Judith Butler Art Definition Fury the Government Has Blood on Its Hand

Ryan Conrad

…history is a process of generalization, an elevator pitch, and we privilege the stories that are easier to tell. In the public sphere, complexities are oft slipped under the shadows of our zeitgeists, and well-worn media tropes supplant more disorderly truths.

- Avram Finklestein, AIDS 2.0[one]

Introduction

This essay analyzes cultural production by queer American artists in the 1980s and 1990s that frames the AIDS epidemic as a grade of genocide, using James Wentzy's 1994 experimental film Past Any Means Necessary as its anchor. Reviving these neglected works will demonstrate how common the analogies between warfare upon civilians, genocide, the Holocaust and the AIDS epidemic were amid queer cultural producers at the time. Through (re)readings of Paula Treichlar, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler and Deborah Gould, this newspaper examines how these significant-making metaphors came to be accepted within the shifting emotional habitus of queer people at the elevation of the crisis. This essay continues past briefly examining how the AIDS epidemic is being historicized at the present moment, in terms of both its political and affective legacy, through recent film and visual culture. How accept these metaphors of mass decease and total destruction of queer lives been rearticulated or forgotten and to what ends? Lastly, this essay will offering provisional reflections as to how the historical framing of the AIDS epidemic as genocide does or does not serve the electric current gay and lesbian political turn towards assimilation, inclusion and respectability. Or more specifically, what does it mean to not remember the AIDS crisis on the terms by which information technology was described by those queer artists and activists who experienced the carnage and unimaginable loss of life first hand, but are no longer here to remind united states of america? And what do we make of contemporary work produced by those who did survive, but accept turned abroad from these once commonplace metaphors.

Although the AIDS epidemic likewise disproportionately impacted other marginal groups at its onset—the disabled (hemophiliacs), racialized populations (especially Haitians), and injection drug users—this essay focuses specifically on queer cultural responses to the crisis considering my larger projection is to investigate how the legacy of the AIDS crisis had and continues to have an impact on the trajectory of contemporary gay and lesbian politics. While none of these afflicted groups are mutually sectional and racialized groups of people remain grossly overrepresented in both incidence and prevalence of HIV infection, the political fortunes of gays and lesbians have rapidly expanded since the invention of the Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment (HAART). Beginning in the mid 1990s the crisis shifted from the stark reality that AIDS was a disease marked by assured decease, to a chronic long-term manageable illness for those who could admission treatment. While the political fortunes of gays and lesbians chop-chop expanded since these then-called post-AIDS years only after the invention of HAART, racialized people, drug users and the disabled remain securely marginalized in American society. This essay explores this specific impact of AIDS on gay and lesbian politics in part to understand why their political fortunes have grown by leaps and bounds while other disproportionately afflicted communities remain disenfranchised and in crisis.

Fractional Histories and Metaphors in the Making

Doing the history of AIDS in any chapters, including small, specific and somewhat superficial historiographies like the one offered in this essay, always seems to exist condemned to high-stakes inaccuracies, partial truths and flattened complexities no matter how hard one tries otherwise. This essay hopes to avert such missteps to the extent possible when dealing with such fraught and contested by events. Rather, it hopes to contribute to the messy and disorderly truths, even the uncomfortable and conflicting ones, that Finkelstein demands of us when doing the history of AIDS.

As an original member of the Silence = Death projection and Gran Fury, Finkelstein observed in early 2013 that 'it'southward likely we're now witnessing the solidification of the history of AIDS' in reference to the recent canonization of specific AIDS histories. This observation has since become commonplace as scholars effort to make sense of the outpouring of piece of work looking back at the history of the AIDS crunch.[2] These scholars are reflecting on art retrospectives like the traveling Art AIDS America exhibition on view in various locations for a year betwixt the fall of 2015 and 2016, the New York Public Library's autumn 2013 to spring 2014 exhibition Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism, the Gran Fury: Read My Lips exhibition at New York University in 2012 and Harvard'due south 2009 ACT Upwardly New York: Activism, Fine art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 exhibition.[iii]

Additionally, these scholars are referencing the solidifying of certain AIDS histories through recently released documentary films similar Sex in an Epidemic (2010), We Were Hither (2011), Vito (2011), How to Survive a Plague (2012), United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012) and Uncle Howard (2016) as well as recently released historical dramas like Examination (2013), Dallas Buyers Lodge (2013) and the HBO made-for-Television receiver movie reboot of Larry Kramer's Normal Center (2014). While these new works are vital to our historical and present day understanding of the ongoing AIDS epidemic, this essay will focus more sharply on lesser-discussed works produced in the late 1980s and early on 1990s that weren't conceived under a logic of historical story telling and anniversary—similar the and then-called thirtieth ceremony of AIDS in 2011 which produced an outpouring of nostalgic and commercial interest in HIV/AIDS that will merely as speedily wane later the few bucks to exist made have been extracted.

Cultural product and artistic works, similar those created during the pre-protease inhibitor days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, generously lend themselves to metaphor. Susan Sontag's seminal 1978 pre-AIDS text titled Illness and Metaphor provides guidance in understanding how such metaphors might impact the health and well-existence of people living with AIDS. She argues confronting using metaphor to describe disease suggesting that metaphors, particularly military ones, crusade psychological and social harm to those afflicted; they detrimentally shift our collective focus abroad from the rational biomedical discourse and difficult science from which treatment and cures are derived. Sontag would become on to write the follow up text, AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), where she shifts her main focus from cancer to AIDS while making many of the aforementioned arguments against illness metaphors. Between the publication of Sontag's 2 texts, feminist communication studies scholar Paula A. Treichler interjects with the convincing argument in the now infamous issue of October magazine on AIDS cultural analysis and activism edited by Douglas Crimp that 'no affair how much we may desire, with Susan Sontag, to resist treating illness as metaphor, illness is a metaphor.'[iv] She continues, '…the AIDS epidemic—with its genuine potential for global devastation—is simultaneously an epidemic of a transmissible lethal affliction and an epidemic of meanings or signification.'[v] Treichlar goes on at length, citing other scholars who have challenged Sontag's model of clearing the way of harmful metaphor so that more objective science can lead us, simply Sontag'south writing has had a lasting impact on scholarship virtually AIDS. The work of Eric Rofes (Dry Bones Breathes: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures [1998]) and Jan Zita Grover (Due north Enough: AIDS and Other Clear-cuts [1997]) come to listen in particular as they fastidiously avoid war and armed forces metaphors almost AIDS while employing environmental ones alternatively.

