(Director’s Note: Lee Morrissey, Founding Director of the Humanities Hub, joined the Clemson English faculty in 1995, moving to Clemson from Manhattan, where, while a graduate student, he had volunteered to create the Archives at an arts center, The Kitchen. From 1995 to 2000, he brought artists–including Ben Neill (who performed with David Wojnarowicz in the 1989 event described below), Carl Stone, Pamela Z, Margaret Leng Tan, and Trimpin–to Clemson in a program he called “Technology and the Contemporary Arts.” This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
This summer, I will turn 56, which means, this summer in particular, I am well into what has been considered an elevated risk group for Covid 19. But it also means, in my case, I am now living through the second plague outbreak of my lifetime. There has been so much focus nationally on the Spanish flu of 1918, and other, earlier plagues, including the Black Death in Florence (see Boccaccio’s Decameron) and the bubonic plague in London (see Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year), but much less attention to the more recent experience of HIV/AIDS. A recent article in the Washington Post reviewed how knowledge gained from HIV/AIDS research is helping with Covid-19 research, but considering that Anthony Fauci first came to national prominence in the 1980s’ AIDS crisis (making a frenemy of Larry Kramer in the process), you would think that there would be more attention paid to the last time around.
I’ve been wondering recently why AIDS isn’t more in the news, and I am starting to think it’s because it affected minority communities, and, unless you were traveling in those minoritized circles, well, you just did not really know. I grew up in Boston, shared a radio show on WOMR-FM in Provincetown, MA in the summer of 1984, started graduate school in NYC in 1987, and volunteered, from 1987 to 1995 at The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, and Literature, creating and organizing their archives. I traveled in those circles. AIDS affected people I knew, early in the disease. By the time I reached Manhattan, in a New York City that does not exist anymore (or, if enough people now move out, yet), AIDS was a defining feature of one of the things that used to attract people to New York: the arts. The Aids Coalition to Unlock Power (ACT UP) was already active, with intense meetings at the Lesbian and Gay Men’s Community Services Center. Gran fury, an artists collective formed the year after I moved to the city, created one of The Kitchen’s monthly posters, with the words “art is not enough” taking the center—most—of the page. I remember David Wojnarowicz at The Kitchen, all wiry energy backstage (well, upstairs) before his 1989 performance there, In the Shadow of Forward Motion, and, then, in the performance, realizing that it had the same wiry energy—David offstage had been, that night anyway, David onstage, which was part of his point: silence equaled death, and he was going speak volumes, producing all the time, constantly. His self- portrait with flames coming out of his left side, the viewer’s right (pointedly highlighting the political mirror), turned out to be realism. I was back home in Boston when news of Ethyl Eichleberger’s death reached me via the New York Times, and I won’t forget the frustration of trying to explain to my parents over breakfast why the loss of someone reimagining the Classics in drag and garish makeup, with self-consciously schlocky accordion songs, might matter to someone else studying literature in the same city. I remember inviting everyone I knew well enough to see John Kelly’s 1991 event, Maybe it’s cold outside, because it nearly worldlessly told a life and death story of learning that one is HIV positive, with a soundtrack by Arvo Pärt. Later that year, on World AIDS Day, A Day Without Art, The Kitchen assembled a broadcast, in part from the Kitchen, and in part from other arts organizations, mixing frank safe sex PSAs with artistic reflection on loss. The standout, for me, was dancer Bill T. Jones, HIV-positive, and having outlived his partner, Arnie Zane, dancing toward his mother, Estelle, while she sang “Walk with me Lord.”
I left New York City, and moved to Clemson, SC, where I have lived practically ever since. The metaphorical city I had left had, in many ways, died. Actually died. C. Carr wrote its eulogy in her book, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, whose last chapter is titled, “The Bohemian Diaspora.” In Rent, which has a song called “La Vie Boheme,” Jonathan Larson memorialized it, and the gentrification pressures, which ended it (and on the morning of its first performance he passed away, too, from an undiagnosed aortic tear, not noticed in the several trips he made to his local hospitals, one of which has since been shut down).
There is another, much less well-known, and more abstract, long-form music and theatre piece from the era, Meredith Monk’s Book of Days (1989). It opens in then-contemporary NYC, in color, as a construction crew blasts a hole in a wall, through which the camera travels, into a largely medieval village, complete with separate quarters for Christians and Jews, filmed largely in black and white. As a plague breaks out. There’s a documentary dimension, and contrasting musical and performance styles–martial and spectacular in the Christian white-wearing section, mystical and participatory in the Jewish section of town. When, in this section, the plague arrives, in the figure of a lone dancer gesturing maniacally, the Christians amass and blame the Jews, despite the intervention of one man who tells them that “everyone is dying.” A map of the town turns red as the deaths accumulate across its segregated quarters, and the sounds of the singers get more and more menacing. As can be heard in this rendition of the song, we are listening to the plague itself: about two minutes in, out of those vocalizations, the chorus huffs “we know who you are; we know who you are; we know who you are; ha ha ha; ha ha ha.” It is a chilling effect to have the plague emerge from the cacophony and claim us. But that’s what happens.
