Theodore (ted) Kerr

RM

I want to start on a personal note. In order to talk about the intergenerational dynamics of HIV/AIDS, it feels necessary to first establish the respective points at which we’re entering this conversation, historically speaking. During the 1980s and ’90s, many people entered AIDS cultural production out of a sense of dire urgency. There was this omnipresent notion that, at any given moment, one might be handed—had perhaps already been handed—what was effectively a death sentence. As you know, this threat of imminent death, or of cultural silence, or of institutional and governmental neglect, often directly pushed at risk communities into activism—it feels important to note that these were often people who might otherwise have minimal interest in direct action or organizing. By contrast, you and I are both HIV-negative, financially stable, white gay men who came of age—largely in your case, entirely in mine—after what you have referred to as the AIDS Crisis Culture ¹ of the ’80s and early-to-mid ’90s. Although becoming HIV positive would undoubtedly still have major implications for either of us on a day-to-day level, I think it’s fair to say that the risk of contracting HIV is not inextricably caught up for either of us with this same sense of life-or-death urgency.

At the risk of maybe sounding pedantic, what I’m trying to drive at is this idea that there’s a sort of personal intentionality, or active decision to engage, inherent in someone like you or I joining the conversation around HIV/AIDS, which perhaps differs from the more dire stakes that drove earlier generations into the discourse. You talk a bit in We Are Having This Conversation Now about your early exposure to HIV/AIDS-related news cycles in school in the early ’90s, which was prior to what you have called the Second Silence. You also recount your introduction to AIDS organizing, which occurs slightly later, in your twenties, through your involvement with HIV Edmonton. I want to know what happened in between those two points—how did you go from passing awareness to intentional action? Specifically, I want to know how this desire to become intentionally involved with HIV/AIDS got sparked for you. Were there any particular works of art or activism that stand out as a type of watershed moment, or did your desire for involvement come about in a more ambient fashion?

TK

You share a lot of content that I’m excited by. I want to gently push back on this idea that the activism that took place during AIDS Crisis Culture, or even which took place before that moment, was done solely in response to a specific kind of urgency that doesn’t exist now. I say that, in part, because I want to represent my co-writer Alexandra Juhasz well. She was understood to be at risk at the time. She’s a white cis female. She got involved—like lot of people in her generation—because that’s just what you did. She got involved for the same reasons that I shared #MeToo hashtags, support Land Back, march for Black Lives Matter, or care about what’s happening when it comes to laws that are designed to hurt trans people. These are the social movements of our times. There are some of us who will respond to them regardless of whether or not we understand ourselves to be directly at risk, right? I think that sentiment was true then, and still is true now, when it comes to HIV/AIDS.

At the same time, your question is one hundred percent true. I became involved with HIV/AIDS because, as a white gay man, it was pointed at me. HIV was “my issue.” It was something I had to care about. I got involved because I grew up in a large city—Edmonton is the capital of Alberta. And yet, Edmonton is also very isolated. It is one of the more northern capitals in the world. As much as HIV was a “gay thing,” being involved in HIV was also something that marked you as a global citizen. Having a knowledge of HIV connected you to other struggles around the world, whether that means thinking about the stakes of HIV in Haiti or parts of Africa or thinking about it in regards to the crisis of HIV in Russian jails. My involvement with HIV/AIDS has to do with understanding myself as a global citizen, and as a gay man.

In terms of art and culture, there are a few things that come to mind. In grade nine, I would watch at least twenty minutes of Madonna’s documentary Truth or Dare pretty much every single day. That documentary is interesting because it’s made during AIDS Crisis Culture, but it’s also absolutely an object of silence. Three of the dancers featured in the movie were living with HIV at the time. This is something that was explored in another documentary, entitled Strike a Pose (2016, Reijer Zwaan, Ester Gould). One of those dancers, Gabriel Trupin (1969-1995) was my number one crush at the time. I learned about his death in a special Entertainment Weekly issue that came out one summer when I was young. I was totally devastated. He wasn’t the first person I ever knew to be living with HIV, but I think he was the first person that I had a crush on who had died with HIV.

RM

I want to press on that point a little bit further, because I think there’s something interesting there in this idea of a certain crossover between, on the one hand, a general political or ethical interest in HIV/AIDS and, on the other, this more amorphous or contingent feeling of desire. In retrospect, one of my first real entrees into HIV/AIDS was reading David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives. I had no idea who Wojnarowicz was, and I didn’t know that the book was predominantly about HIV/AIDS. I’m pretty sure I picked it up mostly because a guy I had a crush on said he liked it and I wanted to impress him the next time I saw him. That sort of contingent desire became an accidental pathway into this whole other world of fascination, a fascination which, in retrospect, has definitely outlived my interest in that guy [Laughs.]. Can you say a little bit more about what this interplay between desiring someone like Gabriel Trupin and becoming invested in HIV/AIDS looked like for you?

TK

I love that you use the word “desire.” I think desire is such an important word for understanding why people stay in social movements—not why they get involved, per se, but why they stick around. You have to have desire, you have to have passion. There has to be a sense of eroticism, because there’s always some form of embodiment at play. You have to think that your body is on the line, and that your body matters. So, if I understand that my body, or other bodies that I’m attracted to emotionally, politically, physically, or sexually, are under harm, then of course I’m going to get involved. My love and my attraction to Gabriel, and then the subsequent sorrow I felt for this man that I would never meet, let alone have sex with, is a little hilarious. I was a naive white teenager in Canada, pining over a dead man, who was a man of color, and who was ten years my senior. That’s a fascinating thing. I didn’t do activism in his name or anything like that, but his life and death connects to the life and eventual death of people I do know, and who I do care about.

I’m not sure quite how to say this—as an HIV-negative person, I used to always get asked, “Why are you involved?” There was a period where it was just assumed that if you were involved with HIV/AIDS that you were living with HIV, because of the high amount of stigma attached to involvement. I think people made that assumption for a number of reasons, but stigma is definitely one of them. I used to always try to have an answer ready—I thought that I was supposed to have an answer, out of respect for people living with HIV. And then one time a good friend asked me that question, not as a fellow activist or fellow cultural worker, but as a friend. I told him the truth: “I don’t know.” I’ve been in this for a long time now, and all of my relations, all of my community, all of the people that I choose to be in life with are people who are either living with HIV or impacted by HIV. At this point, it is beyond a matter of desire. It’s just a thread of my life. I think we can sometimes over intellectualize our investments in social causes, or our reasons for doing things. Sometimes it’s just where we landed, and it’s just the people we happen to be with. I’m of the belief that you don’t have to care about every single solitary issue. We just have to try to be decent and show up for what we can. We can actually change the world for the better if we do what’s manageable, or what’s possible, with a sense of love.