What's of interest here though, is thinking through not just how the media, politicians, moralists, popular culture and even biomedical scientific discipline have socially constructed meaning about illnesses such as AIDS historically, but how people living with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s might have utilized metaphor to brand sense of their own illness and lives. Specifically, how might take people living with AIDS in the Us before any form of effective treatments existed, utilized metaphor productively to organize their emotions and fight dorsum in the face of devastating political despair, deadly medical negligence, governmental indifference, and a growing pile of dead bodies comprised of friends and lovers?

James Wentzy, By Any Ways Necessary, 1994, Video still. Paradigm courtesy of the artist.

Genocide?

James Wentzy'south brusk experimental film By Any Means Necessary was made in 1994 and first exhibited equally part of the MIX New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now referred to simply equally MIX NYC, in that aforementioned year.[6] Co-ordinate to a 1996 article from POZ magazine written by the now deceased AIDS activist Kiki Mason, the pic was made after Wentzy approached him and requested to utilize a manifesto he had written for a brusque pic.[7] Mason goes on to describes the manifesto equally the text he contributed to an Human activity UP action in which a smaller affinity group inside ACT UP called The Marys would distribute accurate looking Gay Games brochures with the incendiary text. Information technology just so happened that the 1994 Gay Games in New York City also coincided with the twenty-fifth ceremony of the Stonewall riots, an consequence Deed Upward wanted to commemorate in juxtaposition to the consumer driven Gay Games, Stonemason notes. Although Bricklayer expresses ambivalence as to the effectiveness of the fifty thousand brochures printed with his words, which at the fourth dimension were collectively attributed to Deed UP, but the words themselves have been taken up by another artist (Wentzy), giving them another life and leaving a rich audio visual archive of political feelings from which we can continue to make meaning from the past in this present moment. After searching the finding aids for numerous AIDS related collections to locate an original copy of the spoof Gay Games brochure at the New York Public Library's archives without luck, information technology appears that Wentzy's moving picture is primarily what remains of Mason'southward words.

James Wentzy, By Any Means Necessary, 1994, Video yet. Paradigm courtesy of the artist.

Preceding Wentzy'southward Past Any Ways Necessary is a simulated academy leader where white words on a black background proclaim "ONE AIDS Decease EVERY 8 MINUTES" equally the number of minutes count down by the second. This unique simulated university leader appears on many direct action documentary videos Wentzy produced, including those featured on his Manhattan-based weekly public access television show, AIDS Community Television set.[eight] In chat, Wentzy relayed that he created this university leader shortly after the Act Upwardly action that shutdown K Central station in 1991 where activists were property a "One AIDS Death Every 8 Minutes" imprint over the arrivals/departures time tables.[9] By employing it hither in his experimental brusk video he is directly linking his creative work aesthetically to the now canonized genre of shoot and run style documentary AIDS activist video that emerged along with increased admission to consumer grade video technology in the 1980s and 1990s.[10]

James Wentzy, By Any Ways Necessary, 1994, Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Following the fake academy leader the screen goes dark before transitioning to a tight close upward on the confront of a dimly lit mustachioed human being standing in the foreground earlier yet some other layer of video that will presently be further revealed. The combination of close upwardly shot and dim lighting allows the viewer to come across the glossy reflection of the human being's eyes and the shadowy outline of his face, just not clearly plenty to actually identify him. He remains semi-anonymous equally anyone would in the dimly lit back rooms of the so shuttered gay sexual activity clubs and bathhouses in New York City.[11] The man slowly begins to deliver the then anonymous manifesto by Kiki Mason in a at-home, simply sure vox every bit the photographic camera slowly zooms out revealing the black and white picture show footage of World State of war 2 concentration camps littered with lifeless bodies in the groundwork.

James Wentzy, By Whatsoever Means Necessary, 1994, Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

The manifesto begins:

I am someone with AIDS and I want to live past any means necessary. I am not dying. I am being murdered just as surely as if my body was being tossed into a gas sleeping room. I am beingness sold down the river by people inside this community who merits to be helping people with AIDS. Hang your heads in shame while I point my finger at you.[12]

The metaphor between AIDS and genocide, and the Holocaust more specifically here, begins at the commencement of this spoken manifesto and visually through the pairing of Holocaust imagery with that of a person living with AIDS. This framing of AIDS as genocide and analogies linking AIDS to the Holocaust continues throughout the emotionally dense v infinitesimal and 40-nine second video as the following two cursory excerpts demonstrate:

Activists at present negotiate with drug companies just as the Jewish councils in the Warsaw ghettos of Globe War 2 negotiated with the Nazis. 'Requite united states of america a few lives today,' they insist, 'and we'll merchandise yous even more tomorrow.' AIDS careerists—both HIV-positive and HIV-negative—have exchanged their anger for an invitation to the White Firm…[thirteen]

Jewish leaders established organizations to run their ghettos and nosotros practice the same in a desperate endeavour to proceeds some sense of command over this living nightmare. Everyone is selling you out. We refuse to plead with the US government or negotiate with the entire medical-industrial circuitous for our lives. We accept to become what we need past any means necessary…[fourteen]

The framing of AIDS as war or genocide, and specific references to the Holocaust are not limited to Wentzy'south short video. In fact the metaphorical reference is quite common throughout AIDS related cultural production in the Us created before the invention and big-scale usage of life-saving medication like protease inhibitors as the post-obit examples demonstrate.

