This is happening tomorrow in NYC for World AIDS Day.
sheepfilms
noise dept.
cherry valley forever
Peter Solarz

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Xuebing Du

#extradirty
todays bird
trying on a metaphor
Jules of Nature
Mike Driver
One Nice Bug Per Day
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

blake kathryn

@theartofmadeline
Cosimo Galluzzi

PR's Tumblrdome
ojovivo

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@weareviral
This is happening tomorrow in NYC for World AIDS Day.
Viral Legacies' New Chapter
Back at the beginning of 2014, I set out to write a book called Viral Legacies. While I still fully intend to write a book on the subject of memorializing grief from the HIV/AIDS crisis and reducing stigma/shame surrounding queer sexuality in the present day, I realized the time has gone to expand the scope of this project. This is why I'm incredibly excited to announce the launch of Our Viral Lives, a project that was bring these ideas into a broader community-based focused.
A Different Name, A Different Mission
The first is the name. Viral Legacies is a great name for a book, but Our Viral Lives signals an important shift in focus. Rather than focusing on the notion of legacy, I want to examine how our everyday lives as queer men can itself be a viral educational tool.
1) How do our lived experiences with sexuality, with HIV/AIDS activism, with our direct involvement in HIV prevention tools like PrEP function as educational tools?
2) How do our embodied lives and personal (hi)stories challenge conventional stigma, shame and fear around sexuality/sexual health disclosure?
3) And, by including the "our," I want to focus on building support between HIV/AIDS advocacy organizations and prominent figures within this movement, so that everyone, irregardless of geographic location, can leverage the successes and challenge the failures of our present day movement.
A Capacity to Evolve
Our Viral Legacies is going to start off small. It's only me working on this project, so with limited resources and a lack of graphic design skills, I'll use the tools at my disposal to launch a website that can then be customized and built out when additional resources are secured. At first this might mean doing simple things like building out Twitter/Instagram/Tumblr presence and curating a lot of content, but over time, there is a strong chance that this content will become more original, and the level of interactivity will grow.
This sense of growth is important to the notion that this project is "viral." This is literal in the sense of becoming a digital phenomenon, but it also challenges the viral replication process of HIV. To reproduce sex positive ideas virally is a challenge to the negative connotations associated with AIDS. As such, outside voices will contribute a great deal to the project and help guide what features, tools, and stories seem to most reflect their own experiences.
Much More To Come
On December 1st, World AIDS Day, I will provide a more detailed description of the project and some starting goals over at POZ Magazine. But for now I wanted to informally announce the project since you've all kept up with, and shared various components of Viral Legacies. Without all of your support, I wouldn't be where I am right now with this idea, so to that extent, I am grateful.
Makings of a degree plan focused on HIV/AIDS
The following is a possible degree plan for Goddard's MA in Social Innovation and Sustainability:
For my MASIS degree, I propose a two-pronged degree plan. The first component of this degree plan is to create an online digital platform that can serve as an archive and resource platform surrounding HIV/AIDS, specifically as it relates to men who have sex with men (MSM) populations. The second component is to interview current health care professionals and leaders within LGBTQ non-profit organizations to both explore the challenges that contemporary AIDS activism is facing, and to use these transcribed interviews to inaugurate this digital archival space.
