of following year, however, Thaemlitz was what she calls ‘the languages of silence’ within concerned with another kind of silence – an queer critical practices, Thaemlitz has argued emergent historical process that she called that when acquisition and amplification are ‘assimilation’s silencing of Queer difference’.[7] unquestioned as the sole strategies by which oppression is identified and fought, quietness Following the height of AIDS activism in the becomes culturally frowned upon – and that, as US, there was greater representation of queers a result, ‘we have culturally lost skills for and queer life in mainstream media and popular understanding the value of secrets, their culture. At the same time, an assimilationist protective power and their ability to connect silencing of difference and dissidence meant people in deep ways through the cultivation of that a lot of the earlier political struggles were personally affecting social responsibilities’.[5] subsumed under the intensifying regimes of respectability, marketability, and gay and The CD design for Thaemlitz’s 1999 album lesbian conservatism.[8] The increased attention Love for Sale: Taking Stock in Our Pride features and visibility might seem to counter the a pink triangle on a black background, with the historical violence of anti-queer silencing, but word SILENCE written in white capital letters Thaemlitz’s concern was with what became underneath, clearly referencing the hushed along the way. Writing in 2006, she Silence=Death Project’s posters which were claimed that direct action AIDS activism in the first wheatpasted around New York City in US had ‘run its course’ by the mid ‘90s: 1987, and which went on to become emblematic of the HIV/AIDS activism movement. In Thaemlitz’s reworking of the graphic, though, ‘Those who declared “Silence=Death” the second part of the equation is removed so had for the most part fallen silent under that the word silence stands on its own. a new hush of media visibility, bureaucratic cooperation, and In its original context, ‘Silence=Death’ was a institutionalization (including Community rallying call that demanded vocality in the Based Organizations typically reliant midst of the literally lethal silence of the upon large, non-community funding Reagan administration – along with all the bases – in turn absorbing “expansionist” homophobia, racism, poverty, religious business models of outreach that bigotry, big pharma greed, familial neglect, remained unreconciled with notions of societal indifference, journalistic negligence, localization and the microsocial) (…) and governmental inaction that constituted the Weakened by exhaustion, desiring AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The isolation of the mass-cultural understanding of and

The Contemporary Journal ‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of [2/7] Sonic Continuum Silence - Amelia Groom sympathy for our various issues, and essay and album. The first track on the album, seduced by the reflection of our own Taking Stock in Our Pride, is an audio collage strategies, an unfounded “public trust” piecing together samples from a local television was born. We forgot the alternative broadcast covering the San Francisco Pride histories and struggles from which AIDS Parade. A relentlessly cheery business and activism sprang, peacefully hushed by media friendly affirmation of ‘legitimacy and the hypnotic repetition of our reified Pop credibility’ suffocates the acoustic field, as image.’[9] fragmentary voices enthuse over corporate sponsorship, merchandise, product placement, and money: ‘If you want a really fabulous Thaemlitz – who identifies as non-essentialist leather outfit, what’s it gonna set you back?’, ‘I and uses both she and he pronouns like the idea of The Lavender Chamber of – grew up in the American Midwest. She moved Commerce!’, ‘six thousand dollars’, ‘fifty to New York in 1986, when she had just turned thousand dollars’, ‘a hundred and fifty 18, to study at the Cooper Union School of Art. thousand dollars’, ‘one point six million a He has recalled that going to art school left her year’, ‘tons of money, they’re great people!’. disillusioned with ‘the exclusionary politics of the visual arts industry’, leading her to focus Someone in one of the sound bites who wants to instead on cultural theory and acknowledge ‘the Stonewall drag queens and (although her work has increasingly been transgender people who started the whole shown in exhibition contexts in recent years, movement in New York in 1969’ is promptly cut [10] including at Documenta 14 in 2017). short by the presenters.[11] By the end of the two minute and fourty-six second track, it is clear Living in the East Village in the late ‘80s, that within this noisy embrace of the previously Thaemlitz also became involved in safer-sex silenced, there is also active erasure, as well as educational outreach and other forms of completely unchecked continuation of HIV/AIDS activism, including with the direct- transphobia, and general contempt for action group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to nonconformity. One nervous exchange between Unleash Power). He started DJ-ing at activist the presenters goes like this: ‘they’re benefits under the name DJ Sprinkles, which cosmetically enhanced’, ‘um, excuse me?’ was in part a tribute to sex work performance ‘apparently they’ve had … things … done to artist Annie Sprinkle, who was doing her live themselves … surgically’, ‘ok, well I think it’s feminist sex shows and safer sex workshops in about time that we can take a break here’. downtown New York at the time. By 1992, Thaemlitz was recording his own tracks, and in Against any sort of sweeping progress narrative 1993 he started the record label Comatonse that would draw a simple equation between the Recordings. acquisition of cultural visibility and queer liberation, Theamlitz notes that heightened Thaemlitz left New York in 1997, moving her visibility can at times not only coincide with but studio and label to Oakland, California – and in also occlude continued and newly targeted 2001 she moved to Japan, where she still lives. procedures of marginalisation.[12] ‘Concealed by He has described his time in the Bay Area in the the mist of our newfound love and late ‘90s as his ‘activist burn-out phase’, and it reconciliation with the “public,”’ she writes in was during these years that she produced her the Love For Sale essay, ‘there has been a most explicit and most searing critique of the corollary increase in legislation and police emergent gay and lesbian mainstream – and the activity against the Queer community, new Pink Economy – with the Love For Sale

