#jeffrey edwards

[woman-loving]

By the end of the 1980s in the US, people of color were making up a rapidly growing proportion of new AIDS cases and constituted the overwhelming majority of the growing number of cases amongst women. ACT UP chapters were also increasingly attracting individuals interested in working on issues of concern to women and people of color. By 1990, though, the resurgent new right had effectively brought a campaign against “political correctness” and multiculturalism—a campaign aimed squarely at the phenomenon of “rainbow politics" [a broad, multicultural movement of the oppressed]—to the mass public. Furthermore, a corresponding campaign by a number of liberal and left intellectuals to blame the supposedly “excessive” demands of people of color and feminists (and gays and lesbians) for the collapse of the left in US politics was just getting off the ground.[38] My argument is that it was the collision of these two processes—the increasing “racialization” of AIDS and white racial backlash—within the lesbian and gay community itself that shattered movement solidarity, coming as it did on top of increasing feelings of frustration on the part of street activists with both the seeming relentlessness of the epidemic and the seemingly growing political isolation of the movement.

A precursor to what was to unfold within the AIDS street-activist movement could be detected in late 1989, when nationally syndicated journalist Rex Wockner, challenging the women-only policy of Chicago’s Mountain Moving Coffeehouse in an essay titled “Dogma, Discrimination, and My Dick,” led a wave of public challenges across the country against the concept of women-only spaces that proceeded without any mention of the fact that the preponderance of restricted spaces within lesbian and gay communities were, and are, reserved for men, and white men at that. The next year men would take complaints of gender discrimination against the sponsors of women’s spaces to the human rights commissions of both Boston and New York City. The New York case did not even involve a women-only space, but a space that happened to be patronized mostly by women.[39] These incidents were a precursor not only in terms of the deployment of terms such as “reverse discrimination” and “Politically Pure Rhetoric,” but in terms of the targeting of women, whose caucuses within in ACT UP chapters were critical internal organizational forces for advancing people-of-color issues. [...]

Wockner, the nation’s most widely syndicated gay journalist, led the way in attacking “PC” specifically within ACT UP. For example, in a “straight” news story covering the first national protest (an action that involved bringing activists from around the country to one locality) to put the issues of people of color and women with AIDS at the center of the demands, the National Actions for Health Care in Chicago in April of 1990, Wockner wrote:

“They set up several large tents to sleep in and listened to a series of African-American, Latino, and women speakers and performers. 

In many ways, the afternoon resembled a reunion of 60s activists. The air was thick with the political philosophy that in order to be free, all oppressed peoples must unite against the straight, white, male establishment.

… and they whooped and hollered as each speaker noted that AIDS services are doled out unfairly to women and minorities (other than white gay men).”[41]

He would eventually be joined in this project by the nationally syndicated political cartoonist Daniel Sotomayor, who quit ACT UP/Chicago in August of 1990 because, he said, AIDS was no longer a priority for the group (having been supplanted by campaigns against racism, sexism, and homophobia), and because, he said, the group was being manipulated by “people without AIDS”—a coded phrase meaning the Women’s Caucus.[42] For the next year, his political cartoons, published in local lesbian and gay papers across the county, as well as in the national weekly Outweek, which in the early 1990s was the publication of (white, young) queer culture and politics, singled out for ridicule the supposed “political correctness” of lesbians;[43] the supposed crushing of the AIDS movement by opportunistic ideologues riding on the back of the movement in order to pursue prior commitments to fighting racism, sexism, and militarism, or simply the lack of genuine commitment to the cause by dilettantes who flutter from one “politically correct” cause to the next;[44] and even a supposed “gay McCathyism.”[45]

It was in this context that in city after city activism around “treatment issues” got constructed by many activists and the press as separate and opposed to activism around racism, sexism, and heterosexism, and that confronting racism, sexism, or heterosexism either inside or outside ACT UP chapters got constructed as “not fighting AIDS,” and in fact as “getting in the way of fighting AIDS.”46 [...]