Possible new MA In Social Innovation and Sustainability
In February, I may be starting up again at Goddard College, working on a new MA in Social Innovation and Sustainability. I realized I was approaching grad school from the wrong angle before. Rather than focusing on getting a degree to teach at the College level, I want to get more of a conceptual, real-world degree. This new plan would focus on HIV/AIDS but from the perspective of actually trying to implement an online archive related to HIV/AIDS history, prevention/treatment, and space where other queer individuals could share their stories. This is the making of what would be some of my reading list:
Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive- by Alana Kumbier
Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History- edited by Antionette Burton
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS- by Deborah B Gould
Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991- by Herve Guibert
Handbook of Autoethnography- edited by Stacey Holman Jones
ACT UP New York Archive at the New York Public Libraries
Interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project. Available online at: http://www.actuporalhistory.org/interviews/index.html
Remembering the AIDS Quilt- edited by Charles E. Morris III
InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing- by Kvale & Brinkmann
Interviewing as Qualitative Research- by Irving Seidman
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination- by Sarah Schulman
How To Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS- by Paula A. Treichler
The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings- by Gregg Bordowitz
Tongues Untied (documentary) – directed by Marlon Riggs
Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS – byMartin Duberman
Austin Faces AIDS (digital video archive of people living with HIV/AIDS in Austin): http://vimeo.com/channels/austinfacesaids
You're the First One I've Told: The Faces of HIV in the Deep South- by Whetten-Goldstein, Wells Pence
Urban Action Networks: HIV/AIDS and Community Organizing in New York City – by Howard Lune
Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City: How Resourceful Latinas Beat the Odds- by Sabrina Chase
Structural Intimacies: Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic- by Dr. Sonja Mackenzie
David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side- eds. Lotringer, et al.
ITSOFOMO (CD/DVD)- by David Wonjarowicz and Ben Neill
Participatory Politics: Next-Generation Tactics to Remake Public Spheres- by Elisabeth Soep
Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance- by Dr. Erin J Rand
Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence- by Christina B. Hanhardt
Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement- by Tom Roach
Life of Christ Alterpiece by Keith Haring (at Cathedral of St. John the Divine)
Over the summer I had decided to apply for the Open Society Fellowship, but life intervened in a really terrible way. But thankfully there’s a new deadline at the beginning of next year, and I feel it necessary, if I’m not doing academic work, I need to devoting myself to a cause, in an...
I haven't written much lately, but here's something new. The wheels are turning.
Wach as I recite a recent poem I wrote called "cut off."
La Facultad
“The capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities.” – Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
It’s probably odd to insert a quote and theoretical concept by Gloria Anzaldúa into the mix, isn’t it? After all, there’s no discernable connection she has to the AIDS crisis, and her subjectivity in these in between spaces varies radically compared to most of the actors I’ve brought up thus far in my discussions on political future in this era of disease. But to not include Anzaldúa, to knowingly and willingly place her outside of this discussion, denies us our la facultad. As I think of her work, I’m also reminded of a quote Lucas de Lima places at the beginning of Wet Land, from Edmund Jabes. Death means alliance.
==
It’s important to remember two things about Anzaldúa in the context of these interwoven narratives on HIV/AIDS:
First is that she remains one of the most influential theorists in terms of my writing and thinking. When I first read Borderlands it was as if I was suddenly given new eyes, or at least a new pair of glasses that allowed me to see things not only more clearly but also differently. This recognition in the wake of Borderlands inspired a restless feeling that has yet to go away. I’d never realized words could be sentient before. I’d never realized they could be so hungry as to consume cultural failings, using the power harnessed from them to produce a manner of living that was more equitable, that embraced interwoven struggles without resorting to the tactics of normalcy or origin.
Second, Anzaldúa died prematurely in the mid-2000s from another illness—diabetes. While the same kind of cultural disgust toward AIDS doesn’t necessarily translate to those people who have diabetes, she nevertheless struggled with being able-bodied, and saw herself in this borderland space, where she was perceived as Other, as less than normal. At the same time, this marginalized status also afforded her la facultad. This perception to see with more clarity was condition of her status as a non-white woman in the American Southwest, but it was also as much about her physical decline, of how we establish the terms of disease in this country and use it against the people who most need our help.
Like David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring, or Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I too wish that I could revive Anzaldúa. Every day that I think about her absence, there’s a sharp pang in my ribcage, her images (and the images of all these other cultural actors) recognizing her absence in me, and calling out for her body that cannot ever be made again. And so, even being able-bodied myself, I possess the fragmented perspectives of those who were not able-bodied, who succumbed to illness. My la facultad is not to know, necessarily, what it’s like to have AIDS or diabetes, but to bear witness to the pain this language of contagion, disease, and being “unclean” enacts psychically on an individual. And how that very same language gets turned against people who are HIV-negative and dare to speak out against its limiting capacity.