The Silence = Death project, a pocket-size consciousness raising group that predates the more well known propaganda arm of ACT Upwardly called Gran Fury with whom they are ofttimes conflated, designed numerous posters framing AIDS every bit genocide.[15] They are credited with the cosmos of the 1986 iconic black poster with a centrally placed inverted pink triangle, a straight reference to the pink triangle worn by homosexual men in Nazi concentration camps, and the white text 'SILENCE = Decease' running along the lesser. They also produced the group'due south as recognizable 1987 neon yellow and pink "AIDSgate" poster of Ronald Reagan with fiendishly neon pink optics and includes the caption '…What is Reagan's real policy on AIDS? Genocide of all non-whites, non-males, non-heterosexuals?...'[sixteen]

Members of the Silence = Decease project also contributed to an installation in 1987 titled 'Let the Record Testify' in which 'AIDS criminals'—doctors, politicians, journalists—are shown earlier a backdrop of the Nazi Nuremberg trials, again making the connection between AIDS, and WWII and the Holocaust.

AA Bronson of the renowned queer Canadian artist collective General Thought describes the process of making a portrait of one of his dying collaborators titled Jorge, February 3, 1994 in the 2008 documentary General Idea: Art, AIDS, and the Fin de Siècle. In it Bronson states,

This was a portrait, three portraits I guess, of Jorge [Zontal] that I took well-nigh a week before he died. His father had been a survivor from Auschwitz and he had this idea that he looked much as his father had looked when he came out of Auschwitz. He's blind here and he asked me to take these pictures to document that. Then when I finally produced them every bit a piece, I printed them in sepia on Mylar so they have this sense of memory to them and it'due south interesting how vivid that echo back to Auschwitz is. This piece is in fact in the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York.[17]

Although General Thought was originally based in the fledgling Toronto art scene of the late 1960s, the collective would soon split their time between New York City and Toronto before their demise in 1994 due to the deaths of all members except Bronson.[18] They are included amid the other American cultural workers here every bit they were influenced by their time in the politicized art milieu of New York Metropolis and their work is clearly in dialog with other American artists working during this time period.

Musician and activist Michael Callen, an HIV-positive gay man and the founder of the People Living with AIDS Coalition, produced a pop album titled Purple Heart in 1988.[19] The title of this thematically AIDS focused album references the medal earned past agile duty United States military personnel injured or killed in battle. Metaphorically, Callen is suggesting that this is also a medal that should be awarded to people living with AIDS if AIDS was indeed a war being waged against HIV-positive people, peculiarly the so-chosen undesirables who felt most under siege: queers, injection drug users, poor people, disabled people and people of colour. Additionally, according to artist and AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz, the track Living in War Time that appears on Callen's Purple Heart album serves equally the soundtrack that structures one of the earliest directly action AIDS activist video documentaries, Testing the Limits: NYC (1987).[20] Callen also covers Elton John'south 1970 piano ballad Talking Old Soldiers, imbuing it with new significant as an homage to the first generation of gay men and activists of which Callen was a function, who are already state of war weary from the ongoing battle against AIDS.

A longer iteration of Testing the Limits: NYC was produced 4 years after by the same commonage titled Voices from the Forepart (1991). This video documentary aired on HBO in October 1992 and featured segments where activists discussed opposition to the proposed laws to quarantine and tattoo HIV positive individuals. This documentary too included an interviewee who made the argument that not including people of color in medical trials was equal to genocide.

The war metaphors proceed with the Red Ribbon project that was produced through an analogousness group inside Visual AIDS Artists' Conclave. The Blood-red Ribbon, at present a ubiquitous and arguably politically innocuous international symbol was originally designed to mimic the yellow 'support our troops' ribbons popularized during the United States invasion during the Gulf State of war in the early on 1990s.[21] Or as one of the founding members Robert Atkin's put it, 'the Artists' Conclave produced the [Red] Ribbon to subvert the onslaught of gooey jingoism unleashed by the Gulf War and embodied in the yellow ribbon.'[22]

These sentiments are echoed in echoed in the cultural interventions undertaken during one of ACT UP/NYC'due south coordinated days of action known as the Day of Desperation on January 23^rd 1991. The night before the big day of activeness, John Weir, a novelist, cultural critic and activist, snuck into the CBS news studios in New York City along with two other activists and interrupted a live broadcast of the evening news with Dan Rather. Weir, popping on screen briefly shouting 'Fight AIDS not Arabs!' was articulating a connectedness betwixt the state of war abroad and the unaddressed AIDS war at dwelling house.[23] Further stressing the links betwixt George Bush Senior's gulf state of war and the AIDS crisis in the United States, Act UP/NYC performed a massive takeover of Grand Key Station releasing a banner affixed with helium balloons that read 'Money for AIDS, Not for War.' Neither of these interventions explicitly makes the connectedness between war, genocide and holocaust as conspicuously as the imprint carried by Human action Up at San Francisco's Pride Parade in 1990 that read 'AIDS = GENOCIDE, SILENCE = Death,' just it's clear that AIDS and war are seen on equal footing and easily comparable through the interventions undertaken every bit role of Human activity Upwardly/NYC's 24-hour interval of desperation.[24]

Two of L.A.-based Gregg Araki films from the early 1990s also portray characters describing the AIDS crunch as genocide. 'I call back it's [AIDS] all function of the neo-Nazi Republican final solution. Germ warfare you know?  Genocide' claims Luke in the Araki's cocky-proclaimed 'irresponsible' route picture, The Living End (1992). 'It'southward regime sponsored genocide, biological warfare, I mean retrieve virtually it. A deadly virus that is just spread through premarital sex and needle drugs, it'south like a born once more Nazi republican wet dream come truthful,' says Michelle in Totally Fucked Up (1993) to which Patricia adds, 'AIDS volition get down in history as i of the worst holocausts ever. I mean America is committing genocide confronting information technology's ain people and eventually this plague's gonna rack up more than causalities than Hiroshima and Hitler combined. And nobody will e'er forgive our lame shit government for merely sitting dorsum and letting it happen.' In the product notes enclosed in the DVD release of The Living End Araki again despondently explains,

In the dorsum of my mind, I was sort of hoping that past the time The Living End was finally released, the AIDS holocaust would be over and the flick would be something of an anachronism. Unfortunately, given our present day sociocultural climate of rightwing oppression and rampant gaybashing, it seems even more relevant now than when information technology was written [1988] over three years ago.