Yet, it is impossible to identify just what priorities these particular treatment activists had that those organizing around women’s and people-of-color issues presumably pushed to the side. Actually, following [an ACT-UP/New York Treatment and Data Committee]-organized national demonstration at the [National Institutes of Health] in May of 1990 that was intended to force open NIH decision-making processes to meaningful participation by activists and people with HIV, treatment activism became increasingly bureaucratized; the NIH eventually agreed that year to include activists as voting members on all its committees that set research priorities and approve proposals for government-financed treatment research.

Even beyond the issue of bureaucratization, the substance of treatment activism increasingly required a level of scientific expertise that would exclude mass participation. Up until 1990 ACT UP had been able to rally broad support for campaigns to pressure drug companies and the FDA into making already-existing promising treatments available more quickly to people with HIV-infection; such a mobilization could be organized around the simple demand that bureaucratic red tape be cut, something intelligible, and in fact appealing, to even the Reagan and Bush Administrations. After 1990, though, because of corporate and FDA reforms that shortened drug-approval time and expanded access to experimental therapies, the central tasks for treatment activism became the identification of, and the securing of funding for, specific new lines of treatment research, under the direction of the NIH, to make sure that the FDA had a steady stream of promising treatments for review. Participation in scientific processes at this level would require a degree of expertise on the part of both activists and the public(s) they sought to mobilize that had not been necessary for the earlier campaigns against FDA red tape—a degree of expertise that even most of the best-educated members of ACT UP would never be able to develop.[48]

So, there was indeed a diminishing place for treatment activism in a mass-based, direct-action politics, but this had nothing to do with those who wanted to address the full range of issues of particular concern to women and people of color. Indeed, those who broke away from the original ACT UP chapters in Portland, Seattle, and Chicago claiming that they were being held back from doing treatment advocacy ended up failing to mount any campaigns, and quickly faded away. Given the trajectory of treatment politics, along with the growing pessimism amongst many within the movement at the time that there could ever be a way to extend significantly the lives of people with HIV-infection, the only sense that can be made of the increasing sentiment of certain men that they were being “marginalized” within the movement and that issues of access to basic health care, housing, and disability benefits were not “real” AIDS issues is that these men were increasingly simply unwilling both to align themselves politically with women and people of color and to recognize that their own specific agenda was not the universal, or only “real,” AIDS agenda.

"AIDS, Race, and the Rise and Decline of a Militant Oppositional Lesbian and Gay Politics in the US," Jeffrey Edwards, New Political Science, Vol 22(4), 2000

[thefailurecult]

Terribly underrated masterpiece this one.

[woman-loving]

Within this context, two of the developments that constituted the decline of the AIDS street-activist movement can be interpreted in terms of the failure of political development to occur both within ACT UP organizations and within the lesbian and gay community more broadly. One was a growing frustration with political action of any kind, which had been reflected in Larry Kramer’s “A Call to Riot.” From the early years of the epidemic, Kramer had spoken to and for a large and vital cluster of activists where much of this sentiment would materialize. This group was made up almost entirely of white, middle-class, previously apolitical men politicized by a combination of their own HIV-infection (or that of their close friends), a powerful sense of entitlement to the health care they needed, and a profound anger that the scientific, health care, and political establishments were treating them with what they saw as disregard at best.[30] Throughout the epidemic Kramer had given voice to their anger, and to that of lesbians, gay men, and people with HIV more broadly, but his politics, and that of his core constituency, never developed any basis beyond sheer anger. Seeking to build and sustain a movement on an emotion, he represented a lack—not uncharacteristic of many people newly attracted to political engagement by a “single issue”—of a strategic sense as well as of the sort of transformative political vision necessary for sustained mass activism.

Obviously any dynamic political movement is going to attract large numbers of people lacking in political experience, and any mass movement seeks to do just that, but in times of broader movement activity, individual organizations and movements benefit from a broad ideological framework, a shared understanding about both the world and the purposes of political action, that gets communicated throughout society by a broader movement culture.[31] ACT UP did not have this advantage.

