AIDS and its afterlives: race, gender, and the queer radical imagination

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Content AIDS AND ITS AFTERLIVES: RACE, GENDER, AND THE QUEER RADICAL
IMAGINATION
by
Jih-Fei Cheng
December 2015
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

i

Acknowledgments

I do not know life without AIDS. And, I do not know AIDS without loss. My
experiences with race, gender, desire, sex, love, family, friendship, community, work,
death, and justice are entangled with AIDS.
I remember.
After graduating high school, I had my first sexual encounter with an HIV-
positive white man fourteen years my senior who had a “thing” for Asians. Then, I finally
met other gay Asian men who promptly informed me that touching one another would
make us detestable “incestuous lesbians.” This was the mid- to late-1990s. I was soon
recruited by the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) in Los Angeles,
California as a young person who they identified as “at risk” for contracting HIV. At the
time, I was attending the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where I found
myself isolated, alienated, and depressed for most of the years I was there. I would travel
back to Los Angeles often in search of “gay community.” I had only a few gay friends.
While I was still under-aged, one friend lent me his identification card so I could enter
the largely white, affluent, gay male world of West Hollywood bars and clubs to
participate in their consumerist delights. Even then I experienced exclusion because I
didn’t wear the right clothes, have the right body, and I certainly wasn’t the right race or
gender presentation (read: moneyed, trendy, white, muscular, and masculine).
Encountering APAIT outreach workers, and then eventually becoming one, is what
initiated my training on AIDS, race, gender, and sexual politics. Meanwhile, I took
courses at UCSD with J. Jack Halberstam and Chandan Reddy, among other influential

ii

ethnic, feminist, and queer studies scholars. I formed life-changing friendships with other
queers of color who also experienced exclusion and vulnerability. This education
provided me the language and historical context to understand and articulate my
experiences. It also further galvanized my political will.
As an M.A. student in Asian American Studies at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA), I became more involved in HIV/AIDS outreach and prevention
education. I later became responsible for providing emotional support and coordinating
the mental health services for people living with HIV/AIDS. At APAIT, I revived the
“Buddy Program,” developed a Mandarin-speaking support group, aided in treatment
advocacy, interfaced with government bureaucracy, and leveraged resources where they
did not exist (trans inclusive transitional housing, addiction treatment programs that
would accept non-English speakers, etc.). I charted the details of my clients’ lives in
order to report our progress to funders. Many late nights were spent charting, charting,
charting...
I remember.
Elderly HIV-positive clients who lost their social security disability benefits
without clear warning. No one at the Social Security Administration office could speak
any other language except English (or, maybe Spanish) and the employees would refuse
to release information to me on the client’s behalf. The young woman of color who told
me: “I’m not ready to die.” I can still hear her voice crack through the phone that I held
tightly with both hands while pressing it against my ear; I didn’t know what to say. A son
that threw himself upon his estranged father’s headstone and wailed. They never had the
chance to exchange last words. The immigrant man suffering from neuropathy that called

iii

me incessantly to plead for things I could not offer. He spoke no English, but he could
say “Klonopin.” Another elderly man who lived in a convalescent home and required a
walker to remain somewhat mobile. He reminisced often about dancing at Oil Can
Harry’s in the 1970s and early 1980s until he could no longer. The undocumented and
homeless trans woman of color whose boyfriend beat her. She said to me in putonghua
that if I left for New York City she would have no one. Then, there was this small-
framed, quiet, and gentle man. The physical agony he endured as the result of a
misdiagnosed Mycobacterium Avium Complex infection—no longer. His blood was
washed clean from the pavement at the bottom of a bridge where the sun sets over Silver
Lake.
I remember.
Lovers that pushed my politics and trained me in action.
Lovers with vivid nightmares.
Lovers that expressed their rage at me, poetically.
Friends no longer friends, except online, where we are organized according to
categories for race/ethnicity, gender presentation, body type, hairiness, and HIV status,
and tied tentatively together by thin social network threads.
My mother who could not understand why I would choose not to use a condom
with my partner. I still regret how I responded to her questions.
The woman I wanted to become and the male body I have come to inhabit.
We are abandoned and we abandon before we are abandoned again.
This is the secret to sero-sorting.

iv

In the supposed “post-crisis” era of AIDS, I’m bound by confidentiality. We are
still steeped deeply in stigma and are deterred from calling out names as activists once
did (and still attempt to do).
So, this is my non-exhaustive litany of acknowledgements.
The losses I’ve gained.
Still trying to figure out how to hold onto something I can’t shake anyway.
I begin by acknowledging losses, but I’m sustained by love. I’m cared for by
family and friends, and steered by the wisdom of many who came before me. To my
parents, Shou-Yinn Cheng and Min-Lee Cheng, who I cause much frustration and
heartache because I insist that they “understand” me: Thank you; I love you. You have
been there for me unwaveringly. I could not ask for more perfect parents. Without you,
all aspects of life would be impossible. My four amazing grandparents and many loving
extended relatives have been important supporters, even if they are cognizant to varying
extents of what I am studying. To my brother, Jih-Hao Cheng, who has not been present
in my life since that argument on his birthday turned stupid: I love you. I wore the
bespoke suit you bought me for my birthday to my job interviews and on graduation day.
My dearest friend, sister, brother: Ernesto Moreno. Our friendship since the early
years of college has helped me muster the will to face many, many, many obstacles. Our
conversations in the moments we share between work always deepen my heart. Our
travels together make life more full. With you in my life my spirit can only grow
stronger. Your honesty and openness cuts through all the bullshit. You deserve the same
and more. R. Benedito Ferrao, you are a gracious and giving soul and a fundamental part
of who I am. I admire the expanse of your warmth and your sage-like ways. I'm ever

v

grateful for your friendship, the caring ear you’ve lent to my woes, and the careful eye
you’ve dedicated throughout the years to examine my writing. Anjali Nath, even across
oceans and continents I feel your presence. Your empathy is a current that keeps me close
and carries me far, like a warm embrace lulls one into a dream. I am endeared to you and
endlessly in awe of you. Deborah Al-Najjar, you were the first in the Department of
American Studies and Ethnicity to open your heart and invite me in. I love your laughter,
your soul, and I love the way you love people. Priscilla Leiva, your friendship, brilliance,
incredible ability to generate personal insights, and razor sharp wit keep me on point. I’ve
missed you, but I’m excited we get to remain in Los Angeles together! Sriya Shrestha,
you are the sister and co-conspirator I have always wanted. Your thorough
considerations, commitment to radical thinking and being, and wry sense of humor
endear me to you forever. Nic John Ramos, your capacity to synthesize and respond to
complex scholarly and emotional quandaries astounds me. More than that, I feel like I
found in you my first queer kindred Asian scholar-activist spirit.
There are many other scholars, artists, and activists whom helped make graduate
school not only tolerable but actually magical. Crystal Baik, Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, and I
were part of an intellectually and emotionally vital writing group led by Macarena
Gómez-Barris. Akhila Ananth, you helped me “survive” the job market and find ways to
smile and laugh in the meantime. You amaze me. Jennifer DeClue, Umayyah Cable,
Feng-Mei Heberer, Clifford Landon Pun, Neelam Sharma, Kenny Garcia, Vivek Mittel,
Treva Ellison, Margaret Rhee, Natasha Bissonouth, Jessica Lovaas, Laura Fugikawa,
Gretel Vera-Rosas, Álvaro Daniel Márquez, Christina Heatherton, Saeed Rahman, Emily
Raymundo, Jenny Hoang, Sarah Fong, Floridalma Boj-Lopez, Sabrina Howard, Kristie

vi

Valdez-Guillen, Heidi Hong, Jennifer Tran, Rebekah Garrison, Patty Ahn, Inna
Arzumanova, Tony Davis, May Alhassen, Celeste Menchaca, Ryan Fukimori, Stephanie
Sparling Williams. These people inspire me with their compassion, the passion with
which they approach their work, and the grace with which they move through this world.
Cathleen Otero, Damien Wilpitz, Gladys Nubla, Anthony Yuen, Hoang Tan
Nguyen, Dredge Kang, Elliott Powell, and Uri McMillan have been crucial as mentors
but also as friends who make life exciting and pleasurable in and outside institutional
walls. I cherish this so much. I’m extremely grateful for the insights, feedback, materials,
and recommendations that Elliott Powell, Justin Leroy, Hentyle Yapp, Lucas
Hilderbrand, and Ramzi Fawaz shared at critical moments. I think fondly upon my time
at APAIT with Marie Ada Auyong, Haruyo Fujiwaki, Nic Truong, and Jury Candelario.
The years I spent in New York City during the early- to mid-2000s working at the Asian
and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS, and organizing with groups such as the Gay
Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York and the Fabulous Independent Educated
Radicals for Community Empowerment, are foundational to my sense of “justice.” For
this, I thank the tireless energy and dazzling minds and hearts of those who I met around
this time and worked alongside: John Won, Stephen Kang, Ray Hsia, Justin Leroy, L. L.
Gimeno, Kenyon Farrow, Diana Roygulchareon, Un-Jung Lim, Jennifer Paek, Sung Won
Park, and Christine Cauble, to name a few.
While at UCSD, I met many creative forces with whom I formed my original
chosen family: In addition to Ernesto Moreno and Damien Wilpitz, Frisley Juarez,
Vanessa Teran, Rommel Salveron, Fernando Estrada, Joe Villa-Mora, and Mikeah
Jennings were part of my first experiences with queer of color kinship. Although we

vii

don’t see each other often or spend nearly as much time together as we once did, there is
a special place in my heart where I hold the memories of our years spent traveling
between San Diego, Buena Park, Tijuana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City,
and beyond.
Many luminary scholars led me in the chase for this PhD dream. I cannot express
enough the gratitude and admiration that I feel. J. Jack Halberstam, Macarena Gómez-
Barris, Kara Keeling, Dorinne Kondo, and Akira Mizuta Lippit comprise the ideal
dissertation committee. I feel extremely fortunate and privileged to receive their
extraordinary insights and to bear the mark of their influence. They patiently read,
commented, and challenged each idea I churned out, each chapter draft I wrote (including
those I set aside or tossed out), and each theoretical framing I attempted to use to draw
the dissertation parts together. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alexandra Juhasz, Lanita Jacobs,
Nayan Shah, and Shana Redmond were beacons of light when I felt lost. They listened,
reviewed, advised, invited my participation in events and decision-making, and gave up
much of their precious time in the process. Mel Y. Chen generously explored
opportunities to mentor me as a postdoctoral fellow. Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, Rachel C.
Lee, and Russell Leong formed my M.A. thesis committee at UCLA. That experience
continues to mold, shape, and embolden me to push forward. Chandan Reddy gave so
much care when teaching me as an undergraduate student at UCSD. He assisted me
greatly with my first attempt at graduate school applications. His selflessness is
unparalleled. Lisa Lowe also kindly provided advisement and support to further my
studies. J. Jack Halberstam has mentored me in innumerable ways since I was an
undergraduate student at UCSD who stepped foot in his graduate seminar on “New Queer

viii

Theory.” I didn’t have role models growing up, but in my adult years, these people have
become precisely that. I am indebted to each of them.
While at the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity (ASE) at the
University of Southern California (USC), Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, and Jujuana
Preston provided the staff labor that allowed our department and students like myself to
thrive. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I had the unique opportunity to help
establish and benefit from the collective participation of those in the Race-ing Queer
Studies Research Cluster and the Indigenous and Decolonization Studies Research
Collective, which are initiatives led by ASE. On several occasions, ASE generated funds
that helped me with the costs of conference attendance and to organize events. Vanessa
Schwartz and the USC Visual Studies Research Institute and Visual Studies Graduate
Certificate program also provided financial support and essential training that have been
invaluable to my research. I was fortunate to participate as a New Directions Fellow for
USC’s Center for Feminist Research 2011-2012 seminar, “Race, Sexuality, and Resistant
Bodies,” which was directed by Macarena Gómez-Barris and included J. Jack
Halberstam, María Elena-Martínez, David C. Lloyd, and Gretel Vera-Rosas. That
experience will stay with me for a lifetime.
This is another non-exhaustive list of the countless people and places for whom
and which I am (and will be) thankful. Please forgive me if I have missed mentioning you
in this small space. All errors contained herein are my own.
I wrote this dissertation with the selfish desire to alleviate my own sense of grief.
I also like to tell myself that it will mean something to others; that the questions I pose
herein will orient us in a direction with more care and more political possibility, even as

ix

it lacks immediate answers. In this way, I search for connections across spaces and times,
guided by loss and compelled by love in the ways we aren’t meant to expect or accept it.

x

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Dissertation Abstract

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE
How to Survive: AIDS and the Queer Context for Popular Media

CHAPTER TWO
Science and Silence: AIDS, Black Feminisms, and the Resounding
Queer Radical Imagination

CHAPTER THREE
Time Bends and Queer of Color Kinships: Paris is Burning and Ke
Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place

CHAPTER FOUR
Masculinity and Militarization: Representations of AIDS and Gay
Men of Color in New Media

Conclusion. Queerness and Virality

Bibliography

i

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1

19

61

117

166

220

228

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Dissertation Abstract

AIDS and its Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination
examines how AIDS activists’ experimental videos produced during the U.S. crisis
period (1980s to early-1990s) continue to intervene into contemporary popular culture
and social movements. While the stigma of AIDS associates it with death and abjection,
crisis period activists faced with the massive loss of women and queers of color invented
new political imaginations and representations of life. This research builds on AIDS
media studies and feminist and queer of color critiques by arguing that the queer of color
images forged by feminist video activists in the crucible of the crisis continue to circulate
and install a “queer radical imagination.” Analyzing contemporary and historical activist
documentaries, New Queer Cinema films, and Internet-based HIV prevention campaigns,
I theorize how queer of color AIDS images attain “afterlives” through their
appropriations in popular media. These afterlives interweave visual texts, performing a
method for representational and materialist analyses. They contextualize the present-day
political shift towards gay inclusion in military and marriage as correlated with U.S.
expansion, privatization, and online HIV prevention campaigns demanding personal
responsibility among women and queers of color for AIDS. Meanwhile, they manifest
kinship and coalition among dispossessed communities through cultural reverberations
between documentary films that entwine the lives of gender nonconforming subjects
across different sites and periods of U.S. empire. AIDS afterlives, I submit, guide
understanding of how the tactical employment of analog camcorders to stage direct
action, counter police violence, and document the AIDS crisis converge

xii

with contemporary handheld digital devices used to record, broadcast, and expand
protests through “viral” videos, thereby stoking the queer radical imagination.