David Wojnarowicz's performance poetry and visual works also include comparisons between the Holocaust and AIDS. In his collage piece Untitled (If I had a dollar…) 1988-89 he refers to politicians and authorities healthcare officials as 'thinly bearded walking swastikas.' This line is repeated in spoken discussion performances featured in his own 1991 video collaboration ITSOFOMO with Ben Neil. This same piece of performance poesy was besides used in an unfinished video collaboration between Wojnarowicz and Diamanda Galás chosen Fire in My Belly (1989) that was excerpted and re-edited for German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim'south documentary, titled Silence = Death (1990), on the impact of the AIDS crisis on New York City artists. In another photographic work titled Subspecies Helms Senatorius (1990) Wojnarowicz has taken a photo of a plastic spider with a swastika painted on its back and conservative political leader Jesse Captain's face collaged onto where the spiders face should be.

Returning to Von Praunheim'due south videoworks, the Silence = Death documentary mentioned previously also opens with a videotaped performance by the punk stone performer Emilio Cubiero of his spoken discussion slice The Decease of An Asshole (1989). In this slice he explicitly refers to AIDS as germ warfare earlier delivering a blistering diatribe confronting having had war alleged on him 'and this whole grouping of people [gays].' He finishes with a screed confronting AIDS victimhood and takes control of his own life by inserting a pistol into his asshole and pulling the trigger thereby killing himself.

Praunheim's other documentary titled Positive (1991) released the same year focused more on New York Metropolis'south gay activist milieu fighting the AIDS epidemic. In this documentary Praunheim includes a brief interview with gay Jewish activist and writer Arnold Kantrowitz who explicitly broaches the topic of comparisons between the AIDS crisis and the Holocaust. In Kantrowitz'southward arbitration on the discipline he notes how some people take offense to AIDS-Holocaust metaphors, just that in his inquiry and self-education about the Holocaust he sees many legitimate points of comparison including the disappearances of many friends and acquaintances, the general public non caring, the relief exhibited by homophobes that homosexuals were going away—a similar relief to that exhibited by anti-semites during the Holocaust—, that many were killed in a curt time, and that there was a swell loss of contributions to the arts and philosophy due to the death of so many creative gay people and gay intellectuals. The documentary ends with an interview on the street at a Pride festival in New York City with a man named Marty who emphatically states to the camera that AIDS was the Pearl Harbor of gay liberation. To hammer home the illustration farther, a quote from playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer adorns the cover of the VHS release from Get-go Run Features proclaiming: 'this is our Holocaust, New York City is our Auschwitz, Ronald Reagan is our Hitler.'

Critically acclaimed gay playwright Tony Kushner may be about well know for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America (1993) that was given the full fabricated-for-boob tube HBO handling in 2003, but his 1987 play A Bright Room Called Day is also noteworthy. In this play, set in both the inter-war years of the Weimar Republic and the 1980s in New York Urban center, Kushner conspicuously compares Hitler's rise to Reagan's amongst thinly veiled references to the AIDS crisis. This comparison caused outrage amongst theater critics at the time of its production and is largely overshadowed past the success of Angels in America.[25]

Felix Gonzalez-Torres too carries the Nazi Holocaust metaphor throughout a series of untitled works in the late 1980s, often featuring family portraits of Nazi leaders in jigsaw puzzle form. Also of notation amidst this collection of untitled works is the piece Untitled (1987) which is a photostat with Gonzalez-Torres's signature date-list. This slice starts with 'Bitburg Cemetery 1985,' referencing Reagan's ceremonial visit to the graves of Waffen-SS Nazi soldiers at the request of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in club to demonstrate the repaired friendship between the United States and Germany after World War 2.

Taking theatrical protests to new levels of ridiculousness, the anonymous collective of AIDS activists known as Strong Sheets utilized the Holocaust metaphor twice at their January 1989 AIDS fashion show that coincided with the week-long protestation vigil outside L.A. County/University of Southern California Medical Center.[26] Equally seen in John Goss's 1989 documentary of the effect, i person is modeling a night gown complete with a pink triangle and identification number printed directly on it, invoking the style of 'concentration camp chic.' The MC of the consequence lets anybody know they should order theirs today, before the chiliad opening of Auschwitz-Anaheim where they volition all exist transferred in the spring. Afterward all the AIDS inspired ensembles accept been shown off before a raucous crowd, the 'Parade of Homophobes' follows. In this final segment activists march downwardly the ruby-red carpet rail with oversized cut outs of the busts of notorious serophobic homophobes. Included amongst Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Lyndon LaRouche, Jerry Fallwell, and a few other notorious gimmicky enemies of people living with AIDS, is Adolf Hitler.

I provide this detailed list of visual and performative work from the United States that makes the metaphoric connection between the AIDS crisis and war, the Holocaust, and genocide non to belabor my signal, simply to show how the analogy circulated in mutual usage beyond artistic disciplines amid queer cultural producers at the time. This is not to elide the differences in specificity betwixt genocide, state of war and the Holocaust, or to even argue that these were the only metaphors in usage amidst American artists making work most the AIDS crunch, but this cursory overview of artistic and cultural works makes clear that such a cluster of metaphors was in broad apportionment and these works were non isolated in their metaphoric invocations.