RM

There’s something so opaque about desire, or about the way you fall into certain threads without even realizing it in the moment. It’s easy to lose track of how you actually got to where you did within the excitement of it all—it’s hard to figure out at what point you shifted tracks. This idea of an aspirational self, or an aspirational world, seems to come up a number of times in your book. At one point, you describe your art practice and organizing work as, at least in part, an attempt to fashion or move closer toward some sense of self or cultural belonging that you desired to inhabit when you were younger. Could you say a bit more about what that aspirational-self looked like when you were younger, during your early involvement with AIDS cultural production? Have your aspirations for this work changed over time?

TK

I’m smiling right now because, as I think about my answer, I so clearly remember being in this big sports stadium in Edmonton in my early or mid teens. I was there because I was working at a clothing store, and part of the clothing store’s social engagement—although they probably wouldn’t have called it that at the time—was that we would do the AIDS Walk together. AIDS Walk is an important fundraiser, and, for a lot of people, it’s an important moment for raising awareness because everyone’s talking about HIV and raising money for this walk. I remember looking around and, to your question, feeling like this was exactly the world I wanted to be in. There were all these very appealing looking young adults. What made them appealing to me was not only their queerness, as I would now refer to it, but also that they were spending their weekend doing something socially engaged, and that this social engagement was rooted in sex and drugs, which, because of the nature of the event, also felt so connected to healthcare and community. That’s where I wanted to be. I never wanted to be a teenager. I didn’t really enjoy being in my twenties. Through those early experiences at the clothing store and doing AIDS Walks and stuff like that, I became really drawn to this idea of wanting to be a fun 30-year-old. Those early years had a big impact on me, because I saw this perfect idea of relatively young-ish people coming together to build a better world for themselves and others.

To your second point, has that changed? Absolutely not. As a founding member of What Would An HIV Doula Do?, I feel like I’m always trying to replicate that vibe. As a teacher, I feel like my classrooms are attempts at recreating that sense of curiosity, that sense of caring about coming together to make the world a better place.

RM

I can’t help but think of that Runaways song “I Wanna Be Where the Boys Are.”

TK

[Laughs.].

RM

I think it tends to get downplayed a bit in the discourse around AIDS history, but the aesthetics and excitement attached to AIDS activism is often a huge part of the appeal, in a lot of ways. I mean, you look at old footage of ACT UP meetings, and it’s hard not to feel drawn to the very sleek style that was adopted by so many of its members—the black boots and messy haircuts, the crisp white shirts and simple leather jackets. It’s a very charged sort of aesthetic, both in an aspirational and sexual sense. That dimension feels like an integral piece to grapple with when asking the question, “Why would someone be drawn to this movement in the first place?”

TK

I think of someone like Ella Baker, right? Like, it’s important for us to think about Martin Luther King Jr., or Stokely Carmichael, or all of these other big names. But it’s also important to think about someone like Ella Baker. We can’t point to a specific text or moment in time that synthesizes who she was and what she did for the movement. Her impact was rooted in all of the conversations she had, all of that networking, all of that connecting, all of that presence. She created the social roots from which so much was able to flourish. As important as these decisive moments are for history, these decisive moments are only made possible by hundreds of small and often calculated decisions made by wise people who are just doing what they think is right. I always come back to Ella Baker for that reason. After reading her, I am reminded that sometimes the most important part of the Zoom call is the five minutes of chatting before and the five minutes of chatting at the end.

RM

Definitely. Perhaps to dovetail a bit, I’ve been thinking a lot about how emotional transference happens from one generation to the next, or from one moment in time to the next—you address this idea a couple of times in your book, in regard to coming of age in this transitory period within AIDS history, between AIDS Crisis Culture and the Second Silence. I hope this isn’t too much of a digression, but I keep on returning to the 2010 short-film Last Address by Ira Sachs, which makes a couple of appearances in your conversations with Alexandra Juhasz. It’s such a touching piece, which is basically just comprised of these short scenes of the facades of the apartment buildings where well-known HIV-positive New Yorkers lived inprior to passing on, interspersed with occasional shots of other street level scenes like trees rustling in the wind or cats running along stoops. The first time I saw that film, which must have been when I was 19 or 20, I remember being so overwhelmed and caught off-guard by both the intensity and immediacy of my emotional response to the material. Even though I hadn’t yet lived in New York, and even though most of the subjects depicted in the film had died years before I was born, something about it felt deeply personal and deeply familiar, in an inexplicable way. Later on, when I visited New York during the fall of 2021, I decided to make a trip to David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar’s last apartment in the East Village—I found the address through Sachs’ film. I was a bit shocked by the fact that I felt basically zero emotional response while standing there in the flesh. The emotional transference fell flat when transposed into the material world. There’s a sort of disjunction between, on the one hand, the emotional strategies of Sachs’ film and then, on the other, the actual reality of the built structures being represented. It’s as if there’s a sort of tension between monuments, buildings, and fixed memorials, on the one hand, and then, on the other, the different channels through which emotions actually take on these historical characters. What is your emotional relationship to the historical and archival materials that you work with? Does the question of medium inform how you’re thinking about emotional transference, or this sense of feeling the weight of history?

TK

I’m so happy you brought up Last Address. What’s interesting about that piece is that, on paper, you could argue that the film doesn’t need to be a film. It could be a slideshow, or it could be a series of postcards. For me, where the emotional response comes in is these interspersed shots where you see a stop sign, where you hear the sound of a bike bell or a bird, or the construction in the background. It’s the sound of life going on without the people who used to live there. It can be sad, it can be lovely, it can be energetic. It can be all of those things, but it’s actually just the sound of the planet continuing to spin forward. By just keeping his camera there, Ira is holding space for the truth of mourning in his experience of it, or in the experience of whoever he imagines his audience to be. Alex Fialho has done something really incredible with Ira’s film by creating the Last Address Tribute Walk, which is this sort of tribute walk where he takes the film as a jumping off point and then gathers people at those sites—and now sites beyond the film too, like AIDS service organizations and dance clubs where people used to gather. There’s this ritual of sharing, of creating a physical drawing and then leaving it there, of asking if people want to remember. As you’re alluding to, in the book I say that action, or activism, is the best form of memorial. I like to think of something like Ira’s film as the beginning of that equation, and then Alex Fialho’s addition as the next step. It’s beautiful to make space, and then it’s also beautiful to activate that space.

We start to heal communal trauma when, first, there’s a space for the people who have dealt with the trauma to name it, and then, second, for them to see that this naming has been heard, and third, for new stories to be created together. I often think of something like Alex Fialho’s walk as the third piece in that progression. Friendships are built, relationships emerge. You see the space anew, in a way that you’ll never see it again.

So, what makes me emotional? I’ve already listed sound as an important component. A few years ago, I got to work with Dave Harper at the New York City AIDS Memorial, and we created Hear Me Now: Voices of the Epidemic, which was this forty-five minute sound collage of people living with and impacted by HIV in New York City since the early 1980s. Working on that was so intense, because there’s something so ephemeral about the voice. And often in the archive there is a strange dichotomy where for some, only a recording of their voice remains, and for other people, no recording exists. I am thinking about this right now because I just learned that Mary Lucey and Nancy MacNeil, two long-term AIDS activists—Mary herself living with HIV—have died. And with them, I got to hear their voices, and dive into their papers. Elizabeth Koke and I Zoomed with them late last year regarding a play we have written. And a few years ago I was able to flip through a pile of their snapshots at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. I’m a bit cheesy in the sense that like, as much as I’m moved by the ephemerality of sound and how amazing it was to hear their voices, I’m equally moved by the idea that they once touched these photographs that have been saved.