==
“[T]he tv has been turned to some show about the cost AIDS and I’m watching a group of people die on camera because they can’t afford the drugs that might extend their lives and some fella in the health-care system in texas is being interviewed—I can’t even remember what he looks like because I reached through the television screen and ripped his face in half—he’s saying, “If I had a dollar to spend on health care I’d rather spend it on a baby or an innocent person with some illness or defect not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS.” – David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
I come across this quote from Wojnarowicz in an essay by Todd R. Ramlow called, “Bodies in Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa’s and David Wonjarowicz’s Mobility Machines,” which is precisely about the ways in which Anzaldua, like Wojnarowicz, possesses la facultad, and how this way of seeing enables both of them to challenge the conventional understanding of what’s normal, who’s diseased, and what kind of politics we can strive for in the face of what seems like constant erasure. I’d never thought to connect the two individuals even though I’d read both extensively and shaped my self-perceptions through their works. But then I read this Wojnarowicz quote and realized how his tearing apart of dominant culture norms—of patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, and able-bodiedness—reflects the same radical impulse of Anzaldúa.
In fact, their atemporal, ahistorical focus on the violence and grief from these normalizing discourses is the same model I’ve chosen to adopt, even as its realization is fraught with the same question they struggled with. How can I enact change and challenge dominant understandings of disorder without reinscribing some of the same dominant paradigms? Another way of putting this: how can I learn to enact change via embodied experience without claiming a legitimate, exclusionary subjectivity? I’m necessarily sure that’s possible. But I’d rather operate from an impossible notion of being that’s more just and equitable than believe in the discourses that leave me immobile.
For Anzaldúa and Wojnarowicz, I think their greatest legacy is what Ramlow calls their production of a “prosthetic subjectivity.” This idea, without getting into too much theoretical background, is that they not only reject these discourses of normalcy, but they flaunt their abnormality; they show off the parts of themselves that are different and reject the notion that they must return “home.” There is no home for the prosthetic subject. Instead, they are “always on the move.” And they “institute a mobility machine that incessantly crosses in and out of the borderlands in the creation of provisional alliances and more inclusive communities.”
==
What are my provisional alliances?
What is my vision of more inclusive communities?
==
I separate these two questions out because they are at the core of Viral Legacies’ call-to-action. They are the two questions that will speak to what power Viral Legacies can have, and how this power can be used to at least abate some of the trauma of living queerly in the midst of an AIDS crisis. This virus is not going away anytime soon, and even if tomorrow’s New York Times headline would declare, “A CURE FOR AIDS HAS BEEN FOUND,” we can see how many people still believe AIDS is a justified result of recklessness, that these people who have thus far contracted the virus and are unclean because they chose not to define their desires and actions through abstinence-only or condoms-always sexual models.
The first question, of provisional alliances, is an easier one to answer. I’m allied with the people of these borderlands spaces. I’m allied with people for whom horizon—what’s going to happen when the AIDS crisis is over?—is less of concern than is the trauma of everyday life—how can we inhabit our beaten and scarred bodies with our desires and pleasures as guides? how can we inhabit this present moment while carrying these ghosts on our backs? how can we remember while still giving ourselves multiple future possibilities, unburdened by our erasure? These questions are not easy, I know, but they provide a kind of bridge between different temporal, historical, and identity fields. They ally us all against these outside forces that want to split us apart and fragment us in order to deny our power.
The second question, of how these communities look, is always more illusive for me. In This Bridge We Call Home, Anzaldúa remarks, “Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries.” In Close to the Knives, Wojnarowicz remarks, “I’m the robotic kid, the human motor-works, and surveying the scene before me I wonder: What can these feel level? What can these feet pound and flatten? What can these hands raise?”
My vision then begins less with absolute notions of how we can come together and be together in this world than the ways in which we can begin, together, this process of making communities. In order to combat stigma, shame, and violence wrought against our bodies in this era of AIDS, we must reject a black-and-white mentality of sexuality. We must not let our past experiences and intimate struggles be overshadowed by the power of silence to reduce, destroy, and co-opt our desires into something that is comfortable and easily understood. We must harness la facultad, as Anzaldúa described, to see what happens when our feet pound and flatten, when we raise our prosthetic hands in defiance.