It is also important to annotation that many—but certainly not all—of these queer cultural workers surveyed previously are both Jewish and based in New York City. These artists were also contending with the ongoing historification of the Holocaust punctuated at the time by the Broadway production of Martin Sherman's play Bent in 1980, which examines the Nazi persecution of homosexuals,  as well as the release of Claude Lanzmann's ballsy ix-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah in 1985. For immature queer and/or Jewish artists living in the United States, the historification and passing on of cultural memories of the Holocaust from older to younger generations are inescapable; they clearly had an influence on the fashion these cultural workers understood the AIDS crisis in relation to their other identities. With AIDS killing people past the thousands and a number of American politicians responding to the crisis by proposing laws for mandatory testing, quarantine, and tattooing of those infected, the analogy seemingly becomes unavoidable.[27]

It should also exist noted that the taking up and general usage of Holocaust and genocide metaphors in relation to the AIDS crisis is particularly American. While surveying the queer cultural works of other western countries with similar epidemiological profiles to the United States, it is hard to observe like metaphorical assertions. This could be in part due to the U.s.a.' big Jewish population that fled a hostile Europe earlier, during and afterwards World State of war II, with the highest concentration residing in and around the largest epicenter of the AIDS crunch in America, New York City.[28] Furthermore, The United States has the second largest Jewish population in the globe. Besides at play in the amplification of the genocide/holocaust metaphor in America is the complete absenteeism of a national health intendance organisation. These ii cardinal factors together likely contribute to the circulation and resonance of the genocide/holocaust metaphor in the Unites States in relation to the AIDS crunch, but as Roger Hallas has demonstrated in his treatise on AIDS, the queer moving image, and witnessing, other historical traumas have been invoked by different constituencies of gay men trying to make sense of the AIDS crunch the world over including the Holocaust, American slavery, Australian anti-immigrant violence and apartheid in South Africa.[29]

Although two Australian artists utilize similar holocaust and genocide metaphors, these pieces come up from artists influenced past American artists and or American media. David McDiarmid'southward Kiss of Light series uses swastikas in multiple works that he produced only a few years afterwards his tenure in New York City where he mingled with ACT Upwardly activists and from where many of the previous artists mentioned were based. Despite the fact that the references in the exhibition catalog for the contempo retrospective When This You Come across Call back Me (2014) only mention the swastika'due south pre-Nazi spiritual uses and meanings, it'southward hard not to make the connection to these other artists making much different meanings from the aforementioned symbols. Secondly, Christos Tsiolkas' debut 1995 novel Loaded besides features Ari, a young poofter protagonist who lists 'war, affliction, murder, AIDS, genocide, Holocaust, famine…' in ane breath, nihilistically explaining how and why we are all essentially screwed. These two examples do non, however, stand for the larger cultural milieu's response to or structures of feeling regarding the AIDS crisis throughout the industrialized west outside the U.s.a..

Lastly, in situating the AIDS genocide/Holocaust analogy in relation to longer view of queer history and politics, it is helpful to reverberate upon how the Holocaust and Nazi references came to occupy a place in gay liberation consciousness before the AIDS crisis. Historian Jim Downs has mapped this out in his writing on gay liberation newspapers like Fag Rag, the Body Politic, Gay Sunshine, Gay Community News, and others, that discussion of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals was mutual.[30] Downs convincingly argues that these gay liberation papers from the 1970s illuminate the ways in which gay people tried to historically situate gay culture in order to make sense of their present day situation. This was accomplished through the publishing of articles that historicized events like the emergence and crushing of Magnus Hirschfield's same-sex friendly Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany to the feel of gay men and lesbians in concentration camps in Primal and Eastern Europe. This history allowed readers and fellow writers to draw analogies between their lives to the lives of an imagined gay community of the by, setting the stage for the explosion of Holocaust/genocide metaphors the next decade every bit the political crisis of HIV/AIDS emerged. While much ink has rightfully been spilled discussing how or why the Holocaust has become the event to which acts of regime suppression and violence are compared to today, every bit opposed to the many other genocides, taking into account the specificity and genealogy of the Holocaust and its repercussions on queer people offers an understanding of this miracle that is specific as opposed to overly generalized.[31]

Returning to Wentzy'due south short picture show, after framing the AIDS epidemic equally genocide, Mason's words turn ever more towards demanding radical action while the video of concentration camp carnage in the background becomes more and more visible. While the anonymous homo narrating on screen suggests radical actions like belongings drug company executives hostage, splattering claret on politicians, trashing AIDS researchers' homes and spitting in the face of television reporters, we run across bulldozers pushing heaps of lifeless bodies into mass graves and deteriorating trunk parts strewn nigh. Although the anonymous man demands these actions he acknowledges that most, including himself, find it hard to conjure the courage necessary to comport out such activeness. He concludes past calling upon heterosexual and HIV-negative allies to join the fight and for queers to utilize their queerest gift—creativity—to discover new ways to fight the battle confronting their continued genocide. In the final seconds of the video the man slowly moves off-screen rendering the groundwork footage fully visible as a limp decomposing body is slowly pulled from a mass grave.

James Wentzy, By Any Means Necessary, 1994, Video still. Epitome courtesy of the creative person.

Framing Genocide and the Politics of Emotions

Jim Hubbard, a co-founder of the MIXNYC picture festival and long time colleague of James Wentzy, recently exhibited ii of Wentzy'due south films at the Fales Library at New York Academy as part of Non merely this, but 'New linguistic communication beckons us', a 2013 exhibition on AIDS histories. In Hubbard'due south curatorial argument he refers explicitly to By Whatsoever Means Necessary outlining his wariness, as a Jew, of making analogies between AIDS and the Holocaust—a wariness he notes that is frequently expressed by others. He goes on to say, 'but James Wentzy by combining the physicality of the imagery and the cold-bloodedness of the narration forces me to recognize the connections between mass expiry from a preventable epidemic and mass death in the gas sleeping room.

