Radical Distribution: AIDS Cultural Activism in New York City, 1986-1992 Notes

Radical Distribution: AIDS Cultural Activism in New York City, 1986-1992

Abstract

• ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) used ephemeral media for demonstrations to end the AIDS crisis.
• Slogans like “SILENCE = DEATH” and “ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE INNOCENT” were used to galvanize collective action and take control of the unjust representation of gay men and minorities with AIDS.
• ACT UP updated protest tactics for late 20th-century American society's televisuality, using ephemera to distribute activist slogans and images.
• Ephemeral materials provided a powerful and inexpensive mode of representation.
• The essay examines how ACT UP and associated collectives used visual ephemera to create a presence in NYC when AIDS cases were high.
• The author argues that the ephemeral properties of activist materials are central to their meaning, enabling discursive and spatial representations of collectivity that sustained ACT UP during its most active period (mid-1980s to mid-1990s).

Keywords:

• Political art
• AIDS
• New York City
• Queer studies
• Ephemera

Introduction

• Civil disobedience examples: sit-ins, park occupations, Black Lives Matter movement.
• ACT UP used images as demonstrations to end the AIDS crisis.
• ACT UP devised a style of cultural activism that imprinted the group and its cause in public consciousness.
• Cultural activism included visual ephemera like posters, placards, stickers, T-shirts, banners, and graffiti.
• The essay argues that the synergy between sophisticated design and ephemeral distribution enabled representations of collectivity that sustained ACT UP (mid-1980s to mid-1990s).

The AIDS Epidemic and ACT UP's Formation

• The AIDS epidemic, first reported in 1981, escalated in the 1980s, unleashing prejudice against gay men, IV drug users, and people of color.
• The 1984 Denver Principles statement rejected portraying people with AIDS as pathological victims.
• Cultural activism, as described by Douglas Crimp (1988), transformed AIDS representations and discourses, including posters, videos, and public access television.
• The staging of AIDS activism alongside political goals was notable due to its transformative success, rooted in the exigencies of the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP's resources.
• ACT UP's formation in NYC in 1987 culminated from anger over the AIDS crisis and the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Bowers vs. Hardwick, which upheld the illegality of sodomy.
• ACT UP was a diverse, non-partisan group committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.
• ACT UP drew on groups like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Lavender Hill Mob.
• ACT UP gained momentum, forming chapters in different states and internationally.
• Membership included community organizers, veterans of the New Left movements, graphic designers, and stockbrokers.
• Initially, ACT UP's membership was relatively homogenous (white, male, gay, upper-middle-class), but by 1988, it had a significant contingent of women and people of color.

ACT UP's Media Strategy and Use of Ephemeral Materials

• ACT UP courted popular media attention to cultivate a national reputation for anger-driven politics.
• The group strategically used graphic signage and developed press liaisons and alternative media.
• ACT UP is part of a history of ephemeral materials used in social and political upheaval.
• Examples include print in the Protestant Reformation, banners for women’s suffrage, and the visual counterculture of the 1960s.
• Former members noted the affective import of these materials.
• Tom Kalin described his first ACT UP meeting at the LGBT Community Center, noting the leaflets seeking roommates, substance abuse support, and size 12 pumps for drag queens.
• Kalin described the meeting as reminiscent of 1930s New York socialist/communist meetings and the 1960s, feeling urgent, improvised, responsible, and nimble.

ACT UP's Achievements and Impact

• During its first 5 years, ACT UP New York achieved its largest membership and greatest social impact, changing the public discourse on AIDS, streamlining drug testing and distribution, and broadening the definition of HIV/AIDS.
• People were dying, and ACT UP took a leadership role in providing care and services.
• Recent exhibitions and documentaries have explored ACT UP’s activism, art, and agitprop emblems like SILENCE = DEATH.
• The archival representations capture the collectivity and relationality of these materials, collaboratively designed and printed in multiple copies.
• Ephemerality is underscored by the loss of many depicted to AIDS.
• The films achieve intimate effects, while exhibitions tend to deflate the temporality of activist graphics.