In terms of intergenerationality, working with Alex Juhasz has been amazing from day one. We’ve written together for a while now. I also did an oral history with her for the Smithsonian that changed the nature of our relationship. I was deputized to ask her questions, and to allow for silence to be present as she considered the questions. That changed our relationship, in the sense that silence became a major factor in our work. I think she saw me as someone who could actually listen and witness her in the past, but also, more importantly, who could witness her in the present. I’ve named sound and I’ve named touch as important places for me, and then I would also say that the ability to share silence with someone is also an effective, if not the most effective, way to bridge emotions.

RM

I wonder if something like the word stewardship makes sense here? This idea of existing in active relation to archival materials, or to people who have lived through something that you are trying to access in an emotional or experiential register. I feel like you’re touching on this idea of a sort of distance felt through proximity, or a sense of feeling something that exists in two times simultaneously. When you touch those photos, there’s a sense of immediate closeness: I am holding something in my hand that has also been held in theirs. At the same time, this closeness is only felt through a sort of exaggerated distance: in acknowledging that they also held it, I’m also acknowledging that they’re not here with it now.

You use a really beautiful phrase at one point in the book that has stuck with me, which is “registers of grief.” The phrase captures this sort of distinction between what happens to materials when they’re not touched, or when they’re relegated to the silence of boxes cloistered in the back of offices and archives, versus the type of activation or ongoing stewardship that you’re describing. I often think about this idea that grief requires a certain sense of personal implication in order to become productive. It’s not about just existing in relation to an idea or historical object or concept, but rather feeling some sort of personal responsibility to the flesh and bone that actually animates history and concepts, because it’s the same flesh and bone that comprises you—your ability to personally implicate yourself in the grieving of another is what also allows to you to be grieved by someone else in turn. Do you feel beholden to anyone or anything in particular through your work with HIV/AIDS? Does this idea of personal responsibility, or carrying out work in the name of love for another, feel resonant?

TK

Absolutely. The number one most important to me in my HIV work is the constant attention paid to HIV in the present, the attention paid to the people who are living, thriving, and struggling in this moment. It is so easy for me, and perhaps for you too, to “theorize” HIV. I think the hardest thing for HIV-negative people to do is to be present with HIV. It’s the most important thing to do for those of us who decide to insert ourselves into the conversation and to do this work. At some point, I had to decide to work through my fear of HIV. I had to say, “I am not afraid, it is something that most likely won’t happen to me, but it could happen to me.” Any time I’ve felt afraid of HIV in the past, it’s had to do with bad messaging I’ve gotten about sex and homosexuality, and not with anything that I’ve actually done that has put me at risk of HIV. I think another thing that’s interesting to think about in this context is the fact that semen is an archive. Not only does it connect us to a genetic lineage, in the case of HIV, it connects people virally. Bryn Kelley´s writing clued me into this. Paper is amazing, video is amazing, and audio files are amazing, but so is semen. To be on the other side of fear is to embrace all of these things as beautiful traces of a virus that does what viruses do, and which has inspired people to do beautiful things in the name of saving their own lives, and the lives of others.

RM

Definitely. There’s a particular section in your book where you describe your struggle to find a voice within the discourse surrounding HIV, especially as someone who didn’t directly participate in the activism of AIDS Crisis Culture in the same way that your co-writer Alex did. There’s this certain tension you’re pointing towards, between, on the one hand, wanting to defer to the lived experiences of those who lived through AIDS Crisis Culture and those who are still living with HIV and then, on the other, resisting this false notion that HIV/AIDS is a crisis of the past, or that the experiences of subsequent generations don’t stand to offer a novel perspective on HIV/AIDS culture. What did the process of finding your voice look like? At what point did you feel as if you were able to enter this discourse with some sense of authority, perhaps rooted in your particular position?

TK

One thing that I write about briefly in the book, and which I touched on earlier in our conversation, is that I entered HIV work in part hoping to find a “global community,” or hoping to find a “gay community.” Instead of that, I found an intersectional community, or a community that taught me about intersectionality. By the time I entered this work, lifesaving drugs were readily available. Before this point, the people who were involved with AIDS service organizations were anyone and everyone who needed anything, because there were no sure-fire treatment options. After treatment became available, the people who remained involved in service organizations were primarily those who didn’t have access to good medical care, or who needed support beyond medication. As a result, middle-class people living with HIV, who were mainly white, cis gay men, largely left AIDS service organizations behind. The people who stayed were people who were injecting drugs, experiencing homelessness, as well as Indigenous people, newcomers to Canada and other people who were not only marginalized by society, but also marginalized within the AIDS response.

What gave me permission to stay and keep on working—I use “permission,” instead of “authority,” because it feels like a better word for me—is that we were all working with and for each other. I’m able to stay with this work because of that permission, or that curiosity, or that unspoken rule that in the long line that is AIDS activism, you are not just fighting for yourself, but also for the people that will come after you. In some instances that fight has been about access to drugs, sure, but even before and also after that, it has been about housing. It has been about making sure that food gets into people’s bellies so they can actually absorb the drugs. It has been about gender equality, and understanding that gender is a big, beautiful word. It has been about racial equality and pushing back against xenophobia.

One time I hosted an event at the Bureau for General Services-Queer Division, and I invited this amazing activist, Kelly McGowan, to talk with me as part of the event. At one point, like the young dummy I was, I asked Kelly, “When did you know you were an AIDS activist?” And Kelly said, “Oh, am I an AIDS activist? I just got involved because…” and then she went on to list these three or four other things that she was involved with. HIV just happened to be at the intersection of them. That has stuck with me—I don’t want authority, I want community.

RM

The way you’re framing community here reminds me so much of the way you describe your early experiences of growing up during the Second Silence, in part because it stands in such stark contrast. Your description of coming of age in your book is so wrapped up with these themes of isolation and a lack of information, or a feeling of being siloed off from a larger community of HIV/AIDS culture. In one sense, I wasn’t surprised to hear you describe that moment in time in the way that you do—I’ve done enough reading into AIDS history to understand that there was a truly deafening cultural silence around HIV/AIDS in those years, so your story isn’t shocking in a literal sense. At the same time, something about that ambient feeling of isolation doesn’t totally register or feel real in our current moment, at least to me personally, if that makes sense? I think a large part of this has to do with the fact that, having come of age a bit later, during the early years of what you refer to as the Revisitation period, I felt like my entrée into this history was partially defined by feeling inundated by material and culture and information concerning HIV/AIDS. I can intellectualize how an earlier moment was literally different, but there’s something about that sense of being siloed off from culture that feels difficult to grasp. Could you talk a little bit more about this tension between cultural isolation and active participation in a community? What does the affective difference between those two poles feel like for you?