From there, we forge a sense of community, a sense rather than absolute destination. From there, outside of geographic limitations, through the center of these multiple borderlands spaces, the notions of “we” are developed and refined but, maybe, never fully understood. However, full understanding doesn’t matter so much because the AIDS crisis is still going on, and on going death and silence rule over these mobility machines. Sure, it might be hard, if not impossible, to combat culture itself but I parts of me are everywhere in the world. I’m split up in so many ways. This is the burden of witnessing I’ve come to bear. But it’s the burden I now wear, proudly. Split up doesn’t mean powerless. It just means I’m not reduced to any one object; I’ve got more feet to flatten and more hands to wave in defiance.
cut off
this booklet i hold in my hands is probably worth 250,000 dollars & i think oh my god this tiny black and white booklet is worth more than i’ll earn in the next five years but i look at the grayscale cover & i’m lost in a sublime space the memory of felix gonzalez-torres’ body this cover is both a blank canvas & an obscured scene how he invites us to be intimate with him but then complicates the gesture it’s all the more complicated now because he’s dead & he’s done all that he can to remove his physical form from his art so his absence is more acute now as it takes me a moment to gather the courage to look inside the booklet to go under felix’s skin but when i do i’m suddenly liberated the same sky scene but gulls swoop down silhouettes that move through this implacable scene how I feel myself soaring with them how i feel like i am the gull transcending loneliness through the heart of absence but then it occurs to me noticing my hands covered in latex with that particular odor wafting in my nose that i am not a gull & it’s 2014 & felix is still dead & aids destroys as much now as it ever did before days later the news of a malaysian airlines jet downed in ukraine with some of the most prominent aids researchers makes c-u-r-e a word scattered throughout the debris beneath this booklet at the edge where those ukrainian fields lie yet i feel again i’m one of those gulls or i hunger for their wings how i wish i could sever them from their bodies watch them plummet among the wreckage how i could affix them to my sides step off from the third story window of this library room to be with felix but these gulls are flattened in their image i cannot cut off their wings i will not fly in this really expensive & prized artifact from an aids era artist but the space where i can liberate i understand holding this book in my hand the edge of latex against the smooth gloss is subliminal it’s where felix’s body is assembled where our anti-horizon is drawn out & those cut off wings give us an open sky to remake what our desires & bodies can mean
Important Project Update
It is with a very heavy heart that I must announce the European research phase of Viral Legacies is coming to end prematurely after I was unexpectedly fired from my job yesterday. This decision is something that did not come lightly, but it is necessary in order to live and be able to have a future, even if the terms of that future are uncertain. What this might mean is that I'll have to stop writing for a while but that does not mean the project is over.
So, with that being said, I will return to the United States on August 4th, instead of September 1st, as originally planned. I thank everyone for reading so far and for the continued support you've given me. It means a lot in these times of unrest.
Update on Viral Legacies
So far 12,500 words written, which amounts to 39 single spaced pages! All in all, I think I'm making a lot of progress and getting into the heart of the complexities of HIV/AIDS, on personal, collective, and political levels. I'm starting to find an ease to the writing because I think I've stopped thinking I've got to write in any one genre or style. There's a lot of conceptual musings on identity, desire, and historical memory, but I think that's punctuated by personal narrative and poetry lightness.
As I remarked in one my pieces, the writing has turned less into a geographic/spatial journey of how HIV/AIDS is manifest differently in other countries, and has, instead, become more of a writing on how HIV/AIDS history and present day visibility is itself a destination and place to travel to. There are cultural differences, as I've mentioned, but HIV/AIDS is globalized, and it sneaks up everywhere we go, often times in unexpected ways. I think the approach I'm taking to the subject resists getting involved in the noxious political debates on things like PrEP, and instead lays out the fact that sexual behavior and desire is not black and white. As I said in my piece today, "a choice that seems reckless in one sense might actually be beneficial or liberatory in another."