Ephemeral Interventions and Radical Distribution

• Ephemeral intervention offers a way to understand the contingency resulting from urban contexts of reception.
• Graphics are produced in multiple and become animated as parts of demonstrations, along with aural and tactile elements.
• Meaning is located in the production and distribution of materials, not exclusively in aesthetic reception.
• Activists described the creation and dissemination of visual ephemera as central to their affective experience of collective political activism.
• Activist graphics are transient, functional instruments conceived for specific events.
• Eileen Myles (2010) noted that very little material is still extant, as ACT UP’s production was absorbed by the world of its time.
• To consider the “radical distribution” of ACT UP graphics, it is helpful to situate this visual archive in terms of “dark matter,” defined by Gregory Sholette (2005) as the bulk of artistic activity produced in post-industrial society.
• Although Gran Fury has received critical recognition, most AIDS cultural activism remains cultural dark matter.
• This art/history of resistance seized public display opportunities opened by the city’s derelict buildings from the early 1970s through the early 1990s.
• It includes multiple and overlapping groups like Little Elvis, Metropolitan Health Association, Gang, and the Silence = Death Project.
• Video was a crucial medium for AIDS cultural activism.
• ACT UP prioritized information and agitation, blitzing ephemeral materials into the public sphere.
• Examples include posters wheat-pasted before demonstrations, projects created for particular demonstrations (e.g., New York Crimes newspaper), sex education stickers, and enduring visual ephemera (SILENCE = DEATH posters).
• These materials joined other AIDS-related visual campaigns, such as the AIDS posters created by General Idea, appropriating Robert Indiana’s LOVE image.
• AIDS activist ephemera were distributed throughout the five boroughs of New York City, especially downtown Manhattan.

Urban Space and Ephemeral Production

• Before the Internet, building exteriors were vital public forums for information exchange.
• This was especially the case between the Stock Market crash of 1987 and the gentrification of the mid- to late-1990s when graffiti was relatively unmonitored.
• Gregg Bordowitz (1998/2006) recalled being drawn to ACT UP’s first demonstration by a flyer wheat-pasted to the wall.
• Consideration of ephemeral production reconstructs the circulation of discourse that constitutes the epistemological experience of urban space.
• Myles’s observation about ephemera’s multiplicity and obsolescence is crucial, as surviving materials often exist as singular objects, though they were produced in multiple copies for distribution.
• One could substitute “ephemera” for “dark matter” as the answer to Sholette’s (2005) riddle: “What is invisible, has great mass, with an impact on the world that is everywhere in plain sight?”
• This argument is made in AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS, a book juxtaposing ACT UP graphics with photographs and descriptions of events.
• Published in 1990 by Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS is a manifesto foregrounding ACT UP’s ephemeral interventions.
• The book argues for the importance of documentation and distribution.
• The book is intended as direct action, putting the power of representation in the hands of as many people as possible, and as a do-it-yourself manual.

The SILENCE = DEATH Campaign

• AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS opens by sketching the chronology of ACT UP graphics, beginning with SILENCE = DEATH.

• It is described as a “simple graphic emblem printed in white Gill sanserif type underneath a pink triangle on a black ground” that has come to signify AIDS activism.

• In 1986, an AIDS consciousness–raising group of six gay men decided to create a poster to galvanize action.

• They collaboratively designed SILENCE = DEATH, printed several thousand copies, and had them wheat-pasted throughout Manhattan in early 1987.

• The poster contains a call to action, asking:

  • Why is Reagan silent about AIDS?
  • What is really going on at the Center for Disease Control, the Federal Drug Administration, and the Vatican?
  • It says Gays and lesbians are not expendable and calls on people to use their power, vote, boycott, defend themselves, and turn anger, fear, grief into action.

Appropriation and Impact of SILENCE = DEATH

• SILENCE = DEATH appropriates and inverts the pink triangle used by Nazis to designate homosexual men and relates the historical parallel between the Holocaust and the government’s mismanagement of the AIDS crisis.
• The graphic design combines historical charge with the visual language of advertising.
• Avram Finkelstein, a member of the Silence = Death Project, stated that the poster puts political information where people are unaccustomed to finding it.
• Less prescriptive than provocative, SILENCE = DEATH had an immense impact.
• It was akin to public art projects in New York City, such as culture jamming and feminist public art practices.
• The bold legibility of SILENCE = DEATH was highly influential on subsequent AIDS activist graphic design.
• Many posters successfully adopted this formula, combining the visual pleasure of advertising with instructions for direct action.