TK

I think part of this break between us has to do with something as simple as the internet. A lot of young-ish people who are left-leaning or politically engaged—especially if their engagement dovetails with a minoritized relationship to sexuality or gender—go through what I call their “AIDS phase.” More specifically, they often go through an “ACT UP phase,” where they get to see queers speaking truth to power and looking hot and making gains. It’s a very alluring thing. It’s interesting to think about what my relationship to HIV would look like if the internet was more robust in the early 2000s, or if I was a better researcher, or if search engines were more optimized. It was the silence that drove me. The silence brought me to other people who wanted the same things as me.

I did this project while I was at HIV Edmonton where I invited queer dudes over to my house and took Polaroids of them in their underwear. The whole idea was that we were going to push against the narrow representation of how gay men were seen in public. Of course, I was actually just reinforcing it, but in the end that was ok. The actual value of the project, for me, existed in the interactions we’d have before and while taking the photos. A guy would come over, and we would spend the first half hour or getting to know each other. Once they found out I worked for an AIDS organization, they would always ask me questions about HIV. It’s not that they didn’t have basic information. We lived in a city that had school systems where HIV education was taught, and they also had some sense of the history because they were generally curious. But they wanted to know about HIV in the present. What dawned on me over the six months or so that I did that project—where we would have these conversations over tea in underwear—was that that space was the AIDS culture of our time. And that realization was really valuable. We were assembling the networks that we needed, that, due to mass death and silence, had largely dissolved. A lot of us around my age felt that the people who were five, ten, fifteen years older than us didn’t want to talk about HIV. What we slowly learned was that they did want to talk about it, that they were desperate to talk to us and we were desperate to talk to them. In almost every micro-community that has a robust AIDS culture in the present, there has been some sort of watershed moment in which different generations impacted by AIDS have had to break through a barrier of silence and as a result have come together. In New York, I think the censorship of David Wojnarowicz at the Smithsonian brought the generations together. HIV was already in the air, of course, because we were talking about Wojnarowicz. The protests in response to his censorship kicked off a lot of what became AIDS Crisis Revisitation, because young people were feeling brazen enough to ask older generations who had experienced the early days of the crisis firsthand about it. A lot of the older generation was happy—or maybe willing, is a better way to say it—to entrust their trauma to these young people who looked like they were going to take it seriously. 

RM

Would it be fair to characterize this as an example of silence leading to a type of productivity? I’m thinking about this idea of desire or lack becoming a motivator for establishing connection anew, or for actualizing what has so far only existed as a fleeting aspiration.

TK

Totally, I think that’s a really succinct way of putting it.

RM

We should talk about your new book a little more explicitly. I was particularly drawn to the formal structure of it. It’s not really something that you would describe as a typical academic monograph, or a standard Duke University Press title. It’s essentially comprised of a series of extended dialogues between you and Alexandra Juhasz. These dialogues often progress in a non-linear fashion: certain ideas accrete over the course of multiple chapters, while others seem to stall out and then re-enter the picture at a later date, as if they needed to wait for a better moment in order to become fully realized. There doesn’t really seem to be any sort of hermetically sealed or self-contained critical argument going on, yeah? It feels more like the book is built to exist within time, as opposed to attempting to stake out a specific claim rooted in the context of our particular moment. What brought you two to the dialogue format as a formal device?

TK

It was important to both of us that we provide a multi-voice experience, particularly because we’re two white cis people not living with HIV. Even though we’re of different generations, and even though we have a diversity of experiences when it comes to how we have sex and with whom, there are so many things that are similar about us. We needed to create space for disagreement on the page, but also space for nuance and subtle difference. We wanted things to sit beside each other. Alex is one of the best processors I’ve ever met. She is generous with her questions, she listens intently, and her curiosity comes fast and ceases to end. Sitting with someone is work, but not only work. That idea comes from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, of course, this concept of play as a type of study. We also just needed to make space for the fact that we’re from different generations. The fact that we continue to push up against each other’s expectations of one another is really important. For instance, Alex, understandably, is not a huge fan of being called upon as an elder who isn’t present in the here and now. One thing that came out through the process of writing the book is that I was also sick of being misunderstood as someone who only cared about the past, because that’s never been me. I’ve had dates, friends, colleagues, work partners, and so on who have wanted to bond over a nostalgia for this moment that we were never a part of, and I’ve always refused to. The book gave Alex a chance to say, “I’m here in the present.” And it gave me a chance to say, “Of course I care about what happened at The Center in 1988, it’s so interesting, but I’m also just as interested in what happened at the AIDS Action Now meeting in Toronto in 2008.” That is just as valuable, and, actually more crucial, to how I understand myself as anything else.

AIDS is not simple. AIDS is an assemblage. It is a medical and a social diagnosis. To untangle what that means, you need time and you need different inputs. Conversation is the only thing that will get you to that sort of full understanding. We have this idea that if someone lives with the virus, then they understand it, whatever virus it is. In reality, even people living with HIV can spend a lifetime trying to understand the phenomenon they are a part of. So, for Alex and I, the least we can do is slow down and expose ourselves, as well as expose the things that we’re interested in.

The very last chapter in the book that we wrote was the first chapter in the second section. You might remember, but it’s the one where there are several points in which we stop talking, where the single word “pause” appears. That was the most honest way we felt we could represent the real intensity of that conversation. The conversation is about Alex talking about the intensity of always being called on to talk about the past, and how that relates to her relationship to Jim, who is one of her closest friends, who died with HIV, and for whom she does a lot of this work. She initially interpreted a kind of silence on my part as a sign of emotional blockage, or as being rooted in a lack of baggage. I didn’t think that was a fair assessment—I have baggage too. A lot of people in my generation, and perhaps in your generation too, Ryan, feel like there isn’t space for us to be upset, or to have emotions, or to talk about our wounds. Whether it’s out of respect, or deference, or fear, we’re not bringing all that we are holding to the table yet. That conversation happened because—and I’m not proud of this—I had rewritten a chapter without Alex’s permission. We only had two or three highly charged moments of frustration during the process of writing this book, and that was one of them. She was understandably very upset with me, and I went into denial saying I didn’t do that. The only thing that brought us back together was creating this chapter that had breaks in it, because we couldn’t find words to hold those emotions. Often during that fight, we had to stop and just have silence together. In a meta way, that’s how we arrived at this idea that silence brings possibility, that silence is not the lack of sound. It’s when two sounds don’t connect. We learned that in real time through the writing process.

