'HPRQVWUDWLRQVRI&DUH7KH$FW8S2UDO+LVWRULHVRQ 9LGHR 'HEUD/HYLQH GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 3, 2010, pp. 441-444 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\'XNH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v016/16.3.juhasz_sub04.html Access provided by New York University (7 Jul 2015 14:09 GMT) Mo v in g I ma g e Re v ie w MOVING PICTURES AIDS on Film and Video Paul Sendziuk In May 2008 we participated in the “AIDS/ART/WORK” conference held at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and presented by Visual AIDS and CLAGS, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. The conference was intended to be a “starting point for continuing dialogue between artists, activists, and workers engaged in health promotion and HIV prevention.”1 We decided to commission this Moving Image Review to further this worthy project in our current atmosphere of stifled or forgotten conversation on the subject, and asked Paul Sendziuk, the organizer and convener of “AIDS/ART/WORK,” to guest edit the section. He brought a fresh vision and enthusiasm to U.S. AIDS studies, coming from a younger generation than most of the field’s authorities (people who lived and organized through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s), another continent (Australia, where his 2003 book Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS was short-listed for the 2004 Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction), and the position of a heterosexual male scholar. Paul commissioned new work from a diverse group of scholar/artist/ activists who chose to look back at AIDS media of the past with the wisdom, melancholy, yearning, and desire of our present. We are pleased to see the results of his efforts. The combined articles remind us of the necessity of making and remembering art not just about the past of AIDS, and all we have lost, but also about the now of AIDS: a time and place where we still hunger for the community, conversation, and inspiration that media is so well suited to produce. —Alexandra Juhasz and Ming-Yuen S. Ma GLQ 16:3 DOI 10.1215/10642684-2009-038 © 2010 by Duke University Press 430 430 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION The emergence of the AIDS epidemic at the start of the 1980s coincided with the growing accessibility of one of the most powerful tools used to fight the disease and the public’s panic-stricken response: the video camera. Video and film became a way to bear witness and make sense of the epidemic and the loss of our lovers and friends. Cameras provided comfort by helping us memorialize and remember, but they also created images that were used to challenge the often ignorant and homophobic representations of the disease and of people with HIV/AIDS that were circulating. In the absence of a response from Hollywood, independent and activist video makers and filmmakers provided vital information about how to prevent transmission of the virus and sought to end the ostracism of and discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS. The short texts presented here provide an overview of the videos and films that were produced (particularly in the epidemic’s first decade) and that have subsequently been appropriated and reworked by contemporary filmmakers for a variety of purposes, not least to contemplate the “post-AIDS” condition and the waning of radical AIDS activism in North America and elsewhere. In re-viewing these works from a distance, the authors themselves have revised old assumptions about the nature of these films and videos and the people and the activist movement that they depict. Jim Hubbard, for example, in seeking to articulate the different strategies and aesthetic of AIDS activist video as opposed to film, finds some surprising similarities. Debra Levine, reviewing preserved tapes of ACT UP demonstrations and placing these alongside the more recently produced ACT UP oral history videos, concludes that participants in the demonstrations were driven by a compulsion to demonstrate kindness and care toward their fellow ACT UP members as much as they were motivated by anger and desperation (as their actions have been commonly interpreted). I provide a reassessment of the merits of Philadelphia, Hollywood’s first big-budget film to address the topic of AIDS and homosexuality but long reviled by AIDS and gay activists, arguing for the need to temper our judgments by understanding the historical circumstances of its production and its intended mainstream audience. Roger Hallas provides a counterpoint by acknowledging the less-recognized independent and experimental filmmakers, whose small, predominantly gay and lesbian audiences were grateful for films that helped them consolidate their community and understand what AIDS was doing to it. AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO QUEER AIDS MEDIA AND THE QUESTION OF THE ARCHIVE Roger Hallas AIDS has generated both a vast body of audiovisual representation and an even greater mass of experience, knowledge, and history yet to be documented. Archival projects have burgeoned across the globe to collect, preserve, and archive political, artistic, and medical knowledge about HIV/AIDS. In fact, an ongoing project of AIDS cultural activism is the imperative to build an archive of AIDS knowledge otherwise neglected, marginalized, suppressed, or forgotten. In this short essay, I consider how this archival imperative has manifested itself within queer AIDS media in different ways in the three decades since the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Much of the work of the past decade has focused on preserving and reframing earlier AIDS cultural activism, including the production of oral histories, the collection and preservation of films and videos, and the appropriation and reworking of these materials in new works of memory and retrospection. However, the first two decades of queer AIDS media were also engaged in an archival imperative, but of a different sort: to marshal a range of representational archives as a way for AIDS cultural activism to articulate historical consciousness as well as political immediacy. The recent preoccupation of queer film and video with 1970s gay liberation and the archive of its sexual culture further complicates our complex relationship to multiple pasts, before and during the AIDS pandemic. The archiving of queer AIDS media began in earnest in the mid-1990s when film archivist Jim Hubbard undertook the collection and preservation of AIDS activist videos in a project funded by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the works of artists with AIDS across different media.2 The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division houses this collection that includes over 650 tapes of completed works and raw footage that cover the years between 1983 and 2000. As the largest collection of AIDS activist video in the world, it is now one of the division’s most requested collections. Hubbard has subsequently collaborated with author and activist Sarah Schulman on the ACT UP Oral History Project, which aims to produce a testimonial archive of all surviving members of ACT UP New York that will provide a history of the organization and its achievements told by its own members. 