A PROGRAM OF MIX – THE NEW YORK LESBIAN & GAY EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL Interviewee: Christine Vachon Interview Number: 177 Interviewer: Sarah Schulman Date of Interview: February 26, 2015 © 2015 The New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival, Inc. ACT UP Oral History Project Interview of Christine Vachon February 26, 2015 SARAH SCHULMAN: Have you looked at the website? CHRISTINE VACHON: Have I looked at the website? Not in a long time. SS: But you get the basic idea. We ask you about your entire life. CV: You ask me about my entire life? Okay. Alright as long as we’re done by 4. SS: We’ll be done. It’s about who people were before they came to ACT UP and all that kind of thing. CV: Okay SS: So look at me. CV: Okey doke. SS: So we start. You tell us your name, today’s date, your age, and where we are. CV: My name is Christine Vachon. Today is February 26th, 2015. I am in my office at Union Square. SS: And how old are you? CV: Oh, I forgot that part. I’m fifty-three years old. SS: Okay. Now, you’re a native New Yorker, right? CV: I am. I grew up in Manhattan. SS: And what did your parents do? Christine Vachon Interview 2 February 26, 2015 CV: My father was a photographer, most notably an FSA photographer, but by the time I came around, he was a Look photographer for Look magazine, and my mother was a French teacher at the Columbia School of Continuing Education and then at Juilliard and Purchase, and then eventually worked for the United Nations. SS: Okay. Are you bilingual? CV: Not really, but I am bi-passportal. SS: Okay. CV: I’m a dual citizen. SS: Oh, you are? CV: Yeah. SS: So would you think that you were brought up with particular values about community, intervention, social justice? CV: Well, I mean, I think if you grew up in the sixties, in the seventies, it was certainly more part of the fabric than it is now. I mean, Manhattan was a very different kind of place, and my parents were very, very liberal, so I think it had a fairly strong effect on how I viewed our place in our world. SS: Were they politically active? CV: Yes. I mean, my father, you know, he was a photographer, so he was at Selma. He was at many of the defining moments. He took pictures of people like Kennedy and—I don’t know if he ever took pictures of Martin Luther King, but he very well could have. That was his—he was a photojournalist. So I don’t know if that is politically active or not. Christine Vachon Interview 3 February 26, 2015 SS: Did they ever take you to demonstrations? CV: I remember—I had an older sister also, who’s twelve years older than me, so she was right in the middle of that. I don’t remember going to demonstrations necessarily, but I remember knowing about them and seeing them. I went to demonstrations, myself, by the time I was a teenager. SS: In high school. CV: Yes. SS: Do you remember what they were for? CV: What was our issue then? Wasn’t it anti-nuke? SS: It could have been. CV: Yeah, I think that was it. SS: So what do you think came first for you, being queer or having a political sensibility? CV: I mean, having a political sensibility for sure, because I didn’t really decide what I was until, like, my mid-twenties. But I had a pretty strong sense of what my politics were way before then. SS: Before high school or in high school? CV: I mean, I don’t remember much before high school, to be honest. I went to LaGuardia, to the Fame high school, and, in fact, I was there when they were shooting Fame, and I guess one thing at LaGuardia that was pretty—and I didn’t realize how unusual this was, to be honest. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place, before or since, that was as truly mixed in every sense of word, race, class, economic level, and Christine Vachon Interview 4 February 26, 2015 00:05:00 everybody was united by a common passion for art or music or—so it just broke down barriers in a way that I’ve never really experienced since. It’s had a profound effect on my life. I went there—you know, that was the battle days of New York City when, you know, there were forty kids to a classroom, and often not enough books to go around, but everyone was just dying to be in a place that celebrated. SS: What was your art form at LaGuardia? CV: I was an artist. SS: You were like a painter? CV: You got in on a portfolio and then you had to go through a fairly strenuous series of courses in ceramics, graphic design, etc. I think by your last year, you got to declare that you were a painter or whatever or a sculptor, but— SS: So do you think that art and politics were linked for you from the beginning? CV: Maybe they were. My older sister was an experimental filmmaker, so I did—I got to go and see her work at the Collective for Living Cinema and kind of understand this idea that how radical it was for a film not to be narrative. Of course, I was also like, “That is so not for me.” But I understood this whole notion, and I think that was a fairly—the idea that there wasn’t some set way a movie had to be was a pretty profound one. SS: So when did you start getting involved in any kind of organized politics? Did you do anything before ACT UP? Christine Vachon Interview 5 February 26, 2015 CV: Well, does it count that my brother and I campaigned for McGovern when we were ten and eleven? SS: Yeah, that counts. CV: And, you know, our universe was so small. It was the Upper West Side of Manhattan, that it didn’t occur to us that he would lose, because I think that’s the only place where he didn’t. SS: Right. He got all his votes from the Upper West Side. Then you famously went to Brown. CV: I did. SS: Now, where did that take you in terms of this sort of sexuality, art, politics relationship? CV: Well, I got to Brown. I don’t remember much about my first year, to be honest. I mean, I probably did what most freshmen did, which is drink and do a lot of drugs. But my second year, I started to get involved in semiotics, or maybe by the second half of my freshman year. And again, at that time semiotics was such a radical notion, which now seems ridiculous because it’s so integrated into our vocabulary, especially as artists, but at the time it was considered so radical that if deconstructionism sort of even crept its way into your papers for other classes, it was like an automatic fail. There was a lot of, like, defensiveness around, like, the new ways and the old ways. SS: What was inherent—what was radical about semiotics? CV: I guess it was really this notion that you could break something down along political lines and not just—you know, that a poem wasn’t just about emotion or Christine Vachon Interview 6 February 26, 2015 that a book couldn’t just stand on its own as just a piece of literature that was part of a whole like cultural tableau, that was political, that did bear—where race and sex and feminism, everything, you know, all of that, the whole potpourri could be brought to bear, and that you could see a text in so many different ways. And then it was much more like you saw the text in terms of what the author meant, and this notion that it doesn’t matter what the author meant was a very radical idea. SS: But do you still feel that way? CV: Do I still feel what way? SS: It doesn’t matter what the author meant. CV: I mean, I do and I don’t. I mean, the fact is when we make a movie, I’m well aware that once you make it, it doesn’t really matter what you meant to say. What matters is what people hear, and that works on a million different levels. I mean, Still Alice, obviously, you know, for a lot of people it’s about seeing their same relationship that they had with a loved one that they lost to Alzheimer’s. For other people, it’s a text about, you know, upper-middle-class people and their problems, and they’re not interested in it. That’s like that’s how it exists in the world, and I’m totally fine with that. SS: Okay. So there was no irony in Brown, this very exceptional Ivy League school, being the place that semiotics entered into our generation? CV: I don’t know. I mean, probably there was, but, you know, it probably just went right over my head, you know. 00:10:00 SS: All right. So when did you first become aware of HIV? Christine Vachon Interview 7 February 26, 2015 CV: I remember—this I remember very clearly.