ACT UP's Use of Graphics and Media Coverage

• SILENCE = DEATH posters debuted the same week as the formation of ACT UP in March 1987.
• SILENCE = DEATH was adapted for use by ACT UP in posters and buttons.
• In 1989, ACT UP infiltrated the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal, with one-third of attendees wearing SILENCE = DEATH buttons.
• ACT UP realized the potency of the graphic’s instant legibility, easily translated on camera.
• The media was impressed by the uniformity of the presentation, with black posters and pink triangles.
• Early on, ACT UP and affiliated collectives poured resources into printing posters, flyers, T-shirts, and buttons.
• Crimp and Rolston (1990) explained that well-prepared visuals at quickly arranged demonstrations are disarming to opponents.
• ACT UP’s innovation was to get the wheels of mechanical reproduction turning on short notice.

Design and Financial Influences on AIDS Activism

• SILENCE = DEATH and subsequent aesthetics of AIDS activism drew on advertising tropes rather than the grassroots aesthetic of the 1960s New Left.
• These design decisions were influenced by contemporary public art practices and enabled by the organization’s financial stability.
• ACT UP’s resources included graphic designers, people with corporate jobs, reproduction technology access, and the group’s cultural and social capital.
• In 1987, the Silence = Death Project created a poster with Reagan in Warholian distortion with an “AIDSGATE” stamp.
• As a demonstration placard, the emblem provided an instantly legible protest message.
• Maxine Wolfe described the orchestration of these graphics at the March on Washington in 1987, with a snake formation of posters, SILENCE = DEATH T-shirts, and stark banners.
• The graphic-design-oriented stuff had a tremendous impact, and many ACT UP groups started after that march.

Goals of Protest Graphics and Sloganeering

• Although the sleek graphics garnered attention, there were often handmade signs alongside printed ones at demonstrations.
• ACT UP poster-painting parties supplied placards for spontaneous demonstrations.
• The goal of these protest graphics was to assist other activists in clarifying their positions and to represent those positions and goals to the world.
• Sloganeering was a key endeavor of early AIDS cultural activism.
• Within the laboratory of ACT UP New York, various graphic strategies, production techniques, and scales of display were tested.
• Gran Fury’s first billboard project asked, “When a government turns its back on people is it civil war?”
• The company balked at displaying Gran Fury’s politicized message, and Gran Fury eventually wheat-pasted poster versions in strategic locations.

Cultural Activism and Awareness

• While direct actions focused on specific issues, cultural activism aimed to create awareness, galvanize support, and change dominant representations of people with AIDS.
• ACT UP demonstrations created a national consciousness of the AIDS activist movement.
• The activist sartorial style that emerged within ACT UP helped to shape a new defiant generation of queer activists.
• ACT UP could represent itself through the reproduction of its graphics.
• T-shirt graphics and visual puns often puncture oversimplifications in mainstream newspapers.
• ACT UP is a media organization, and these images can feed the protest.
• Posters to publicize demonstrations often remained affixed to buildings after the event.
• Besides informational messages, potent emblems akin to SILENCE = DEATH were developed for street campaigns.
• In successful ephemeral interventions, informational and emblematic modes worked together to create a discursive representation of oppositional collectivity.

Campaigns Against Misinformation

• For the ACT UP New York campaign against Steven C. Joseph, the Health Commissioner of New York City, Richard Deagle created a series of subway posters.
• One with Joseph and the caption “DEADLIER THAN THE VIRUS” and another with Mayor Ed Koch and “10,000 AIDS Deaths—How’m I Doin’?”
• These supplemented Gran Fury posters with a bloody red handprint and the text “YOU’VE GOT BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS, STEPHEN JOSEPH. THE CUT IN AIDS NUMBERS IS A LETHAL LIE.”
• These were distributed all over the city and supplemented with “bloody” handprints stamped by ACT UP members.
• Richard Meyer (1995) argued that the force of the bloody handprints graphic lies in its status as a handprint, “a trace of a body that is no longer present, presumably because it has died from government neglect.”
• However, the bloody handprints symbolized more than the disappeared victims of the AIDS crisis because they were emphatically linked to the presence of activists.