The Contemporary Journal ‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of [3/7] Sonic Continuum Silence - Amelia Groom particularly in relation to “public sex” and points out that when the content of a work is cruising.[…] The Gay and Lesbian mainstream explicitly queer and explicitly anti-religious, silently scrambles to distance itself from such and when people who collaborated on the work acts, giving way to the pretense that police live in contexts where association with that sort sweeps are serving a “public interest” – a public of content could incriminate or otherwise whose interests supposedly include those endanger them, preventing the work from served by the Pink Economy.’[13] circulating freely online can help to minimise risk. In more recent years, Thaemlitz has refused the logics of maximal exposure by trying to The Naisho Wave Manifesto also considers how prevent his own releases from being openly audio sampling practices have become shared through online platforms like YouTube increasingly risky for artists, with corporations and SoundCloud. ‘Protect the unusual and using scanning software to identify controlled minor!’ reads a pop-up window at her content that has been posted online. Strategies homepage, which asks fans to refrain from of silence and withholding are again crucial for uploading her work for free circulation. ‘Terre protecting critical subcultural practices, when wishes to keep ‘queer’ audio and media their existence depends on remaining functioning queerly, contextually, and with undetected by corporate interests, and surviving smallness’, the announcement says. instead through small-scale, context-specific ‘Indiscriminate file sharing, YouTube and appreciation. ‘This is why something seemingly SoundCloud grant too much exposure with too innocent, like posting a list online of all the little precision’.[14] samples used in one’s favourite underground dance track, is a horrible tribute’, Thaemlitz In his Naisho Wave Manifesto (Secrecy Wave notes. ‘Horrible in that it is intended as a Manifesto) – which was first published in 2014 – display of one’s intimate understanding of a Thaemlitz writes about how his removal subculture, when in actuality it betrays a total requests through these online corporate lack of understanding for how to protect and platforms end up being misunderstood as cultivate subcultures’.[17] copyright claims or legal reassertions of authorship, when really they are about Paradoxically – or, to use a word Thaemlitz maintaining the protective tools of ‘secrecy, often claims for her own practice, closets, invisibility and silence’ that were hypocritically – there’s a lot of language going historically cultivated by queer communities as on within the artist’s strategies of silence. He means of self-defence within dominant cultural has tracks with titles like Meditation on Wage spaces.[15] Labor and the Death of the Album (Sprinkles’ Unpaid Overtime), and once gave a conference Practices of openly sharing content online presentation with the title Please tell my might feel generous and celebratory, but landlord not to expect future payments because Thaemlitz insists that such indiscriminate Attali’s theory of surplus-value-generating distribution can mean that things end up in the information economics only works if my home wrong hands. ‘Randomly uploading things for studio’s rent and other use-values are zero. Her anyone, anywhere – including homophobes, songs can feature extended spoken word transphobes, misogynists and religious segments; albums are often amply annotated; fundamentalists – does not make uploaders the liner notes become long critical essays. Far all-giving sweethearts they imagine themselves from being a silence of serenity, vagueness, or [16] to be’, she writes. In one example, Thaemlitz detachment from the social, Thaemlitz’s is a