This controversial, yet largely employed framing of AIDS every bit genocide in the belatedly 1980s and 1990s past activists and artists alike is a clear indication of the shifting emotional land of gay and lesbian people facing the onslaught of a seemingly unending deadly epidemic. Deborah Gould points out that this framing did not resonate emotionally or instigate the necessary political organizing amidst gays and lesbians when Larry Kramer outset penned 'ane,112 and counting' in the New York Native using a genocide framework with Holocaust metaphors for understanding AIDS in 1983.[32] She notes nonetheless, that by the tardily 1980s the AIDS as genocide framework began to resonate emotionally and politically with gays and lesbians in ways it had non before. Gould accounts for this shifting emotional habitus—the embodied, somewhat unconscious emotional disposition of a group formed through social and political forces—of gay and lesbians in the late 1980s in convincing item. Summarizing her ain points she says,

…given a context of immense and apparently intentional regime fail, pop and legislative support for quarantine, denial of basic civil rights by the Supreme Court [Hardwick vs Bowers], media hysteria, and horrific illness and e'er-increasing deaths, lesbians and gay men no longer saw information technology equally farfetched to compare thousands of death from a virus with the millions of death due to intentional state murder.[33]

Discussing the implications of framing further, Judith Butler argues in Frames of State of war: When is Life Grievable? (2010) that,

Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, considering they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are ontologically and from the showtime already lost and destroyed which means that when they are destroyed in war, naught is destroyed.[34]

Although Butler's concern in this text is the way the United States government frames and justifies the ongoing war on terror from the top down, it is instructive to think through the possible ways her theorizing about framing could be applied to the bottom upwards framing of AIDS as genocide by queer artists and activists. If the AIDS epidemic was indeed a war between those with and those without country power every bit then many queers claimed, does that brand queers—again among other so-chosen undesirables—ungrievable subjects as far equally the United States government, the medical establishment and the so-chosen general population was concerned?  Could the framing of the AIDS epidemic by queer artists and activists as genocide then be understood as an attempt to reframe the crisis in a way that contests the bailiwick position of queers as ungrievable by tapping into the emotional responses related to a familiar 'indisputable instance of immorality' like the Holocaust.[35] Could the genocide framework also be used by queers to brand a moral argument for the right to grieve on a massively public and political calibration?[36] Was the much-contested term 'genocide' a helpful mechanism through which queers could competition their precarity, tap into a well of stiff emotional responses, and mobilize against the deadly complicity of government, medical establishment, and the and then-called general population?

In an exchange between David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian over what the term 'genocide' does and does not do in relation to the all the same unacknowledged Armenian Catastrophe/genocide, Kazanjian summarizes some of Nichanian's claims.

Information technology ['genocide'] is not just a word nosotros utilize to correspond an event we can know. Rather it has get a word that represents us in our utilise of information technology. It does so by continually restaging what [Zabel] Essayan and [Hagop] Oshagan figure as the Catastrophe itself: not only the loss of the police of mourning, only also the deprival of the loss of the law or mourning. 'Genocide' denies this loss and so performs the Catastrophe again and once again.[37]

He continues, stating that '…"Genocide" is not itself a silence; rather it imposes a silence by entombing the Event [Armenian Catastrophe/genocide] within the pursuit of a calculable verdict.' In this linguistic configuration of 'genocide' Kazanjian and Nichanian are concerned virtually the un-transmittable experience of mass death on such a large scale that it remains indescribable despite linguistic attempt to do then. Furthermore, this passage suggests that naming anything a 'genocide' renders its indescribability mute and thus perpetrates the horror of events similar country sponsored mass death in trying to rationalize or calculate the incalculable. The loss of concern hither appears to be the loss that occurs when trying to interpret complex and unknowable histories and experiences into language.

Despite these claims to the opposite, how might the word 'genocide' also act equally a generative naming and performative framing of a catastrphoic event like the AIDS crisis whose circuitous history has been, as Finkelstein noted, largely 'slipped under the shadows of our [current] zeitgeists, and well-worn media tropes supplant more than disorderly truths?'[38] How might employing a highly contested term like 'genocide' to describe the AIDS epidemic past artist and activists in the 1980s and 1990s perform an opening up of political power for queer subjects that were considered disposable, undesirable and un-grievable?  Additionally what political and affective implications might at that place be to name and recall the AIDS crisis in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s as a grade of queer genocide?

Teaching AIDS as Genocide

During my experience volunteering at a queer and trans youth driblet-in center in central Maine over the last decade, an insatiable amount of free energy, resources and fourth dimension has been squandered on fights to repeal Don't Enquire Don't Tell and gain access to same-sex marriage benefits. During this same time AIDS service organizations were handed the largest austerity measures in the history of the epidemic, marked locally by the closure of the Maine AIDS Alliance, All About Prevention, the Lewiston/Auburn needle exchange, and the Maine Community Planning Group on HIV Prevention of which I was a member. Numerous services for young queer and trans folks were besides closing their doors meantime.[39] Many of the queer and trans young people who came to the drop-in program were devastated in 2009 when the gay union referendum failed in Maine but to be overjoyed by its approval by referendum in 2012. The emotional habitus at present seemed much like Yasmin Nair and I had previously described in the Leap 2011 edition of the online journal Nosotros Who Experience Differently,

Years from now, children volition draw around campfires and listen to tales of the dark ages when gay marriages were non allowed. Their optics volition widen at this historical fiction: first, gay men and lesbians were repressed; then, they gained a measure of sexual freedom in the 1970s; were struck past AIDS in the 1980s (every bit punishment for their pleasure-seeking means); and finally came to realize that gay matrimony would be their salvation.[40]

Kenyon Farrow, the former director of Queers for Economic Justice, shares a similar sentiment. Speaking on a December 2012 a panel about gay marriage and equality at the New School for Social Policy in New York City, Farrow stated:

One of the things that I think nosotros demand to exist very careful [most] is how the push for same sex matrimony is not a natural, information technology'due south not…  I want to remove this assumption that this [gay wedlock] is next step in kind of LGBT… We went from Stonewall and at present matrimony is what made logical sense. No. That was really a process that was very much involved in a kind of response to AIDS and a kind of reaction to Human action Upward and to some of the more radical elements in queer organizing. And some political choices were made to drive u.s. in this particular direction and that at that place are a hell of a lot of resources that have as well backed up that decision.[41]

It appears the emotional habitus in which queer political work is now done has once again significantly shifted, where anger and an accompanying radical political vision has been traded in for respectable calm and political inclusion within the status quo. For example, queers take somehow gone from demanding universal health care during the AIDS crisis, to enervating marriage rights so they can admission wellness insurance through partner benefits, assuming 1 has a job with health insurance benefits in the outset place.

Whatever attempt to unpack which numerous events accept structured the shift in emotional habitus is beyond the scope of this essay, however, it's of import to note that the structuring role of neoliberal economics alone is not a sufficient optic to business relationship for these changes. It is clear that an epochal shift in political disposition amongst LGBT people has occurred betwixt the years of cultural product documented in this essay. Nowadays-twenty-four hour period gay and lesbian politics and visual representations have largely distanced themselves from sexual liberation and HIV/AIDS histories in an endeavor to appear respectable and deserving of the tenuous rights gained thus far. Worse yet, are present-day gay and lesbian political organizations and accompanying visual narratives that prey upon and co-opt such radical political movements with deeply revisionist agendas. All of a sudden the Stonewall riots become a quaint tea political party paving the way to nuptial elation and the AIDS crisis becomes a moment of bang-up maturity for gay men who have now left backside their rebellious, promiscuous, youthful bad boy days at the kids table and now occupy a proper place at the table amongst the rest of the existent adults. So the question remains: how did such a radical shift in mood or commonage affective states, which shapes what is imagined equally possible, take place and how do we revive a radical queer political imagination in the present?

Remembering the Dead

In Vito Russo's speech communication Why We Fight, delivered at an Deed UP sit-in at the Department of Health and Human being Services in Washington D.C. on 10 October 1988, just two years earlier he died from AIDS related illness, he said,

Living with AIDS is like living through a state of war which is happening simply for those people who happen to be in the trenches. Every fourth dimension a shell explodes, you expect around and you discover that you've lost more of your friends, merely nobody else notices. It isn't happening to them. They're walking the streets as though we weren't living through some sort of nightmare. And simply you can hear the screams of the people who are dying and their cries for help. No one else seems to be noticing.[42]

At present that most of the trenches that have been filled with the lifeless bodies of quickly forgotten HIV-positive queers are quietly covered over, what does it mean not to historicize this period of the AIDS crisis in the same fashion every bit those who experienced it first hand and then loudly named information technology genocide?  What does it hateful to misremember or forget the war dead who fought courageously then that fags like me could live?  Those same queers, who like Michael Callen and Richard Burkowitz, helped develop some of the start strategies on how to have sex in an epidemic without becoming another prey in the ongoing state of war against queers.[43]

Once more, to return to the question this newspaper opens with: what does it hateful to not remember the AIDS crisis on the terms by which information technology was described by those queer artists and activists who experienced the death and destruction commencement mitt, just are no longer here to tell the states near it? And what practise we brand of those who survived and continue to produce AIDS histories through art and visual civilization while abandoning the terms by which their experience was one time and so readily described?

Demian DinéYazhi'/R.I.S.Due east.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, American NDN AIDS Flag, 2015, 11 x 17 inch poster. Image courtesy of the creative person.

And what might reasserting the genocide framework on the queer historical feel of HIV/AIDS do? Could a present-day naming of the past queer commonage experience of HIV/AIDS exist as generative as I perceive it to have been historically? Might queers that are not already part of other marginalized communities then see themselves in stronger relation to other peoples struggling against settler colonialism, racism and xenophobia concomitant with genocides? How might an acknowledged history of queer genocide temper queer demands for recognition and inclusion inside country forms that take and can be used to dehumanize us once once more? For the moment, the answers to these questions remain entirely speculative, but the reassertion of the AIDS crunch as genocide has begun creeping back into contemporary queer work created by a younger generation of cultural workers. For case, Eric Stanley and Chris Vargas' featurette Homotopia (2007) or my own experimental brusque film things are unlike now… (2012) or the transdisciplinary work of queer indigenous artists like Demian DinéYazhi' that put AIDS in direct dialog with histories of genocidal settler colonialism. These works, if nothing else, open up a space to imagine what remembering our queer histories differently might mean.

Demian DinéYazhi'/R.I.Due south.Due east.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, HIV/AIDS Affects Indigenous Communities, 2014, xi x 17 inch poster. Image courtesy of the artist.

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[1] Finkelstein, Avram. 'AIDS ii.0.' Artwrit. (Accessed January 20, 2013). http://world wide web.artwrit.com/article/aids-2-0/.

[2] For examples of observations like to Finkelstein'due south encounter Feiss, Eastward.C. 'Go to Work: Deed Upwards For Anybody.' Piddling Joe, November 2015, 158-71; Juhasz, Alexandra. 'Acts of Signification-Survival.' Leap Cut: A Review of Gimmicky Media, 55, 2012; Kerr, Ted. 'Fourth dimension Is Not A Line: Conversations, Essays, and Images Virtually HIV/AIDS Now.' Nosotros Who Experience Differently, 3, 2014. http://wewhofeeldifferently.info/periodical.php?issue=3#TOP; Nishant, Shahani. 'How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS: Global Pasts, Transnational Futures.' QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 3, one, 2016, 1-33.

[iii] Finkelstein, 2013.