3 The film producer Staffan Hildebrand and his Swedish-based nonprofit organization, Face of AIDS Foundation, have constructed a “global AIDS 431 432 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES film archive,” which now incorporates over sixty documentaries and nine hundred hours of unedited footage from forty-two countries, covering a wide range of issues including medical science, treatment access, prevention, and activism.4 In the years around the turn of the millennium, AIDS video activists such as Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Richard Fung, Alexandra Juhasz, and James Wentzy revisited their own archives of sounds and images they’d recorded barely a decade previously. Their purpose was to contemplate the historical change that had come to pass in that time, namely, the waning of radical AIDS activism in North America and the increasing normalization of AIDS in the global North.5 For instance, Carlomusto’s Shatzi Is Dying (2000) develops a complex autobiographical meditation on mortality, memory, and queer relationality in light of AIDS activist burnout. As she and her lover, Jane Rosett, witness their beloved Doberman, Shatzi, undergo an attenuated process of dying, they keep returning to their personal archive of activism to reflect on the nature of experiencing loss and mortality that have so profoundly shaped their lives over the past two decades.6 Fung’s poetic and deeply moving video essay Sea in the Blood (2000) also explores his own archive of personal photographs, family home movies, and AIDS activist images to work through the experience of having lived most of his life in the shadow of another’s illness. Throughout the video, he parallels his two most intimate relationships: with his sister Nan, who died of thalassemia (literally “sea in the blood”) in 1977, and with his lover, Tim McGaskell, who has been seropositive since 1980. Fung subtly traces how these two experiences of living intimately with another’s illness have mutually informed one another on personal as well as cultural levels. Such parallax contemplation provides Fung with the opportunity to finally bear witness to his experience of Nan’s death over twenty years after the event. Yet in our concern with the need to preserve a testimonial archive and to reflect on how its acts of witnessing have transformed with the passage of time, we should not forget that alternative AIDS media have engaged with the question of the archive since their very beginnings in the early 1980s. In my new book, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, I argue that the archive has been an ongoing preoccupation for queer AIDS media in their commitment to bear witness to the epidemic.7 It has frequently provided a historical frame to situate acts of AIDS testimony in social and political terms, and thus prevent them from slipping into universalizing or pathologizing frames that render them merely acts of individual confession. One of the very first works of alternative AIDS media, Stuart Marshall’s documentary Bright Eyes (1984), sought to historicize dominant AIDS representation by reading it in relation to the archive AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO of nineteenth-century medical photography, which was founded on the medium’s purported capacity for picturing the truth of deviance. As Bright Eyes illustrates, it was this moralizing visual discourse that print and television journalism would revive so vociferously in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. A decade later, John Greyson’s AIDS musical Zero Patience (1993) uses the archives of medical history and modern visual technology to contest the discursive construction of the French Canadian gay man Gaetan Dugas as “Patient Zero,” the alleged origin of the epidemic in North America. Mike Hoolboom’s films excavate the archive of popular culture (from 1960 adverts to Michael Jackson videos) to articulate the shared structures of feeling that arise from the corporeal experience of living with AIDS, while Marlon Riggs’s No Regret (Non, je ne regrette rien) (1992) draws from the archive of the civil rights movement and African American oral culture to forge an empowering discursive space for black gay men living with HIV/AIDS.8 The increasing attention of recent queer film and video to the gay liberation era of the 1970s has not only resuscitated its historical archive but also reframed the meanings of that archive in light of the normalizing discourses around both AIDS and gay identity in contemporary U.S. culture. Although much has been said about the resonance of Gus van Sant’s Milk (2008) with the contemporary political imperatives created by Proposition 8 in California, the film also engenders a powerful elegiac quality rooted in its seamless incorporation of archival images of the Castro and its immaculate historical mise-en-scène based on that visual archive. This mourning for a generation and for an era in gay life, and not merely for Harvey Milk himself, is paradoxically enhanced by the narrative frame in which Milk (Sean Penn) testifies to his imminent death. Mortality thus hangs over the film’s depiction of gay culture of the 1970s, which, in conventional biopic fashion, Milk embodies. Despite Penn’s dynamic performance as Milk, the film engenders a certain museological quality that embalms and obscures the period’s sexual energy through van Sant’s tight adherence to the look of the past preserved in its visual archive. By contrast, Nguyen Tan Hoang’s experimental video short K.I.P. (2001) offers a more explicit act of mourning the sexual culture of gay liberation: the young gay video maker records his faint reflection on a television screen that is showing a condom-free sex scene from classic gay porn starring Kip Noll (the iconic gay porn star of the late 1970s). K.I.P. recalls Warhol’s Blow Job (1964) in that we see only Hoang’s head and shoulders as he responds erotically to the images before him. Like those of Warhol’s actor, Hoang’s facial expressions remain deeply ambiguous, suggesting at times ecstasy, pain, and sorrow. As the on-screen sex moves toward climax, Hoang opens his mouth wide. The ghostly reflected 433 434 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES image of his open mouth waiting to catch Noll’s cum in the money shot crystallizes the sense of loss experienced by gay men of Hoang’s generation, who have never tasted another man’s cum or enjoyed condom-free sex without the specter of HIV. Hoang presents a fantasy of intergenerational sexual communion, but one that, as the title’s mournful connotation suggests, tragically exists only in the superimposition of images on a screen. Continuing the fascination with gay liberation–era porn, William E. Jones’s found footage film v.o. (2006) unearths what he calls a “certain morbid glamour” within the archive of 1970s and early 1980s gay culture by mashing up interstitial and nonexplicit scenes from porn classics by Joe Gage, William Higgins, Fred Halsted, and others with soundtracks taken from obscure European art films, such as Werner Schroeter’s Death of Maria Malibran (1971), Manoel de Oliveira’s Doomed Love (1978), and Raoul Ruiz’s Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1978).9 Jones contends, “I didn’t impose this mood on the material I used; it was already there. An apparently arbitrary intervention — lifting the non-sexual scenes and pairing them with dialogue in foreign languages — reveals how obsessive and dark these movies really were. Years before the AIDS crisis, porn films embodied tendencies contrary to the affirmation and sexual arousal that were their stated aims.”10 In its documentary treatment of the ephemeral details of the places, objects, looks, and gestures that make up the mise-en-scène of gay porn in its supposed golden era, v.o. performs a certain ethnography of queer desire in that era, filled with inscrutable moments of tense waiting, lonely wandering, and inexplicable departure. In the film’s penultimate scene, for instance, two naked young men are lying asleep, presumably postcoitus, on a plush rug in front of a fireplace. As one of them quickly dresses and surreptitiously leaves, the subtitles of the Portuguese dialogue on the soundtrack read, “I may not see the light of day tomorrow. Everything about me has the color of death. The cold of my tomb seems to be running through my blood and bones.” As the abandoned lover awakes, he anxiously picks up the phone, and we continue to the listen to the dialogue from Doomed Love: “Only the fear of losing you brings me to death. What is left of the past to me is the courage to seek a death worthy of me and you.” The poignant cinephilia of v.o. thus bears witness not only to a lost generation of gay men (including many of the porn actors in the films themselves) but also to a lost gay culture, which included an experimentally oriented porn tradition deeply committed to sexual and aesthetic transgression. Although Joseph Lovett’s popular documentary Gay Sex in the 70s (2005) offers a brighter portrait of the era, its precredit sequence wistfully frames the subsequent interviews and archival images with two gay artists discussing their AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO own personal archives of the era. Presenting a pile of porcelain fragments with photographs of friends and lovers on them, Barton Benes describes the artwork as “pottery chards, memories of a civilization.” Cut to African American photographer Alvin Baltrop in his overflowing home as he flips through a pile of his black-and-white documentary photographs of the West Side Piers in the 1970s. He laments, “Photographs everywhere, I can’t get rid of them. This whole house, the back room is worse. Nothing but stacks of photographs. I don’t go back there.” His archive may have become unbearable to him, but he is also inseparable from it.11 The sequence’s final shot captures the tension between exuberance and unforeseeable loss that runs throughout the film as Baltrop describes the photograph he is holding by implicitly acknowledging its pre-9/11 cityscape: “The Twin Towers, the West Side Highway, the elevated structure. The trucks went under the highway so there were people running here having sex, running over to these buildings having sex.” Given their inclination to frame the gay liberation era and its visual archive by impending loss, how do these recent queer films avoid replicating the ideological assumption that the gay culture of the 1970s constituted the pathological and teleological precondition of the AIDS crisis? The answer, I argue, lies in the complex historicity of the AIDS pandemic as it approaches its fourth decade. In our normalized, “post-AIDS” era, the archive of the gay 1970s provides a palimpsestic and potentially revelatory image of historical difference that no longer rests on the singular distinction between the AIDS epidemic and the time before it. It offers the opportunity to contemplate our own complicated historical difference with the more recent past of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s — to consider the historical condition of an afterward — without resorting to a mythologizing discourse of “the end of AIDS.” The question of the archive is thus in the end not whether it succeeds in preserving the past from oblivion but how the past that eventually emerges from it can potentially produce a revelatory historical consciousness of our present. 435 436 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES CONTEMPLATION AND URGENCY: DIFFERING STRATEGIES OF FILMMAKERS AND VIDEO MAKERS CONFRONTING AIDS Jim Hubbard For a long time, I believed that inherent differences between film and video fostered divergent responses to the AIDS crisis. Film takes longer to make, and the films about AIDS made in the late 1980s tended to be more contemplative and personal. When they dealt with political issues, they tended to be ideological or theoretical. The videos of this era, however, tended to be more of the moment and directly political; that is, they analyzed specific political situations and insisted on specific solutions. I can best explain my view of the differences between film and video by recounting my own experiences. I first began filming the lesbian and gay movement in 1979. I went to a national meeting in Philadelphia to organize the first Lesbian and Gay March on Washington. At the beginning of the meeting, there was a vociferous forty-five-minute debate about whether there should be cameras allowed at all. Some people felt that this was a historic event that should be documented. Others believed that they would lose their jobs or their children if it became known that they were homosexual. It was decided that people who didn’t want to be photographed would sit on the right side of the meeting hall and those who didn’t mind would sit on the left. By the end of the weekend, no one was sitting on the right side of the hall. Over the next eight