1

Introduction

On May 4, 2015, Thomas Miguel Guerra was convicted after pleading “no
contest” to a misdemeanor charge for violating California health codes by presumably
knowingly transmitting HIV to his partner. Guerra was sentenced the maximum penalty
of six months in jail.
1
Under the state’s Health and Safety Code 120290 “any person
afflicted with any contagious, infectious, or communicable disease who willfully exposes
himself or herself to another person” can be found guilty. Code 120291 further specifies:
“Any person who exposes another to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) by
engaging in unprotected sexual activity when the infected person knows at the time of the
unprotected sex that he or she is infected with HIV, has not disclosed his or her HIV-
positive status, and acts with the specific intent to infect…is guilty of a felony.”
2

Although the reasons for Guerra’s misdemeanor rather than felony conviction are
unclear, the court proceedings for the case seem to have followed code 120291’s
requirements. The identity of the accuser remains confidential and the prosecutor had to
provide “[e]vidence that the person had knowledge of his or her HIV-positive status,
without additional evidence, shall not be sufficient to prove specific intent.”
3

1
Perry, Tony. “San Diego man sentenced to jail for not telling partner he is HIV positive,” Los
Angeles Times. May 4, 2015. Accessed: May 6, 2015. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-
ln-hiv-positive-20150504-story.html.
2
Notably, code 120291 specifies that those HIV-positive persons found guilty of willfully
transmitting HIV to an unknowing partner can be convicted of a felony and serve up to 8 years of
imprisonment. The reasons for Guerra’s misdemeanor conviction are, at present, unclear to this
author. Official California Legislative Information. “HEALTH AND SAFETY CODE SECTION
120275-120305.” Accessed: May 7, 2015. http://www.leginfo.ca. gov/cgi-
bin/displaycode?section=hsc&group=120001-121000&file=120275-120305.
3
Ibid.

2

Guerra and the case plaintiff met through an online gay social networking
application. How HIV transmission between Guerra and the plaintiff was documented has
not been publicized. However, text messages and videos presumably sent and created by
Guerra were marshaled as evidence. According to NBC San Diego News reporter Omari
Fleming, the “mask” of Guerra’s smiling face in online photographs had been uncovered
to reveal a “potentially sinister plot.” Arrest warrant records show that the digital
evidence was culled from Guerra’s ex-boyfriend’s computer archive. Text messages
indicate that Guerra “joked around…about being HIV-positive.” Fleming published in his
article a supposed image of one such text message, erroneously inserting an extra “lol”
(“laughing out loud”) in his television and article reporting to further exaggerate Guerra’s
purported menacing nature.
4

This dissertation opens with a brief mention of this case to highlight the curious
convergence of AIDS surveillance and digital media. Guerra’s conviction demonstrates
the stakes of AIDS representations in the context of digital social networking. In Guerra’s
case, individual responsibility, media technology usage, and race played roles in
determining his culpability. Technology and software increasingly modeled on individual
user production and consumption, such as the handheld smart phone, is meant to facilitate
social connectivity. Yet, digital social connectivity relies on the individual user’s capacity
to represent a “true” sense of “self” to other users. Meanwhile, U.S. people of color and
those living in the global south represent the categories with the highest number of
peoples living with and/or at risk for HIV/AIDS. Hence, in today’s world where AIDS

4
Fleming, Omari. “Ex: Man Accused of Knowingly Spreading HIV Still on Grindr.” NBC San
Diego News. August 29, 2014. Accessed: May 12, 2015.
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/HIV-Positive-Thomas-Miguel-Guerra-San-Diego-
Grinder-273178761.html#ixzz3ZxoNcCki. See video clip of television news broadcast.

3

public health concerns and digital self-representation enmesh, racial/ethnic minorities
bear the greatest onus for authentic self-representation and the disclosure of HIV-status.
It is important to note that these terms for digital participation conflates
“representation” and “self” to mean “truth.” Further, this collapse between
self/representation (versus “self-representation”) relies on visual documentation. Hence,
increased submission to surveillance, as in the case of reality television and webcasting,
generates performances of “authenticity” and expressions of “empowerment.”
5
The
disclosure of HIV-status, which cannot be verified by the naked eye, through digital
social networks can be assumed to be the most authentic and empowered form of
self/representation. Guerra was deemed deceptive precisely because he did not
consistently announce his HIV status in his engagements with social media. Archived
messages and videos filtered through the smart phone were used to document Guerra’s
failures of self/representation. However, the burden placed on Guerra to represent
authenticity disguises other failures embedded in digital networking and AIDS
surveillance.
If Guerra had consistently disclosed his status as HIV-positive, he would
presumably risk social stigma but secure for himself an ethically and morally empowered
representation of self. By not repeatedly disclosing his status as HIV-positive, Guerra is
said to have caved to social stigma and engaged in willful masquerade. Thus, in the
failure to represent his HIV status unwaveringly, he is believed to be criminally
responsible for the diagnoses of others. However, the assessment for Guerra’s criminality
obscures the inadequate, if not impossible, methods for detecting and preventing the

5
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New
York: New York University Press, 2012.

4

movements of HIV. HIV criminalization also underscores the overreliance on
representations of race and gender to supplement scientific inaccuracies, statistical
insufficiencies, and gross historical inequities.

Identifying the Ongoing “Crisis” Pandemic
According to the federal government, Black and Latina/o communities, especially
“men who have sex with men,” are the most infected and affected by HIV/AIDS in the
United States, while statistics on Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians are
underreported.
6
Although women constitute a smaller portion of total U.S. HIV
infections, women of color make-up the majority of new cases, with Black women
comprising over half the reported incidences among women each year.
7
Globally, sub-
Saharan Africa remains the most disproportionately affected region while HIV infections
continue to rise in the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, and the
Middle East.
8
In short, there is a correlation between women and queers of color in the
United States and those living in the global south when it comes to vulnerability to
HIV/AIDS. This reflects not the criminal failure of individual responsibility, but systemic
racism, heteropatriarchy, unequal development, and western imperialism.
Meanwhile, compulsory HIV self-disclosure runs parallel to the increasing
conceptualization of HIV status as a form of social identification. HIV is the virus

6
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “U.S. Statistics.” AIDS.gov. Accessed:
6/23/14, http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/statistics/.
7
Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “HIV Among Women: Fact Sheet.” Accessed: May
8, 2015, http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/gender/women/facts/index.html.
8
UNAIDS.org. “Global Report: UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic 2013.” Accessed:
6/23/14,
http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/epidemiology/2013/gr2013/UN
AIDS_Global_Report_2013_en.pdf. See page 12.

5

scientifically known to infect and replicate using a certain type of human white blood cell
known as “T helper cells.” The virus is transmitted when a person comes into significant
contact with blood, semen, pre-ejaculate, vaginal fluids, and breast milk wherein HIV is
present. One method for detecting HIV transmission requires testing the individual for
antibodies that are supposedly produced by the body’s natural response to the presence of
HIV in the body. Another method is to test for the virus itself, which involves a
genotyping process used to confirm the individual’s HIV-positive status. HIV-infection
can depress the human immune system and cause the onset of opportunistic infections.
“AIDS” is a medical diagnosis given once certain opportunistic infections set-in, or when
the number of viral copies rises, or the number of T-cells falls, to a certain level in a
sample “drop” of blood. There is a threshold for the technologies used to test and verify
one’s HIV status. These scientific methods cannot prove without a doubt that a person is
HIV-negative. For HIV-positive persons, an “undetectable” status can be achieved when
effectively using anti-retroviral medications, but that does not mean the body is free of
the virus. By the same token, the conferral of an HIV-negative status upon someone who
is tested simply means that the technology available cannot detect HIV within the
sampled blood. “Truthful” HIV disclosure depends on an individual’s submission to
constant testing, which can only provisionally document but not accurately or perpetually
confirm one’s HIV status. Hence, HIV monitoring relies on individual self-disclosure
using the statement: “I am HIV-positive.”
Although HIV/AIDS are unstable medical terms, they have been adopted in the
present as rigid expressions in a grid of self-identity. Like other forms of identity, such as
citizenship or race/ethnicity, HIV status declaration generates social and cultural

6

meaning, and is propped up by bureaucratic institutions. However, HIV/AIDS is also
unlike race/ethnicity or gender in that race/ethnicity and gender are presumed to be
visually recognizable. With the advent of effective medications since the mid-1990s, the
signs of HIV/AIDS diagnoses are increasingly considered visually non-existent. Thus,
many HIV prevention campaign messages, like those of EraseDoubt.org, signal to the
public that HIV status cannot be determined by the appearance of a seemingly healthy
person. Rather, the entire public must consider itself “at risk” for HIV infection.
9

However, as in the case of EraseDoubt.org and many other HIV prevention
campaigns, “risk” is represented by images of people of color who are not simply “at
risk” for HIV. People of color are represented as inextricable from HIV/AIDS. On bus
ads, billboards, literature, and online representations, people of color are epitomized as
virus carriers who must pledge individual responsibility. Or, they are visually embodied
as the virus (fig. 1-4). The public is prompted to participate in AIDS surveillance by
emphasizing people of color’s individual responsibility to remain vigilant about repeated
testing and HIV status disclosure. Like announcing one’s sexual identity, particularly
when it is not heterosexual, HIV status must be announced again and again, especially in
the case of an HIV-positive individual. Yet, it is people of color who bear the most
responsibility, as individuals, to disclose their HIV status in order to represent their
racial/ethnic and gendered authentic selves according to the statistical expectations
regarding HIV.

9
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the County of Los Angeles, Department of
Public Health. EraseDoubt.org. Accessed: May 8, 2015, http://erasedoubt.org/.

7

Fig 1. HIVStopsWihMe.org Campaign targeting presumably heterosexual women of
color. Source: HIVStopsWithMe.org.

Fig 2. HIVStopsWihMe.org Campaign targeting gay men and non-gay identified “men
who have sex with men.” Source: HIVStopsWithMe.org.

8

Figure 3. HIVStopsWihMe.org Campaign targeting non-gender conforming people of
color, namely trans women of color. Source: HIVStopsWithMe.org.

Figure 4. EraseDoubt.org visually inscribes images of the HIV on or in the body of men
of color. Pictured here, the virus sits inside the eye and on the hand of two men of color.
Source: EraseDoubt.org.

9

AIDS and its Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination
explores the contractions in public health surveillance, digital circuits of media, and
depictions of race and gender by analyzing AIDS representations that lay claim to racial
authenticity and scientific and historical “truth.” Specifically, it examines the trend in
contemporary AIDS digital media to repurpose the styles, aesthetics, and analog footage
of original independently produced AIDS videos that were developed during the U.S.
“crisis period” (1980s to early 1990s) by AIDS activists. By appropriating AIDS video
activism from the past, today’s AIDS media attempt to construct a narrative of progress
that has been presumably achieved through the development of biomedical interventions,
since the mid-1990s, to manage HIV infectiousness.
Notably, this story of progress is achieved by representing largely white gay men
as healthy and empowered individuals who effectively exercise social responsibility
through their revolutionary AIDS activism and access to medication. Women and people
of color are nearly disappeared and silenced in the historical record of AIDS crisis
activism in spite of their fundamental and lasting contributions. A vast number of videos
in the archive of AIDS representations demonstrate women and queer of color
participation in AIDS crisis activism and the radical queer theory and politics that
emerged from it. Yet, these political representations are less visible in today’s AIDS
media. Instead, contemporary popular AIDS representations of people of color focus on
their individual responsibility for an enduring global pandemic.

10

“Afterlives” and the “Queer Radical Imagination”
“AIDS and its Afterlives” approaches the study of today’s AIDS media based
upon three assertions. First, the appropriation of the AIDS crisis past in today’s digital
media circuits inevitably conjures representations of women and people of color whose
participation have been essential and irreducible. Secondly, these women and people of
color representations resurface through feminist and queer of color AIDS video activist
practices and networks of care. Thirdly, feminist and queer of color video practices
consistently invoke in the present anti-racist, feminist, queer of color, and anti-imperialist
AIDS politics, or what I term a “queer radical imagination.” This dissertation builds on
AIDS media studies by Alexandra Juhasz and Roger Hallas, and theorizations of
feminisms and queer of color critique by Roderick Ferguson, José Esteban Muñoz, and
others. It analyzes recent and crisis period activist documentaries, New Queer Cinema
films, and Internet-based HIV prevention campaign theorize how feminist and queer of
color AIDS video activism re-mediates and re-circulates “afterlives” in popular media to
install a “queer radical imagination.”
I offer “afterlives” as a framework and method for tracking the movements of
feminist and queer of color AIDS video activist images, aesthetics, and styles. In chapter
one, I analyze the feature-length documentary film, How to Survive a Plague (2012) and
its uses of archival AIDS video activist footage. I show how, as a framework, “afterlives”
generates a way of perceiving the appropriations of feminist and queer of color AIDS
video activist practices across analog and digital platforms. This framework attends to the
representations of women and queers of color who may show up momentarily in
contemporary AIDS media, but ultimately disappear because their lives were presumably

11

lost to the crisis. “Afterlives” as a method analyzes the co-optations of anti-racist and
feminist video practices, and their caring and careful representations of women and
queers of color that intervene into narratives of AIDS and gay progress. That women and
queers of color represent failures in the developmental logics of science and liberal
politics, I contend, upends the story that AIDS and gay life have “gotten better.” Instead,
the afterlives of archival images and video aesthetics produced by anti-racist feminists
and queers surface in today’s popular representations of AIDS to demand that we
imagine other radical possibilities for coalition and livelihood.
If feminist and queer of color AIDS afterlives appear in the moments they are
visually suppressed in the archive, then they are also heard in the moments in which they
are silenced in the archive. Chapter 2 analyzes the documentary film Voices from the
Front (1992) by the video activist collective Testing the Limits to explicate the racial and
gendered silences in the AIDS pandemic. A significant amount of footage in recent
documentary films, such as How to Survive and Vito (2011), was lifted from Voices.
However, How to Survive and Vito omit and silence the representations of women and
queers of color that Voices intentionally foregrounded. This chapter examines how Black
feminist and queer voices continue to interrupt the visual discourse of biological survival
in today's AIDS media. These sonic afterlives draw from longer histories of Black
feminist scholarly and cultural experimentations with sound and science, prompting
audiences to reconsider the meanings of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)
slogan “SILENCE = DEATH.” The amplification of Black feminist and queer sonic
afterlives in Voices connects the war waged “inside” the biological body against AIDS, to
wars waged by the U.S. state against communities of color, and to the U.S. imperial wars

12

fought “abroad.” In aurally augmenting these correlations, Voices articulates a queer
radical imagination that traverses time and space.
The Black feminist and queer afterlives of AIDS video activism continue to
manifest through popular representations of queer of color kinship. Now available on
Netflix video-on-demand (VOD), Paris is Burning (1990) has become a documentary
film classic. Paris is a popular source for representing the non-normative kinship
structures of the largely Black and Latina/o ball culture participants in New York City
during the late-1980s AIDS crisis. It is constantly referenced by the reality television and
online show series, RuPaul’s Drag Race. In chapter three, I compare Paris to another
feature-length documentary film, Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place
(2001), which focuses on the Indigenous gay and gender nonconforming mahu club
performers in the late-1990s Hawaiian archipelago.
These two queer of color films span about a decade of New Queer Cinema (NQC)
independent filmmaking. Together, they interweave gender performance and non-
normative family structures as strategies for surviving the ongoing AIDS pandemic.
Rather than presume that Paris merely assimilated queer of color images into the
mainstream, I analyze how Ke Kulana re-mediates the transgressive representational and
social practices of queer of color subcultures depicted in Paris to “bend” the space and
time of cinematic narration. Ke Kulana mirrors the ball culture and queer of color
“houses” of New York City’s Black and Latina/o queers during the crisis. However, it
also recalls a pre-colonial past that proceeds in the face of the islands’ white-dominated
and gender normative lesbian and gay movement focused on marriage and emboldened
by military occupation and tourism. The movements of AIDS video activist afterlives