The Contemporary Journal ‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of [4/7] Sonic Continuum Silence - Amelia Groom confrontational silence which marks a totally erased that context with her lyrics, “It withdrawal from dominant regimes of makes no difference if you’re black or white, if visibility; an insistence that not everything is you’re a boy or a girl”’.[20] best served by achieving the widest possible reach; and a commitment to context specificity. While Madonna’s Vogue became the world’s best-selling single in 1990, Thaemlitz recalls She is best known for her musical output within that ‘the Queen who actually taught her how to the registers of deep house and contemporary vogue sat before me in the club, strung out, ambience, but he refuses associations of depressed and broke’. If anyone requested a universalism and transcendental escapism in Madonna track during a DJ Sprinkles set, he such genres – and his use of language within would tell them, ‘No, this is a Madonna-free and around the music is part of her insistence zone! And as long as I’m DJ-ing, you will not be on contextual precision and non-universality. allowed to vogue to the decontextualized, Take, for instance, DJ Sprinkles’ celebrated reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, debut full-length album Midtown 120 Blues asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection of (2008), which is a deep house album shot this dance floor’s reality!’.[21] through with a corrective treatise on deep house’s origins – and a meditation on the In 2006, the audio art/activist collective Ultra- erasure of those origins in the genre’s embrace red asked Thaemlitz to contribute to their free by mainstream culture. As Thaemlitz narrates download compilation album A Silence Broken, in a digitally processed spoken word segment in for which a number of electronic musicians the opening track, ‘The contexts from which the were invited to work with Ultra-red’s field Deep House sound emerged are forgotten: recordings from a queer protest in LA in the [22] sexual and gender crises, transgendered sex year 2000. In response, Thaemlitz as DJ work, black market hormones, drug and Sprinkles produced a hypnotic ten-minute+ alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, deep house track called Hush Now (DJ Sprinkles ACT-UP, Thompkins Sq. Park, police brutality, Broken Record Mix), whose fragmentary, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment repetitive sonic layers include the voices of and censorship – all at 120 beats per minute.’[18] protestors chanting ‘silence equals death’ in unison, the crackling sounds of a broken During the early ‘90s, DJ Sprinkles was a record, and a looped vocal sample with the resident DJ at queer voguing balls thrown by words ‘hush now’ sung on loop. Sally Maggio’s ‘House Of Magic’ at Sally’s II, a trans sex worker club off Times Square in pre- ‘Hush now’ is what the dominant culture says to corporatised midtown Manhattan.[19] The third its assimilating dissidents as it becomes more track on the Midtown 120 Blues album, Ball’r inclusive for them, but the same words can also (Madonna-Free Zone), addresses Madonna’s hit be an anti-assimilationist invitation, where single Vogue, and its decontextualising silence can equal refuge from the incessant appropriation of ballroom culture. Refusing the demand to become legible through a equation of visibility with empowerment, reproduction of the dominant culture’s terms… Thaemlitz’s concern here is with what became Beyond a binary logic where silence is set up in invisibilised through voguing’s increased opposition to sound, there is space for visibility, noting (in a spoken word layer of the amplification and proclamation as well as track, and in the liner notes) that Madonna ‘had coded, disguised, whispered and withheld taken a very specifically queer, transgendered, speech – recalling Thaemlitz’s proposal, back Latino and African-American phenomenon and in 1998, for queer sound as ‘an irresolvable

The Contemporary Journal ‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of [5/7] Sonic Continuum Silence - Amelia Groom sound which declares its presence at the same [8] time it eviscerates itself’.[23] For historical accounts of this process of assimilation, see for instance Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, (Los Angeles and Cite this piece as: London: University of California Press, 2013), or That’s Groom, Amelia. ‘‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. the Languages of Silence’. The Contemporary Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008). Journal 3 (May 24, 2021).