years, I filmed many lesbian and gay demonstrations and meetings — first in Super-8 and later in 16-mm film. I was often the only person in attendance with a camera. From time to time, I was also accused of being a spy from the FBI. While I remained aware of the historical nature of the events I filmed, I never succumbed to a reportorial approach. I always processed my own film and continued to transform and play around with color. I was more interested in expressionistic and metaphorical uses of the footage than in simply documenting what went on. When I began making a film about AIDS around 1983, I certainly didn’t want to portray AIDS in the manner of the mainstream media, by representing it as a shameful disease or by representing people with AIDS as victims dying of a horrible, disfiguring, humanity-sapping disease. It was difficult, however, to AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO Figure 1. Seize Control of the FDA, from Elegy in the Streets (1989) by Jim Hubbard find alternative visual material. I tried filming a friend of mine with AIDS, but he quickly tired of having my camera in his life. Two events fundamentally affected my approach. First, in 1984 my exlover, Roger Jacoby, was diagnosed. As a filmmaker himself, Roger understood what it was like to be the subject of an experimental film, and he wanted to be filmed. I continued to film him until he died in November 1985. Then, in 1987, ACT UP suddenly appeared with an exciting, media-savvy visual style and began expressing its anger through public demonstrations. I knew how to film demonstrations. These two subjects entwined to form the public and private aspects of my film Elegy in the Streets (1989), a film that attempted to find a filmic equivalent of the elegiac form (fig. 1). It seemed to me that the elegy, the intent of which was to use the occasion of mourning the death of a friend to meditate on larger, often political issues, was the perfect form for dealing with the AIDS crisis. However, I was also highly invested in exploring the material, chemical nature of film and genuinely enjoyed processing my own film and discovering the alchemical metamorphoses of color I could produce. Furthermore, I was deeply dedicated to the experimental practice of working alone. This method made the process slow, and I liked it that way. I do not have easy access to my emotions, 437 438 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES and this slow processing gave me time to consider what I was creating and allowed my complicated feelings about AIDS to percolate through me and ultimately be reflected in the films. Of course, I wasn’t the only artist dealing with the AIDS crisis. A number of filmmakers were grappling with the epidemic, and, most important, a cadre of young video makers was earnestly and urgently documenting the crisis. At ACT UP demonstrations I may have been the only person with a film camera, but there were sometimes dozens of young people with video cameras recording the action. The films that I think most typify this early period of burning struggle with the crisis include A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. (1988) and Final Solutions (1990) by Jerry Tartaglia, An Individual Desires Solution (1986) by Larry Brose, Decodings (1988) by Michael Wallin, and my films Elegy in the Streets (1989), Two Marches (1991), The Dance (1992), and Memento Mori (1995). There are many videos, but they are epitomized by Testing the Limits (1987) by the collective of the same name, Like a Prayer (1990) and Target City Hall (1989) by DIVA TV, We Care (1990) by WAVE (Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise), and The Ashes Action (1995) by James Wentzy. Let me contrast certain aspects of these pieces that illuminate the differing approaches of filmmakers and video makers. The following discussion reduces each of these works, which are complex and multifaceted, to a single aspect and may, in this way, prove a little unfair to all of them. A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. and Testing the Limits both attack the mainstream belief that gay male sex was the root problem of AIDS. A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. assails the notion in a wholly emotional manner, using an angry voice-over (“Four out of five doctors agree: no sex for gay men!”) in combination with the sound of a European police siren and images of a naked, leather-masked man with a number tattooed on his side. Subtlety is not the point. Testing the Limits employs footage of a panel discussion with Simon Watney discussing in his proper English accent the policing of gay male desire. A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M. might be overwrought and Testing the Limits too decorous, but both effectively attack the pathologization of gay sex. An Individual Desires Solution and We Care are both about taking care of lovers with AIDS, yet these works could not be more different. An Individual begins with an extensive text taken from phone messages left by a former lover coping with AIDS. The second part consists of slow-motion footage of the lover playing the piano, doing various mundane things, and taking a train trip, all chemically treated so that they are very grainy, almost devoid of color, evoking memory and distance. The soundtrack consists of the phone messages distorted such that it is possible to discern words only after repeated viewings. AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO Figure 2. Marcia, Glenda, Juanita, and Alex, frame grab from VHS video of a video/support group meeting, from We Care (WAVE, 1990) We Care, made by a collective of seven women caregivers for people with AIDS, sets out various rules for humanely dealing with people with AIDS and quashes prejudicial myths about transmission (fig. 2). It contains an interview with a heterosexual couple — the wife plump and healthy and incredibly supportive; the husband, thin, undoubtedly sick, yet still handsome — clearly articulating their experience with the disease. It also contains an incredibly touching and remarkable section with a middle-aged African American woman identified only as Marie. She is HIV-positive and provides a tour of her apartment, showing what has changed and what has not. Her true courage in the face of evident vulnerability is immensely moving, even after many viewings. We Care is direct, technically crude, yet emotionally sophisticated. An Individual Desires Solution is indirect, sometimes obscure, but equally affecting and enlightening. Target City Hall is an interesting hybrid. It was made by DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television), an affinity group of ACT UP. DIVA TV consisted of as many as forty people, with a core group