13

between these films circumnavigate Euro-American geopolitics and extend the queer
radical imagination across time and space. They manifest coalition and kinship through
cultural reverberations that entwine the livelihood of dispossessed subjects that endure
the legacies of transatlantic and transpacific Euro-American colonialisms and at different
historical ends of the continued AIDS crisis.
In chapter four I draw further upon the audiovisual afterlives of AIDS video
activism to intervene into the geopolitics of contemporary Internet activists movements
for U.S. gay military service rights. In 2009, Korean American and Arabic linguist
Lieutenant Dan Choi was dismissed from the military for announcing he is gay on The
Rachel Maddow Show. Galvanized, he became a poster-boy and leader for gay military
service. French-born and reportedly mixed-race Arab, François Sagat, gained popularity
after 9/11 by starring in U.S. gay porn eroticizing conquest of the Middle East. He was
featured in controversial photographer Terry Richardson’s gay military series, Ross
Watson’s rendition of Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of Saint Peter to protest the Catholic
Church, and gave workshops on masculinity. Labeled “gay Internet activists,” Choi and
Sagat each participated in Internet campaigns that mimicked historical AIDS videos
activism.
Unlike past AIDS video activism, which addressed racial and gender
misrepresentation and structural inequities, Choi and Sagat each advocated for individual
responsibility. Their online representations stand out as heroic and empowered against
the backdrop of new media HIV prevention campaigns targeting women of color and
gender non-conforming queers of color for their failure to act ethically and responsibly.
Choi and Sagat’s online displays of masculinity and self-responsibility pose as remedies

14

to AIDS in a presumably homophobic but otherwise “post-race” and “post-feminist” U.S.
nation that requires less healthcare reform and economic parity, and instead, more
monogamy and more troops. However, as they attempt to craft responsible and masculine
representations of selves in the image of feminist and queer of color AIDS video activist
afterlives, contradictions between Choi and Sagat are exposed. I show how racism,
misogyny, transphobia, and AIDS stigma continuously undercut the narrative of gay
progress, prompting the demand for further articulation of the queer radical imagination.

Feminist and Queer of Color Concepts of “Life”
The phrase "women and queers of color" is deployed throughout this dissertation
to refer to AIDS artist-activist practitioners who were/are socially and/or politically
affiliated. This includes women of color who are lesbian, bisexual, or queer. It also
generally refers to queer people of color, including gay or bisexual men of color, but also
those people of color who do not conform to a gender or sexual binary or discrete form of
identity. The phrase also refers at times to anti-racist white women who are lesbian or
bisexual, or who engaged in queer affective and/or sexual relations. Where necessary,
more specific terms will be used, such as "women of color."
"AIDS and its Afterlives" is animated by the desire to reconceptualize the terms
for life. It also intervenes into rigid identity formations to instead map agentive political
coalitions and alternative forms of kinship. When I began AIDS social service work in
1999 at the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team in Los Angeles, people infected with
HIV were supposed to be living with HIV/AIDS. The new medications produced a few
years earlier were supposed to extend the quality and duration of peoples' lives. However,

15

my clients, colleagues, and friends--women and queers of color--were dying. Most, but
not all of my clients and colleagues were Asian and/or Pacific Islander. Also, many
"Asian and Pacific Islander" organizations are predominated by certain Asian ethnic
groups. They are often unable to maintain fundamental inclusion of Pacific Islanders and
other Indigenous subjects, so settler colonial practices persist.
By the twenty-first century women clients, colleagues, and friends, especially
women of color, were still often misdiagnosed and received woefully inadequate medical
care that led to much earlier deaths. Undocumented, non-English proficient, trans,
homeless individuals had to engage in sex work for survival and endured intense violence
from police and cis-men. Elderly queer men often lost their social security disability
benefits without warning, and, unable to navigate the English-only bureaucracy, lost
access to life-saving medications. People in deep physical pain often chose to end their
lives, leaving behind a distraught partner, an inconsolable son, or plants and pets that no
longer had human partners to care for, and to care for them. My people of color friends
and partners continued to be infected with HIV and diagnosed with AIDS at a greater
rate. The bureaucratic categorization of people according to behaviors and identities left
many individuals' lives statistically marginal and unrepresentable, except as groups of
people lumped into "hidden," "unknown," and/or "at risk."
When I arrived in New York City in 2002 to work at the Asian and Pacific
Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS, George W. Bush's conservative policies began to repeal
many of the advances AIDS activists had made against social stigma and structural
inadequacies. By the twenty-first century, the pandemic among communities of color did
not reflect the "post-crisis" era we were supposed to be living. However, rather than

16

address historical inequities and uneven access, emphases on individual responsibility for
the pandemic and personal behavior change among women and queers of color became
the guiding solution for the Bush administration. This remains the proposed state solution
for AIDS; meanwhile, the broader range of social issues and services that impact those
who are most vulnerable continue to be de-funded or removed from communities of
color.
In a time when AIDS treatment and care was supposed to be saving lives, women
and queers of color have become a “problem.” Stigma is no longer considered by
mainstream public health and gay activists a social deterrent to institutional access that is
structured along axes of race, gender, and class and the underresourcing of vulnerable
communities. Rather, stigma has become a matter of individual struggle that women and
queers of color have to personally overcome in order to forge a stable sexual identity and
to be entitled to institutional care.
The logics for individual responsibility are reflected in the processes of urban
renewal, where indigenous subjects and people of color are continuously dispossessed
and alienated from the polis. My work in New York City with the Fabulous Independent
Radicals for Community Empowerment (FIERCE), the Gay Asian and Pacific Islander
Men of New York (GAPIMNY), and other queer of color organizations and networks
involved alternatives for political affiliation and activism not through separated identities
but through vectors of vulnerabilities that aligned us, albeit unevenly and in distinct
ways. Rather than presume that identity formation, institutional acceptance, and
mainstream representation are end goals, we considered homelessness, police harassment,
imprisonment, militarism, AIDS, and other colonial forms which violently degrade

17

women and queer of color lives, points of contact and grounds for sustaining alternative
kinships.
This reality—that women and queers of color, and the global south, continue to
confront a crisis with increasing stigma, less institutional means, and as perpetual
recipients of state neglect and violence—is not being narrated in today's mainstream
media representations of AIDS. In fact, the story of women and queers of color upsets the
liberal mainstream narrative of AIDS and gay progress. AIDS crisis activists imagined
women and queers of color not as a problem but as the solution to an oppressive system
in need of revolution--a revolution yet to come. By holding themselves and each other up,
women and queers of color challenged the limits and logics of biological life. They held
onto each other in the end and, even in the afterlife, the bodies and their images are cared
for. This is why feminist and queer of color AIDS activist videos are archived. The
stirring of that archive surfaces the afterlives of bodies and images that continue to
connect the past and present and exert alternative forms of kinship and care for those who
remain most vulnerable to the global crisis pandemic.
Today, we are faced with the severe social stigma and public health pressure to
sort ourselves based upon HIV-positive/negative “sero-status.” In this sense, we are often
lost to one another long before life and death terms would separate us, and oftentimes
based upon mere suspicion of status. When we forge sero-discordance into identity, we
reinforce whiteness and heteropatriarchy. Less we internalize whole the colonial narrative
and scientific myth that we merely exist as hierarchized species and biological subjects,
we should pause and listen to the afterlives that fail to narrate scientific and liberal
progress. This dissertation situates itself in the fields of social movement and film/media

18

studies. It utilizes methods culled from studies of visual culture, but vested with anti-
colonial, feminist, and queer of color stakes to consider the persistent under-/mis-
representations of women and queers of color as incidences of generative political
possibility. Thus, it brings the marginalized past and pop cultural present together
through feminist, queer, and anti-colonial histories of media to theorize practices of queer
temporarily and kinship in movements for social justice. “AIDS and its Afterlives”
attends to anti-racist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and queer of color praxes that re-present a
radical imagination for vulnerability and care.
By breaching cinematic narratives about liberal progress, the afterlives of AIDS
video activism foreground the ongoing pandemic among communities of color and the
global south, and conjure a “queer radical imagination.” This dissertation tracks how
these feminist and queer of color video activist practices expose the discourse of
disability inherent in today’s gay military movement. These afterlives highlight how
positive representations of patriotic, monogamous, and healthy gay bodies are exercised
against HIV prevention messages that freeze-frame people of color as infectious and
predatory transgender “prostitutes,” abject women, and “down low” men. Ultimately, this
dissertation contends that feminist and queer of color AIDS video afterlives demonstrate
how the means of media production are innovated upon so that videos circulate through
the multiplying network of handheld devices "virally" to spread alternate stories, create
new social attachments, and galvanize public protest.

19

Chapter 1: How to Survive:
AIDS and the Queer Context for Popular Media

A new set of feature-length documentary and “true story” films about the 1980s to
mid-1990s U.S. AIDS crisis and activism has gained a foothold in popular culture. We
Were Here (2011), Vito (2011), How to Survive a Plague (2012), and Dallas Buyer’s
Club (2013), to name a few, circulate through film festivals, television, movie theatres,
DVD, and Internet-based video-on-demand. HBO, which gave Vito its television debut,
continues to expand its queer and AIDS-related content. In May 2014, the network aired
the film adaptation of AIDS activist Larry Kramer’s 1985 autobiographical and Tony
award-winning play The Normal Heart.
1
Unlike popular AIDS films produced in the
recent past, such as And the Band Played On (1993) and Philadelphia (1993), today’s
films focus on activism during the crisis. They depict the exuberance of AIDS activists’
defiance of the U.S. state and the agony of AIDS and its stigma. Furthermore, many of
these films draw upon original AIDS artist and activist videos to offer non-fictional or
“realist” representations of this energetic past.
2
The enthusiasm and accolades for films
about the past of AIDS suggest that now is the time for a sustained look back at the U.S.
crisis and its representations. How to Survive gained a 2012 Oscar nomination for Best
Documentary Feature. Dallas garnered a bevy of industry nominations and awards for the
movie, its script, and famed cast members Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto.

1
I thank Sophia Azeb for pointing me to this.
2
According to Alexandra Juhasz, Dallas Buyers Club (2014) uses original AIDS video activist
footage in its trailer. Juhasz, Alexandra. “AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative
Video.” Presentation for “Oxy VideoCinematheque: 1967-2014.” Occidental College, Los
Angeles, CA, May 27, 2014.

20

This chapter traces the afterlives of AIDS video activism generated during the
crisis phase of the U.S. epidemic as it surfaces in present-day popular movies.
Specifically, the chapter analyzes video activist footage produced during the late-1980s
and early-1990s on analog VHS as it is digitally formatted and projected within director
David France’s documentary How to Survive a Plague. The impetus behind AIDS video
activism was to intervene into the mainstream media’s inaccurate and demoralizing
portrayal of AIDS using experimental representational strategies. That strategic AIDS
activist images from earlier years make contact with today’s feature-length movies
screened across mass media platforms for commercial consumption begs several
questions. Why represent the AIDS crisis and its activism in popular media now? What
happens when the video activist footage for documenting the most marginal stories of the
AIDS crisis are rendered consumable in the mass media market?
Together, these contemporary films dangerously ascribe a master narrative to a
pandemic that AIDS activists, artist and media producers, and scholars have shown
cannot be told from an individual or single group perspective. To teach viewers about a
crisis that is increasingly represented in the United States as a thing of the past, these
films rehearse well-worn scientific tropes, Hollywood narratives of heroism, and
Christian-based conceptions of life to construct AIDS history. These popular films
overwhelmingly depict the activism of individual white men who struggle for and/or
achieve biological survival through the crisis period. To do so, they adapt
sensationalized, debunked AIDS epidemiological studies and masculinist protagonist
narratives to represent the crisis and fight against AIDS phobia. In 1982, researchers
initially named the new disease GRID (Gay-related Immune Deficiency) after the

21

infection of a cluster of mostly white gay men in the United States could be traced to
French Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, also dubbed “Patient Zero.”
3
The disease
was renamed AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) once epidemiologists
accounted for Haitian-born immigrants in Florida who had shown symptoms as early as
1980.
4
However, the narrative that AIDS was only significant as it affected middle-class
white gay men in North America held fast.
5
The valuation of white men’s lives has
significantly shaped AIDS public health policy and popular beliefs about the disease with
varying and often fatal consequences for racial and gender minorities globally. The most
recent films assume this tale about AIDS by valorizing the struggle of white gay men for
biological survival while tokenizing and/or nearly dismissing entirely the images and
essential cultural and political contributions of women and people of color since the onset
of the pandemic.
During the U.S. “crisis,” women and people of color who were artists and
activists attempted to remedy their gross under-representation and misrepresentation by

3
Lawrence, Altman K. “NEW HOMOSEXUAL DISORDER WORRIES HEALTH
OFFICIALS.” New York Times, Science, May 11, 1982. Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures,
Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, 215-7.
4
Center for Disease Control. “Opportunistic Infections and Kaposi's Sarcoma among Haitians in
the United States.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Vol. 31, No. 26 (July 9, 1982): 353-
354; 360-361. Accessed: April 28, 2014,
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001123.htm.
5
Cindy Patton describes the epidemiology for North American and European AIDS incidence
among homosexually active men and injection drug users of both sexes “Pattern One” of the
global pandemic. See Patton, Cindy. Globalizing AIDS. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002, xi. Marita Sturken argues, “Though AIDS is a global pandemic, in the United States
it is represented as primarily a national phenomenon, often perceived to have infected the nation
as a whole. (147)” She continues, “In the United States, the image [of AIDS] is irrevocably tied to
the fact that gay men constituted the first visible group of people dying of AIDS.” Sturken
maintains that “IV-drug users fail to constitute a demographic category, but their deaths were not
considered unusual. However, when otherwise healthy, middle-class gay men began displaying
symptoms of strange ‘opportunistic’ diseases, medial professionals were included to indentify a
new disease ‘syndrome.’ (150)” See Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the

22

seizing upon relatively new and cheap camcorders to visually document the magnitude of
this event.
6
They were politically driven to challenge totalizing scientific knowledge and
mainstream media accounts. Their interventions are fundamental to the styles, frames,
shots, and images used to develop AIDS videos specifically, and AIDS representations in
general. AIDS video activist footage and tactics figure significantly into the commercial
making of How to Survive. Now, in the third decade of the pandemic, we are seeing the
increased effort to digitize and screen AIDS videos originally produced in analog format.
The return to these videos has resulted in increased feature-length films about AIDS
activism. While today’s AIDS films exalt the politics of white male biological survival,
the use of footage by and about women and people of color inevitably confronts
audiences with the strategic politics of representing the most disenfranchised groups of
the crisis.
VHS’s thirty-year shelf life is not reason enough for AIDS activist video
digitization and screening. Not everything that is VHS gets digitized. Desire animates the
making and movements of original AIDS images. The image transfers from analog to
digital underscore the varying motivations and capacities of these formats to transmit
AIDS activism and its intense and complex emotional struggles.
7
Contemporary
audiences are offered a comparative and critical framework for viewing AIDS politics

AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997;
also see Wald, 220-1.
6
I use the term “crisis” to provisionally mark the early 1980s to the mid-1990s period of the
AIDS epidemic in the United States. Although dates vary, the early 1980s is discussed in
scientific literature as the onset of the crisis. By 1996, effective medications were manufactured
and began to extend the life expectancy of those with access to the drugs.
7
Deborah B. Gould chronicles the “various constellations of affects, feelings, and emotions, as
they shifted over time, decisively shap[ing] lesban and gay, and eventually queer, political
responses to AIDS.” Gould, Deborah B. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against
AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 10.