SELF + EDGE (SELVEDGES)
Is a collection of stories about HIV/AIDS more a story of my motion, or the motion of the virus? When we speak of globalization, when I travel to various countries in this age of breaking down barriers, what is really guiding me? I think, for a moment, we have to consider how I was compelled to move because of some force beyond myself, how the invisible, ubiquitous nature of the HIV virus forces us to consider the edges of our identity. I’m interested in the place where I cease to be myself because the historical legacy of this crisis overshadows my own journey. I have to consider a moment where, in the course of my travels, I discover there is no way out of this journey.
==
I sit in Barcelona coffee shop as I read an article about the NAMES Project and the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The project was conceived in the United States, and many narratives of loss stitched into the panels reflect people who lived their lives in the US. But to say that the AIDS Memorial Quilt is only an object of Americana is a great disservice to the boundaries it tries to break down. The quilt is itself a hybrid form—on one hand a way of preserving something local through a traditional form of art, but subverting the form of that art at the same time through the implement of other art forms and display methods.
As it says in this article, “the most moving and at the same time most politically suggestive thing about the quilt: the lived tackiness, the refusal of so many thousands of quilters to solemnize their losses under the aesthetics of mourning.” By opening up the ways we can remember, by focusing on bodies as they were when alive. By focusing on passions, quirks, and characteristics that are specific but still vague enough to allow a viewer to imagine what this person was like. There is no right or wrong construction, and so every person who passes through—no matter what connections they have to American life—are invited into this history. And in doing so, this history gets replicates. The text of these bodies spreads outward, traveling to all corners of the globe to compel action. To make people realize we live in an era where there is no escape from AIDS.
==
We will have these bodies that we have to stitch back together, to figuratively stitch into our skin to break down the barrier between self and edge until, as the deceased Vito Russo says, “this is going to be over. Someday there’s going to be no such thing as AIDS. And people will just look back and remember that there was a terrible tragedy that we survived.”
But now, it is not over.
Now, I’m living in an era when every time I have sex with an unfamiliar man, no matter where I am in the world, I think of HIV. I think of disease. I think of how I’m protecting myself, or not protecting myself. I think of how these quilted bodies are with me, as if the sheets or the comforter of the bed I fuck on is alive. I feel like I don’t have any autonomy quite often. When I fuck, I get to forget these legacies for a moment, but afterward, as I exit his apartment with the taste of his cock on my lips, Vito Russo is there. Or Jimmy. Or whoever it happens to be that I remember today.
==
I think how, when I return to the United States on September 1st, it’s going to be my supposed return “home.” But the more I travel, the more I seem to reside outside of place. Or at least a fixed conception of city that I must attach myself. I will return and I will be welcomed home and people will ask, “So what did you learn being there?” To which I will have to respond, “It doesn’t feel like I’ve ever really left.” To travel and research contemporary AIDS-era artists, to travel and get HIV tests in other cities, to meet men in other cities exposes cultural and linguistic differences, but that isn’t what this piece is about. This piece is about the skin of history. This piece is about what happens when, in the course of your travels, you realize this skin is your tour guide.
To your left, it says, is the place where two lovers found out one partner had seroconverted unexpectedly. To your left is the place where they waited for months wondering if the still negative partner had, in fact, been infected. To your left is where generalized HIV-specific anxiety was manifest. Walk 10-15 minutes more, and you’ll find that anxiety to your right. But a guidebook would never write about such an uncomfortable thing. So, unless you’ve experienced it first hand, you’ll never know it existed.
==
I permit myself to reside in these selvedges. I permit myself to be fused to history at the same time that this fusion prevents me from my escape. I cannot escape and this is supposed to be the most terrifying thing imaginable, to be stifled by a text, a legacy, constant memorialization, but I don’t have any other choice, do I? I’ve built up my identity through this global, ever present companion. The anxiety is acute. The anxiety is something I wish I could be freed from, sometimes at least. After orgasm, I wish it could just be like we had fucked outside of time. But there is no outside of time, just outside of place. So I’ve just got to make due with what I have.