of about twelve. Having large groups of people taping at demonstrations yielded large quantities of video footage. But having large groups of people editing and collectively deciding on each cut was time consuming, so Target City Hall was divided into sections edited by different groups. There is an extended look at the affinity group CHER (which stands for Cute Hunks Examining Reality, Cathy Has Extra Rollers, and 439 440 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES a dozen other things). The cameraperson interviews members as they walk and skip toward City Hall. The camera then captures the discussion and vote about entering the street to stop traffic — a remarkable record of grassroots democracy in action. The affinity group joins hands and walks into the street. At first they chant, scream, and jump up and down. Then something formally unexpected happens. The images switch to slow motion, to still images, and eventually become black-and-white super-8 footage transferred to video. The soundtrack plays the late-1960s song “White Bird” by the group It’s a Beautiful Day, a surprisingly anachronistic choice for a group of twenty-two-year-olds usually more taken by contemporary rap songs. The black-and-white footage was shot by Zoe Leonard and Catherine (Saalfield) Gund and was primarily produced for their piece Keep Your Laws Off My Body (1990), a meditation on lesbian desire and government attempts to criminalize sexual behavior. The production of this video would not have been possible if done in Super-8 or 16-mm film, which had to be sent to the lab or laboriously hand processed and then edited on rewinds or a Steenbeck. Perhaps I’m projecting, but, it seems to me, the necessity of physically cutting and taping each splice would have slowed down the editing process even more and hindered the ability of the group to experiment with different editing strategies. Rather, Target City Hall became the product of a group of energetic young people who saw themselves as grassroots activists more than artists, who benefited from the collection of moving images from multiple video cameras and the ability to quickly review, edit, and manipulate those images. The films made by filmmakers ten or fifteen years older, working in a much slower medium, maintaining a practice that encouraged individuals to shoot and edit pieces alone, created a more poetic, philosophical set of moving images. The divide is not so vast when viewed from the present, some twenty years later. There are numerous films and videos that resist tidy classification. DHPG Mon Amour (1989) is a super-8 film that embodied many of the characteristics of AIDS activist videos and had an enormous influence on those video makers. Marlon Riggs had spent his entire career making television, yet Tongues Untied (1989) is thoughtful and precise in ways that AIDS video makers usually sacrificed in exchange for speed and immediacy. Furthermore, a fair number of AIDS activist video makers went on to make work that was more poetic and philosophical and yet still on videotape. Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) by Gregg Bordowitz, Schatzi Is Dying (2000) by Jean Carlomusto, and Video Remains (2005) by Alexandra Juhasz are examples that come readily to mind. Gregg and Jean were members of Testing the Limits and DIVA TV, and worked in the Audio Visual Department AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). Alex made tapes for GMHC’s cable access program Living with AIDS (1987–ca. 1995) and worked on We Care. They were at the very heart of the AIDS activist video movement. All have continued to deal with AIDS-related issues in their subsequent work. All of those tapes deal with mortality and memory in complex ways. It is hard to imagine that they would have been more meditative had they been working in film. DEMONSTRATIONS OF CARE: THE ACT UP ORAL HISTORIES ON VIDEO Debra Levine In May 2008 I began watching the ACT UP Oral History Project (AUOHP) on video as a durational performance piece. My goal in making “Enduring ACT UP” (deblevine.blogspot.com/) was to experiment with methods of interactive and performative archival engagement. For my performance studies–based dissertation about how members of ACT UP collectively took care of each other — during meetings and demonstrations, in committees and affinity groups, and especially as members became ill — it seemed that I needed to employ a research methodology that echoed ACT UP’s practice of collectivity. For the preceding year, I had been reading AUOHP transcripts and viewing interviews produced by the project’s codirectors, Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, on my own. But as a member of ACT UP from 1988 until 1993, I remembered that when we watched ourselves in both mainstream media and the videos and photographs that we produced ourselves, we watched everything in one another’s presence. Doing so was a way to generate a feeling of collectivity. Now, in my role as a researcher and scholar of the group, I acutely missed that feeling as I watched oral history tapes for my research project. I experienced an incredible urge to turn to someone, to debate many of the points made, to ask others to add information to the story, or just to get another person’s reaction. Therefore a major component of my endurance “performance” was to invite members of ACT UP, plus any others interested in the archive, to watch with me, and to “speak” back to the archive. Fifty to sixty participants joined me for whatever time period they could manage while I watched each two- to four-hour- 441 442 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES long interview in the order assigned by the archive. For two and a half weeks I watched approximately twelve hours of oral histories on video per day.12 What was profound about this experience of watching, both alone and with others, was that we all acknowledged how the conduct of the interviews and the structure of the interviewees’ narrative demonstrated that acts of kindness and care secured ACT UP’s communal survival. This was most often experienced through a constant turn of one testifying subject to another. That form of indexical behavior showed itself as a gesture of deferral and an offer of reconnection. It invites the present user of the archive to follow the links that in turn allow for a multiplicity of engagements that attach surviving voices to reconstructed narratives. The archive demonstrates how hundreds of activist bodies similarly attached to each other, keenly aware of their proximity to fellow activists’ impending death. Activists did what was necessary to ensure the survival of those members. But the meaning of survival before HAART (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy) was