enoughtohold: Sexual expression has always been a critical component of queer identity, and ACT UP t

enoughtohold: Sexual expression has always been a critical component of queer identity, and ACT UP tended to favor a more radical sexual politics. Gran Fury was looking for a way to articulate it, and Read My Lips was our first stab at it. [… I]t seems inconceivable in the post-gay twenty-first century that images of queer kissing could ever have been so controversial, but the layering of queer sexuality and AIDS was explosive in our culture at the time. When ACT UP NY staged its first Kiss-In in 1988 on the AIDS and Homophobia day of the ACT NOW demonstrations, television had witnessed only a smattering of primetime lesbian and gay characters and had yet to see its first queer kiss. […] Read My Lips was not the first work by the newly formed Gran Fury, but it was the first to bring us national recognition, by symbolizing the growing queer nationalism ACT UP had precipitated. The homophobia that was one of the root causes for the crisis had activated much of queer New York, and the Monday night meetings at the Center were a point of assembly around it. ACT UP was also politicizing people who were there to do something about AIDS but had not done activism around homophobia before. So while Read My Lips was just one of five posters we’d designed for the nine days of action, it was the only one to capture the attention of the larger lesbian and gay community and to have a life beyond its original use. In the process, it drew a lot of attention to the collective. Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, sent up a trial balloon that captured the American imagination during an early stump speech for his 1988 presidential campaign, saying, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” It became a defining sound bite during his uncertain candidacy, which had been plagued by accusations of spinelessness from his party’s far-right base, and by critiques from the media for its patrician manner and overall lack of vision. ACT UP NY had already decided that a same-sex kiss-in would be our demonstration here in NYC, and Tom [Kalin], who was drawn to the AIDS and Homophobia day because of his own work as an artist around images of kissing, threw down a proposal: what if we appropriated this slogan, coupling it with an image of a same-sex kiss? Over the coming years we would frequently argue over text for weeks on end, but this was the first of the rare “Aha!” moments Gran Fury occasionally had. With one gesture, it clearly illustrated the point of the demonstration, squatted on Bush’s newfound defiance for our own ends, and dragged the neglectful Reagan AIDS policies onto the playing field. […]Mark Harrington was trying hard not to grin at the next [Gran Fury] meeting as he unveiled the image he’d found in a fifties gay porn magazine. Even though both men’s genitals were exposed, that is not where your eye went. It was toward the lip-lock, one with great gestural power, and it seemed oddly passionate for pornography. The vintage photo added layers of historical certainty to the affirmation of queer existence, further rooting the politics of the project. Only a handful of people were there, and by my recollection none of the women or people of color working in the collective were at this meeting, which raises the question of whether its whiteness would have been so immediately acceptable at another meeting. But I recall no discussion about it that day, or any time spent considering alternatives. In fact, because it captured both the tension and irony we were looking to convey, we spent little time even extolling the image’s virtues. I instigated a brief discussion about whether the sailor insignia would sideline the political rationales for the demonstration by eroticizing militarism, and Mark Simpson and I spent some time considering retouching it before being overruled.[…]The shirts nailed the zeitgeist within my immediate circle, many of whom went on to form the group Queer Nation, and it became a badge of courage within activist communities. We added the T-shirts just before Pride that year, and in no time, they were outselling Silence = Death. Soon there was enough demand for them to lead to national distribution through additional sales outlets and other ACT UP chapters. Several months later I got a message on my answering machine from the manager of the ACT UP workspace, who had fielded a call by a man who wanted to be put in touch with the image’s designers. There was a chance it could lead to another project for Gran Fury, but I was also nervous about it. I swallowed, deeply, and dialed the California area code. A man answered, and I introduced myself as a member of the collective.“Oh! Thanks for getting back to me,” he said. He sounded a little surprised to hear from me, and older, but he would not have been older than I am now.“So, what can I do for you?” I asked after we exchanged pleasantries.“I’m one of the men in that picture,” he answered calmly, with a little amusement and no trace of menace.I was not so calm, but I tried to sound as if I was. It is the kind of call artists who work with appropriated images live in fear of. I looked at the floor and then scanned my bookcases.“Wow. Really?” I swallowed again. “So what can you tell me about it?”“Well,” again, calmly, “the other man was actually my boyfriend. We met in the navy, stationed on the same ship. We were on leave in San Diego at the time.”“Wow,” I said again, vamping while I took it in, my mind racing. “So the sailor thing wasn’t just for the pictures?” I was actually surprised by that. I assumed the military aspect was staged. But the kiss was so charged it seemed to transcend performance, and now I knew why. “Who took the picture?”“Well, one night we were approached by a photographer at a local gay bar who told us he was assisting a famous photographer on a fashion shoot in LA. They had come down to San Diego to go to the bars.”“Was it Horst?” I interrupted, for no particular reason. I had recently worked with Horst, and knew not only that he was a flirt but that he shot a fair deal in LA during that period.“That sounds familiar,” he responded, but I got the sense I had led him into that answer and he was being polite. He was very polite.“Anyway, he asked if they could take pictures of us, and we said, ‘Sure.’ So we went back to the studio with them, and he started taking our picture.” He sounded delighted as he told me the story. “And then he asked if we would kiss, so we did, and we got a little carried away.” The cropping of the demo poster conceals the fact that the men were semi-erect in the original image, and he delivered this line a little coyly. He actually seemed shy about it.“I thought no one would ever see it,” he went on, as if some kind of jig was up, and he was possibly a little embarrassed. I wasn’t sure he even knew we’d found the image in a skin magazine, and decided not to mention it.“That is some story,” I circled back. And then I waited, afraid to say anything else. I was actually waiting for the other shoe to drop.“Anyway, you can imagine how surprised I was when I saw someone wearing that T-shirt at Gay Pride here in LA!”I swallowed again. “I’ll bet!”“… So I asked him where he got it, and he said it was from ACT UP!”“I’d love to send you one!” It seemed like the right thing to say.“Oh, god, no, I would never feel comfortable wearing it.” He sounded completely sincere, but he also seemed to like saying it. And then it went quiet for a beat.“Anyway, I just wanted you to know how great it is for me to know it could be used to help the community, especially now. It makes me so proud, and I just wanted to thank you.”No shakedown, no request for royalties, no cease and desist. Just pride. Which is exactly what it felt like to declare yourself during that terrible moment, to stand up and be counted when you were needed, simply because it was the right thing to do.— Avram Finkelstein, After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images (2017), Ch. 4. -- source link

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