My self is always at some kind of edge with these viral legacies. That is the burden of queer life, but these selvedges are also the spaces where you can feel an unbelievable ecstasy. While you’re never alone, you have this tremendous power to shape your companions. What does their skin feel like? How does their laughter sound? When you’re lying together in bed, your head resting in their ribcage, what does their breathing remind you of? You’re never immobile in all of this; instead, what you must do is change the terms of that motion to adapt to life in constant crisis, at least for now. At least while the skin of history is your global companion.
Present Deaths
Our red Prius spins through the narrowed and still narrowing roads along the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s strange to be so close to death yet remain so captivated by its beauty. But is it really such a rare occurrence, I start wondering, to tempt death? Must we be positioned a hundred feet above a hungry sea to recognize it? Maybe not, but I have to admit: death is more naked up here. Probably because you sense the risks more acutely, like a rockslide, a clueless out-of-towner that swerves into you, or a car’s malfunction that makes you careen off the edge, in a graceless tumble.
But this imminent death soon dissolves as I sit in the passenger’s seat, listening to my driver, several decades my senior, recount a different kind of death—during the start of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, before AIDS really even had a name, except, of course, for the “gay cancer.” This is also a naked kind of death, but it’s decidedly different. Here pleasure for the lost object reemerges in the retelling of past events. The way you walk a city hoping for a past that can never be present again. We used to eat at this restaurant in the Haight, he says. Or sometimes I walk by our old apartment and pause, thinking about the moments we spent at night, when I still smoked pot.
The car makes a sudden right turn, as the view of inlet I was ignoring opens up again into a vast expanse of coast, the light grey fog retreating, in the afternoon sun, to the edge of the horizon. A distant somewhere, not here, because here is the spot where a relentless westerly whips sea spray into the cliffs, where gulls with wings outstretched dive down, just to the surface of the sea, hungry as the waves. Here is where we both sit in this red Prius, not rejecting death, but disavowing its hold over us. Here is where we refuse to be lost like those other people and memories we nevertheless keep with us.
==
The car swerves away from the sea’s expanse again, and it’s as if, when faced with the land, I retreat inward. Something about the size of the boulders around me, or the alien shrubs flattened by the wind, makes me seem so small. Except for the fact that the memory that comes into my mind is never a memory I could have held when I was in that Prius in April 2012. It occurred after the fact of this ride, so consider the fact that I’ve ripped apart my own history and stitched in another panel—this memory—for symbolic purpose. That’s really what this project is about, after all, renaming and reinscribing meaning into queer life and queer history, making a claim for our narrative as an on-going draft of our escape from trauma, violence and loss.
So this new memory I place into 2012 is from the beginning of 2014, from when I was on the opposite coast.
==
Today in the mail I received a plainly wrapped box from my grandmother back in Wisconsin. Plainly wrapped and on the small size, it seemed ordinary. It seemed as if there was nothing that could hold any power over me. Perhaps a few homemade snacks, some pairs of socks, or another object I didn’t really need. Still, I tore into the wrapping, throwing it the side, that heap of generic brown, as I then cut through layers of thick tape.
When I opened the box, I was a bit taken aback. A thin but insulated winter coat, in a grey color, and a pair of winter boots, nothing stylish, but perfect for those days when New York City snow turns to your worst neighborhood. But what got me is that I remembered why they were sent. My Uncle Jimmy, who was living with AIDS, died in March 2013, and my grandmother had taken over his condo. These items were ones I picked out from a pile when I had stayed with her a few weeks earlier. Items she let me look through before they went to Goodwill because we had been similar in size.
I paused for a moment and then it struck me: These are a dead person’s clothes. A dead gay person’s clothes. My gay uncle who I never talked to about his gayness or his illness. My gay uncle who is lost, forever, except in these few objects that remain to remind me of how I miss him. I remember tearing up then. (Why should clothes make me tear up?) But seeing these objects in front of me was one kind of closure, of closing off his absent body, even as I vowed to keep his ghost alive by selecting these objects. These things no longer belonged to Uncle Jimmy. They were mine.