[https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/strands/soni [9] c-continuum/hush-now-terre-thaemlitz-and-the- languages-of-silence]. Terre Thaemlitz, Ultra-red’s A Silence Broken liner notes: http://www.ultrared.org/publicrecord/archive/2-04/2-04- 001/2-04-001.pdf [1] [10] See for example the image for the event series Fearless Speech at Hebbel am Ufer: Terre Thaemlitz, Profile: https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/archive/fearless-spee https://www.comatonse.com/thaemlitz/profile_more.html ch/ [11] [2] While the central role played in the Stonewall uprising by Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1: An drag queens and trans women of colour like Marsha P. Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Johnson and Sylvia Rivera is still often whitewashed out of Books, 1978), 33. historical accounts, Sarah Schulman recalls that Donald Suggs once said to her, ‘The drag queens who started [3] Stonewall are no better off today, but they made the world safe for gay Republicans.’ Schulman, The Gentrification of Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 27. the Mind, 115.

[4] [12] Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 101. Gestures towards inclusion do not on their own equal structural change: While Time magazine optimistically [5] declared the ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ in the year 2014 Terre Thaemlitz, ‘Naisho Wave Manifesto (Secrecy Wave – with a cover story celebrating increased trans visibility – Manifesto)’, Afterall 41 (Spring/Summer 2016), 38–45. the US saw record numbers of known murders committed Revised and abridged version of a text previously against transgender people, most of them trans women of published in the bilingual Japanese journal Farben 1 (June colour. See Audrey Silvestre, ‘Me Vestí De Reina: Trans We Are Not 2014), 1–27. and Queer Sonic Spatial Entitlement’, Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the ed. Leisy J. [6] Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales (Durham and Terre Thaemlitz, ‘HIV/AIDS 101’, Comatonse, 1993, London: Duke University Press, 2020),168-189. http://comatonse.com/hivaids101/ [13] [7] Thaemlitz, Love For Sale. Terre Thaemlitz, ‘Love for Sale: Taking Stock in Our Pride’, Comatonse, 1998, [14] http://www.comatonse.com/writings/love.html Terre Thaemlitz, homepage pop-up window: http://comatonse.com/popup_youtube.html

The Contemporary Journal ‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of [6/7] Sonic Continuum Silence - Amelia Groom [15]

Thaemlitz, Naisho Wave Manifesto, 40.

[16]

Thaemlitz, Naisho Wave Manifesto, 44.

[17]

Thaemlitz, Naisho Wave Manifesto, 43.

[18]

Terre Thaemlitz, Midtown 120 Blues, Comatonse, 2008. https://www.comatonse.com/writings/2008_midtown120 blues.html

[19]

The club was forced to close in 1997, after the city of New York effectively sold Times Square and the western end of 42nd Street to Disney. In 1998, DJ Sprinkled released his 12” Vinyl EP Sloppy 42nds: A Tribute to the 42nd Street Transsexual Clubs Destroyed by Walt Disney’s Buyout of Times Square.

[20]

Thaemlitz, Midtown 120 Blues.

[21]

Thaemlitz, Midtown 120 Blues.

[22]

Ultra-red, A Silence Broken, Public Record Archive 2.04.001, 2016. http://www.ultrared.org/publicrecord/archive/2-04/2-04- 001/2-04-001.html

[23]

Thaemlitz, Love For Sale.

The Contemporary Journal ‘Hush Now’: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of [7/7] Sonic Continuum Silence - Amelia Groom