ACT UP's Reputation and Responses to Posters

• By the late 1980s, ACT UP New York had gained a reputation as the “No. 1 loose cannon of local [NYC] politics.”
• SILENCE = DEATH galvanized the gay community and the broader public.
• The bloody handprints signified the directed rage of collective action.
• There were inevitably virulent responses to posters from diverse audiences.
• Gran Fury engineered posters with this in mind and often documented them in situ on New York City streets.
• On a bilingual Gran Fury poster addressing AIDS in women and children, a passerby wrote “SCARED FAGS’ CRAP.”
• Another Gran Fury poster, wittily illustrating “Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head” with an erect penis, was routinely torn down.

Culture Wars and Queer Nation

• As the culture wars escalated in the late 1980s, public censorship debates played out on city walls via posters, stickers, and graffiti.
• With the formation of Queer Nation in April 1990, the strategies of rhetorical address became more confrontational.
• Queer Nation was founded to combat homophobia with brash visibility strategies to address a nationwide spike in hate crimes against gays and lesbians.
• After the group’s second meeting, a large group wheat-pasted posters with the phrase “My Beloved Was Queer-Bashed Here” around the city at hate crime locations.
• Queer Nation was composed of ACT UP members and other activists.
• The group prioritized immediate action to circumvent the bureaucratic nature of ACT UP meetings.

Direct Actions and Reclamation of Space

• Queer Nation’s direct actions included wheat-pasting phone booths with posters featuring a pink triangle and the legend “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” a reworking of SILENCE = DEATH.
• Queer Nation drew on the visibility tactics of ACT UP, aiming to redefine the community, its rights, and its visibility, and take it into straight political and social space.
• This included the reclamation of hate speech—“queer”—and the occupation of iconic straight bars in “Nights Out” actions.
• These public displays of queer sexuality created mise-en-scènes of Gran Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill campaign.
• While it resuscitated the separatist tone of the Black Panthers and radical lesbians, Queer Nation also embraced the media-savvy strategies of ACT UP.
• Trebay noted that Queer Nation had “groomed a generation of demonstrators to look for the sound-bite, to keep the message within a limited, tele-visible range, to treat reporters as people almost constitutionally incapable of seeing past the clenched fist to the underlying agenda.”
• Like ACT UP, Queer Nation expressed activism through style, with provocative buttons and T-shirts such as “Queers Bash Back” and “We’re Queer, Get Used to It.”
• Recalling the tactics of the Civil Rights era, these accessories put activists’ bodies on the frontlines of conflict.
• This was a bold move in New York City’s homophobic public sphere, where hate crimes increased exponentially.
• Trebay observed that these Queer Nation T-shirts “don’t yet outstrip the street-side potency of ACT UP’s graphics, which have defined a generation of activists through fashion presence, but they’re pretty close.”

Evolution of Activist Collectives

• As street activism by ACT UP began to wane, participants from ACT UP, Queer Nation, WHAM!, and the Guerrilla Girls formed new visually oriented collectives to perform direct actions on lesbian visibility and reproductive rights.
• These included the Pink Panthers (f. 1990), fierce pussy (f. 1991), Dyke Action Machine (DAM!; f. 1991), Oral Majority (f. 1991), Women’s Action Coalition (WAC; f. 1992), and the Lesbian Avengers (f. 1992).
• These groups merged the toolkit of AIDS cultural activism with the strategies of Queer Nation and contemporary feminist art.
• Activist-artists drew from each other, appropriating from art history and advertising.
• DAM! created posters with photo and digital equipment, with printing donated by HX Magazine.
• A DAM! poster campaign in 1991 replaced celebrities in GAP clothing ads with local activists.
• An abortion rights poster by Gang paired a photo of a hairy vagina with the phrase “READ MY LIPS” (a feminist appropriation of the slogan used by Gran Fury).
• This image appeared in a fierce pussy campaign protesting homophobic and misogynistic policies, sending greeting cards to John O’Connor and Alfonse D’Amato.
• The Lesbian Avengers logo of a bomb with a lit fuse embodied the confrontational ethos of the period.
• WAC placed an ad in the St. John’s student newspaper featuring the heading “Stop Rape at St. John’s” over a hand with “No Means No” printed over its palm, echoing Gran Fury’s bloody handprints.
• Crimp and Rolston (1990) stated, “what counts as activist art is its propaganda effect; stealing the procedures of other artists is part of the plan—if it works, we use it.”