In 1990, The Kitchen got caught up in the 1990 NEA defunding. A decade earlier, as Bill T. Jones recounts in an essay he contributed to The Kitchen Turns 20, a book I edited on the occasion of the first two decades of The Kitchen, the US Information Agency had asked The Kitchen to select US artists to send to a cultural exchange in Bucharest, Romania. But, now, after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War had ended and the so-called Culture War had broken out, at home. The US is still living with the profound consequences of this redirection. At the time of the NEA defundings, my father called, and said “I thought you were volunteering at a soup kitchen!” Or, in other words, I guess, he was asking “what are you doing there?” That’s a fine question, and I think the answer has to do with being interested in making meaning; the people, the artists, who performed at The Kitchen and other venues in New York, wanted to do something meaningful. Like me, they came to New York from somewhere else with that hope. They came from and spoke to overlapping communities, and they wanted to create something, usually ephemeral, filled with allusive, polyvalent, and, I think it’s important to note, embodied meaning. Some of it, a really small number within it, left the performers vulnerable to charges of obscenity, but, ironically, usually in works which meant to raise questions about what else we live with, without considering it obscene. All of this took place before the internet, before Ken Starr’s detailed report on President Clinton, and so might strike people today as quite tame. They might also be struck by the convivial friendliness of the experiences in the audience at the time. In the process, or processes, of creating their works these performers created new communities, sometimes as small as the seating at the original P.S. 122 (a former public school), or at the original Dixon Place (an apartment living room), but sometimes, as with Bill T. Jones, as big as everyone who’s seen any of his several Broadway choreographies.
Comparing then and now, a few things stand out. First, I have not seen much emphasis recently on how fatal HIV was for that first couple of decades of the disease. I think of it all the time now, in part because I saw so much loss at the time, but also because Covid-19 is so much more transmissible than HIV. Imagine if the novel coronavirus were as fatal as AIDS. Actually, don’t. It’s too much to contemplate. Second, in the early days with Covid 19, as doctors started to see patterns in who was most vulnerable to the virus, age, occupation, and then race were the initial factors. Eventually, it became clear that other factors involved the status of one’s immune system, or “underlying health conditions,” and then it was reported that only 12% of the US population was metabolically healthy, meaning not obese, not diabetic, not with high blood pressure, etc. It is as if 88% of the population has a different kind of acquired immune deficiency, related to diet (and access to healthy foods), environmental and living conditions (and access to places in which to exercise), and other cultural, meaning economic, meaning political, factors. Third, HIV/AIDS is still with us. Last year, 690,000 people died from AIDS, and 1.7 million people were infected, worldwide. And, while there is PrEP if you think you are at high risk, there is, still, no vaccine, and no cure, yet. In the US alone, according to the CDC, there were about 38,000 new HIV diagnoses in 2018, most of them in the South.
Fourth, thirty-five years ago, people who were affected by HIV/AIDS were frustrated by a President who would not mention the disease. At the time, his political party was focused on family values and personal responsibility, which meant a disease cast as gay and preventable with celibacy (and safe sex) needn’t be a national issue, they thought. Today, the president, of the same party, certainly talks about the current pandemic, but he has spent a lot of time saying that it will go away (it hasn’t yet, almost six months later), and that it is getting better (when it is getting worse). And personal responsibility has devolved to NOT wearing protection, because, it is argued, nobody can tell another U.S. American how to do anything. Four decades ago, conservatives blamed the sexual activities of gay people for spreading AIDS, mistakenly thinking it was a gay disease. Today, as soon as the lockdowns are lifted, apparently heterosexual young people mingle in close proximity, close enough for this pandemic’s transmission–without wearing any protection. In terms of disease transmission and prevention, they are acting as irresponsibly as Republicans used to allege gay people were, except this time, all they need to do for transmission is stand near each other, unmasked, in, say, a pool, while a beach ball bounces off their heads.
Finally, I think about how much changed in the US because of AIDS activism, a range of activisms. By becoming experts in the disease—no one else would initially, so they did—activists changed healthcare. By highlighting their exclusion from their partners’ hospital beds, activists pressed for recognizing lifelong commitments among lesbian and gay people, known today as gay marriage, and legal nationwide. Most of all, though, because so many affected were artists, they could create verbal, visual, musical, and, in the end, emotional responses to living with or being stalked by the disease. There was some hope, then, that there might be angels in America. I can imagine the current Covid-19 pandemic–which is also creating the second great recession, or worse, in just 12 years–is going to have even bigger social consequences, and, I say hopefully, just as positive. If so, though, we are going to have to do the imaginative work of the artists lost to AIDS to create affecting representations of living with and being stalked by both a disease and an economic collapse. Gran fury said “Art is Not Enough,” but, actually, it is a start.