IT WAS VULGAR AND IT WAS BEAUTIFUL: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
By Jack Lowery
When the AIDS activist movement ACT UP was at the height of its powers, between 1987 and 1992, bold posters communicated its messages and shaped its public image. In the most famous, a pink triangle swims in a sea of black. The text: Silence=Death.
As Jack Lowery recounts in a thoughtful, cogent new history of their creation, this was the work of six gay men who had lost people to AIDS and started holding potluck dinners to talk about feelings of loneliness and heightened awareness of mortality. In 1985, AIDS was associated in the public mind with gay men and people who injected drugs, and killed virtually everyone diagnosed. America shrugged — or worse. President Reagan’s press secretary shut down questions about AIDS with a joke; William F. Buckley proposed that people with AIDS be tattooed on the arms or buttocks.
The creators of Silence=Death were inspired by the simplicity of a Vietnam-era antiwar poster. Buckley’s proposal evoked the Holocaust, and one member of the group suggested they use the pink triangle that Nazis had forced homosexuals to wear. He misremembered it as pointing up — a mistake later spun as an intentional signal of empowerment. For the motto, the group compressed a line that another member, Avram Finkelstein, had written in his journal: “Gay silence is deafening.” The poster had two aims: to call on fellow gays to speak out, and to put the rest of society on notice that a new movement had begun.
In February 1987, the poster was wheat-pasted on construction sites across Manhattan. Shortly after the news reported that an AIDS vaccine was unlikely, the writer and activist Larry Kramer called for a new, more combative political organization, which ultimately became ACT UP. The creators of Silence=Death donated the image to the new organization, whose members were soon carrying it to protests and wearing it in interviews.
The New Museum commissioned a window installation from ACT UP, which precipitated a second art collective. At the center was a charismatic, mercurial man named Mark Simpson, a Texas preacher’s son who had become a painter and construction worker in New York. He was joined by Finkelstein, a couple of graphic designers (including the group’s only straight woman), an artist, a Rockefeller scion, the manager of an AIDS medication buyer’s club (the group’s only person of color), the filmmaker Tom Kalin and a cabdriver who became an AIDS nurse. The group took the name Gran Fury after the artist walked past patrol cars of that model parked outside a police station.
In Gran Fury’s most iconic poster, from 1988, two clean-cut men in sailors’ uniforms embrace and kiss. Mark Harrington, later one of ACT UP’s leaders in researching medication, had found the black-and-white photo in a film archive. In the original, the men’s trousers are unbuttoned, their full glory lolling provocatively in the foreground. Even the cropped image startled. It evoked Victor Jorgensen’s August 1945 Times Square kiss, but also, Lowery explains, “kissing was an integral part of ACT UP’s culture,” a way of bridging the moat of fear with which society isolated people with AIDS. A sexual charge ran through ACT UP; according to Kramer, meetings became “the best cruising ground in New York.” The poster’s caption, “Read My Lips,” was echoed a few months later by a campaigning George H.W. Bush, and the irony seemed all the sharper.
Gran Fury went on to design fake currency that was handed out on Wall Street to protest a pharmaceutical company’s profiteering; bloody handprints meant to symbolize the New York City mayor’s culpable reluctance to act; and posters for the Venice Biennale that juxtaposed the pope and an erect phallus. The group also coined the slogan “Women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it” to pressure the C.D.C. to update AIDS’s official definition, allowing women access to government support.
Some Gran Fury artworks were duds. Indeed, members of the collective themselves dismissed one nearly illegible piece as “the eye chart,” and in Lowery’s telling such put-downs were common. One member compared the sniping to that of “The Boys in the Band”; of the group’s eventual demise, another quipped that “it died because nobody wanted to be in the same room anymore.”
The splintering paralleled tensions within ACT UP, which held together for as long as possible two contrary impulses: outrage against an establishment willing to let social outcasts die, and a wish to understand and repair, which required collaboration with the same establishment. In 1991, Harrington led an exodus from ACT UP of members who had become experts in the science and bureaucracy of drug research and had grown impatient with being told not to work too closely with authorities — a story told in more detail by both David France and by Sarah Schulman, books with markedly different perspectives that suggest that the rift may well be recapitulated in the historiography.
Gran Fury’s last great work grew, in 1993, out of a series of political funerals (including one in which a friend of mine, David Robinson, threw his partner’s ashes onto the White House lawn) and out of Simpson’s awareness of his own imminent death. Modeled on the liturgy of the Passover Seder, the understated graphic work is echo of and answer to the command printed at the bottom of the original Silence=Death poster: “Turn anger, fear, grief into action.” As Simpson told a friend, before his death, “There’s only so much the art can do.”
IT WAS VULGAR AND IT WAS BEAUTIFUL: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
By Jack Lowery
423 pp. Bold Type Books. $35.
Caleb Crain is the author of “Necessary Errors” and “Overthrow.”
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