23

across these modalities. In using archival AIDS video activist images, these films press
audiences to consider how radical change can be manifested through the differentiated
practices and platforms for video.
The process of video digitization does not merely extend the duration and feeling
of AIDS activism. Rather, I argue that archival AIDS video activist images—especially
those generated by and for women and people of color video collectives—buoy in the
mainstream precisely because they show how and why certain images survive in the face
of biological duress and eventual technological failure. Like the bodies of those who
became sick during the crisis, the material medium of analog video recordings breaks
down. The preservation of potential affective, corporeal, and material absences by video-
makers is what makes the production and distribution of AIDS images so inimitable. It is
important to consider here the correlation between corporeal and imagistic existences that
are sustained by the physical and affective labor of video-making. AIDS video artist-
activists cared for the bodies and images of those who were most vulnerable to the crisis
not simply to prolong life; they anticipated the return of these videos and images as the
afterlives of those who would come to pass.
8

By focusing on How to Survive, this chapter challenges the contemporary
commercial feature-length narration of historical AIDS activism and traces the feminist
video activist practices invested in the production and care for queer of color images. It
proposes the queer of color AIDS image as an “afterlife”; that is, as a method for
representational and materialist critiques against both AIDS commodification in popular

8
Alexandra Juhasz examines the relationship between AIDS video and nostalgia and terms their
relationship “queer archive activism.” See Juhasz, Alexandra. “Video Remains: Nostalgia,
Technology, and Queer Archive Activism.” GLQ: A journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies Vol. 12,
No. 2 (2006): 319-328.

24

culture and the politics of biological survival. This method draws together past and
present AIDS representations, prompting us to revisit feminist AIDS video activism to
reconsider the possible scholarly meanings, aesthetic practices, and political valences for
queerness as it intervenes into popular media.

The “How to” of How to Survive
How to Survive is an apt popular visual text to analyze because it is a “realist”
representation about AIDS that makes the biggest claims. France has stated that his aim
for making the film was to tell of “soaringly successful” and “triumphant” AIDS
activism.
9
The film trailer posted to the Oscars website declares: “Their courage gave
them strength” and “Their strength changed the world.”
10
Arguably, How to Survive was
the first of its kind to generate industry acclaim. Using AIDS video archives, it developed
a format for the cinematic representation of AIDS activism that paved the way for the
market success of other films and television shows, including Dallas and The Normal
Heart.
For How to Survive, the story of the crisis and activism begins in 1986—six years
into the AIDS epidemic when the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) convenes
in New York City. The film follows the birth and development of ACT UP and its spin-
off, the Treatment Action Group (TAG), from the late-1980s to the mid-1990s. It narrates
AIDS activist insurgency against the systemic stigmatization of homosexuality and the

9
Sullivan, James. “‘How to Survive a Plague’ a triumph of activism.” The Boston Globe. Movies.
September 29, 2012. Accessed: May 11, 2013,
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2012/09/29/how-survive-plague-triumph-
activism/gPTGBJ7MsM1BeSkhbtukFP/story.html.
10
Oscars website. “How to Survive a Plague.” Accessed: 5/ 11/13,
http://oscar.go.com/nominees/documentary-feature/how-to-survive-a-plague.

25

demand for research and treatment for those living with AIDS. ACT UP’s politics of
visibility is portrayed through mostly white gay men who march the streets of New York
City, stage die-ins in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and on Capitol Hill, sheathe Senator Jesse
Helms’s home in an approximately thirty-five foot canvass condom, and seize the offices
of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Slogans such as “Silence = Death” and
chants like “ACT UP, Fight Back, Fight AIDS!” are epitomized by the film as the anger
and determination of white gay men who catalyzed historical and global change.
11

Those who survived the early years of the U.S. epidemic appear as the “talking
head” experts that contextualize the archival footage and narrate global AIDS history.
The film follows the stories of ACT UP activists that pursued drug treatments. By 1991,
the crisis reaches its zenith when division erupts between the ACT UP “treatment and
data committee” and those interested in “social issues.” Accused of elitism, the largely
white gay men of “treatment and data” splinter off and form TAG. The remainder of the
film focuses on TAG’s efforts, even though AIDS activism expanded its social justice
agenda far beyond the initial call to get “drugs into bodies.” According to the film, the
crisis subsides in 1996 when the first effective combination therapy of anti-retroviral
drugs extends the lives of the film’s lead activists. The survival of most of these men
enables them to relay their memories of struggle and victory on camera in the present.
As its title suggests, How to Survive presents itself as an instructional guide to
living beyond the crisis. How to Survive offers mainstream audiences instruction for how
to challenge the state, demand recognition, and win. The outcome was a change in U.S.
AIDS administration, including dedicated AIDS research funding, acceleration of drug
trials, and the production of essential medications. Access to the state and corporate

11
How to Survive a Plague film trailer. Accessed: 6/25/14, http://surviveaplague.com/trailer.

26

pharmaceuticals afford the film’s white gay male activists’ the biological endurance
equated with success. By representing “revolutionary activism” through the bodies of
white men who have extended their corporeal lives, How to Survive eclipses stories of the
dead and defers audience comprehension of the ongoing global pandemic among people
of color.
This depiction counters an extensive archive of AIDS videos varying greatly in
their representations of race, gender, and the political issues associated with AIDS. A
significant number of videos were collected by AIDS video activist James Wentzy and
are maintained at the New York Public Library. Activist and filmmaker Jim Hubbard
describes the archive of AIDS videos as “a broad range.” “What unifies these tapes,” he
insists, “is their urgency, passion and strongly-held belief…each tape speaks directly to a
community in its own language.”
12
Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, activists and producers
of the recent independent documentary film United in Anger (2012), have also
painstakingly collected and curated online the ACT UP Oral History Project, which
corroborates the multi-racial, multi-gender, and multi-issue politics of AIDS activism.
13

Like How to Survive, Hubbard and Schulman’s United uses archival AIDS video
footage to teach broader audiences about the activist past. However, unlike How to
Survive, United does not aim for industry success. Instead, it follows the “large and
diverse body of work” of “independent video” that AIDS video activist Alexandra Juhasz

12
Hubbard, Jim. “AIDS Video Activist Collection: 1985-2000.” The New York Public Library
Archives & Manuscripts. Accessed: 12/10/14,
http://archives.nypl.org/mss/3622#content_structure.
13
Hubbard, Jim and Schulman, Sarah. “ACT UP Oral History Project.” Accessed: 12/10/14,
http://www.actuporalhistory.org/index1.html.

27

calls “alternative AIDS media.”
14
United confronts the “profit-oriented”
15
politics of
commercial achievement and mainstream acceptance by portraying a history of AIDS
activism that defied pharmaceutical corporate greed. For instance, it uses stretches of
footage of the 1989 ACT UP protest where the New York Stock Exchange was forced to
stop its operations for the first time in its history. This momentous direct action staged
against the commercialization and profiteering of AIDS led to the price drop of AZT,
which was one of the first drugs more widely used to treat HIV and is identified in United
as the most expensive drug ever produced.
France’s illustration of AIDS politics in How to Survive as the pursuit of
biological longevity denotes his personal investment in a medical solution that sidesteps
the stakes of structural discrimination and globalized political and economic disparities—
the very issues which AIDS activists have long tackled. In March 2013, during a panel at
the New School in New York City that revisited the crisis period, Hubbard and France
debated the differences in their films’ representations.
16
It was revealed that France’s
depiction in How to Survive underlined his belief that the effective outcome of historical
AIDS protest is the eventual manufacture of a pill that will provide a treatment-based
solution to AIDS. Hubbard insisted that this depiction is both historically inaccurate and
misguided precisely because of its short-sightedness and narrow framing. As of this
writing, HIV/AIDS is considered the longest-running contemporary pandemic that has

14
Juhasz, Alexandra. AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995, 298.
15
Ibid.
16
A March 3, 2013 debate between Jim Hubbard and David France on the tensions between their
films took place at the New School. It can be seen online. Hubbard, Jim and France, David.
“Revisiting the AIDS Crisis: A Conversation with David France and Jim Hubbard.” New School
YouTube.com Channel. March 3, 2013. Accessed: May 12, 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jJ1nOsT4uQ. Accessed: 5/10/14.ffemn.

28

yet to find a medical cure. Furthermore, as an abundant number of archival AIDS videos
show, and as this chapter elaborates through an analysis of video activism, AIDS has
never only been a medical problem.
In order for How to Survive to manage the AIDS crisis narrative as only focused
on medication, it must draw very selectively from the archive of AIDS video footage
stories that convey the plight of specific white men. Many AIDS videos, including those
that depict the struggles and deaths of white gay men, such as Silverlake Life: The View
from Here (1993), revealed the failures of the medical system and the limits to
conceptualizing “life” based upon corporeal existence. I will return to a discussion of
Silverlake Life’s significance to AIDS video activism later. How to Survive’s attachment
of “successful” and “revolutionary” activism to biological durability necessarily entails
revising AIDS history so that it largely concentrates on a set of individual white male
survivors. In addition, the film drastically simplifies the politics of these white men. Not
all of them would agree today with the films’ reductionist representation. That several of
the white men in the film did pass is a contradiction left unexplored. Furthermore, Gregg
Gonsalves, who was a key member of TAG during the crisis, is now challenging anti-
regulatory corporate pharmaceutical lobbyists to prevent the exploitation of ACT UP’s
historical political achievement in speeding-up the FDA’s drug trial processes.
17

Although Gonsalves appears in the archival footage used in How to Survive, he does not

17
Associated Press. “Former Act Up activist defends FDA bureaucracy he once rallied against.”
FoxBusiness.com. August 11, 2014. Accessed: 8/12/14,
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2014/08/11/former-act-up-activist-defends-fda-
bureaucracy-once-railed-
against/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxbusiness%
2Flatest+%28Internal+-+Latest+News+-+Text%29.

29

appear amid the film’s present-day interviews of survivors who elaborate their memories
of activist history.
The strict attention to treatment activism and those white men who survived
significantly downplays the fundamental role queer women played in the AIDS social
movement and the complex emotional and political struggles associated with biological
survival as underscored by Deborah Gould.
18
How to Survive attempts to seal off a
history of AIDS activism and cultural productions by queers of color, which José Esteban
Muñoz and others have carefully examined.
19
In turn, audience reception of the wide-
ranging issues that AIDS activism addressed, which made women and people of color
particularly vulnerable prior to and during this pandemic, is forestalled. This includes
documentation of the misogynistic and racist history of the field of medicine, police
violence, the prison industrial-complex, xenophobia, militarization, uneven economic
development, and as I argue here, a reconceptualization of life performed through AIDS
activist videos. Viewers of How to Survive are not immediately made privy to how
systemic disenfranchisement and limited access to social services, medical care, and
therapeutic drugs—during the crisis and today—have fueled AIDS as a global pandemic
largely endured by women and people of color. The historical and continued impact of
AIDS on women and people of color, in and outside the United States, almost falls out of
view.
20

18
Gould, Deborah B. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002.
19
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
20
Sarah Schulman also argues that urban renewal necessarily entails the forgetting of AIDS
activists and artists, especially those who have passed. Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of the
Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

30

If white men constitute the core agents of AIDS politics, then the narrative arc of
AIDS history bends toward a very narrow notion of justice. Where the quality of life is
represented according to biological endurance, women and people of color always
already live less qualified, less representable lives. How to Survive insinuates that the
commercial filmic representability of white men’s biological survival is the horizon for
AIDS politics. The “liveness” of white men on film foregrounds them as the historical
actors of the crisis while women and people of color are relegated to the background or
exist off-screen as the passive and ill-fated recipients of the historical “burden” of
AIDS.
21
Yet, contemporary, mainstream AIDS narration and expository documentary
filmmaking bears unintended and uncontainable social and political affects. The film’s
queer of color footage contradicts this framing of AIDS politics.
As AIDS scholar and video activist Alexandra Juhasz claims, fundamental to
AIDS politics and feminist video practice are postmodernist sensibilities and aesthetics
which denote the multi-racial, multi-gender, and multi-issue activism and art that
emerged in response to AIDS and its stigmas.
22
These activist sensibilities and aesthetics
repudiated singular narration. Representing AIDS history inevitably marshals the video
activist fragmentary and even contradictory strategies for mediating a crisis temporality.
It brings with it the marginalized and uneasily commodifiable feminist and queer

21
I am juxtaposing Philip Auslander’s conception of “liveness,” as necessarily performed in a
mediatized age, with José Esteban Muñoz’s critique that racial and gender minorities always
already perform the “burden of liveness.” To illustrate this point, Muñoz analyzes MTV’s The
Real World: San Francisco (1994) cast member and AIDS activist Pedro Zamora. See Auslander,
Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Age. New York: Routledge, 1999. Also see
Muñoz, 143-160.
22
Alexandra Juhasz claims, AIDS is the “logical culmination of the postmodern condition, only
manageable in representation, and best managed in postmodernism’s definitive discourse—
television,” which videos mimic. Juhasz, AIDS TV, 7.

31

structures for intimacy, organizing, and representation among women and people of color
that have been vested in AIDS video-making.
23

How to Survive’s production relied on approximately seven hundred hours of
compiled archival footage. The footage draws heavily from the original visual works of
AIDS video activists and the personal archives of surviving relatives and friends.
24
It
mimics the politicizing pedagogical functions of original AIDS video activist works,
including the unavoidable and obdurate refusal toward commercial-friendly narrative
closure. The visual strategies for documenting AIDS employed by women and people of
color video collectives erupt in the visual frame of How to Survive in spite of the film’s
story about progress. Remediated AIDS activist videos draw popular audiences back into
the suspended and unresolved space between life and death. The audience is left uneasy
when the AIDS video activist images of people of color emerge momentarily in How to
Survive only to go missing by the narrative’s end.