Urban Environment as a Stage

• Ephemeral materials displayed in the urban environment of downtown Manhattan were central to the ways in which “the AIDS movement, like other radical movements, creates itself as it attempts to define itself.”
• The intertextuality of AIDS cultural activism and its offshoots demonstrates that public political art projects in New York City constituted a vibrant field of reference.
• Slogans became “deeply seated in downtown queer fashions and New York City’s landscape.”
• As one participant noted in 1992, “in New York, it was feeling more like the 1960s again, as posters—and demonstrations—became frequent spectacles.”
• The contingency of activist ephemera is lost when these materials are considered in isolation as graphic design, rather than as constellations of embodied collectivity.
• We should consider the art/history of these ephemeral materials in spatial terms of collective agency and representation.
• Activist graphics in downtown Manhattan discursively rendered the queer activist community and signified the presence of activists to the broader public.

Mobilization and Violence

• In April 1990, when a pipe bomb exploded in Uncle Charlie’s, a gay bar, Queer Nation mobilized over a thousand people for a street demonstration.
• Activists marched with a banner that read “Dykes and Fags Bash Back!”
• A 40-foot version of this banner had been displayed on the side of a local building a week earlier.
• At the time, the escalation of antigay violence in New York City seemed to be a social response to newly empowered and organized gay and lesbian communities.
• Berrill observed that “Greater gay visibility and activism have opened the doors to understanding and acceptance. However, our increasingly open and unapologetic existence has triggered hostility and made us a more identifiable target for potential assailants.”
• Queer Nation sustained this momentum in frequent direct actions and zaps throughout the 1990s.

Decline of Activism

• The life span of activist movements, like ephemeral materials, tends to be brief.
• There is a commonly described breakdown of collective momentum in the mid-1990s.
• Frequent direct actions gave way to exhaustion and despair.
• Gran Fury members describe the difficulty of translating AIDS discourses into pithy sloganeering as a prime reason for disbanding around 1992.
• Even the efflorescence of identity-based activist art collectives could not sustain itself for more than a few years, with most groups nearly or totally defunct by 1994.

Structural Reasons Behind the Waning of Ephemeral Interventions

• Describing the Guerrilla Girls’ shift away from poster campaigns toward performance, one collective member said, “It got harder and harder for us to poster. The police became more attentive.”
• Guerrilla Girls began hiring snipers to poster, losing control of placement locations.
• Moyer describes how locations traditionally used by activists became battlegrounds for public recognition as limited public space was co-opted by sniping companies working for corporate clients.
• Police turned a blind eye to protect corporate revenues.
• Noncommercial wheat-pasting became a prime target of the “Quality of Life” policing prioritized by the Giuliani administration.

Intent and Impact of Activist Graphics

• Activist graphics for ACT UP were produced with the same skills as commercial advertising but deployed with an entirely different intent.
• The power of the images enabled them to occasion further ephemeral interventions as they circulated in the public domain.
• The reproducible and ephemeral nature of these works was key to their distribution and impact.
• Once the materials were distributed, they served to construct collectivity well beyond the initial intent of use.
• Outside New York City, posters by ACT UP New York’s visual collectives enacted microinterventions when displayed in public and institutional settings.

Controversies and Reactions

• At Yale University in 1992, controversy erupted when a student hung Gran Fury’s Sexism Rears its Unprotected Head poster.
• A debate about free speech took place in front of the poster between the dean and students.
• At Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, a gay professor brought harassment charges against a student after a disagreement about the professor’s display of Know Your Scumbags.

Conclusion

• Rather than simply responding to negative stereotypes, ACT UP New York and its affiliated collectives engaged in a transformative dialogue with scientific, political, and media institutions, as well as the heteronormative public sphere.
• The ephemeral network of ACT UP aesthetics made possible the microactivism of individual bearers long after demonstrations cleared.
• Ephemeral materials with ACT UP graphics continue to inspire AIDS activism and other movements for political and social change.
• Any history of ACT UP aesthetics should resist isolating its achievements and examine the far-reaching impact of AIDS cultural activism.
• Activist graphics, like the political movements that sustain them, are predicated on collectivity.
• They are produced collectively and construct collectivity through their distribution.
• When posted in a public urban space, ephemera transformed that space by evoking the specter of collectivity.
• Because of their mobility, the ephemeral materials created smaller collectives as they circulated in numerous unpredictable contexts.
• This unique capacity accounts for its power well after the waning of the initial period of intense political activity.
• The apparent fragility of ephemera belies its actual efficacy as a means of intervening in public life.