vague, and its definitional indeterminacy afforded members license to do things that now might seem peripheral, silly, indulgent, or somewhat perplexing. These acts should be reconsidered for how they offered — not hope exactly — but demonstrations of support. In viewing preserved tapes of the ACT UP demonstrations and placing these alongside the more recent oral history videos, it becomes clear that these acts were motivated not only by anger and desperation but by as strong a determination to demonstrate kindness and care. Several interviewees recalled the indomitable and loud presence of Bob Rafsky at every meeting and demonstration. Their stories directed me to an old video shot by ACT UP/DIVA TV member James Wentzy that documented an action at the headquarters of the pharmaceutical corporation Hoffman LaRoche in February 1993. The video features an interview with Bob, who, face and body covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, chained himself to a delivery truck and laid under it in subzero-degree weather. When asked how long he planned to remain there, he replied, “Until I feel that I’m going to lose a finger or toe.”13 At that moment, eschewing the hyperbolic temporality of a cure or what became the next best option, “chronic manageability,” time was measured in Bob’s ability to entertain the possibility of corporeal loss. The Oral History Project offers an even broader corporeal and temporal configuration of that event. The archive’s polyvocality allows us to “see” and “hear” more in that videotape — how other participating members of ACT UP became a body to support Bob’s determination to protest according to his own timetable. In ACT UP, civil disobedience training taught that care for another was about physical preservation certainly, but not at the expense of each member’s freedom to act politically. And given the wildly dif- AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO ferent levels of ability and agency experienced by ACT UP’s actors, the freedom to imagine and execute some of those ideas was never a solo endeavor but could be supported only by a coalition of differently abled bodies. Making this point more explicitly in his oral history on video, Jim Eigo acknowledges the many other bodies whose work was crucial to the successes often solely attributed to him. In particular, he speaks of Iris Long, a partner to his work, whom he fondly calls “a Queens housewife,” an ironic yet accurate title that accentuates the reality of her existence and belies the magnitude of her analytic contribution to the movement.14 In his interview, Eigo does not claim to speak on behalf of Long or suggest that his experience is representative of other ACT UP members. And in the Oral History Project, this becomes a performed ethic. In my mind, the most repeated phrase that intervened in a subject’s narrative was “did you speak to ___?” or “you should talk to ___” — an indexical show of an exponential network of support. As for the dead, they are most significantly marked in multiple testimonies by the naming of their presence at events and actions. But almost to a person, the interviewees refused to speak for them. In the archive they have become sites that bonded the people they touched and who touched them. Their absent presence multiplies as they are referenced by the objects and people who hold their memory, which now include the archive’s present users. Dedicating over 170 nearly continuous waking hours to witnessing the entire archive was often overwhelming and slightly trippy, but the extremity of the encounter offered an experience far in excess of historiography’s preoccupation with ACT UP — its actions, demonstration images, political failures, achievements, and just how many of the lesbians slept with gay men. What I have come to understand is that as well as shaking off the shackles of fixed sexual identities, relationships made in the doing of AIDS activism were the result of a willingness to share both brief and extended experiences of finitude. In her interview, Roma Baran explains, It was precisely my interest in his process of dying that made my friendship with him [Tom Cunningham, ACT UP administrator] so invaluable, because most people wanted to push that away and emphasize everything else that was still happening. And the fact that that [dying] was the most important thing happening to him and that’s what I wanted to focus on. And even more, that I wanted that and he could give it to me. As he was less and less able to give things to people that they wanted — whether it was to have the energy to go to a movie, or even the energy to have a 443 444 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES conversation, that he could give me what I wanted, which was to watch him go through dying. That he could give that to me he said was absolutely invaluable. And it spun me around, because I think for a lot of us — certainly for me — the fear of dying is about the fear of being alone, and the fear of having to hide your fear; the fear of having to be alone in the process of being afraid of it. And I watched Tom be completely — right till the end — be completely open, engaged, straightforward, in the moment and himself through the process. And it gave me the sense that it was possible to die that way.15 Indeterminate, “open, engaged” relationships like Roma and Tom’s, or Jim and Iris’s, or that which was exhibited through the Treatment Action Group supporting Bob Rafsky at Hoffman LaRoche, were common in ACT UP. These demonstrations of care existed at the limit of what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy understands as the work of community, which is a “being-with” at the death of another.16 Relationships that don’t “do” anything but make community were in excess of ACT UP’s political goals but were entirely a product of its politics. PHILADELPHIA OR DEATH Paul Sendziuk “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” quipped the American comedian and actor W. C. Fields when suggesting an epitaph for his gravestone. Critics of the 1993 film that shares the name of that city were of a different opinion; death seemed preferable to being in, or watching, Philadelphia, the first Hollywood studio–backed film to tackle the topic of AIDS and homosexuality. The perception that Philadelphia was a bad film, a missed opportunity, and that it misrepresented gay men and the experience of living with AIDS quickly became the established view, even while the film was garnering acclaim in Hollywood circles and winning awards for its lead actor, crew, and musicians. Yet to remember the film as a betrayal of the community it was depicting, and not as a key moment in the wakening of mainstream America’s consciousness of