Queer AIDS Media and the Question of the Archive

AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO QUEER AIDS MEDIA AND THE QUESTION OF THE ARCHIVE Roger Hallas AIDS has generated both a vast body of audiovisual representation and an even greater mass of experience, knowledge, and history yet to be documented. Archival projects have burgeoned across the globe to collect, preserve, and archive political, artistic, and medical knowledge about HIV/AIDS. In fact, an ongoing project of AIDS cultural activism is the imperative to build an archive of AIDS knowledge otherwise neglected, marginalized, suppressed, or forgotten. In this short essay, I consider how this archival imperative has manifested itself within queer AIDS media in different ways in the three decades since the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Much of the work of the past decade has focused on preserving and reframing earlier AIDS cultural activism, including the production of oral histories, the collection and preservation of films and videos, and the appropriation and reworking of these materials in new works of memory and retrospection. However, the first two decades of queer AIDS media were also engaged in an archival imperative, but of a different sort: to marshal a range of representational archives as a way for AIDS cultural activism to articulate historical consciousness as well as political immediacy. The recent preoccupation of queer film and video with 1970s gay liberation and the archive of its sexual culture further complicates our complex relationship to multiple pasts, before and during the AIDS pandemic. The archiving of queer AIDS media began in earnest in the mid-1990s when film archivist Jim Hubbard undertook the collection and preservation of AIDS activist videos in a project funded by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the works of artists with AIDS across different media.2 The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division houses this collection that includes over 650 tapes of completed works and raw footage that cover the years between 1983 and 2000. As the largest collection of AIDS activist video in the world, it is now one of the division’s most requested collections. Hubbard has subsequently collaborated with author and activist Sarah Schulman on the ACT UP Oral History Project, which aims to produce a testimonial archive of all surviving members of ACT UP New York that will provide a history of the organization and its achievements told by its own members. 3 The film producer Staffan Hildebrand and his Swedish-based nonprofit organization, Face of AIDS Foundation, have constructed a “global AIDS 431 432 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES film archive,” which now incorporates over sixty documentaries and nine hundred hours of unedited footage from forty-two countries, covering a wide range of issues including medical science, treatment access, prevention, and activism.4 In the years around the turn of the millennium, AIDS video activists such as Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Richard Fung, Alexandra Juhasz, and James Wentzy revisited their own archives of sounds and images they’d recorded barely a decade previously. Their purpose was to contemplate the historical change that had come to pass in that time, namely, the waning of radical AIDS activism in North America and the increasing normalization of AIDS in the global North.5 For instance, Carlomusto’s Shatzi Is Dying (2000) develops a complex autobiographical meditation on mortality, memory, and queer relationality in light of AIDS activist burnout. As she and her lover, Jane Rosett, witness their beloved Doberman, Shatzi, undergo an attenuated process of dying, they keep returning to their personal archive of activism to reflect on the nature of experiencing loss and mortality that have so profoundly shaped their lives over the past two decades.6 Fung’s poetic and deeply moving video essay Sea in the Blood (2000) also explores his own archive of personal photographs, family home movies, and AIDS activist images to work through the experience of having lived most of his life in the shadow of another’s illness. Throughout the video, he parallels his two most intimate relationships: with his sister Nan, who died of thalassemia (literally “sea in the blood”) in 1977, and with his lover, Tim McGaskell, who has been seropositive since 1980. Fung subtly traces how these two experiences of living intimately with another’s illness have mutually informed one another on personal as well as cultural levels. Such parallax contemplation provides Fung with the opportunity to finally bear witness to his experience of Nan’s death over twenty years after the event. Yet in our concern with the need to preserve a testimonial archive and to reflect on how its acts of witnessing have transformed with the passage of time, we should not forget that alternative AIDS media have engaged with the question of the archive since their very beginnings in the early 1980s. In my new book, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, I argue that the archive has been an ongoing preoccupation for queer AIDS media in their commitment to bear witness to the epidemic.7 It has frequently provided a historical frame to situate acts of AIDS testimony in social and political terms, and thus prevent them from slipping into universalizing or pathologizing frames that render them merely acts of individual confession. One of the very first works of alternative AIDS media, Stuart Marshall’s documentary Bright Eyes (1984), sought to historicize dominant AIDS representation by reading it in relation to the archive AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO of nineteenth-century medical photography, which was founded on the medium’s purported capacity for picturing the truth of deviance. As Bright Eyes illustrates, it was this moralizing visual discourse that print and television journalism would revive so vociferously in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. A decade later, John Greyson’s AIDS musical Zero Patience (1993) uses the archives of medical history and modern visual technology to contest the discursive construction of the French Canadian gay man Gaetan Dugas as “Patient Zero,” the alleged origin of the epidemic in North America. Mike Hoolboom’s films excavate the archive of popular culture (from 1960 adverts to Michael Jackson videos) to articulate the shared structures of feeling that arise from the corporeal experience of living with AIDS, while Marlon Riggs’s No Regret (Non, je ne regrette rien) (1992) draws from the archive of the civil rights movement and African American oral culture to forge an empowering discursive space for black gay men living with HIV/AIDS.8 The increasing attention of recent queer film and video to the gay liberation era of the 1970s has not only resuscitated its historical archive but also reframed the meanings of that archive