Returns of the Bottom: The Queer of Color Image in AIDS Video Activism
“We are committed to making media which directly counters and interferes with
dominant media assumptions about AIDS and governmental negligence in dealing with
the AIDS crisis. We are committed to challenging a racist, sexist, and heterosexist
dominant media which is complicit with our repressive government.”
—Catherine Saalfield and Ray Navarro of DIVA TV, 1991
25

23
In quoting Greg Bordowitz, Juhasz calls this a “queer structure of feeling.” See Juhasz, AIDS
TV, 25.
24
Sullivan, James. “‘How to Survive a Plague’ a triumph of activism.” The Boston Globe.
Movies. September 29, 2012. Accessed: May 5, 2013.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2012/09/29/how-survive-plague-triumph-
activism/gPTGBJ7MsM1BeSkhbtukFP/story.html.
25
Saalfield, Catherine and Navarro, Ray. “Shocking Pink Praxis: Race and Gender on the ACT
UP Frontlines.” inside/out: Lesbian and Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge,
1991, 363.

32

A few white women are interviewed briefly in How to Survive and only one
image of a queer person of color is named and permitted to speak while the rest remain in
obscurity. Chicano AIDS activist Ray Navarro is introduced first as a hypervisual sign of
AIDS activist vitality. Later, his image is burdened by stark grief. Rendered seemingly
incoherent to the narrative of success, this queer of color image disappears before the
film’s end. To describe the absence of women and people of color in How to Survive as
being “stark” is not to proclaim that they are merely invisible and/or deceased. Rather,
their absence is marked indelibly and excessively.
Navarro appears in the film as tangential to the story of AIDS activism. Unlike
white gay male activist Gregg Bordowitz, who is given the title “video artist” and
occupies the panel of living experts, Navarro is labeled more generally an “artist.” As a
result, Navarro is depicted as the subject of politically motivated AIDS art—a passing
even if compelling figure in the AIDS movement. Meanwhile, Bordowitz is made to
stand-in for AIDS video activism. The film associates Bordowitz with authorship for
many of the archival video images the audience sees. Obscured by the film is the fact that
Navarro and Bordowitz were close friends involved in overlapping AIDS video artist
networks. According to Alexandra Juhasz, Navarro was cherished, adored, and
considered highly pivotal by fellow activists.
26
Furthremore, Bordowitz has outlined his
video activist politics as necessarily coalitional and never singular in its authorial voice.
27

Within these coalitional networks of AIDS video-makers, Navarro’s art and activism was
foundational to conceiving the radicalism of AIDS cultural productions. He appears in

26
Bordowitz’s fondness for Navarro was emphasized in my conversation with Juhasz on June 4,
2014 in Pasadena, California.
27
Bordowitz, Greg. “Picture a Coalition,” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism October,
Vol. 43 (Winter, 1987): 182-196.

33

How to Survive precisely because his visual, media, performance, and scholarly works
helped inaugurate AIDS visual politics.
Importantly, Navarro’s video art, and the pivotal role he played among fellow
artist-activists, infused the revolutionary spirit of AIDS activism with decolonizing racial
and gender critique. His work drew from critical theory and was informed by longer
histories of anti-statist political movements. Navarro, Bordowitz, Juhasz, and other video
activists, like Catherine Saalfield and Ellen Spiro, were acquainted through their
participation in the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study Program where critical
theory and aesthetic practice were combined.
28
Confronted with the AIDS crisis, they
formed collectives that responded to misrepresentations with innovations in video that
were informed by radical and postmodern theories.
29

Juhasz identifies Navarro as co-founder of the Damned Interfering Video Activist
Television (DIVA TV), which was an ACT UP “affinity group” that “organized to be
there, document, provide protection and countersurveillance, and participate.”
30
These
affinity groups, according to ACT UP activist Debra Levine, were derived from “Spanish
anarchists in the 1930s.”
31
She maintains that affinity groups were designed to catalyze
revolution through “micro-sites of resistance: politically inspired alternative-lifestyle
formations existing within dominant culture.” ACT UP adapted this model of organizing

28
Hallas, Roger. Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 278n21. In the June 4, 2014 conversation in Pasadena,
California, Juhasz also emphasized the importance of these video artist-activists’ association
through this “exclusive” site of study.
29
Juhasz, Alexandra. “Making AIDS Video as Radical Pedagogy.” The Radical Teacher No. 50
(Spring 1997): 24.
30
Juhasz, AIDS TV, 62.
31
Levine, Debra. “Another Kind of Love: A Performance of Prosthetic Politics.” e-misférica:
Sexuality and Politics in the Americas Issue 2.2 (Fall 2005). Accessed: June 17, 2014,
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/journal/2_2/levine.html.

34

so that affinity groups “doubled as the site of both political action and active caregiving
where the able bodies understood themselves as a prosthesis for the disabled body.”
32

Navarro’s participation in ACT UP affinity groups like DIVA TV involved “guerilla
video”
33
that was designed around a radical politics of caregiving for those racialized and
gendered bodies most peripheral to the state and to their white male counterparts in the
crisis.
According to Juhasz, DIVA TV’s video style was “alternative.” It simultaneously
worked alongside and intervened into other AIDS videos that omitted representations of
women and people of color. “Alternative AIDS video,” she describes, inherited its
politics of cultural theory and self-determination from the 1950s and 1960s Third Cinema
and New American Cinema movements followed by feminist and Black film
movements.
34
Stated otherwise, the alternative documentary practices of DIVA TV did
not merely record political action; it was and is ongoing revolutionary political action
through the legacy of anti-racist and feminist filmmaking where the methods for creating
“images as a form of collective direct action”
35
install “counter-memories”
36
about
historically repressed bodies in U.S. media.
In a 1991 co-authored essay, Saalfield and Navarro offer an early feminist and
queer of color AIDS activist theorization of “queer temporality” that challenges racism,
patriarchy, and colonial conceptions of time, space, and historical narration. They argue
that “counter-memory” is not “merely an oppositional category” that affirms the dualistic
approach to time and social relations where alternative stories can be coopted back into

32
Ibid.
33
Saalfield and Navarro, 363.
34
Juhasz, AIDS TV, 33.
35
Saalfield and Navarro, 347.

35

the “the binary logic of history.” Instead, counter-memory activism “establishes itself
between the pages of official record.” AIDS counter-memories, they assert, are
constituted through an “internal critique of racism and sexism within ACT UP.” They
attack “symbols of institutionalized benign neglect.” Furthermore, they function through
“the culture of pleasure and the politics of desire [which] are always threatening to
explode the ‘official’ history or the police record.”
37
Navarro’s art and activism
consistently drew attention to the “stratification of resources along the lines of race and
gender not only in dominant culture but in ACT UP itself.” His cultural productions
reveal and intervene into “the price minority subjects pay by joining a predominantly
white gay male movement.”
38

DIVA TV’s “alternative” and “counter-media production” style inserted anti-
racist, feminist, and anti-colonial interruptions into the white male dominated video
archive of ACT UP. In How to Survive, the adaptation of archival footage of Navarro
rouses these counter-memories. Navarro’s images depict impassioned AIDS activist
attacks against institutions of power while also performing video techniques that resist
documentary filmmaking conventions and linear history.
39
Between the folds of
scientific and white male heroic narratives, there emerges a recursive politics of pleasure
and desire of and for images of women and queer people of color in the face of their
representational erasure.
The edited footage of Navarro in How to Survive is derived primarily from the
twenty-nine minute alternative AIDS video Like a Prayer (DIVA TV, 1990) where he

36
Ibid. Also see Levine.
37
Saalfield and Navarro, 347.
38
Levine.
39
Juhasz, AIDS TV, 97; Saalfield and Navarro, 363.

36

appears in what Roger Hallas calls “Jesus Christ Drag.” According to Hallas, Navarro’s
performance as Christ invokes seemingly familiar religious images and discourses, but
renders through camp, parody, and black humor uncontainable meaning about the
historical traumas that converge upon his body.
40
The images of Navarro fold together the
violences of state and religious institutions and their colonial histories. Excerpts from
Like a Prayer form two short sections that serve as transitions in How to Survive. The
film’s arc is fashioned after the sacrificial story of Christ. Navarro’s Jesus drag image is
used to tell the “birth,” “death,” and “afterlife” of AIDS activism. Here, I analyze the
birth and death scenes and linger in the afterlives of Navarro’s image.
Almost forty-five minutes into How to Survive, Navarro appears for the first time
conducting news reportage for the “Fire and Brimstone Network.” The scene opens with
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings’ song “Answer Me,” conjuring the radicalism of Black-
led civil rights movements. “Answer me, sweet Jesus, Don't You hear me callin' You?,”
sings Jones. Navarro responds. He moves alongside protestors outside a church, swathed
in a white robe, and adorned with a crown of thorns. The film places him in corollary
position to the “die-in” taking place inside New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral as
part of the momentous 1989 “Stop the Church” protest. Navarro’s image indexes the
exhilarating magnitude of the event and the revolutionary potential of AIDS activism. His
image pulses with vitality. He excitedly interviews other protestors. His humorous
reportage establishes the context for the action as a response to Cardinal John
O’Connor’s denouncement of condom use. How to Survive’s editing conceals how the
footage of Navarro resulted from carefully crafted collaborations among video activists.

40
Hallas, 9.

37

His performance in Jesus drag, however, summons the coalitional labor poured into
alternative AIDS videos (fig. 1).
The “Stop the Church” protest was the cooperation between ACT UP and the
Women’s Health Action Coalition (WHAM!). Wrenched from this context and forced
into How to Survive’s narrative, Navarro’s image is ventriloquized to suggest that ACT
UP acted alone.
41
Still, his image defies singular narration. His appearance through video
reflects joint organizing efforts. Like a Prayer was the outcome of DIVA TV’s work with
ACT UP and WHAM! and was intended to document the demonstration while also
educating on condom use and safer-sex practices. Juhasz describes the video as six
individual parts held together by Madonna’s song of the same title. The video addressed
the history of the Catholic Church while deconstructing the mainstream press’s
inaccurate portrayal of the demonstration. DIVA TV co-founder, Catherine Saalfield
explains that Navarro’s playful performance of Christ and media reportage decodes
mainstream news and exposes its distortion.
42
Activists are shown discussing how the
mainstream press missed significant coverage of the event and asked them for footage.
Once provided, the news media skewed facts about the event. The video points this out
while also covering the actions of Operation Ridiculous, which sent clowns to intervene
into the “pro-life” organizing events of Operation Rescue.
43

41
I thank Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne for suggesting the use of the term “ventriloquize.”
42
Saalfield, Catherine. “On the Make: Activist Video Collectives.” Queer Looks: Perspectives on
Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, eds. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar.
Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993, 21-37.
43
Juhasz, AIDS TV, 16.

38

Figure. 1. Ray Navarro in “Jesus Christ drag” during the 1989 “Stop the Church” protest
before New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Original footage: Like a Prayer (DIVA
TV, 1991). Footage repurposed: Navarro appears for the first time in the image of Christ
in How to Survive a Plague (2012).

Anti-colonial, feminist, and queer of color critiques are fused together in Like a
Prayer. AIDS and abortions rights are entwined and irreducible to the gay male “AIDS
ravaged” body or the “hysterical” female body. Jesus-as-drag-as-reporter evokes multiple
racial, gender, and sexual significations. Navarro’s performance and video production
affected not only AIDS visibility, but also altered the language of representation—both
its articulation and reading practices—to suture seemingly disparate marginal
communities. This includes, but is not limited to, women, compassionate Christians,
Latinas/os and other racial/ethnic groups who are significantly Catholic-identified, and
those who may generally find a critique of the Church and its colonial past resonant. His
image is situated within the broader network of multi-issue, coalitional organizing.
Instead of invoking realism by representing the “here and now” of early-1990s crisis

39

activism, Navarro’s performance affects a fantastical mode that reassembles time and
memory, time and time again.
44
Through Navarro’s queer of color representation, the
exceptionalization of the AIDS crisis is refused and instead placed within the frame of
ongoing western colonial and heteropatriarchal impositions.
Navarro arrives a second time about one hour into How to Survive. Shrouded
again in white, he is seated in the partial dim of chiaroscuro lighting. He seems less regal
and more vulnerable. His crown of thorns has been removed. One shoulder is exposed.
We hear him say, “Make sure your second coming is a safe one. Use condoms.” He lifts
with his left hand an unrolled, possibly used condom for the viewer to see. Using drag as
a queer appellation to religious narratives, Navarro stages an about face against
moralisms. “Second coming” conjures the certainty of life after death (the Resurrection)
through orgasmic experience (la petite mort, “or small death,” as analyzed by Roland
Barthes
45
). Navarro’s playful performance makes us wonder: What was the first coming?

44
Macarena Gómez-Barris assesses how documentary films can record absences about the period
of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile. Specifically, Gómez-Barris is interested in
how certain documentaries can “visually conjur[e]” the “figure of muteness” to draw forth
memories of authoritarian violence enacted upon those who have disappeared (103). Analyzing
Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto (1998), Gómez-Barris describes the intersubjective space
conjured through viewing the film, which generates the affective condition for “a living, rather
than finalized, death among families of the disappeared…the experience of time for relatives of
victims, namely bringing into relief the contradictions between this time-sense and institutional
notions of forgetting based upon linear time…” In the film there emerges a space “to visualize a
different conception of death, with more porous boundaries between the dead and the living, than
the Western imaginaing of death as separation and finality (112).” See Gómez-Barris, Macarena.
Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009, 103, 112.
45
In discussing the history of media authorship, Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner refer to
Roland Barthe’s discourse on the “death of the author.” Barthes, they argue, believed that the
myth of the death of the author must be overturned. Instead, the author only experiences la petite
mort (the French colloquialism for a “small death”). Barthe’s analysis “conjures an erotic
conjoining between the author (who passes away as soon as her words mark the page) and the
reader-as-writer whose ‘birth’ takes place at the very moment of passing.” See Chris, Cynthia and
David A. Gerstner. “Introduction.” Media Authorship (AFI Film Readers), eds. Cynthia Chris and
David A. Gerstner. New York: Routledge, 2013, 7.

40

Given the context of the AIDS crisis, maybe Jesus never came to “save us from our sins.”
Or, one might presume that his first coming was performed under “unsafe” conditions,
i.e. engaging in homosexual sexual depravity and without a condom. If Jesus and his
apostles did “come” a first time and succumbed to the “evils of man,” we are promised
Jesus will perform an exhilarating post-mortem return—the “second coming.”
When considering the cross-gender referentiality of drag, Navarro’s Jesus drag
can only come again under the cover of feminist and queer of color representational
alterity. That is, in the racist and (hetero)masculinist parlance of visual representation,
Jesus is a “bottom”—the submissive, feminized, and/or receptive partner in penetrative
sex and arguably the most abject behavioral “risk category” described in the public health
language of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) prevention. HIV prevention came to
focus attention and stigma on unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse, especially as it
pertains to women, transgender people, and people of color “bottoms” who are
increasingly targeted by public health surveillance. Hoang Tan Nguyen elaborates
“bottoming” not simply as sexual positioning, but a “social positioning” that interweaves
feminist and queer of color political networks through a shared sense of social
vulnerability.
46
Navarro performs queer of color bottomhood while usurping the authority
for judgment. Uncrowned from the thorny emblem of AIDS moralism, Navarro remains a
“queen” but judgment of her has been lifted. Instead of presuming social demoralization,
the figure of the bottom becomes the site for the visual and political articulation of
feminist and queer of color AIDS counter-memory and care.