[4] Treichler, Paula A. 'AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.' AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Boston: MIT Press, 1988), 34.

[v] Ibid., 32.

[6] http://www.actupny.org/diva/CBnecessary.html.

[7] Masson, Kiki. 'Manifesto Desitny.'Poz Magazine (New York City), 1996. (Accessed July 17, 2016.) http://www.poz.com/manufactures/252_6966.shtml.

[eight] Juhasz, Alexandra.AIDS Television receiver: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), seventy-73.

[9] Wentzy, James. 'Interview with James Wentzy.' Interview by Ryan Conrad. Jump 2011.

[x] For cursory clarification of the links between AIDS Activist Video and applied science, run across Lucas Hilderbrand, Retoractivism. Likewise see AIDS Activist Video archive, New York Public Library.

[11] For a history of the closures of commercial gay sex venues in New York City see: Colter, Ephen Glenn.Policing Public Sex activity: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism. (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996); Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. (New York: New York Academy Press, 1999); Warner, Michael.The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ideals of Queer Life. (New York: Free Printing, 1999).

[12] By Any Ways Neccessary. Directed by James Wentzy. New York City, 1994. (Accessed January 20, 2013). http://www.actupny.org/diva/CBnecessary.html.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Crimp, Douglas, and Adam Rolston. AIDS Demo Graphics. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990); Finklestein, Avram. 'AIDS ii.0.' Artwrit. (Accessed Jan twenty, 2013.) http://www.artwrit.com/article/aids-2-0/.

[16] Crimp, 1990.

[17] Full general Idea: Art, AIDS, and the Fin De Siècle. Directed by Annette Mangaard. (Toronto: Vtape, 2008.) DVD.

[18] Bordowitz, Gregg. General Thought: Imagevirus (London: Afterall Books, 2010).

[nineteen] Bordowitz, Gregg. The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (Cambridge: MIT, 2006.), 13.

[twenty] Hubbard, Jim. A Report on the Archiving of Film and Video Work by Makers with AIDS. Report. (Accessed January 20, 2013.) http://www.actupny.org/diva/Archive.html; Bordowitz, Gregg. The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (Cambridge: MIT, 2006).

[21] Santos, Nelson. NOT OVER: 25 years of Visual AIDS (New York: Visual AIDS, 2013).

[22] Atkins, Robert. 'Off the Wall: AIDS and Public Art.' RobertAtkins.net. (Accessed July 17, 2016). http://www.robertatkins.net/beta/shift/culture/trunk/off.html.

[23] Siegel, Robert (writer). 'Acting Upwardly on the Evening News.' Transcript. InAll Things Considered. National Public Radio. June 15, 2001. http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2001/jun/010615.actingup.html.

[24] Rodriguez, Joe Fitzgerald. 'Act UP Protesters Reverberate on AIDS Demonstrations 25 Years Ago.'San Francisco Examiner, June 10, 2015. http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/act-up-protesters-reverberate-on-aids-demonstrations-25-years-agone/Content?oid=2932874.

[25] Rich, Frank. 'Making History Echo, Fifty-fifty Against Its Will.' Review of A Bright Room Called Twenty-four hours. The New York Times, January 8, 1991. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/08/theater/review-theater-making-history-echo-even-against-its-will.html.

[26] Bordowitz, 2004, 52.

[27] Male monarch, Dennis. 'America's Hitler? Behind the California AIDS Initiative.'New York Native, November three, 1986.

[28] Tighe, Elizabeth et al. 'American Jewish Population Estimates: 2012'. Brandeis University: Steinhardt Social Research Plant, 2013. Retrieved ten April 2016.

[29] Hallas, Roger.Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham: Duke Academy Printing, 2009), 38.

[xxx] Downs, Jim. 'The Body Politic.' Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (New York City: Basic Books, 2016), 113-41.

[31] For an elaboration on this concept and the arguments over the use of Holocaust analogies run across: Shaw, Martin. 'The Holocaust Standard.' What Is Genocide?, 2nd Edition (New York Urban center: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 53-65.

[32] Gould, Deborah B. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 165.

[33] Ibid., 169-170.

[34] Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), Nineteen.

[35] Stein as Quoted in Gould, Deborah B. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT Up's Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 166.

[36] Here I am thinking of another set of videos put together by James Wentzy documenting the many political funerals Deed Upwards did including those of David Wojnarowicz, Tim Bailey and ACT UP's Ashes Activity.

[37] Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. 'Between Genocide and Catastrophe.' In Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: Academy of California Press, 2003), 125-47.

[38] Finklestein, 2013.

[39] Conrad, Ryan. 'Against Equality in Maine and Everywhere.' In Confronting Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Spousal relationship (Lewiston: AE Press, 2010), 43-50.

[xl] Conrad, Ryan, and Yasmin Nair. 'Confronting Equality: Defying Inclusion, Enervating Transformation in the U.Due south. Gay Political Mural.' We Who Feel Differently, 1, 2011. (Accessed Jan xx, 2013). http://www.wewhofeeldifferently.info/journal.php?issue=1#AE.

[41] Marriage and Equality with Melissa Harris-Perry at the New School for Social Policy. Youtube. Accessed January xx, 2013. http://youtu.be/BnFR4kpDYUE.

[42] Russo, Vitto. 'Why Nosotros Fight.' Voice communication. Accessed January 20, 2013. http://www.actupny.org/documents/whfight.html.

[43] Callen, Michael. 'How to Have Sex.' Purple Middle. 1988, CD.

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Ryan Conrad is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD offered through the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Civilisation at Concordia University, where he is also a role-time kinesthesia member in the Interdisciplinary Sexuality Studies and Film Studies programs. Conrad is also the co-founder of Against Equality (againstequaltiy.org), a digital archive and publishing commonage based in the U.s. and Canada. His work is archived at faggotz.org.

warrenprourting.blogspot.com

Source: http://drainmag.com/revisiting-aids-and-its-metaphors/

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