in light of the normalizing discourses around both AIDS and gay identity in contemporary U.S. culture. Although much has been said about the resonance of Gus van Sant’s Milk (2008) with the contemporary political imperatives created by Proposition 8 in California, the film also engenders a powerful elegiac quality rooted in its seamless incorporation of archival images of the Castro and its immaculate historical mise-en-scène based on that visual archive. This mourning for a generation and for an era in gay life, and not merely for Harvey Milk himself, is paradoxically enhanced by the narrative frame in which Milk (Sean Penn) testifies to his imminent death. Mortality thus hangs over the film’s depiction of gay culture of the 1970s, which, in conventional biopic fashion, Milk embodies. Despite Penn’s dynamic performance as Milk, the film engenders a certain museological quality that embalms and obscures the period’s sexual energy through van Sant’s tight adherence to the look of the past preserved in its visual archive. By contrast, Nguyen Tan Hoang’s experimental video short K.I.P. (2001) offers a more explicit act of mourning the sexual culture of gay liberation: the young gay video maker records his faint reflection on a television screen that is showing a condom-free sex scene from classic gay porn starring Kip Noll (the iconic gay porn star of the late 1970s). K.I.P. recalls Warhol’s Blow Job (1964) in that we see only Hoang’s head and shoulders as he responds erotically to the images before him. Like those of Warhol’s actor, Hoang’s facial expressions remain deeply ambiguous, suggesting at times ecstasy, pain, and sorrow. As the on-screen sex moves toward climax, Hoang opens his mouth wide. The ghostly reflected 433 434 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES image of his open mouth waiting to catch Noll’s cum in the money shot crystallizes the sense of loss experienced by gay men of Hoang’s generation, who have never tasted another man’s cum or enjoyed condom-free sex without the specter of HIV. Hoang presents a fantasy of intergenerational sexual communion, but one that, as the title’s mournful connotation suggests, tragically exists only in the superimposition of images on a screen. Continuing the fascination with gay liberation–era porn, William E. Jones’s found footage film v.o. (2006) unearths what he calls a “certain morbid glamour” within the archive of 1970s and early 1980s gay culture by mashing up interstitial and nonexplicit scenes from porn classics by Joe Gage, William Higgins, Fred Halsted, and others with soundtracks taken from obscure European art films, such as Werner Schroeter’s Death of Maria Malibran (1971), Manoel de Oliveira’s Doomed Love (1978), and Raoul Ruiz’s Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1978).9 Jones contends, “I didn’t impose this mood on the material I used; it was already there. An apparently arbitrary intervention — lifting the non-sexual scenes and pairing them with dialogue in foreign languages — reveals how obsessive and dark these movies really were. Years before the AIDS crisis, porn films embodied tendencies contrary to the affirmation and sexual arousal that were their stated aims.”10 In its documentary treatment of the ephemeral details of the places, objects, looks, and gestures that make up the mise-en-scène of gay porn in its supposed golden era, v.o. performs a certain ethnography of queer desire in that era, filled with inscrutable moments of tense waiting, lonely wandering, and inexplicable departure. In the film’s penultimate scene, for instance, two naked young men are lying asleep, presumably postcoitus, on a plush rug in front of a fireplace. As one of them quickly dresses and surreptitiously leaves, the subtitles of the Portuguese dialogue on the soundtrack read, “I may not see the light of day tomorrow. Everything about me has the color of death. The cold of my tomb seems to be running through my blood and bones.” As the abandoned lover awakes, he anxiously picks up the phone, and we continue to the listen to the dialogue from Doomed Love: “Only the fear of losing you brings me to death. What is left of the past to me is the courage to seek a death worthy of me and you.” The poignant cinephilia of v.o. thus bears witness not only to a lost generation of gay men (including many of the porn actors in the films themselves) but also to a lost gay culture, which included an experimentally oriented porn tradition deeply committed to sexual and aesthetic transgression. Although Joseph Lovett’s popular documentary Gay Sex in the 70s (2005) offers a brighter portrait of the era, its precredit sequence wistfully frames the subsequent interviews and archival images with two gay artists discussing their AIDS ON FILM AND VIDEO own personal archives of the era. Presenting a pile of porcelain fragments with photographs of friends and lovers on them, Barton Benes describes the artwork as “pottery chards, memories of a civilization.” Cut to African American photographer Alvin Baltrop in his overflowing home as he flips through a pile of his black-and-white documentary photographs of the West Side Piers in the 1970s. He laments, “Photographs everywhere, I can’t get rid of them. This whole house, the back room is worse. Nothing but stacks of photographs. I don’t go back there.” His archive may have become unbearable to him, but he is also inseparable from it.11 The sequence’s final shot captures the tension between exuberance and unforeseeable loss that runs throughout the film as Baltrop describes the photograph he is holding by implicitly acknowledging its pre-9/11 cityscape: “The Twin Towers, the West Side Highway, the elevated structure. The trucks went under the highway so there were people running here having sex, running over to these buildings having sex.” Given their inclination to frame the gay liberation era and its visual archive by impending loss, how do these recent queer films avoid replicating the ideological assumption that the gay culture of the 1970s constituted the pathological and teleological precondition of the AIDS crisis? The answer, I argue, lies in the complex historicity of the AIDS pandemic as it approaches its fourth decade. In our normalized, “post-AIDS” era, the archive of the gay 1970s provides a palimpsestic and potentially revelatory image of historical difference that no longer rests on the singular distinction between the AIDS epidemic and the time before it. It offers the opportunity to contemplate our own complicated historical difference with the more recent past of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s — to consider the historical condition of an afterward — without resorting to a mythologizing discourse of “the end of AIDS.” The question of the archive is thus in the end not whether it succeeds in preserving the past from oblivion but how the past that eventually emerges from it can potentially produce a revelatory historical consciousness of our present. 435