ACT UP took off at the tail end of a wave of broader (rainbow) activism that for the most part had ceased after the 1988 Jackson campaign. There was no broader movement culture in the society to offer and sustain any oppositional political strategy and vision. In short, some got involved in ACT UP out of anger, vented their anger, and then, with no cure in sight, their friends still dying, the movement increasingly isolated (even within the lesbian and gay community), movement infighting intensifying, and no political strategy to guide them or political vision capable of sustaining them, dropped out.[32]

Simultaneously, in what participants at the time heralded as an important broadening of lesbian and gay political activism, individuals across the country, some with roots in ACT UP, began to form Queer Nation chapters in order to engage in a street activism unencumbered by an AIDS-specific agenda. Viewed in terms of the broader political context of the time, however, as well as of the changing demographics of AIDS and responses to the epidemic, the turn away from AIDS activism to Queer Nationalism constituted yet another instance of political retreat that can be understood in terms of lesbian and gay political development being undermined by the collapse of a broader rainbow politics. Fighting heterosexism and homophobia had always been at the center of ACT UP’s agenda, and over time was increasingly integrated with concerns about racism, sexism, and the situation of low-income people. What Queer Nationalism did was isolate “queer issues” from other social and political concerns, such as racism and AIDS, just at a time when people of color faced increasing political marginalization, and just as AIDS was becoming increasingly “racialized” by a combination of factors: reports of declining HIV transmission and a leveling off of new AIDS diagnoses amongst white gay men; soaring rates of new AIDS diagnoses amongst people of color, especially amongst women and children; increasing attention to people-of-color issues within ACT UP; and news media “discovery” of the always disproportionately high incidence of AIDS in people-of-color communities.[33]

Granted, the immediate impetus to Queer Nation’s founding was an upsurge in hate-motivated street violence directed at lesbians and gay men. Furthermore, Queer Nation did elaborate upon the “pro-sex” thrust of ACT UP by celebrating and mobilizing many on the outside of normative sexuality who theretofore had been marginalized by much of the lesbian and gay movement itself: a new generation of lesbians and gay men alienated from “mainstream” lesbian and gay male cultures; bisexuals; sex rebels who did not define their sexuality simply, if at all, in terms of gender preference (e.g. leather and S&M folks); those who resisted the very notion of sexual categories; and the transgendered.

Still, as Valerie Lehr has argued, a queer politics, distinguished from a queer cultural activism performed largely for the movement itself, never fully materialized. ACT UP had always mixed expressive and identity-oriented action with efforts to alter institutional practices and priorities: ACT UP’s street activism entailed challenging social norms and strengthening a sense of community and solidarity by giving voice to anger, and by camping it up and otherwise celebrating lesbian and gay (and eventually “queer”) difference; it grabbed the attention of the media, of the “general public,” and of those in positions of institutional power through its street theatre, graphics, and civil disobedience; and it almost always put forward some kind of political analysis and demands intended to achieve specific goals in the fight against AIDS, such that ACT UP was almost always engaging power relations as they are embodied in corporate, governmental, media, or scientific institutions and practices. Queer Nation’s activism, though, was mostly limited to expressive and identity-oriented actions. Its stock-in-trade action was the “visibility action”—the queer shopping-mall invasion, the queer night out in a straight club, and the queer kiss-in on a city street. These actions did confront social norms. Also, for the activists and their supporters these actions contributed to a sense of community, and established a certain sphere of freedom and sense of “empowerment” at a moment when queers were under siege, but they did not typically confront social or political institutions.[34]

“AIDS, Race, and the Rise and Decline of a Militant Oppositional Lesbian and Gay Politics in the US,” Jeffrey Edwards, New Political Science, Vol 22(4), 2000

[thefailurecult]

[thefailurecult]

[thefailurecult]

[creativepoole]

It’s been a while. Here’s the coloured cover for the Warlock 5 graphic novel, written by Cullen Bunn (Deadpool, Captain America), and drawn by Jeffrey Edwards. It’ll be published by Outland Entertainment very soon.

[thefailurecult]