46
For an in-depth discussion of the feminist, queer, and coalitional politics of “bottomhood,” see
Nguyen, Hoang Tan. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual
Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

41

The exhilarating post-mortem, post-crisis return of AIDS video activism in How
to Survive functions like the female or queer of color bottom’s orgasm in pornographic
film: seemingly secondary, incidental, and/or unrepresentable to the camera’s eye trained
on the “money shot” of the “top’s” ejaculation. Feminist and queer potential is constantly
deferred through visual representation, yet always arriving. The bottom is still coming
(fig. 2). The queer of color image is incipient and recursive—an afterlife of AIDS that
that anticipates the official narrative insistently reproduced by the mainstream. In short,
the history told from the social positioning of the “bottom,” is also a counter-history and
counter-memory from “below.”
As the visual field fixes expectation on a spectacular and final second coming—
the resurrection of the central protagonist of History—undetectable traces of feminist and
queer of color sociality and pleasure evade immediate visual scrutiny. The conjuring of
Navarro’s Jesus drag in How to Survive unintentionally thwarts Christian mythologies
about life and death. At the end of the condom demonstration, the camera zooms in for a
close shot of Navarro’s face. His look is stern and steadfast. The Jesus drag image
anticipates the ironic pleasure of escaping surveillance in the face of imminent judgment.
By the second decade of the pandemic, public condemnation for AIDS swelled around
women, trans subjects, and people of color, domestically and globally. The scientific and
popular AIDS narrative always arrives belated to the course of the pandemic. To protect
its authority and proceed with its forward thrust, this narrative buries its inevitable
failures with the dead. The Christian narrative of Judgment and Redemption is a well-
tooled technology of U.S. settler colonialism used to justify the killing of Natives, the
enslavement of Africans, and the general disenfranchisement of subjects of color by

42

white saviors. Following this narrative requires that Jesus be martyred so that all may
enjoy eternal life. How to Survive conveniently offers the image of Navarro as its
sacrifice, yet we do not see Jesus ascend to the mythological heavens. Instead, we see
Navarro’s ongoing dissent.

Figure 2. Original footage: Navarro appearing in “Jesus Christ drag” conducting a
condom demonstration in Like a Prayer (DIVA TV, 1991). Footage repurposed: Navarro
performing the “second coming” of Christ in How to Survive a Plague (2012).

AIDS Video Activism and the Touch of Absence
Theorizations of queer temporality are intimately bound to questions about AIDS
representations and the attempt by the viewer to hold onto the dead. Analyzing the
documentary film Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993), Peggy Phelan cites
cinema’s general capacity to reverse time, but proffers how AIDS media specifically

43

prods us to rethink our attachments to the “onto-theological relation to dying”; that is,
“[w]e can perhaps touch the architecture of this blind grief by rehearsing the psychic
substitutions at the heart of cinematic and sexual identifications.”
47
Put simply, AIDS
media exceed the normative and Christian-inflected expectations regarding life and death.
In Silverlake Life, the documentation of his own death on film by white gay man and
filmmaker, Tom Joslin, prompted his lover, Mark Massi, to pick-up the camera to film
Joslin’s moment of passing. In the wake of Massi’s death, Joslin’s former student, Peter
Friedmen completed the editing process to create the feature-length film. The
cameraperson, editor, and viewer behold the images of death and become endeared to it.
In each of these instances of filming, editing, and watching, Phelan contends,
The formal transference from Joslin’s style to Friedman’s rehearses the
psychic transference at the heart of the film in which the image of Joslin’s
body, as it approaches death, becomes at once opaque and dense with the
images of the spectator’s others, images of other bodies that are not,
achingly not, there.
48

What Phelan points to in her rendering of AIDS media as queer temporality is that
moving towards rather than away from the bodies of those who have passed collects
multiple places, times, and experiences with mortality. This filmic “psychic transference”
between the living and dead is what Jim Hubbard describes as the underlying “urgency”
and “passion” that ties together the vast field of AIDS videos. AIDS media production
and audience reception perform a collective practice for care. We hold dear the deaths of
others as we do our own viscerally imagined vulnerability to death. AIDS media exploits
the potential of cinema’s reverse motion to reverse death and indulge our fascination. It

47
Phelan, Peggy. “Dying Man with a Movie Camera: Silverlake Life: The View from Here.”
GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies Vol. 2 (1995): 380. I thank Feng-Mei Heberer for
pointing me to this article.
48
Ibid., 386.

44

“promises a chance to re-see that which has passed.”
49
Hence, even in the attempt in How
to Survive to abbreviate and/or edit-out the stories of those who passed and to focus
representation on the living, the use of archival AIDS video activist footage inevitably
touches and is touched by death.
How to Survive stages the third and final appearance of Navarro in a hospital
using footage rarely, if ever, seen by the public. Before the visual fully transitions from
his condom demonstration to this cold and sterile environment, Navarro is overheard
asking, “Are you shooting?” In this moment How to Survive reaches narrative climax and
begins its collapse into disillusion. What was Navarro’s irreverent and effervescent figure
becomes an image weighted by irreconcilable grief. This image struggles for
transcendence beyond the corporeal limits of human life.
We are re-introduced through a close shot to Navarro seated upright in bed. A
dark blue pattern is stitched across the top of his hospital gown. He is more fragile and
sickly yet his hair is swept away from a clean and still-bearded face, his locks tied neatly
to the side. His eyes are less focused. A thin fabric outlines his gaunt body. Navarro’s
mother, Patricia Navarro, introduced to the viewer through a title, cues him to speak to
the camera:
Unidentified Voice: Yeah, I just turned it on. OK, rolling. Tell him we’re rolling.

Patricia Navarro: The machine is rolling. You can start talking now, honey.

Ray: Oh, I didn’t know she meant now. What I was gonna say was I just love, I
love so much to go up to the tenth floor because no one had ever explained to me
that there was going to be light again in the world and that the whole world wasn’t
going to be dark. Some great challenges face us as young people. We’re in our
twenties, and…and this is the challenge that’s been placed in front of me. And,
who knows, Little Camera. Lots of other blind, deaf men have lived happy lives.

49
Ibid.

45

Navarro’s narration is spliced with a scene of him and his mother sitting near a window,
presumably on the hospital’s tenth floor, looking together at what looks like a greeting
card. He continues:
Ray: There are, there are many years to come…let’s hope. So….what the
hell…life is worth living…isn’t it?

His voice cracks and trembles, leaving one unsure whether he is laughing, crying,
wincing in pain, or all the above. A hand seems to reach across the lens. The frame goes
dark.
Navarro’s direct address to the “Little Camera” as an embodied subject indicates a
desire to arouse thinking and feeling beyond the subject position and corporeal existence
of a human body anchored in a specific place and time. It is an attempt to communicate
beyond the dyad of a conversation between the video subject and an ideal viewer. He
imagines a collective audience that reflects his youth and the simultaneous hope and
despair he experiences with AIDS. Navarro appeals with bitter irony to the failed
promises of Christ and western medicine to enact miracles and heal the blind and deaf.
He longs for the light, the space and time in which the image of himself might bask
eternally before the screen, but is restrained by the notion that his image might give way
to a fleeting existence. Navarro concedes to the paradox and possibilities for queer of
color visibility.
The year is 1990 and How to Survive suggests Navarro passes from AIDS-related
illness. Unlike the deaths of white gay male activists, Navarro’s funeral is not portrayed
and he is not eulogized. Also not depicted is the fact that Navarro opted to end his life

46

with medical assistance, his mother by his side.
50
The audience is only privy to a tender
and endearing relationship he shares with Patricia Navarro (the film’s Mother Mary)
before his death. His representation is cut from the broader context of his artistry, the
fabric of his organizing labor, and the fold of activist networks. Navarro’s excerpted
image patches together How to Survive’s makeshift narrative where the queer of color
image marks a breach in the fabricated tale of AIDS activist progress (fig. 3).

Figure 3. Original footage: Navarro is filmed and interviewed in the hospital by Ellen
Spiro shortly before his passing (from the personal archive of Patricia Navarro). Footage
repurposed: Navarro embodies Jesus Christ as the image of sacrifice in How to Survive a
Plague (2012).

Shortly after the hospital scene, viewers see archival footage of ACT UP’s white
male leaders being asked, “Do you expect to live?” They unanimously answer “no.”
According to the film, in 1991 and ten years into the pandemic, ACT UP experiences a

50
“A Day Without an Artist: Ray Navarro,” “Leap Into the Void” (blog). Accessed: March 20,
2014, http://imoralist.blogspot.com/2008/12/day-without-artist-ray-navarro.html.

47

deep rift resulting from the onset of fatigue and the fear that nothing will change. People
are still dying. Mistrust develops among members. Those who later form TAG and
pursue work with pharmaceutical companies are accused of colluding with the state.
Most of these white men do live and are lauded at the end of How to Survive. Yet, the
challenges that Navarro’s creative, political, and representational work lodge against
what normatively constitutes a life worth living clings like a sticky residue. Navarro’s
remainders are also insistent reminders.
Even as Navarro’s image fades to black, he is held. Hands that held and cared for
his body still hold and care for his image. His mother. The person holding the camera.
These hands hold the attention of audiences in this time. How to Survive suggests that
Patricia Navarro operates the camera and maintained the footage. However, at the top of
the scene, she is addressed by a third person in the hospital, off-screen, untitled in the
film: “Tell him we’re rolling.” The Little Camera is this person’s embodiment. As the
camera goes dark at the scene’s end, we are reminded of the video artist’s hands. She
chooses what to record, where to direct our attention, and how to hold it. With AIDS,
touch is critical.
51
AIDS video artist-activists John Greyson, Gregg Bordowitz, Jean
Carlomusto, and Catherine Saalfield created a memorial tape for Navarro to
“conceptualiz[e] a reservoir for our friend, which turned out to be a reservoir for
collective action.” As they scoured video footage looking for images of Navarro—“even
the back of his head or his elbow”—Saalfield writes, they were “exorcising, purging,

51
My use of “touch” differs from Laura U. Marks’ discussion of hapticism in media. Whereas she
is concerned with symbolization generated by videos, I am interested in how materiality and
symbolization intersect in AIDS video activism to mark the combined labor of the embodied
subjects of AIDS and of the video-makers in the effort to generate AIDS representations. See
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002, xi-xiii.

48

processing, crying, giggling, and longing for an image to last forever, or better, to come
back to life.”
52
The AIDS video activist archives form a source for (re-)mediation and
(re-)distribution of this touch of care through image-afterlives that remind us that AIDS is
still critical.
The mixture of footage from DIVA TV’s Like a Prayer, along with rare and
intimate footage of Navarro from personal archives, combines the aesthetics of feminist
video deconstruction with Navarro’s performance of pleasure. In turn, his absence by the
end of How to Survive unravels the story of AIDS progress. How to Survive’s visual
narrative could not do without the queer of color image. Without Navarro and the work of
other AIDS video activists aggressive police behavior would not be so well monitored to
protect and enable direct action. Moreover, there would be little to no source archive for
How to Survive to draw its visuals from. The explicit intention of alternative AIDS video
to visually document disenfranchised subjects means the queer of color image must make
an appearance in today’s mainstream feature-length AIDS activist documentary, even if
briefly. How to Survive would not exist as a film if video activists did not care for the
images. The AIDS activist narrative begins in 1986 because the moment was critical but
also because that is when the cameras were turned on. Audiences see this history
precisely because AIDS video activists cared for those bodies most marginal to
mainstream representation and most vulnerable to death and disappearance. These video
activists continued the practice of care through hands that critically touch, archive, and
distribute the images and care of women and queer of color absence.

52
Saalfield, 343.

49

The absence of queer of color images induces How to Survive to end unresolved.
53

In its closing sequence, lead activists reveal uncertainty about the political significance of
the U.S. AIDS struggle. Even as several of the surviving white male interviewees exalt
their activist efficacy, How to Survive tempers the outcome of the AIDS movement.
Interspersed are the titles: “THE NUMBER OF COMPANIES NOW MAKING
EFFECTIVE PROTEASE INHIBORS: 7”; “THE NUMBER OF LIVES SAVED:
6,000,000”; “THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO DIE BECAUSE THEY CAN’T
AFFORD AIDS DRUGS: 2,000,000 EVERY YEAR.” The song “Keeping Up,” by
Superhuman Happiness plays: “Keeping up…And there’s no end in sight.” The lyrics
comment on the endless pursuit of middle-class ascendancy, the quest for longevity, and
the privileges accorded to the few. A vast majority, particularly those systematically
denied first world nation-state inclusion and adequate healthcare, live precariously. AIDS
is unending and the global change we wish to see has yet to come.
How to Survive cannot turn away from the reports of the pandemic among people
of color and the global south. According to the federal government, Black and Latina/o
communities, especially “men who have sex with men,” are the most infected and
affected by HIV/AIDS in the United States, while statistics on Native Americans, Pacific
Islanders, and Asians are underreported.
54
Globally, sub-Saharan Africa remains the most
disproportionately affected region while HIV infections continue to rise in the Caribbean,

53
Navarro’s image functions much like that of Kara Keeling’s notion of “the image of common
sense” in which “common sense is a shared set of memory-images and a set of commonly
habituated sensory-motor movements with the capacity to enable alternative perceptions and,
hence, alternative knowledges...” See Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the
Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 20.
54
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “U.S. Statistics,” AIDS.gov. Accessed: June
23, 2014, http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/statistics/.

50

Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.
55
The narrative of How
to Survive leads to “no end in sight;” that is, we stare into the visual nothingness of an
enduring global pandemic. AIDS video activism critically appears in the film through the
queer of color image that stalls a pat narrative ending. To be clear, this queer of color
image does not narrate failure; it fails narration. The failure toward biological duration
and narrative resolution marks an absence upon which the audience must dwell. Viewers
are returned to the feminist and queer strategies for documenting AIDS marginality.
Images of absence return to touch.

Feminism, Labor, and Queer Love
“There is a force within society that cannot be contained. Call it Queer Theory.
Clearly no one could have predicted the visual representation of this theory.”
—Ray Navarro, 1990
56

When I presented a paper about How to Survive for a panel titled “Queer
Contexts”
57
at the 2014 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Alexandra
Juhasz attended. This was my first encounter with her and it was constituted by a mutual
care for missing AIDS images. For my presentation, I used Netflix “Watch Instantly” and
captured laptop screenshots of How to Survive. The images, which had been digitized and
edited almost seamlessly into the film, originated from feminist and queer of color analog
videos. I inserted the images into a PowerPoint slide and projected them into the room.