RM

I want to press a bit deeper into this idea of silence as two sounds not meeting, because I think it’s such a crucial framework for understanding the long shadow left by AIDS archives. The term “fiction” comes up a good deal throughout your book. There’s this tension implicit in the act of writing through AIDS archives and objects, because you’re interfacing with these dueling notions of being both beholden to a past which feels, in some senses, inaccessible, and also needing to find a way to square that past with the experiential and emotional language of the present—perhaps this a digression, but I kept on drawing connections to Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” or of using narrative devices to make the past speak through the present. I’m thinking about the Bebashi [Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues] tapes in particular, which the two of you devote most of the first section of the book to talking about. They’re these very emotionally difficult, lo-fi dramatizations of different domestic scenes that take place against the backdrop of a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia in the ’80s. Each scene differs rather significantly in terms of narrative content—one largely re-enacts a story of implied domestic violence, for instance, while another shows a grandmother who is living with HIV recording the story of her life for her unborn granddaughter, whom she will never meet. There are few competing impulses at play. There’s this tension of being thrown up against a wall of sorts, because so much of AIDS history and the context surrounding its cultural objects has been lost—either from a lack of archiving, or from the dissolution of the social contexts that these objects were intended to address. Bebashi, as an organization, began in 1985 as a full-service HIV/AIDS organization aimed specifically at lower-income communities of color in the greater Philadelphia area—they have since expanded to also do work around reproductive health, hunger reduction, and so forth. As you note in the book, nobody who currently works at Bebashi knows who the actors are in these tapes, nor who is responsible for their production. Pieces like the Bebashi tapes were designed to be immediately instructive to a discrete, localized community—their creators were not thinking about properly archiving these materials for the benefit of future generations of researchers, they were thinking about how to keep people alive, or how to help them die with dignity. There’s also something beautiful about that orientation, which is that these objects allow the dying to partially dictate their legacy in their own terms. How do you start to square this? How do you balance between these competing forces of both honoring the dignity of those who have passed, while also contending with these inevitable silences and absences of context, while also finding a framework for rendering these materials prescient to a contemporary audience?

TK

One of the major things we think our book offers is a series of timelines that break down Western ideas of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century into different epochs in relation to HIV. We begin with AIDS before “AIDS”—or, you know, before 1981. That is a way to hold space for all of the people who died of the virus before it had its name. Even though their lives and their deaths don’t get to be a part of the HIV discourse, or at least not in a personal or specific way, we never want to take those souls or those lives for granted. This idea comes even more into focus in the last section of the Bebashi tape, to pick up on your use of the word “fictionalization.” It’s two women—a mother (soon to be grandmother) and a daughter—performing as if they’re taping the grandmother’s last confessional for her daughter’s unborn child, her grandchild. That is another moment in which the book is attempting to hold space for how so many people’s lives and deaths have gone unnamed or disrespected. Another way is through my work on Robert Rayford, who died in 1969 in St Louis with HIV. His death is largely unknown, at least right now. We don’t really get into this in the book, but the graveyard where he is buried is in a state of total disrepair. We can’t find his actual gravesite because of the mismanagement of this historically Black cemetery on the outskirts of St Louis. It’s not due to any fault of the friends and family. It’s because of painful and cruel decisions made by the city to disrespect the dead. Cultural activism can be, and often has been, about bringing dignity to people in life and death.

As much as it’s important to think about this in terms of pre-1981 cases, it’s also important to be doing this in 2023. We know that thirteen percent of all people in the United States living with HIV don’t know their status. We know that in some pockets of New York, for instance, as much as ten percent of people who do get an HIV-positive response are then co-diagnosed with AIDS, which means that they’ve been living with HIV untreated for a long time. Putting those numbers together, we know that there are people who die with the virus who die because of stigma, or who die because they could not seek whatever medical attention they needed. The culture needs to catch up. The activist group VOCAL New York has a great chant, which is something to the effect of, “We could end the crisis tomorrow without a cure.”

RM

Right. Obviously, PrEP is a good thing and anyone who wants to be on it should be able to be on it, but what would the culture around HIV look like if this focus on prevention was transformed into a sense of responsibility to provide adequate care for those already living with the virus, or to help everyone who is already positive reach an undetectable status?

I want to stick with this idea of the unnamed for a second longer. While thinking about the Bebashi tapes, I kept on returning to Roland Barthes’ concept of the death of the author—this postmodern idea that the individual biography of the creator has little to say about the cultural object, and that in order to apprehend the significance of a cultural object we need to look instead at how it infiltrates, functions, and is received within a broader material and social context. In the case of the Bebashi tapes, for instance, nobody knows who the actors actually are, or who produced the tapes. In a certain way, that seems to be part of the point of the video—it’s not a piece of art, per se, but rather a piece of media intended to infiltrate and alter a community. It uses fictional narrative devices in order to do so, but in the absence of an authorial stamp.

I guess part of why I got stuck on this idea of evacuating authorship is because it feels so contrary to what is seemingly, on a mainstream register at least, the defining aesthetic conceit of AIDS Revisitation culture, if you want to call it that. Revisitation culture seems to be obsessively concerned with this idea of the heroic avant-garde genius, or the political martyr—we could probably spend all day naming names, but I’m thinking of what’s become of people like Larry Kramer and David Wojnarowicz, who have been blown up to this sort of mythic proportion, as if their particular biographies contain some sort of hidden skeleton key for making sense of our political moment. Larry Kramer, for instance, is so often incorrectly referred to as the founder of ACT UP—because of his relatively outspoken demeanor and comparatively early involvement in AIDS activism, historical accounts so often arrive at this strange narrative in which Kramer is portrayed as somehow, through the sheer fieriness of his character, single-handedly willing ACT UP into existence. He was at the first ACT UP meeting, sure, but so were a couple hundred other people. How should we engage with this return of the author, for lack of a better way of putting it? There’s obviously this easy sort of critique, which is to say, “Well, that’s not what actually happened, there were so many other people involved, that’s not what Larry Kramer was actually like,” and on and on… not that there’s anything wrong with that! There’s definitely a time and place for that sort of argument. But it doesn’t actually do much critically besides naming what is rather obvious—it doesn’t shut the lid on this sort of Pandora’s Box of AIDS heroism that we’re currently living through. It sometimes feels difficult to find a critical apparatus for engaging with what is going on that doesn’t essentially recapitulate this same obsession with authorship in one way or another, whether this takes the form of critiquing, or “decentering,” certain canonical figures, or the form of trying to expand and further populate the existing cannon of AIDS historical figures—both routes feel like they miss out on this more interesting critique of authorship and the limits of subjectivity that is implicit in so much of AIDS related media, especially media from the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

