ACCM+

montreal: HIV+ 16-29 // friends fam dates & allies, support group, drop-in, zine project, steering committee, lazy dinners, workshops, support, treatment info, what we need when we need it. email [email protected] to register : it's all happening 5-9pm on fridays at 2075 plessis in montreal <3 accmplus.com <3

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chloe dzubilo 

lipodystrophy

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"Chloe, ACT UP Die-In, New York City, c. 1994" by Alice O'Malley

Chloe Dzubilo (1960-2011) was an artist/performer as well as an AIDS and transgender activist. Extended biography available here.

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YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME

Vincent Chevalier with Ian Bradley-Perrin

“Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes…”

In the slight of hand that weaves the short and long memories of our community with the artifacts that remain and the work we do to alter our near future into our present sense of the blurred lines of our “community,” let us not drop the adaptability that we have always used to keep up with the virus that adapts so well to us. It is not the remembering and it is neither the history, nor the material culture nor the valorization of the battles won and lost that impedes our movement forward, but rather the unpinning of our past from the circumstances from which the fights were born. It is this that makes light of the impetus to resist; the gentrification of our memories and our worshipping of idols whose miracles are forgotten.

Silence=Death but the white noise humming from your latest post is keeping me up at night. Flying in two dimensions, scrolling through virtual space, virtual time, random access memories referencing deep memory held in those you find inaccessible; beneath the porch light we’ve all been circling. Do not let the dregs of our history be your horse blinders as you move through today’s world because things are different now as they were different then. Allow the history to be real and tethered to a time and place and reason such that the output is responding to today and is ready for tomorrow. Let the past sleep some such that it can be more present the choices you make on reality, not the reality itself. “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

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" A yellowing ACT UP Media Advisory for the October 1992 Ashes Action in Washington, DC offers an archival shard of this fierce memory politics. It quotes David Robinson, who organized this counterpoint to the display of the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt during which he contributed his lover’s remains to the cause:

 ‘‘‘The Quilt makes something beautiful out of this epidemic. Our political funeral returns people to the reality of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been reduced to bone and ash, by the ignorance and apathy of the ReaganBush administrations. Today, we are depositing this reality on George Bush’s doorstep.’’’

charles e morris : ACT UP 25: HIV/AIDS, Archival Queers, and Mnemonic World Making

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david wojnarowicz (pronounciation: voy-nah-ROW-vitch)

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"The locations of the HIV/AIDS specific sites are mostly in the Church & Wellesley neighbourhood—Toronto’s gay village. John Maxwell, executive director of ACT was interviewed in front of the building on Wellesley Street where ACT was officially established in 1983. The interview includes a 30-year visual survey of the posters and brochures from ACT’s groundbreaking campaigns. Nearby on Church Street is Cawthra Park where the AIDS memorial is located and the annual AIDS vigil is held. The video, which includes interviews with Helen Rykens from The 519 Community Centre and Jocelyn Watchorn from ACT, explores the origins of this important monument and event. Another initiative linked to ACT was the Pussy Palace located at the site of the present day Oasis Spa at the south end of the village. Founded in 1999 by the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee, it was the first program of its kind to create a safe space to educate women on the risks of HIV/AIDS. The site of AIDS Action Now’s first major demonstration in 1988 was at Toronto General Hospital, located on University Avenue near the University of Toronto. AAN protested the drug trials that delayed the release of an already tested and approved drug to treat AIDS patients suffering from Pneumocystis Pneumonia (PCP). The video includes an interview with AAN founding member Tim McCaskell with some important archival video of the 1988 demo and related media interview by documentary filmmaker David Adkin."

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AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. 

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INFLAMED

Ted Kerr and Chris Jones This poster was inspired by the work and lived experience of Chaplain Jones, a black HIV-positive Baptist minister and activist, who is passionate about raising awareness around the lived experience of black and brown men who have sex with others men and their disproportionate rate of HIV infection in the West, which rivals infection rates in third world countries. The burning condom, (and litany text), are shared by Jones, and collaborator Ted Kerr, with the intention of igniting public discourse around the condom. Since the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (Play Fair, 1982) and Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen (How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, 1983) first popularized the use of condoms as an AIDS prevention strategy there has been little public discourse around the holistic impact of condoms on the lives the latex barrier is said to be saving. In an age where condoms are—for some—a loaded symbol of “AIDS Inc” and the systemic discrimination leveled against profiled and monitored bodies, and at a time pharmaceutical interventions such as PEP and PrEP are seemingly reducing the need for condoms, what is one to make of the rubber? Key to this conversation are the various understandings and attachments people have to condoms, often related to age, life chances, race, orientation, faith, gender and class. The burning condom is the fire around which we can gather, listen and discuss.

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ON A BESOIN D’UNE INJECTION DE FONDS…

MY AIDS MY CRACK GET HARPER OFF MY BACK

VIH - VERY IMPORTANT HUMANS

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"What was interesting was that one of the reasons that women did so well in ACT UP was necessity, because these men were desperate to stay alive and the women had a lot of spirit, so they listened to them. I've never seen gay men be so open to listening to women in my life. In our film, you see the women with AIDS …. you see they're leaders, you see that it was women of colour, you see it was former sex workers, former drug users, homeless women, making speeches, leading demos, being dragged away, being arrested.

 Because of thalidomide, women were excluded from experimental drug trials. But they're all dead now, all of those people, so the fact that that was an activist movement is unknown. 

When I showed our film to group of women with HIV in Hartford, Connecticut, which is the poorest city in the United States, the women in the room were all black and Latin, they never knew that there was an activist movement of women like themselves because they've been resocialised into being clients and patients, instead of activists and advocates. Getting that research and that history is really crucial to the self-concept of people who want to make change." sarah schulman re: united in anger via  

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"The drug is sofosbuvir, called Solvadi by its manufacturer, and its effectiveness in treating hepatitis C is so pronounced that the U.S. regulators designated it “breakthrough therapy” when they approved it for U.S. markets last year.

The catch is that it doesn’t come cheap: a single pill costs $1,000, meaning the 12-week daily dose prescribed for most patients will cost $84,000. That has brought howls of protests from activists accusing California-based Gilead Sciences of charging extortionate prices."

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the youth activist's toolkit certainly presumes that all youth have access to/are enrolled in university, so much of the strategies are directed towards forcing change on campus ... that said there are some pieces that we might find useful.

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25 cent crack pipe vending machine is installed in Vancouver! The article is a written with the usual tone ("...keeping hardcore addicts off the streets" and Rob Ford jokes aplenty), but an interesting project nonetheless.

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"Some choice Rob Ford quotes are being reimagined as massive election posters in a new video that's sure to stir uncomfortable memories of the last four years."