AIDS, would be unfair. In AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO the space generally allowed for a short film review, I offer here a defense, of sorts, of the film by focusing on the historical circumstances of its production and the audience for which it was principally made: moms and dads who consumed films in multiplexes rather than those by independent artists and activists at gay and lesbian film festivals, and young people, straight and gay, who lived outside the “gay ghettos” of America’s capital cities and similarly lacked connection with the independent and activist film scene. Philadelphia stars Tom Hanks as Andrew Beckett, a gay lawyer fired from his firm on trumped-up charges after it becomes known that he has AIDS. Rejected by nine lawyers on first approach, Beckett eventually wins a wrongfultermination suit with the help of a homo- and AIDS-phobic lawyer, Joe Miller, played by Denzel Washington. Miller is initially afraid to shake hands with Beckett and openly admits that gay people make him sick, but accepts that the law sees differently. For many gay and lesbian critics, this very premise was false. They found it inconceivable that Beckett could not have hired a sympathetic gay lawyer or gay-rights organization to take his case. The film is “not only absurd but grossly ahistorical,” argued Sarah Schulman, since “gay people built a world of services, advocacy organizations, and personal relationships in response to the epidemic that later became the foundation of support for HIV-infected heterosexuals. Gay lawyers were among the first professional sectors to respond.”17 The love and support extended by Beckett’s mother and father, siblings, and in-laws was also at odds with the rejection that many homosexuals and people with HIV/AIDS experienced in real life.18 Worse, according to some critics, was the conflation, yet again, of homosexuality and disease. The gay man whose lifestyle leads to his being infected with HIV and who eventually dies was the staple of television drama and made-for-TV movies in the epidemic’s first decade, and Philadelphia did little to shift this perception.19 The depiction of a well-to-do white gay man with AIDS obscured the fact that by 1993 AIDS had become a disease of the poor, heterosexual women of color, and drug users. 20 Had a Hollywood studio made the film five years earlier, instead of pretending that AIDS did not exist, its focus might have been better warranted. These complaints can be dismissed easily enough. It was important that Andrew Beckett was a gay man because Philadelphia was as much about exposing homophobia as it was about AIDS. The attitudes of the firm’s partners who stand trial are exposed as repugnant, and Miller’s preconceptions of gay men do not stand the test of engaging with Beckett and witnessing his enormous capacity to give and receive love. And the inclusion of an adoring and supportive extended family, if not the experience of the majority of homosexuals and people with AIDS, 445 446 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES was supposed to provide a model for audience members to begin caring once they left the cinema. More difficult to justify is the film’s sanitized portrayal of Andrew’s relationship with his lover, Miguel, played by Antonio Banderas. The two are barely afforded a kiss, never mind sleeping in the same bed. 21 Critics noted that while Miller is shown doing both with his wife, Miguel might as well be Andrew’s roommate, nurse, or brother. 22 In a film with ambition to improve the public’s acceptance of homosexuality, this rankled many. As Scott Thompson, of the Canadian cross-dressing quintet Kids in the Hall, told Richard Corliss, “If Hollywood is using this movie to make America love us, they are making them love a false image. I don’t want that kind of acceptance.”23 The film’s director and coproducer, Jonathan Demme, was unrepentant: “I made this movie for people like me: people who aren’t activists, people who are afraid of AIDS, people who have been raised to look down on gays. I feel we’ve connected with those people.”24 For the sake of communicating important messages about tolerance, discrimination, and HIV transmission, Andrew and Miguel’s private life needed to remain relatively private. “When we see two men kissing, we’re the products of our brainwashing — it knocks us back twenty feet. . . . I didn’t want to risk knocking our audience back twenty feet with images they’re not prepared to see.”25 In scathing reviews of the film, Larry Kramer, Roy Grundmann, and Peter Sacks accused Demme of underestimating the American public’s tolerance for the depiction of gay life on TV and film. 26 The furor surrounding the modest love scene in Brokeback Mountain, released some twelve years later, suggests that their optimism was misplaced. Demme’s own research indicated that he was already pushing the boundary. One man who attended a prerelease screening of the film in a working-class neighborhood near Baltimore told the director that the sight of Andrew and Miguel dancing check-to-shoulder made him physically ill.27 Truth is in the eye of the beholder, but I have always felt this scene of exquisite tenderness was more honest and, because of its poignancy, more confrontational for heterosexual audiences than any number of bouncing bare asses that featured in earlier and later films about gays. Philadelphia achieved its aim and played in Wichita, Kansas, as well as the East Village. It took in more than $120 million at the box office before being released on video, which suggests that significant numbers of straight people— perhaps previously lacking exposure to homosexuals or people with AIDS — came to care about their fate for the first time. President Bill Clinton and invited guests, including Demme, watched a private screening of the film at the White House — the same cannot be said for any other movie about AIDS that featured AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO gay characters. 28 Who can tell the impact this may have had on his administration? (Clinton disappointed many with his handling of AIDS and gay and lesbian issues, but he might have been much worse.) Philadelphia was not the movie for which everyone hoped, and certainly lacked the invention, political commitment, and, dare I say, rage that propelled many of the independent and activist filmmakers discussed in the preceding texts. But in terms of raising awareness and tolerance outside queer circles, it arguably became the most important film produced in the time of AIDS. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Statement of the organizers, “AIDS/ART/WORK” conference, New York, May 30, 2008 www.thebody.com/visualaids/australia/conference.html. For the scope of the organization’s work, see the Estate Project’s Web site, www.artists withaids.org. The full holdings of the AIDS Activist Video Collection are cataloged on the New York Public Library’s Web site: digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/ead/human/ mssroyal. The interviews, conducted by Schulman, are between two and four hours in duration. A complete set of the video interviews can be viewed in the New York Public Library. Working with James Wentzy, Hubbard has selected short, two- to three-minute clips with a self-contained narrative or anecdote for uploading to the Web site www.actuporal history.org. Complete transcripts of each interview are also available from this Web site. The project was screened in its current entirety on fourteen monitors in the exhibition “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993,” at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, October–December 2009. According to the organization’s Web site, its mission is to create “a world leading searchable and edited digital web-based education, research and information tool on the development and global response to HIV/AIDS.” See www.faceofaids.org/show/ content/aboutus (accessed May 24, 2009). See Fast Trip, Long Drop (dir. Gregg Bordowitz; 1993), Video Remains (dir. Alexandra Juhasz; 2005), Sea in the Blood (dir. Richard Fung; 2000), Shatzi Is Dying (dir. Jean Carlomusto; 2000), and Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP (dir. James Wentzy; 2002). For an extensive analysis of Carlomusto’s engagement with the archive in this video, see Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 262–67. Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Reframing Bodies includes close readings of all the works mentioned in this paragraph. 447 448 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. The abbreviation v.o. stands for version originale, a French term used to denote films exhibited theatrically in their original languages with subtitles, as opposed to dubbed. Johnny Ray Huston, “A Q & A about v.o.: Talking Tearooms, Movies, Morrissey, and Melancholy with Filmmaker William E. Jones,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 13, 2007. It is only since his death in 2004 that Baltrop’s documentary photography has gained public recognition and exhibition in the art world. In its February 2008 issue, Artforum produced a cover feature on Baltrop curated by Douglas Crimp, while the Exile Gallery in Berlin presented the first major solo exhibition of his work in October 2008. Randall Wilcox, Baltrop’s assistant and a trustee of the Alvin Baltrop Trust (www.baltrop.org), is also developing a feature-length documentary, In the Dark We Can All Be Free: The Life and Photography of Alvin Baltrop. There were 84 videotape interviews completed when I watched the ACT UP Oral History Project in May and June 2008; there are 103 at the time of writing. Schulman and Hubbard plan to produce as many as there are surviving activists who would like to be interviewed. Bob Rafsky, quoted in James Wentzy’s video of the Hoffman LaRoche Action, February 16, 1993 (Tape 01334), AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. The videos that constitute the ACT UP Oral History Project can be viewed in the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, MssColl 6148. Jim Eigo, interview no. 47, “A Queens Housewife: March 5, 2004,” ACT UP Oral History Project. Video excerpt and full transcript of interview available at www.actu poralhistory.org/interviews/interviews_08.html#eigo (accessed December 16, 2009). Roma Baran, interview no. 34, “Tom Cunningham: November 5, 2003,” ACT UP Oral History Project. Video excerpt available at www.actuporalhistory.org/interviews/ video/baran.html (accessed February 7, 2010). Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 14. Sarah Schulman, Stagestruck: Theatre, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 49–50. Even the conservative critic John Simon quipped that the scenes shared by Beckett and his family “could have been painted by Norman Rockwell. . . . [The family members] are all models of love, supportiveness and pride, as if Andrew had received some great but controversial award” (John Simon, “Romancing AIDS,” National Review, February 7, 2004, 68). The construction of AIDS as gay, and the enduring consequences of this, are discussed in Emile C. Netzhammer and Scott A. Shamp, “Guilt by Association: Homo- AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. sexuality and AIDS on Prime-Time Television,” in Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, ed. R. Jeffrey Ringer (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 91–106; Frank Pilipp and Charles Shull, “American Values and Images: TV Movies of the First Decade of AIDS,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 21 (1993): 19–26; and Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, “Representing Men with HIV/AIDS in American Movies,” Journal of Men’s Studies 11 (2002): 77–89. This point was made in several reviews of the film. See, for example, Jeffrey Schmalz, “From Visions of Paradise to Hell on Earth,” New York Times, February 28, 1993; and “Films and Fears about AIDS,” Economist, May 28, 1994, 87–88. A scene in which Andrew lies in bed with a shirtless Miguel was cut from the film’s final version. See William Grimes, “AIDS Is the Subject, but Who Is the Audience?” New York Times, December 19, 1993. Manohla Dargis, “AIDS against the Grain,” Village Voice, May 24, 1994; Roy Grundmann and Peter Sacks, “Philadelphia,” Cineaste 20 (1993): 51–54; Desson Howe, “Philadelphia” [review], Washington Post, January 14, 1994; and David DeNicolo, “Is ‘Philadelphia’ on Target in Its Portrait of Gay Life?” New York Times, January 16, 1994. Richard Corliss, “The Gay Gauntlet,” Time, February 7, 1994, 62–64, www.time .com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980088–1,00.html. Demme, quoted in Corliss, “Gay Gauntlet.” Anthony DeCurtis, “Interview: Jonathan Demme,” Rolling Stone, March 24, 1994, www.storefrontdemme.com/rollingstone.html. Larry Kramer, “Lying about the Gay ’90s,” Washington Post, January 9, 1994; Grundmann and Sacks, “Philadelphia.” Grimes, “AIDS Is the Subject.” Philadelphia’s predecessor, Longtime Companion, an independently produced film about AIDS with a more-nuanced portrayal of gay life, failed to attract financial backing (it was eventually produced with government funds) and was passed over by twenty distributors because it was feared that few people would watch it. See Don Romesburg, “Longtime Companion Fights to Break New Ground,” Advocate, June 6, 2000, 20. Romesburg’s article was originally published in the May 8, 1990, issue of the Advocate. DeCurtis, “Interview: Jonathan Demme.” 449