TK

Yeah. I think that most of the people who get involved with HIV work culturally—as in, not necessarily on an activist, or grassroots, or frontline level, but through curating exhibitions, or writing texts, or thinking about it for an artistic or academic project—tend to be HIV-negative. And a lot of those folks tend to be interested in it for very specific reasons. I think naming those reasons from the get-go can be very helpful. One thing that became abundantly clear to me early on in AIDS Crisis Revisitation was that most of the things we were seeing—whether it was a very successful and powerful documentary on ACT UP and drug treatments, or content that examined the impact of HIV on close-knit gay male communities in San Francisco and New York—were motivated by, and received by, gay men and queer people who felt that the gay rights movement had stalled out because of HIV/AIDS. These are people who felt that the movement could now get back on track, because of the legalization of gay marriage, or because so much time had passed, or because of PrEP, or because of U=U [Undetectable equals untransmittable]. Once I started to view those parts of AIDS Crisis Revisitation as having both a specific maker and a specific audience, I became less frustrated by what I might call the whitewashing or the patriarchy of it all, because I understood what it was for and what it was doing. That realization made the idea of being a part of organizations that were supporting other people to make work around HIV more clear and more exciting. Since 2012 or so, Visual AIDS has done an amazing job of commissioning short films about HIV from people all over—well, first from the United States, but now from all over the world. Sometimes that work adds to the Revisitation, and sometimes it adds to Normalization. The people who are attracted to those works are people who are trying to see AIDS as a global issue, as a networked issue, as an issue of people being marginalized. What I’m trying to say is that knowing where things are coming from is important. Being a part of opportunities to make new things, or to recover new things, is important and helps me with the tension you’re describing. I also think it’s important to realize that nothing is ever fully lost, and nobody is ever fully forgotten. The Bebsahi tape, for instance—there’s not a lot of them floating around, but Alex had a copy, so it wasn’t lost. Those women in the tapes, they’re not known to you, they’re not known to me, they’re not known to Alex, they’re not even known to present members of Bebashi. But, they were—and are—known and loved by someone.

Those of us who are committed to and interested in specific things will find what we need. I’m ok if someone who is just kind of passing through the story of HIV only knows the name of Larry Kramer, or the work of Nan Goldin. In fact, that’s awesome. Do I wish people also knew the name of Katrina Haslip, the activist who helped expand AIDS diagnoses to include women, too? Yes, of course. But I also have faith that the people who need to know her name will know her name.

RM

It’s a question of scalability, right? Different narrative structures function better in different media formats, and also at different registers of popular consciousness. Not every story needs to be forced into this decentralized web of collective vocality, and not every story needs to be elevated to the level of pop iconography—it’s about discerning one’s intentions, and then finding the format that fits best. I think about that a lot in terms of someone like Paula Treichler, who somewhat famously described AIDS as the first “postmodern” epidemic. She saw it as “postmodern” in the sense that the AIDS crisis of the ’80s and ’90s happened to conveniently coincide with the mass proliferation of camcorders and VHS. All of the sudden, activists and artists were able to represent their lived realities on their own terms, without making deference to the impulses of televised news or mainstream media—this obviously takes on particular significance in the context of HIV/AIDS, insofar as one of the main concerns activists and artists found themselves working against was the misrepresentation, stigmatization, and sensationalism of mainstream HIV/AIDS reportage. This turn towards self-recording produced a lot of aesthetically interesting content, but it was also essentially pragmatic in nature. It’s a totally historically contingent choice of medium. If mainstream media is not representing the realities of HIV/AIDS properly, you have no choice but to become the media you wish to see in the world.

I think a lot about how easy it is to fetishize what was essentially a pragmatic approach to medium as if it were an aesthetic approach—to be clear, I’m not saying it’s exclusively one or the other. My point is that fetishism kind of implies a certain evacuation of nuance or indeterminancy. The grainy, lo-fi quality of VHS tapes produced during that moment, especially when paired with the high-impact style and aesthetics of AIDS activists, has almost taken on a sort of nostalgic erotics, as if it were intentionally produced for the purpose of seducing a later audience into action. Many of the cultural signifiers depicted in the visual material produced during some these more notable activist actions, such as the St Patrick’s Cathedral demonstration, have morphed into these sorts of short-hand tropes for representing not just AIDS activism, but also the idea of “activism,” writ large, on a mainstream level. I’m thinking, for instance, of shows like Ryan Murphy’s Pose, which, in one episode, essentially inserts several of its protagonists into a shot for shot reenactment of activist footage from the St Patrick’s demo. There isn’t a whole lot of engagement with AIDS activism in Pose—the scene is mostly inserted to create this emotionally overwhelming sense of political action or defiance within the larger arc of the show, with the visual referent of St Patrick’s functioning essentially as a shortcut for bringing the viewer to the realization that the show’s characters have been “politicized.” That scene generated a fair amount of controversy around questions of historical nuance and accuracy. Notably, Sarah Schulman questioned the ethics of Pose’s decision to insert Black trans characters into the history of St Patrick’s in her book Let the Record Show—importantly, she does not deny the existence of trans women or people of color within ACT UP, but rather merely points to the fact that only one trans woman, who was white (Kathy Ottersten), was arrested during the demo. Schulman’s contention is that the insertion of fictional Black and Brown trans people into a real historical narrative erases and obscures the actual actions of real, living Black and Brown AIDS activists—that it aestheticizes their lives, undoes all of the work that they’ve historically done to try to represent their movements in their own terms, and misrepresents them in a sensationalized and historically inaccurate fashion. In turn, Schulman’s criticism became an object of critique in its own right in an essay by Vicky Osterweil, who questioned the validity of the methods through which Schulman had come to the conclusion that Black trans women were in fact absent from these stories—and Osterweil’s essay, in turn, became an object of critique in a letter from Kay Gabriel, and on, and on. It’s obviously great that this discourse is happening, but I don’t think it really gets at the heart of the issue—I don’t think it’s ever going to reach someone like Murphy, for instance. The use of the St Patrick’s demo as a visual signifier in something like Pose has little to do with the historical realities or nuances of AIDS activism—rather, it’s a simple way to emotively communicate this one-note idea of Political Action, in a way that is immediately recognizable to a mainstream American audience. The two conversations pass each other like ships in the night. You can’t really level a critique about historical complexity against something which fetishizes history to such an extent as to preemptively evacuate any notion of historical nuance—you’re critiquing it in terms of a rubric which it makes no pretense of living up to in the first place.

I used to be a bit more wary of this sort of fetishism for AIDS Crisis Culture aesthetics, but, more and more, I’m trying to think of it instead as a question of scalability and function. It’s not as easy as saying that culture which fetishizes or sensationalizes the AIDS crisis, or AIDS activism, is “bad”—whether “bad” here means being politically retrograde, or historically inaccurate, or something else. Part of me wants to cringe in admitting this, but a lot of these more mainstream, “nostalgia-porn” adjacent documentaries like How To Survive a Plague played a foundational role in shaping my interest in AIDS history when I was 18, 19, 20—it’s not something that can be cleanly discarded for a lot of people, in other words, especially younger people who are being exposed to this history for the first time before they’ve had the chance to develop a robust sense of media literacy, or historical literacy. What are the stakes of representing AIDS now? The documentary realism, or “postmodernity,” of the ’80s and ’90s doesn’t have the same clear social function that it perhaps used to, but it also seems impossible to move away from entirely all the same, yeah?