==
Another turn in the road, this time a downward turn, where the enormity of the sea seemed lost for a second. Here, though it never happened, I imagine us stopping to park near one of the many beaches. I imagine us getting out, probably shivering a bit as a chilly wind would whip at our skin, but staring out at the sea and thinking Derek Jarman blue. Some immensely deep, impenetrable shade of our future lives, a chance not to be cleansed our sins or deviance, but instead to be cleansed of the forces telling us our relationship to death must be kept silent. We both understand that SILENCE = DEATH, so as I imagine us approaching the beach, two images emerge from my mind.
The first is Gregg Bordowitz in Fast Trip, Long Drop. Here the camera has a full shot of his sick body as he sits on bed, white briefs and a black t-shirt decorated by the same symbol. He’s smoking a cigarette, and he says, “Safer sex is good. Intimacy, that’s the problem.” The second is from A Single Man, 50 years earlier, where a grief stricken man cannot come to terms with the loss of his partner, with the loss of a fulfilling intimate life in a repressive age. He’s dreaming he’s at the sea, this same Pacific but much further south, as he wades deeper and deeper into the waves, to silence this well of grief.
I think of these two images because on one hand, it’s true we’ve progressed so much from this time of self-erasure, that my own life is a testament to the limits of visibility. But I am an anomaly in all of this. There’s a distinct difference between being visible and being present. The former is a way of announcing you’re here, but it’s static and immobile. The latter is a way of saying that you’re here, but you’re liable to vanish—either from others’ will or that of your own—at any moment. I am present, and so challenging the limits of visibility, I cling to moments that call into question how, or even if, I’m being seen.
==
On this beach, we are not seen.
On this beach, it’s just us, this sand, and this sea.
Just pink flesh, a muted white underfoot, and Derek Jarman blue.
We don’t have to be present now, at least not to anyone but ourselves.
We have to be present to death.
We have to be present to a form of loss that isn’t as naked as the precarious journey in the red Prius to get here.
We have to be cleansed of the shame we feel when we think of these deaths.
We have to be cleansed of the shame we feel when we choose to live and disavow the hold of loss over us.
==
So, I present myself to the sea with my driving partner. I present myself to sea with his lovers, with my uncle, and our interwoven pleasures. I present myself to let the wind pick up. I present myself to let the seas swell, to seas that generate huge, white crests. I present myself to bring the sea spray right into my nostrils, stinging salt as an initiation, into.
This is going on right now in NYC and let me just say....the first line of the flyer really catches me off guard. Probably the first time I've ever seen something advertising gay sexuality with the phrase "tired of condoms" (outside, of course, barebacking websites, group, and the like). It's not that the phrase is shocking so much as I question it's accuracy. Is there really condom fatigue? Are men these days simply "tired" of condoms? Or is the reality a bit more complex than that? I wonder how many of them have ever used condoms in the first place, or how their relationship to using condoms might be a little more ambivalent, that they might slip up on using them sometimes or might not use them in certain contexts.
Land of Perverts
“We’ve got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a perverted human being. Every AIDS case can be traced back to a homosexual act. [The amendment] will force this country to slam the door on the wayward, warped sexual revolution which has ravaged this nation for the...
Check out my latest bit of writing on Douglas Crimp, moralism and the AIDS crisis.
A Future Magic
“We learn from the best of these poets what writing can and cannot do for their lives.” – Kalstone (in “Art and AIDS; Or, How Will Culture Cure You?)
When confronting HIV/AIDS as an epidemic, when confronting the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS, it’s vitally important to also discuss what writing can and cannot do for our lives. Which is to say: How much can visibility achieve? When does the production of individual art and the cultural legacy fail to change the political landscape for the better? Who, after all, is actually listening?
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I like to fill in spaces where bodies have been lost. On days when it’s especially grey, think April in New York, with the constant barrage of rain showers and fog, I like to be a magician. I say magician because there’s an undeniable magic in poetry. You sit there, whether it’s with pen in hand or your hands at the keyboard, and make visible something that may have never existed before. One day I can decide to become an owl. The other, I can bring to life someone who’s dead, and we can sit on a bench in Central Park during a soupy New York summer day, waiting to be cleansed by the impending thunderstorm.
