I would prefer that people speak the word “death” and acknowledge the death that comes along with this disease, I mean we’re not all asymptomatic muscle boys and kickboxing dykes fighting this epidemic, there is a tendency in the face of media images of AIDS, you know that we’ve been fed over the years… there’s a tendency to try to fight those images, so that there were created statements like people living with AIDS, people fighting with AIDS… which I find nothing wrong with and I agree with trying to dismantle those media images, but then I think at times in the activist community there’s a tendency to go into total denial about death which society has always done anyways. I always felt as a teenager and growing up that if this society even could for five minutes deal with mortality, on a coast-to-coast level, I mean in education and our institutions and our schools, that most of us would never be doing the things that we’re doing, that we wouldn’t care to live in and support the social structure if we really understood something about our mortality.
To leave the bed of a friend who can’t even put a spoon in his own mouth and then go to some public gathering where somebody makes a statement that “AIDS is not about death”... is outrageous to me. It’s no less outrageous than what common media will do. [...] You know, I think it brings up other issues, too, you know, that I’ve experienced over the last seven, eight years, of buzzwords like courage and strength, that… he or she was so courageous as they came to their death, or he or she had so much strength and uh, they’re just buzzwords for politeness, and I’m not gonna crawl into the media grave of AIDS and just die courageously or politely. You know, I have no desire to be polite in the face of being slowly murdered.
[...]
I know that, you know if I die I’m not gonna die simply because I got fucked in the ass without a condom or swallowed some stranger’s come. I know that I’m gonna die because of the way that this disease has been handled by those in positions of power.
[...]
There seems to be this sort of aversion to anger, and it’s not just, I mean just in society in general, anger gets the same treatment as mortality, which is people just go into denial about it, or, somehow, anger as an emotion is yet another taboo in this country: we should suppress our anger, we shouldn’t speak angrily [...]. Anger is an emotion that I think is extremely valuable, it’s a transitory emotion, it’s something that leads you out of one place and into another, whether it’s out of inactivity into activity… and it somehow catalyzes a series of reactions to events that one experiences or one contains or one carries. I’ve had people try to explain away some of the things that I’ve said or done by saying “oh, he’s angry because he has AIDS”, and I don’t think you need to be carrying this virus to have a reaction to how this epidemic has been handled. I think everybody has a right to be angry and I feel like I’ve come to a place in my life that… if people prefer to see me as a monster at times because of what they witness of my anger, then I prefer to be seen as a monster. It’s actually comforting, because it just gives me more room, and allows me more room to express the range of things that I feel. If I come to a place where I feel hate [...] and that starts translating itself into activities I think that’s perfectly good for myself, it’s where I am, it’s what I see and perceive and respond to. [...] rage is a really interesting tool to dismantle this whole illusion of things like one tribe nation or general public or what’s acceptable and not acceptable. The things that I loved in experiences of activism were not so much the media revolutionaries or the photogenic revolutionaries or activists who, you know, most get attention or press or airtime on some spot on the TV news; the people that I’m most enthralled by or that I feel the most responsive to is, like, the lesbian waitress from New Jersey who, with her frightened girlfriend are for the first time laying their body on the line where they’re choosing to get arrested, and what I love about them and what I’m really impressed with [...] is that they actually are approaching a wall of illusions called law, and they’re dismantling that wall for the first time in their lives. And once you cross that line you realize that these religious institutions, these public buildings, these institutions of government, you realize they’re just made of stone, or series of stones placed together. You realize that these people, especially those responsible for this epidemic, [...] are just made of blood and muscle and bones. And those buildings and those people can be dismantled just as easily as anything else, once you break through that wall of illusion called law… I have no traditional moral reaction to the idea of murder, in terms of what I was fed growing up in this society. I don’t see the slow murder of myself and the people I love as being any more acceptable or less acceptable than the murder of others in order to either protect ourselves or to take revenge. And the only thing that occurs to me in those thoughts of murder… is wondering if the planet will spin a little bit faster once these people are gone.
David Wojnarowicz monologuing in the short film Bust (1991, 15'), directed by Richard Morrison. Partial transcription and emphasis mine.