TK

Definitely. I think it’s all about opacity, both in terms of figuring out how to end the crisis, and also in terms of the types of aesthetic questions you’re bringing up. When it comes to ending the crisis, it comes down to the failure of public health to better consider how to best serve a small number of individuals who, by the volition of their own power, are refusing public health messages, or who are refusing to take on specific identities that would then allow public health messaging to target them. I’m thinking specifically about people whose sexuality doesn’t fit into the many labels that we have now. I think the key is to not try to keep on finding labels to understand people, but to rather step back and say, “There are some people whose sexuality is not enmeshed in their identity, and that’s how they want it.” It’s up to public health to figure out how to generously provide the tools so that people can live their best lives, regardless of how they are understood—or how they want to be misunderstood, even.

I also think about this in terms of archives. There was this really powerful moment years ago where curator Julian de Mayo said that, as a person who is deeply entrenched in the Latino community, he thought that it was his job to make the Latino version of How to Survive a Plague. After speaking to lots of the people who were a part of the Latino caucus of ACT UP, he realized that was not their actual goal. If I remember correctly, they wanted to connect with each other, and to connect one-on-one with younger people. They didn’t need their archives or their stories to be broadcast on the biggest screens that this country has to offer. Instead, they wanted to know that the photos they had saved, or the flyers they had kept, would be shared with people who would appreciate them. That was more important to them than any sort of fame or notoriety. There’s an opacity that we have to respect around that too.

This also connects to my work with Robert Rayford. He was sixteen years old when he died, so there’s not much that we know about him. At some point, I had to make peace with that. I came to the realization that the dead have some amount of agency over their stories, even if we’ve decided to keep these stories open. I respect and love the idea that Robert, or whatever spirit is connected to Robert, is maintaining that opacity—he doesn’t owe us anything more than he’s already given us.

RM

I’ve been thinking a lot about opacity too in preparation for this conversation. One of the big ideas that comes out of certain strands of ‘80s and ‘90s AIDS activism is this notion that one cannot master, or fully wrest control of, their own desire—it is always to some degree opaque to us, on a subjective level. This idea really comes to the fore with someone like Douglas Crimp, who was obviously drawing heavily upon Foucault and the other post-structuralists who were in vogue at October at the time. Crimp’s conception of desire lines up pretty closely with what we might now commonly refer to as harm reduction. Crimp takes sexuality and desire as forces that are totally inextricable from the social contexts and systems of power in which they’re operating—forces, in other words, which are constantly evolving and rearticulating themselves at a faster rate than we are able to keep up with. This understanding of desire stands in pretty stark opposition to the harsher, sexual-austerity style politics of someone like, say, Larry Kramer. Crimp was all about meeting people where they were at linguistically, and understanding that simply having a working knowledge of the risks involved with certain types of sex would never be enough to stop people from still having those kinds of sex.

I suppose I keep on coming back to that vision of opacity because it feels so out of step with most of the contemporary mainstream discourse around not only sex, but also personal responsibility for how one acts upon one’s desire. The onus seems to have become increasingly placed upon the individual to understand, articulate, and self-manage sexual identity and expression. There’s obviously a number of ways in which this intersects with something like HIV/AIDS, whether we’re talking about HIV criminalization laws, or about who should bear the onus of disclosing their HIV-status during a sexual encounter, or about the use-value of something like PrEP or the term “undetectable.” In each case, it feels like there’s this infatuation with having a total knowledge of oneself, or one’s body, or one’s desires, and also, in addition, this idea that there is an ethical imperative to be able to articulate that knowledge in a manner that lines up with a collectively legible understanding of sexual identity, or of what it means to be healthy. How do you interface with questions of personal responsibility and sexual desire in your work with HIV/AIDS? Are there other frameworks for thinking through desire today that can push past this obsession with a type of wellness centric, quantifiable understanding of how desire works on the individual level?

TK

There’s an interesting way in which your question is at odds with the very thing you’re critiquing. I agree, we shouldn’t always be expected to be able to talk about those things. I, for example, am not always able to. One of the interesting things about the history of the gay rights movement is that the pursuit of sex is supposed to be very important—and it is very important. At the same time, I’m somebody who often jokes about how I’m like, the king of no fun, right? I’m like, pleasure in the streets, go to bed early in the sheets, you know?

RM

[Laughs.]

TK

So, my politic is like, everyone has a right to pleasure, but our activism also has to be rooted in the most radical understanding of pleasure. If it’s not, we’re just throwing people—people who are probably already gonna be marginalized—further under the bus. That’s what happens when we try to say that some people with HIV are “good” and some people are “bad,” or when we try to establish that some ways of doing drugs are “good” while others are “bad.” There are no bad ways for consenting people to do drugs. There are no bad ways for consenting people to have sex. And that includes not wanting to participate, or being kinda crappy at it, or being non-committal to it.

I’m really curious about this question of like, “Who is the public in public health?” I’m interested in applying that question to all facets of life. Like, “Who is the public in public art? Who is the public in public libraries? Who is the public in public discourse?” Too often, “public” fails to include people with disabilities, indigenous people, Brown people, Black people, fat people, people who stutter, and so on. When we look at this history of HIV/AIDS, it is rooted in far too narrow of an idea of who is human. In 1981, alarm bells started ringing because white cis gay men were sick, and that’s “not normal.” It would be a different world if those same alarm bells started ringing in 1969 when Robert Rayford, a young Black teenager, was suffering. If those alarm bells had gone off earlier, we would be able to see all of the people who have been impacted. Instead, the response doesn’t start until 1981, and we’re still having to backtrack and say, “this isn’t just a gay disease.” This lapse in time and judgment has—pardon the pun—plagued us at every stop along the way. For instance, as soon as lifesaving drugs became available in 1996, we knew that if someone with HIV was on a treatment that worked for them that they would become undetectable. And yet, it wasn’t until roughly 2016 that “undetectable” became a phrase that people living with HIV felt comfortable enough to say, because the medical surveillance system was so insistent on making sure that this message didn’t get across. So often, we find things out, and then it takes a generation or two for us to actually enact them. As you’ve said, PrEP is good and important—it could and should be available to anybody and everybody who wants it. And yet, we know that in New York only ten percent of women who would benefit from PrEP are on it. This is because, for far too long, we thought that HIV was not an issue for women. PrEP has been around since 2012, and yet still so many people who would benefit from it are not on it because they don’t know about it, or their doctors aren’t telling them about it, or insurance hurdles are too high. We’re still having to backtrack on all of this.

RM

It's a bit of a boomerang sort of thing, right? We have these meta-narratives about sexual identity, or about who is at risk, or about who might benefit from certain forms of care. By the time they take hold or gain cultural purchase on a mainstream level, they have become abstracted to the point where they no longer correspond to the actual ways in which people understand themselves, their health, and their sexual identities, which are often quite adaptive and complex. You push so hard for certain new meta-narratives to take hold and yet, by the time they actually do, you realize that it has taken so long for them to gain traction that they no longer correspond to the new context in which they are operating. They can be as alienating as they are instructive, in other words. By the time something feels “done,” there is a whole new morass of problems—the narrative you once pushed for comes back to bite you in the ass, in a strange way.