55
UNAIDS. “Global Report: UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic 2013.” UNAIDS.org.
Accessed: June 23, 2014.
http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/epidemiology/2013/gr2013/UN
AIDS_Global_Report_2013_en.pdf. See page 12.
56
As quoted in Levine.
57
I am grateful to Lucas Hilderbrand for chairing and organizing this panel, which included
providing early and ongoing feedback on my paper. My gratitude also goes to Patty Ahn who
introduced and referred me to Hilderbrand for this purpose.

51

The image of Navarro with his mother lingered. Long after its projection dimmed,
his image continued to fill the room and beyond in absence of visual form, gathering
different peoples, places, and times.
58
For its caption, I questioned the source and its
archival keeper since How to Survive obfuscated this knowledge. Juhasz responded and
named them: someone she knew and worked with closely. She also held something
personal that would compel me further: another video. Juhasz invited me to her talk the
following week.
59
There, I re-encountered the unending political and pedagogical
functions of AIDS video activism, maintained through archival, distributive, and
educational practice by their original makers. These videographers existed in content, as
images (even if the individuals already passed), and in context, as preservationists. The
labor of care that motivated AIDS video artistry bounded the dead with the living, and
entwined content and context, through queer of color images. The image of Navarro
returns endlessly to join together through feminist and queer relationality otherwise
distinct political eras, social milieus, and media platforms for AIDS representations.
Juhasz hand-gifted me Video Remains (2005). A DVD distributed through
personal encounter for non-commercial use. Something fragile. It held answers to
questions evoked by Navarro’s image. Video Remains is Juhasz’s experimental video that
looks back at the life of her friend and performing artist Jim Lamb who died of AIDS-
related illness in 1993. Like previous AIDS videos, Video Remains engages in non-linear

58
In describing how she edited archival video footage with contemporary images to create Video
Remains (2004), Juhasz argues that the present, past, and future of AIDS “bleeds in.” See Juhasz,
GLQ, 320. Akira Mizuta Lippit describes the irreducible image archive that survives after
obliteration from atomic light the “avisual.” See Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow
Optics). Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
59
Juhasz, Presentation for “Oxy VideoCinematheque: 1967-2014.” During the talk, Juhasz
emphasized that AIDS video activism was “local and specific” and was designed to politicize its
producers and viewers.

52

storytelling, layers times, places, and people, and ends without resolution. It is both
pedagogical and political in function. The footage of Lamb on a Miami, Florida beach
shortly before his passing is stitched together with more recent video-recorded
conversations Juhasz had with Latina/o and Black youth participants of AIDS Project Los
Angeles’s (APLA) MPowerment program, alongside a discussion that transpires between
her and Michael Anthony, a Silver Lake, California hairstylist, about losing friends to
AIDS in New York City during the crisis. Like France, Juhasz was compelled to digitize
and edit 1993 VHS recordings of Lamb to give it another life. Nevertheless, the desire
that animates her process holds political distinction.
The re-mediation of AIDS videos reveals which video practices have changed and
which remain. According to Juhasz, “the pedagogical value of making video is found
more in the process than the product.”
60
She notes that the “labor- and emotional-
intensive work, and with supportive attention to personal and inter-personal dynamics—
improves not just what and how students learn, but what they take away.” Although
“more time, money, and familiarity with video and each other” improve the outcome,
“making video is always good pedagogy.”
61
Why and how we care for video images
subtend the politics of video production, archiving, and distribution. The lessons learned
from AIDS video activism occur as much in their original making by feminists and
queers of color as in their movements across platforms and shifts from “alternative” to
“mainstream.”
The affective and material labor vested in AIDS video activism is feminist and
queer because its modes of affiliation challenge individualism and cross racial, gender,

60
Juhasz, The Radical Teacher, 23.
61
Ibid.

53

and sexual identitarian boundaries.
62
Juhasz’s “love” for her white gay male friend Lamb
motivated her to use video activism as “feminist history making: a practice that helps
align the poetry, evidence, passion, and politics of AIDS."
63
Juhasz overlays Lamb’s
footage with more recent sound recorded interviews with lesbian video activists Alisa
Lebow, Juanita Mohammed, Sarah Schulman, and Ellen Spiro.
64
These women, one
Black and three white, “had all loved and supported gay men as they participated in
AIDS activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
65
This queer love defied normative
identity and kinship formations and manifested in AIDS video activist coalitions.
These lasting queer kinships also motivate Juhasz to link Lamb’s image to the
queer of color AIDS past and present. Footage of Lamb is melded through gentle and
long dissolves with footage of her discussion among Los Angeles queer of color youth
MPowerment participants. AIDS and queer sex, past and present, are visually, sonically,
and thematically tangled. Juhasz’s care for queer of color images also leads us back to
Navarro. Navarro returns at the end of Video Remains as a visually formless discourse on
queer radical potential. Fifty minutes into the video, the screen focuses on long shots of
various hotels, perhaps sites people with AIDS once inhabited and passed. A phone
conversation between Juhasz and Spiro titled “[Alex & Ellen, 2004 Pasadena/Austin]”
transpires:

62
In describing the return to AIDS video activism, Lucas Hilderbrand cites Ann Cvetkovich and
proclaims: What made ACT UP queer, beyond its predominantly gay male participants, was that
it infused politics with polymorphous desire and subversive sensibilities. See Hilderbrand, Lucas.
“Retroactivism.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies Vol. 12, No. 2 (2006): 303-4.
63
Juhasz, Alexandra. “Feminist history making and Video Remains (in exchange with Antoinette
Burton).” JUMP CUT: A Contemporary Review of Media. Accessed: April 30, 2014,
http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/AIDsJuhasz/index.html.
64
When I met Sarah Schulman in the fall of 2011, she generously gifted me a copy of her then-
forthcoming manuscript for The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.
65
Juhasz, GLQ, 320.

54

Spiro: There’s some footage of Ray Navarro that I only watched once and then I
gave it to his mother. I never let it be used in anybody’s documentaries or
anything, although that would be up to his mother and I don’t think that she told
anybody. It was just this amazing sit-down with him in the hospital room. I guess
you could call it an interview, was when he had lost most of his sight to
meningitis. He was painfully skinny, but during that part of his life, the end of his
life, Ray was, had become this, like, almost like a guru in the hospital. People,
everybody was coming to see him and he would just spout amazing things.
Y’know, would come out of his mouth. Suddenly, he had become 110 years old
and had all this wisdom. And, one day I was there and I had the camera and I
asked him if I could turn it on. He said, “Yes.” It was just this strange feeling like I
was speaking to someone half on earth and half gone. It was as if, y’know, he had
prepared himself to go. He was never ready to go but suddenly all these amazing
poetry came out of his mouth.

Juhasz: It’s funny because the image, the footage of Jim on the beach. He kind of
thought that’s what he was going to do. He wanted to be recorded speaking great
insight and poetry. So, it’s very tragic footage. And I’ve always hated it. It was
meant to be one thing and it really wasn’t and I’ve just never known what to do
with it. And I’ve had it. And, y’know, as the years have gone by, I’ve felt this
incredible responsibility to, y’know, participate in some kind of active memory
about him. So that’s what this piece is about. Not just mine. But, y’know, what we
all do. What we should be doing with these memories and these videotapes that
are, that stand-in for memories.

Juhasz describes her own desire and struggle with how to return to Lamb’s
image.
66
At the time, perhaps suffering from AIDS dementia or the side effects of earlier
HIV medications, Lamb “badly performed an image of death,” “built no stable story of
self,” and “declined…to resolve into the majestic martyr.”
67
The failure to be heroic
made Lamb’s recording all the more urgent. “With video,” Juhasz “fought to hold him
and hold onto him. Losing battles. Crusades lost to biology and technology as much as
indifference.”
68
Like Navarro and others who did not survive, Lamb fails narration.

66
Juhasz, Alexandra. “The Failures of the Flesh and the Revival of AIDS Activism.” Failure:
Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. Eds. Nicole Antebi, Colin Dickey, and Robby
Herbert. Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Los Angeles: Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008, 135-
141.
67
Ibid., 137-9.
68
Ibid., 139.

55

Juhasz ultimately ties Lamb’s memory together with aural discourse about
Navarro. Lamb, Navarro, and present-day youth of color are held together through the
network of feminist and queer relations. They exist together, past and present, dead and
living, and across various subject positions, in an orbit through and outside the frame of
the shot. As Juhasz speaks, hotels in the background dissolve into horizontal streaks of
black and white that flash across the screen. We arrive at the previous era of AIDS video
activist visuality. Signs of VHS tracking remind us that recorded images and sounds defy
alignment, highlighting the inherit failures of linear editing. The material of VHS
deteriorates but images have afterlives. DIVA TV co-founder Spiro discloses she is the
cameraperson who helped care for Navarro. She cared about who touched and used
Navarro’s footage. Patricia Navarro cared for the videotape that later came into the
possession of France to be incorporated into How to Survive. Video Remains shows that
videos are not discrete end products (fig. 3). They are intertextual, moving in, through,
and across one another as remnants, and in this case, through networks of feminist queer
love and care. In 2004, even before How to Survive made it to mass market, Video
Remains anticipated the image of Navarro would return through documentary
filmmaking. Spiro’s recorded voice provides an auditory touch for visually
unrepresentable queerness. That touch indexes Navarro’s image as it circumvents
surveillance.
The queer touch of AIDS video activism arouses audience awareness about
wrinkles in space and time.
69
Elizabeth Freeman argues that, in “queer vision,” wrinkles
represent how time folds when “our sexually impoverished present suddenly meets up

56

with a richer past, or as the materials of a failed and forgotten project of the past find
their uses now, in a future unimaginable in their time.”
70
Navarro’s queer of color image
moves through How to Survive and Video Remains to recall AIDS activism as embedded
in coalitional critiques of U.S. global capitalism. His near-death image triggers a question
posed by How to Survive, however briefly and dismissively, about whether those that
formed TAG had forsaken the queer valences of AIDS activism by aligning too closely
with corporate and state interests.
According to Cathy Cohen, the relationship between queer theory in the academy
and queer political activism merged in the early-1990s during the formation of Queer
Nation. They worked with ACT UP but were dismayed at what they believed was ACT
UP’s assimilationist desire. Queer Nation adapted a form of queer theory and understood
“queer” as a politics of relationality bound by differences and organized in the effort to
exceed the goals of visibility which often stopped short at inclusion in mainstream U.S.
representation (Cohen, 45). In this history, queerness is a response to the growing
conservatism of AIDS activism and gay and lesbian identity politics that were aimed at
white gender normative representations in popular culture. Simply, queerness performs
through the failure to narrate. To borrow from J. Jack Halberstam, queer failure stalls
developmentalism and assimilation, offering instead “modes of unbeing and unbecoming
[that] propose a different relation to knowledge.”
71

69
Carolyn Dinshaw describes her queer desire for history as a “touch across time.” Dinshaw,
Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999, 21.
70
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Introduction” for special issue “Queer Temporalities.” GLQ: A Journal of
Gay and Lesbian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2-3 (2007): 163.
71
Halberstam, J. Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 23.

57

The failures of queer of color images invite opportunities to recognize others who
fail AIDS specifically and nationalist narratives generally; to forge a “politics in the
image of exile, of refusal.”
72
Cohen cites the work of ACT UP New York’s needle
exchange and prison projects as an example of the “possibilities and difficulties involved
in principled transformative coalition work” that queer organizing offers (Cohen, 45).
She contends, “The political work…was undoubtedly informed by the public identities
they embraced, but these were identities that they further acknowledged as complicated
by intersectionality and placed within a political framework where their shared
experience as marginal, nonnormative subjects could be foregrounded.” Citing Douglas
Crimp, she goes on to explain that “‘queer’ entails a relation between [sexual] practices
and other circumstances that make very different people vulnerable to HIV infection and
to the stigma, discrimination, and neglect that have characterized the societal and
governmental response to the constituencies most affected by the AIDS epidemic.”
73
In
other words, an inherent and continual relation between queerness and AIDS arises when
considering the multiple points of difference that connect various marginal subjects
rendered vulnerable to HIV infection and/or state abuse.
Viewed in this light, the AIDS video activist queer of color image cleaves
together anti-racist, feminist, and queer theories and politics, past and present. Navarro’s
image in How to Survive overwhelms the visual frame of the feature-length documentary
in which “reality” appears. Footage of the crisis forms a continual loop between the past
and present through the queer of color image. Audiences are compelled to examine what

72
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007, 71.
73
Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer
Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Vol. 3, No. 4 (1997): 460.

58

narratives fail to contain. Attention is deflected away from visual representations in the
foreground and toward the background, the periphery, and even what remains off-screen,
unseen. Forced to recognize the unending pandemic among people of color, audiences
linger on the absented queer of color image, looking for traces of its undetectable
movements across places and times.

Conclusion: Queerness and “Going Viral”
The afterlives of AIDS video activist queer of color images underscore the
meanings and mechanisms behind what makes a video “go viral” through today’s digital
media networks. In today’s digital web of social networks, one is compelled to narrate
one’s life through images and videos that represent success.
74
Images of failure, like
queer of color AIDS images, tend to fallout or are rehabilitated into stories about gay
struggles for marriage, nuclear family, and middle-class success. Yet, the narratives of
AIDS progress inevitably fail as the missing images of those cared for resurface in the
digital circuit.
AIDS video activists anticipated the images would travel through the
multiplication of screens. The political drives to digitize AIDS images repurposes their
distribution and ensures they make contact through network spread. However, as is the
case with AIDS popular narratives, the viewer’s attention is trained less on what s/he
does see and more on what s/he fails to see. The absented queer of color images of How
to Survive leads viewers into a visual void. This technique, derived from AIDS video
activism, its Third, feminist, and Black film predecessors, and postmodern aesthetics, is

74
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York:
New York University Press, 2012, 35.

59

what complicates visual production and consumption and captivates contemporary
audiences. Likewise, when an image or video is circulated, it is not simply the visual and
its number of views and comments that qualify it as “viral.” Instead, it is the affective and
unrepresentable dimensions of technological mediation that drive the image or video like
a “Trojan horse.”
75
The expansion of digital screens means that viewers have more
fragmented and varying points of access. They also experience viral videos through
modes that contravene narrative normativity. Software applications (apps) such as
SnapChat, Instagram, and Vine, which are accessed through handheld digital
communication devices, exploit the non-narrativity of video media.
While the platforms for video archiving and distribution have changed, the
political and visual strategies adopted by activists for documenting the alterior
dimensions of the crisis remain. AIDS afterlives take a backwards point of view of
official History and make possible future feminist and queer practices for videos that “go
viral.” These representations from below make powerful representational and materialist
critiques against the invisibilization of feminist labor in the commodification of AIDS in
mainstream media. Queer of color AIDS afterlives demonstrate how the means of media
production can be perverted so that “viral” videos circulate through the multiplying
network of handheld digital devices to spread alternate stories, create new social
attachments, and broaden political horizons.
AIDS video activism provides a method for queerness: anti-racist, feminist, and
relational modes of affiliation that exceed identity, move beyond visual representation,

75
I am inspired by performance artist Kristina Wong’s “Trojan horse” approach to digital media
and social networking. By using the fast-paced and far-reaching potential of digital media, she
leads viewers back to her artistic and politically driven work, including live performance.
Interview with Kristina Wong, Los Angeles, CA, May 2, 2014.

