Although AIDS is no longer the subject of his work, art and cultural critic Douglas Crimp\u2014the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and a professor of visual and cultural studies\u2014played a central scholarly role in the first two decades of the AIDS crisis. He examined how we think and talk about the disease and people directly affected by it, the language we use, our ideas about science and medicine, our conceptions of public and private, and our notions of health and illness, sex and death.<\/p>\n
In 1987, Crimp\u2014then a coeditor of the art journal October<\/i>\u2014put together a special issue titled AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism<\/i>, a series of critical essays on the culture of the disease. MIT Press published it as a book a year later, the first book-length treatment of the cultural meaning of AIDS. He followed with two other books on AIDS: AIDS Demo Graphics <\/i>(Bay Press, 1990) and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics<\/i> (MIT Press,\u00a02002).<\/p>\n
Crimp also took his ideas off the page and into the world of activism, as a member of the group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT\u00a0UP.<\/p>\n
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, you wrote that we can\u2019t know AIDS apart from our representations of it. \u00a0What did you mean?
\n<\/b>Any entity, or any question, is something that we know through our various means<\/i> of knowing\u2014language, scientific inquiry, the way we apprehend it through its media representations. And certainly in the early days of AIDS, when it was a kind of mystery, I\u2014and those of us who were immediately affected by it\u2014became especially attentive to the ways it was represented, in terms of trying to understand what this new disease that people were getting could be, the hysteria that surrounded it, and the ways that people were being represented in the media. Of course, that included gay men, of whom I\u2019m\u00a0one.<\/p>\n
The ways that our lives were affected [by AIDS] were so dependent on a whole array of representations. So that statement is a provocative one\u2014but it really matters how something is represented.<\/p>\n
Early on, some people argued that <\/b>AIDS might inspire great art, but that art had no explicit social role to play in fighting the epidemic. You countered that claim, calling for an \u201cactivist aesthetic practice,\u201d in which art could help save lives by intervening in the social world. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it,\u201d you wrote in 1987. How was that received?
\n<\/b>There was a lot of controversy about my demand for activist art practices, and my apparent hostility to what I called \u201celegiac ones.\u201d I revised that position pretty quickly. My book Melancholia and Moralism<\/i> is a collection of everything I wrote on AIDS. Included in that book is the first essay I wrote after the special issue of October<\/i>, called \u201cPortraits of People with AIDS.\u201d It was, again, quite polemical, opposing what I thought were phobic images of people with AIDS and supporting other kinds of images of people with AIDS, including a video called Danny<\/i> by Stashu Kybartas, a beautifully elegiac work about a person who died of AIDS. So already I was aware that there were other important means of responding to the epidemic that were not so obviously activist.<\/p>\n
What do you think of how AIDS is represented now?
\n<\/b>That\u2019s a really complicated question. It\u2019s not so much represented in the culture now, of course, and that\u2019s a problem. We still have a very active epidemic in this country and in the world. And the degree to which there is still an enormous amount of transmission has to do in part with the fact that it\u2019s not something that people\u2014including the media\u2014pay attention\u00a0to.<\/p>\n
The people in this country who are disproportionately affected are still gay men, particularly gay men of color, and IV drug users. And a lot of the men who transmit the virus to other men don\u2019t identify with the kind of mainstream gay culture that is widely represented now, which purports to be a culture of marriage and of committed relationships. It\u2019s no longer one of sexual promiscuity, even though promiscuity is very much alive and well in the culture.<\/p>\n
One way that one could imagine AIDS receiving the wide public recognition that it needs at this point is if it were linked to what we in the activist movement demanded: \u201chealth care as a right.\u201d AIDS is an issue in the same way all kinds of health problems are an issue. If you have HIV and are lucky enough to have health insurance, you will perhaps be able to get one of the enormously expensive drugs, drugs that might cost about $10,000 to $12,000 a year. AIDS is one of the preexisting conditions [that the Affordable Care Act requires insurance companies to cover]. But now Donald Trump has been elected president and the Republicans will control whether or not the Affordable Care Act survives, or survives in any form that makes it at all effective.<\/p>\n
Do you think How to Survive a Plague<\/i>, the new book by David France that chronicles the work of groups such as ACT UP (and the documentary film of the same name that preceded it) will help bring AIDS back to wider public consciousness?
\n<\/b>How to Survive a Plague<\/i> concentrates on one very particular aspect of what we as activists did\u2014changing the drug approval process and speeding up availability of the drugs that actually did save people\u2019s lives. But it\u2019s only one aspect of what we did, and it misses wider questions, particularly about income inequality and access to health care in this country. The book is going to get a lot of attention, and that\u2019s fine. It will bring AIDS back into consciousness, but it will bring it into consciousness in a very particular way\u2014as a heroic story of AIDS activists. The people at the center of the film are all white, but that wasn\u2019t the composition of the movement itself. And there were many more issues in the AIDS activist movement than France took on, including homelessness and AIDS. And activists changed the way that people with AIDS were regarded.<\/p>\n
How so?
\n<\/b>There was a kind of fear and loathing of people with AIDS. There was hysteria. There was talk of quarantine. People wouldn\u2019t touch people with AIDS. Nurses in hospitals wouldn\u2019t attend to people with AIDS. It was a\u00a0crisis.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve written about early TV portrayals of people with AIDS and how phobic they were. There\u2019s a story that at one point [the advocacy group] Gay Men\u2019s Health Crisis put forward a spokesperson for a TV appearance, a person who had AIDS, and a producer said no, that person doesn\u2019t look sick enough. We want somebody who looks really sick. They wanted somebody who looked terrifying, somebody who had Kaposi\u2019s sarcoma lesions all over a bloated face. And that\u2019s what they got eventually. It was a courageous person who agreed to appear. But at the same time, had the TV producers chosen someone who looked like your brother or your father, it would have helped humanize AIDS. And I think that\u2019s what we did as activists, in various ways. We provided different pictures of people with AIDS. And one of those pictures was people fighting for our own lives, standing up for ourselves, and not simply passively fading away and\u00a0dying.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember the courage with which they faced the unknown.\u201d<\/strong><\/a> December 1, 2016<\/em><\/p>\n 8,000 posters, one collection<\/strong><\/a> December 1, 2016<\/em><\/p>\n News from the front lines of the AIDS fight<\/strong><\/a> December 1, 2016<\/em><\/p>\n