TK

That’s a really illustrative way to put it. It takes so long to address crisis. By the time we do, the tools that we’ve brought to it are often no longer the tools we need.

This is a bit of a digression, but as we’ve been talking, I’ve been coming back to the idea of isolation. Maybe this rings true for you, but for me, part of growing up during a period of silence—or, for you, of revisitation—is about finding a type of comfort in silence, or a comfort in being a silent witness. I think that sometimes that comfort can be of service, and also that sometimes it’s good to be pushed a bit.

RM

Definitely. Even though I came of age in a moment where it felt like there were countless cultural avenues for learning about HIV/AIDS, I think there is a way in which isolation still feels pertinent. I really only learned about AIDS through books and memoirs and movies. They were accessible, in one sense, insofar they were literally available, but it’s not like anyone was encouraging or pushing this sort of cultural consumption upon you. If you wanted to find out more, you had to do the individual work of weeding through these different threads and following the storyline from one passing reference to the next. So, on the one hand, it’s a moment in which AIDS history is culturally available in a much more capacious sense, but also, on the other, it’s a moment in which this consumption of history is pretty much only happening on the level of individual cultural consumption, at the expense of consuming more collectively relatable or pertinent types of content—it’s a kind of fantasy, world-building project that happens in the absence of any sort of corresponding interpersonal connection.

TK

That’s one of the things we’re still working through when it comes to these questions of silence and isolation. Part of the reason that you found yourself entering into this conversation through books and movies was because people around you weren’t having these conversations out loud—they weren’t talking about how HIV has touched their lives. In some cases, that’s because they felt that they had to be silent about it. Whether it’s an uncle or a teacher or a doctor, they just didn’t bring it up to you for whatever reason. In other cases, it’s because HIV literally just didn’t touch their lives in a direct way—and that’s ok, of course. But I think it’s interesting to have that conversation, like, “Well, mom, why didn’t HIV touch your life?” And then she might say, “Well, because the communities that were hard hit weren’t in my life.” You know what I mean? And then the conversation can begin.

RM

This might be something that I want to cut from the interview, but I’ve been reading Scar Tissue by Anthony Keidis—growing up in Southern California in the early aughts made me a bit of an unrepenting Red Hot Chili Peppers fan, for better or worse, and it’s a great like, turn your brain off for a couple hours type of memoir, you know? [Laughs.] In preparing for this conversation and revisiting all these sorts of historical questions around HIV, I got to thinking like, “Huh, this is a 500-something page book that largely takes place in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and there’s lots of casual sex and IV-drug use, but not a single mention of HIV/AIDS.” It doesn’t show up at all—which, like you’ve said, is obviously totally fine, I’m not trying to criticize Keidis for that omission. It’s just strange to think about in tandem with these other cultural histories, because it’s happening at the same time, and circles the same sorts of themes as so many AIDS novels in a really strange way, and yet it might as well be happening in a totally alternate dimension. I think that’s something to contend with—silence is not always something which is actively perpetrated or intentionally passed on from one generation to the next. Rather, for a lot of people, there’s a very real sort of epistemological and embodied relationship to the culture of ‘80s and ‘90s America in which AIDS just doesn’t exist. I mean, I’m sure they know that AIDS exists, in a literal sense. But it isn’t a foundational cultural touchstone for understanding history—that probably feels odd for someone like you or me, where HIV/AIDS feels like this monolithic, inescapable thing, but I think it’s also important to understand that it probably shouldn’t feel odd. It’s fine that AIDS doesn’t enter the picture, but it also feels difficult to admit that that’s fine, right?

TK

Yes! There’s another part of me though that would say that it’s not fine. I really do hope you keep the Scar Tissue anecdote in, because that book is such a perfect object of Second Silence culture. There is literally no way that HIV has not meaningfully touched Anthony Keidis’ life. If he doesn’t know how it’s touched his life, then that lack of knowledge is a really fascinating thing to investigate. Why does he, as someone who’s having all of this sex and doing all of these drugs in ’80s Hollywood, not think that HIV is a part of his life? I follow a lot of stylists and hairdressers on Instagram. A lot of them are gay men of a certain age, and most of them are either fully or at least partially out about their HIV status. So, when I see these famous stars and starlets, I know that HIV is a part of their life. Somebody who plays a central role in their life is living with HIV or has lived with HIV.

I gave a talk the other day, and I started off by saying, “What does Beyonce’s Renaissance, the US Open, and Facebook all have in common?” The answer is HIV. You could argue about how we should read Renaissance—is it a Second Silence album? Is it an AIDS Crisis Revisitation album? Is it an AIDS normalization album? Whatever answer you land on, it was deeply inspired by Beyonce’s uncle, who lived with HIV. The US Open happens at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Arthur Ashe is a tennis legend who lived with HIV. Does everyone who walks into that stadium know that? Facebook is only able to exist as a platform, in spite of all of the horrific lies that are told on it, because early AIDS activists fought to be able to use media platforms as a space for sharing information without being censored. Were it not for AIDS, we wouldn’t have any of those three things.

RM

Definitely. I have one more question, which I hope isn’t too broad. We’re slowly approaching a future in which most of the people who were actively involved in AIDS Crisis Culture will no longer be here. In the last few years alone we’ve lost Douglas Crimp, Larry Kramer, and countless others. This is obviously very different from saying that we are approaching a future in which people living with HIV no longer exist, of course. But, in order to do this sort of cultural work in the present, you have to pass through these people’s histories—and I don’t mean that in a nostalgic way. You have to live with these histories, even if you didn’t “live” through them. What is the future of AIDS cultural work? What is our responsibility to an older generation that, one day, will leave us behind to carry on what they started?

TK

One of the arguments Alex and I had in the book—or maybe it’s better to call it a difference of opinion—was that, up until we talked about it, there was an assumption that all culture from the present forward would have a thread of Revisitation in it, because it would necessarily have to reflect upon the past. But our thinking evolved. I’m happy it did. I think it’s amazing to realize that someone could produce AIDS culture tomorrow and it could have nothing to do with the past. Not because they want to intentionally disregard the past, or because they’re ignorant to it. When I think about artists making work now, who are living with HIV, I am most excited about work that they want to make, unburdened by obligation or silence. So, that means that whatever Brontez Purnell, Clifford Prince King, Kia LeBejia, Mykki Blanco, Eric Rhein, Nancer Lemoins, or Jorge Bordello want to make culture about, I’m invested. And maybe there will be a connection to history, but maybe there won't. And maybe there will be a connection to HIV. But maybe there won't, and that is okay as well. Absence, and silence—which are different things—can be archivally rich. There is information in what and why something is not present. So, while I do think the past is always in danger of being overlooked, I am still on the fence if I believe anything can actually ever be fully forgotten. Because of that, I believe that it’s equally as important to lift up and highlight work that is being done now. In the most basic sense, I do believe that supporting new work happening in the present is a way of honoring the sacrifice, the death, the thriving, and the surviving that has been done up until now.