The People's Fountain

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and Writer in Brooklyn, NY

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I was 10 when Panic in Year Zero came out. The unspeakable cruelty of a world gone mad after The Bomb was too much for me as a boy.

Today I voted, and waited in the rain to do it. Most of the scanners were down, and people were worn to a nub after waiting for hours. It was tense. It got ugly.

But it was nothing compared to the unspeakable cruelty of the past two years.

So I stayed, and I voted.

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Visual AIDS has great images on their website of the public intervention, You Care About HIV Criminalization, You Just Know It Yet. 

And if you scroll to the bottom of the page, their are downloadable PDFs of a 8.5″ x 11″ version, and the full size original art file if you have access to a large scale printer.

http://visualaids.org/events/detail/11877

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HE'E'E

According to several early 20th century sources, there were two stories about the Hopi Kachina, He'e'e, depending on which mesa you come from.

On Second Mesa, he was a man changing into women’s clothes when he saw enemies approaching the village. With his hair half-up in a maiden whorl, he rallies the tribe to protect the pueblo.

In Oraibi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in America, He'e'e  is a young woman wielding men’s tools. She interrupts her grooming when she spies enemies attacking, and takes up her father’s weapons to fight them off.

In both tellings, He'e'e is a warrior who saved the community, in a beard and half an up-do.

Either way, He'e'e is a powerful protector spirit.

Either way, He'e'e is fierce.

Either way, He'e'e is queer.

Happy Pride, fierce, powerful, queer warriors of NY.

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Since I am too stubborn to download a repost app.

https://www.instagram.com/thislgbtqlife/

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I feel compelled to put the cruel tears of this week aside because it is Pride weekend in NY.

Bear with me: on the surface, it seems impossible that a Pride march could mediate the terrors of the world. But Pride is an opportunity that comes once a year, and they’re expecting over a million people. Action is needed, and in critical times, no action is small.

So I’m offering a reminder. We rarely talk about radical queer resistance, but it’s always existed, and you have 4 whole days to call a few friends and brainstorm about what you’d want to say to the queers and their families assembled there, and figure out how to print it.

By way of example, I want to map some of the connective tissues passed back and forth during Pride by small collective queer gestures of resistance from the recent past.

Here are four pages from “WE WILL NOT PROTECT YOU,” by Pink Tank, 2005, an offset lithography, 14 page, staple-bound, 4”x6” pamphlet. The top center spread is an adaptation of one of the earliest radical political texts in America, the Declaration of Independence, an appropriation that queered the language embraced by a rising militia movement in America, a strategy the Anonymous Queers collective began experimenting with in that late 80s.

Pink Tank assembled after George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, to produce, write and collectively design a political intervention during the 2005 Pride march in NYC, addressing the insidiousness of physical and cultural gentrification/displacement, the Department of Defense’s shift to message management through embedded journalists during the invasion of Iraq, the assimilationist ideas of equality as conceived by institutional LGBTQ organizations within the DC Beltway, the rising corporate colonization of queer radicalism, and the tsunami of pinkwashing that began in the 90s.

Pink Tank included members of the Lesbian Avengers, ACT UP NY, the ACT UP Women's Caucus, The Silence=Death collective, Anonymous Queers, Gran Fury, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, and artist Nayland Blake. We gave out 10,000 copies at Pride in 2015.

The Against Equality collective generously linked to the full project here, and adapted the bottom two texts (shown here) for their own Pride intervention in 2012. http://www.againstequality.org/files/we_will_not_protect_you_2005.pdf

These texts, if you’ve never seen them, contain things in them that remain true, and have spurred others to find their voices and express their agency: Anonymous Queers, Pink Tank, Against Equality, are all connected, across generations.

You are needed. Now. You have 4 whole days to seize the opportunity to advance the conversation. It’s time. Call your friends.

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I’m not sure why I opened an Instagram account, or why I waited until now to use it, but a picture I took was already on it, posted by somebody else, a picture of Don, in my apartment on Mercer and West 4th Street.