Lately I’ve been wondering just how good my magic is. Most people would say I’m obsessed with death. New York littered with needles and addiction. Gay men in Berlin on darkroom sex binges. Poets and visual artists who, unlike their words, turned to dust. Or the careful cataloging of their pained emotions while they continued to struggle, half-living. But that’s not really what I’m writing about; that’s not where the magic comes in. Anyone can write about death, but few people are good at conjuring the spaces inside of death. Few people are good at conjuring futurities.
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A futurity is not a destination. A futurity is not some kind of place where we will certainly reside at some later moment in time. It is, instead, a point of departure for other kinds of life, a visible and enriching possibility beyond death that is nevertheless informed by the edge, the little pang of loss that no amount of magic can ever fill in.
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Visibility continues to matter a great deal in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Constructing futurities is one of the key elements in constructing this visible presence because we cannot simply say, “See how I have survived! See how I have struggled! See the stigma I have faced!” Residing only in the past just leaves all of these empty spaces. It’s okay to sometimes forget the trauma of HIV/AIDS. It’s okay to say that you fuck without being dominated by intense guilt over the millions that have died. It’s okay to be visible in a way that also stakes a claim in your future. In this respect, writing and language can do a lot to end an epidemic. It can find soft spaces—bodies—among the absence of those bodies. No, they never fill back in the dead. But that’s OK. A magician is not a divine being. We must always rely on laws of physics. The filling in that we do is always ephemeral.
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Criticism lobbied against my work is that it’s disconnected from on-the-ground realities of HIV/AIDS. And yes, it’s certainly true I come from a position of relative privilege socially, economically, and racially. However, this doesn’t cancel out the capacity to recognize inequality. It doesn’t cancel out the ability to work across lines of difference, via different methods, to engender these futures. I absolutely believe that there is the possibility for every person to visibly stake out their futures, but it always becomes a matter of empowering them to do so. We must infect them with the legacy of one of these artists, some disturbing fact about how AIDS spiraled out of control because our government let it, or the reality of personal stigma that may have, up until a certain point been unnamable.
I am not a political lobbyist. I am not working in the non-profit sector in an HIV/AIDS advocacy organization. But what I’m doing isn’t academic theory or high art. I’m writing because we’re dying. I’m writing because we’ve all been dying for a while. And I will not be someone who dies.
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I will freely admit it feels unsatisfying to be a magician sometimes. On those days with my owl beak, when I let out a screech that punctuates the stillness of the forest, I’m lonely because there’s nobody else around to hear me. But it is in these moments of clarity that my queerness feels normal, where there’s no imperfection of my form. And so I drift back into my own body, to my hands running themselves through my hair, the flicker of yellow around my eyes hungry in the sunlight that’s broken through the grey.
And I yell. I make my project known. In the days to come, a few people come out to me as HIV positive. A few other people ask me if I’m positive and I have to ask them the question, “Why do I have to be positive to write about HIV?” For some, there is silence. For others, they realize what they’re question really was asking. Most of these encounters are fleeting. We’re all living in a world where we can’t sit still for so long. But I’m sure at least one of them would sit around later and discover how language has the capacity to transform, how they’ve been a magician without knowing it.
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As a book cataloging a Barcelona exhibit related to HIV art says: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
Today, I stop here. Does writing and language really need to remind us of anything else? Why do we have to write to change anyone but ourselves and those belong to the space we consider “community?”
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Last Tuesday I arrived in Barcelona to begin the next leg of my research through MACBA, Barcelona's contemporary art museum and a great incubator for queer-related programming, including AIDS-specific archival material. Though I haven't yet started at MACBA (that happens tomorrow), I've begun having conversations with men in Barcelona and I've seen both the permanent AIDS memorial and a reconstructed memorial by Keith Haring outside of MACBA, which directly references SIDA, the Spanish acronym for AIDS. The following reflection relates to Keith Haring, remembering, and how to confront nostalgic feelings.
My latest POZ Magazine blog post is up.