We hadn’t left the house in days. I was afraid to, afraid everything about us would vanish if we did. It never did vanish, I guess, even though he would be dead within five years, because he found his way to Instagram, without me.

When I grew up, there was no such thing as a Pride March. By the time I was in college, there was the beginning of an idea of one. Since then, it has morphed into decades of ideas about what Pride does and does not mean.

For me it has always been a day of becoming myself, all over again, and mostly, a chance to share ideas with millions of people who are doing the same thing. I’ve given out broadsheets, stickers, talismans, flyers, pamphlets, and fact sheets over the years, close to 100,000 of them. For me, Pride is a day to be heard, and it is a day to listen.

Some people think of Pride as our Independence Day. I think of it as our Passover, a day to remember our political story, to remember those who didn’t make it, and a day that reminds us of the ways we’re connected to those we never knew.

This is what Don looked like the very first moment I realized I had never loved anyone before, and I would love him forever, long after I’m gone myself, and I’m transformed into archival detritus, just like him, one of millions of bits of data.

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Avram Finkelstein, Worker No.1, Study No.1, 2010, Carved basswood, 18” x 18”

My father was complaining about a photograph one of his students had taken, a picture of somebody’s hand. It was trite, he said, and he found it somehow unforgivable. So I took a picture of his hand, to torment him. I didn’t know he’d be dead in a week.

As Don got sicker, I began studying the lines in my palm, for clues in my lifeline about my own chances. After my father died, I started comparing my lifeline to his.

I’m one of those note-takers: if I write something down it carves it into my memory. Carving the lines of his hand into a piece of wood seemed like the best way to remember him, a map of his political history, the ways we were different, and the ways we were the same.

http://avramfinkelstein.com/workers-1-5/

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If you have never handed out anything to the hundreds of thousands of people assembled to support the marchers during Pride in NY, you need to put it on your list. That’s me, passing out the first Anonymous Queers broadsheet in 1990, in the t shirt longtime collaborator and collective member, Vincent Gagliostro, made for us. Radical queer gestures have always existed, long before Pride Marches were safe spaces for Target and Deutsche Bank (!!). We saw the writing on the wall, even then, and seriously considered a pirate Bed, Bath and Beyond float, to hand out recycled plastic bags with radical queer messages spray painted on them. That still sounds like a good idea to me. Maybe next year? (HT to KS, who took the photo))

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Day and night, at the same time, I hope I never have to leave here, and it makes me miss everyone who has. I miss everyone today, all of them.

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Skill-sharing time. The print shop Anonymous Queers used on 14th and 9th to produce our broadsheets in the late 80s was edged out by luxury goods in the Meat Packing district: NYC apparently needed more stores and less printers. Linco in LIC is one of the few web presses left in the area, used by most of the artists in the area, but activists who don't know about them might want to look into them. Nothing is free, but they are VERY reasonable. http://lincoprinting.com

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SO: the visionary folks at Visual AIDS, Esther McGowan and Alex Fiahlo, invited me to produce a new work, a public intervention at the Pride March this year. We've been working on this broadsheet on HIV criminalization since last summer (!), and will be passing out 10,000 of them along the march route, Sunday, 6/24/18. So, so excited and proud of this collaborative project on an issue that is extremely important to me. You will want to grab a copy when you see the VA contingent (they will be easily spotted, I promise). Once you read through it, you will understand why I will not get a good night's sleep until every law criminalizing HIV is removed from the books. HT to the HIV Is Not A Crime Flash Collective organized by the fantastic Sero Project.

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History is turf.

When you’re queer, you're obliged to break two pieces from it: one to sustain yourself, the other to grow something new that will sustain the rest of us.

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Does this jog your memory, Hillary?

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Reasons To Be Thankful: Thank you, O Captains of Industry, for creating a media landscape to force-feed us the idea that successful commerce is a communal responsibility, and for turning any vestigial remains of our human impulse to give of ourselves into an ever-imploding capitalist trap.