60

and lie outside state inclusion. As an often under-represented and misrepresented figure
of AIDS, the queer of color is a minoritarian yet central and multifaceted image for
rejecting stigmatizing, racist, and masculinist AIDS narratives. The queer of color
“bottom” occupies the absent center of popular AIDS narratives. AIDS video activism
floats images of absence across network screens so audiences are constantly returned to
AIDS but never provided a definitive vantage point for it. Instead, we are asked to
critically examine what is absent. The ongoing politics of AIDS and queerness occur in
the marginal, peripheral, and even tangential practices of AIDS video activism. Feminist
and queer of color AIDS aesthetics and activism ask us to see missing images of queer
people of color. Everywhere.
In the following chapter, I trace archival footage from How to Survive to the
documentary film Voices from the Front (1992) by Testing the Limits Collective. In
doing so, I explore original AIDS activist videos to further analyze the feminist, queer of
color, and anti-imperialist video aesthetics and practices which conjure a “queer radical
imagination” that stretches across the different eras of AIDS representations. Specifically,
we will see why women of color of do not appear as often among video footage and why
the recursive queer of color AIDS image is not merely indexical to a body, subject, or
subject position, but rather the coalescing of the “queer radical imagination.”

61

Chapter 2: Science and Silence:
AIDS, Black Feminisms, and the Resounding Queer Radical Imagination

“It should not surprise us that black women are silent about sexuality. The imposed
production of silence and the removal of any alternatives to the production of silence
reflect the deployment of power against racialized subjects…”
--Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Black (W)Holes and the geometry of Black female
sexuality”
1

“So, there never was a GRID. There never was only a Gay Related Immune Deficiency
Syndrome. There was always an accompanying CRID, or Color Related Immune
Deficiency syndrome based on another reform of GRID, which is Green Related Immune
deficiency syndrome, based on money. Based on who has access to healthcare in this
country (emphases added).”
--Dr. Iris L. Davis, Voices from the Front (1992)

On September 14, 1989, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) led its
third political action on Wall Street,
2
this time against the pharmaceutical corporate giant
Burroughs Wellcome to protest the production of azidothymidine (AZT) as the most
expensive drug ever retailed. AZT was the first U.S. government approved medication to
treat HIV/AIDS. A highly toxic concoction, AZT could not be prescribed and physically
endured by all. Since women and queers of color, and the global south, have been
routinely underrepresented in AIDS research, the affects of AZT on their bodies were
unforeseen at the time. Furthermore, U.S. and European drug patenting laws continue to
prevent the production of cheaper generic drugs for worldwide distribution. Persistent
inequities in healthcare systems further diminish access to treatment for U.S. racial and

1
Hammonds, Evelynn. "Black (W)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality."
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2-3 (1994): 126+. Academic OneFile. Web.
4 Apr. 2011. URL:
http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.albany.edu/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-
Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&docId=A17250598&source=gale&src
prod=AONE&userGroupName=albanyu&version=1.0.
2
ACT UP New York. ACTUP Capsule History 1989. URL:
http://www.actupny.org/documents/cron-89.html. Accessed: March 17, 2015.

62

gender minorities and global south peoples. In their 1989 response to AIDS profiteering
and the continued vulnerability women and people of color face in spite of the advances
made in biomedical interventions, ACT UP’s boisterous and massive protest “delayed the
[New York Stock] Market five minutes for the first time in history”
3
and over two
decades before Occupy Wall Street attempted to do the same.
The documentary film Voices from the Front (1992) by the video activist
collective Testing the Limits depicts this takeover of New York City’s financial district
as a multi-racial, multi-gender, and anti-imperialist AIDS activist network demanding
universal access to healthcare. The lack of access to healthcare is narrated as a war waged
by the U.S. state against the racialized working-class and poor populations who are
vulnerable to U.S. global capitalist hegemony. Protestors are seen holding signs
emblazoned with messages like “SILENCE = DEATH” and “AIDS IT’S BIG
BUSINESS,” while shouting chants such as “Drugs for people, not for profit!” As a
broader imagination for radical and systemic change, their political rhetoric seized upon
the AIDS crisis to galvanize a revolution in the system of care. Voices illustrates how
activists’ strategically expressed the otherwise hidden, silenced, and structural domains
through which the AIDS crisis unfolded as the consequence of institutionalized racism,
sexism, homophobia, and global economic inequity. Today, the footage from Voices has
been repurposed to produce new feature-length documentary films that have garnered
much public attention, including the Academy Award nominated film, How to Survive a
Plague (2012) by David France. How to Survive uses footage from Voices to tell the story
of AIDS activists’ successful struggle for medications. However, it silences and attempts

3
As stated by AIDS activist Michaelangelo Signorile in Voices from the Front (Testing the
Limits, 1992).

63

to disappear what Voices initially represented: AIDS activists’ fight against intersecting
political and economic issues, including corporate exploitation, a misogynistic and
heterosexist medical apparatus, and racist U.S. wars that defunded the healthcare system.
Analyzing Voices, this chapter explores how the film utilizes representations of
racialized and gendered silences to articulate the shared and continual condition of
vulnerability experienced by women, queers of color, and the global south in the ongoing
AIDS pandemic. Specifically, it traces how the historical silencing of racial and gender
minorities is, on the one hand, reproduced in the appropriation of Voices video footage
into contemporary documentary films. More importantly, the chapter considers how, on
the other hand, the political and representational uses of silence in video activists’
original footage continuously demand that audiences interrogate the “truth” status of
visually evidenced scientific knowledge and historical accounts. The video activists’
interventions into the primacy of vision redirects audiences to listen more carefully to the
political discourse of feminist and queer of color AIDS activists. By drawing attention to
silences, video activists such as the Testing the Limits Collective cue viewers to hear the
protests of women and queer of color activists in absentia. That is, the representation of
silence recalibrates the medium of video into a tool for auscultation much in the same
way a stethoscope is used to amplify otherwise undetectable sounds by drawing the
listener into a space of intimacy with another body.
4
Even if that body is “no longer with
us,” the audio diagnostic instrumentation of video collapses the rational distance between
the viewer and screen. It heightens the silence of the redacted body and addresses the
viewer with the ills experienced by a compromised racialized and gendered social body

4
Sterne, Jonathan. “Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope, and the ‘Autopsy of the Living’:
Medicine’s Acoustic Culture.” Journal of Medical Humanities. Vol. 22, No. 2 (2001): 115-136.

64

rather than an individual biological body that stands-in for a universalized (read: white
and male) experience with AIDS.
As demonstrated in chapter one, when AIDS activist archival footage from videos
like DIVA TV’s Like a Prayer (1990) was adapted into the contemporary documentary
film How to Survive, the archival images of women and queers of color were heavily
censored from the representational record. Likewise, film footage from Voices has been
heavily coopted by How to Survive and other recent AIDS activist documentary films,
including Vito (2012). As in the case of Like a Prayer’s coopted footage, the multi-racial,
multi-gender, and anti-imperialist political discourse that is carefully documented by
Voices is stifled in recent mainstream cinematic adaptations. If, as I argue in chapter one,
women and queer of color AIDS afterlives appear precisely when they are invisibilized,
then they also resonate at the key instances in which they are silenced. The appropriations
of archival footage from Voices re-enliven the feminist and anti-imperialist tactical uses
of silence in Voices, thereby generating the sonic afterlives of women and queer of color
AIDS politics.
Footage that appears in Voices and is later appropriated by How to Survive largely
focuses on ACT UP’s 1988 takeover of the offices of the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) in Bethesda, Maryland. We see and hear ACT UP protestors criticize the FDA for
its slowness in approving drugs that are then retailed at extremely high costs. There are
even instances in which the footage from Voices that is edited into How to Survive offers
contemporary audiences brief accounts of the dislocation women and people of color
experience in AIDS research. For instance, white male clinical trial participant, Jim
Jensen, is interviewed as he walks while wheeling an intravenous drip bag attached to a

65

pole, presumably from the clinic to join other protestors in the direct action against the
FDA. Jensen is accompanied by video activists who record and prompt him to discuss the
“Interleukin-2 and AZT combination study.” We see the top of a microphone bob in and
out of the bottom of the frame, and we hear a voice off-screen, but we do not see the
interviewer or the cameraperson. If one accesses How to Survive through Netflix video-
on-demand and switches on the closed captioning, one sees the interviewer identified as a
“woman” (fig. 1):
“Are there any women in your trial?”
“No, there aren’t any women at all.”
“Are there any people of color in your trial? Uh, no. There are not.”
“Why do you think that is?”
[Laughs.] “Just the beginning of the problem.”
While the visual focus in How to Survive remains on its white gay male
protagonists in search of a biomedical solution, the aural pathways of the footage conjure
the anti-racist and feminist video practices vested in Voices. Voices intentionally
enunciates the ways the AIDS activist movement addressed the systemic absences and
silences of women and people of color in AIDS research and care. Even if the footage is
cut from Voices and inserted elsewhere, we can still perceive through critical listening the
resounding silences in the AIDS representational archive. White men may speak and be
seen more often, but they are not representative of the whole. Voices creates a soundscape
between the filmic subject, the video activist, and the viewer, wherein the viewer is
geared to hear how AIDS most heavily impacts women and communities of color

66

precisely because these subjects continue to be silenced in the pandemic. In doing so, the
soundscape diagnoses AIDS as a social ill rather than a mere individual biological ill.

Figure 1. The captured image of footage from ACT UP’s 1998 Food and Drug
Administration action that originally appeared in Voices from the Front (1992) and was
appropriated by How to Survive a Plague (2012). The caption underscores the racialized
and gendered silences of the AIDS pandemic that are nonetheless deposited into the
representational archive.

To excavate an archive for the racial and gender silences that continue through the
pandemic, this chapter begins by explicating the stakes of science and silence in Voices’
representations of AIDS. It critiques the narrative of biomedical progress by unpacking
the symbols of science and queer and AIDS visibilities foregrounded in Voices, such as
the pink triangle, or ∆. The analysis attunes itself instead to the background where
representations of SILENCE = DEATH appear faintly, sometimes captioned below the
pink ∆ but oftentimes receding from sight. As a representational strategy, SILENCE =

67

DEATH fosters the sonic afterlives of anti-racist, feminist, and anti-imperialist AIDS
activism. This chapter aims to show how the video representation of SILENCE =
DEATH auscultates the discursive and aural strategies of Voices. This method of video
auscultation is connected to genealogies of survival devised by the historical subjects of
Euro-American colonialism, namely Black queer women, their encounters with scientific
and institutional racism and misogyny, and their enforced silences.
As one of the voices most often absented in the archive of AIDS activist history,
Black queer women’s silences perform critical interventions into the popular narrative of
biomedical progress. This chapter contextualizes video representations of SILENCE =
DEATH in relation to Black feminist and queer scholarship and cultural productions that
intercede with the industries of science and sound. In these intellectual and cultural
genealogies, representations of silence undercut the appeal and power of colonial vision,
thereby disrupting the sensory perceptual apparatus to disorder the scientific logic of the
“human.” Unbinding sound from sight reveals failures in biological thinking and being.
More importantly, this unconditioning and decentering of biological life unburdens racial
and gender minorities from proving “humanness,” a category of being so often used to
deprive them of individual and collective agency. In turn, alternate social, spatial, and
temporal relations unfold in the field of representation to sound out a queer radical
imagination.
Analyzing specific representational uses of silence and sound in Voices, this
chapter taps into Black feminist and queer soundscapes that reverberate in contemporary
AIDS representations as sonic afterlives. These sonic afterlives summon AIDS as a social
body that collectivizes cultural producers and consumers into an anti-racist, feminist, and

68

anti-imperialist queer radical imagination. Although this chapter is specifically about
Voices—its footage and the proliferation of Black feminist and queer soundscapes in
today’s AIDS audiovisual texts—it takes even greater time and to attune itself to the
historical and discursive impasses through which the racialized and gendered sonic
afterlives of silences, science, and AIDS resonate.

The Stakes of Science and Silence in AIDS Representations
In Voices, the sonic afterlives of Black feminist and queer politics, heard through
representations of silence, recall the relationship between pills and protest as part of much
longer and contentious histories of a racialized and gendered medicine and healthcare
practices. Today, AZT’s most effective successors include anti-retroviral therapies to
treat people living with HIV, the post-exposure prophylactic (PEP) administered to
people immediately after possible HIV contraction, and the pre-exposure prophylactic
(PrEP), which has received the latest and greatest amount of hype as a regimented once-
a-day pill used to prevent infection. These drugs have significantly forestalled the onset
of HIV/AIDS or extended the lives of some but remain out of reach for many. Hence, if
we evaluate the advancements in AIDS science and care by focusing solely on
strengthening individual biological and immunological defense, then we miss the key
ways in which science can be conceived to address the pandemic as a social condition.
For instance, PrEP is largely unknown among men who have sex men worldwide,
especially among men of color and those residing in the global south.
5
Meanwhile, the

5
Ayala, George, et al. “Access to Basic HIV-Related Services and PrEP Acceptability among
Men Who Have sex with Men Worldwide: Barriers, Facilitators, and Implications for
Combination Prevention.” Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases Vol. 2013 (2013): 1-11.
Accessed: March 27, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/953123.

69

effectiveness of PrEP on women globally remains under-researched and unclear.
6

Whether we consider pills a provisional solution or the end-goal of activism guides the
stakes of AIDS politics. Biomedical interventions into AIDS undoubtedly increases the
biological life expectancy of those with access to medical treatment, but emphasizing this
as a political solution affirms the current system of unequal care. If we question the
foundational racial and gendered presumptions behind AIDS research as it proceeds, then
we begin to notice how the science simply does not add up.
Biomedical interventions continue to emphasize race and gender as qualitatively
biological and genetic conditions long after race (and to some extent gender) has been
debunked as a social construct. The search for an HIV/AIDS cure seizes upon “evidence”
that “about 1% of Caucasian people” are genetically and highly immune to HIV while
“up to 20% of Caucasians” have partial immunity.
7
Based upon this assumption,
scientists have continuously experimented with white gay men’s genetics to find a
medical solution for all people.
8
In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown, a white gay man from the
United States who had been living in Germany with HIV since 1995, received a bone
marrow transplant in Germany to treat leukemia. After the successful transplant, doctors
discovered “HIV had been eradicated” from Brown’s body.
9
Researchers believed his

6
O’Neal, Reilly. “Women and PrEP: A Q&A with Dr. Judy Auerbach.” BetaBlog.org. March 10,
2014. Accessed: March 27, 2015, http://betablog.org/women-and-prep-qa-judy-auerbach/.
7
The Tech: Museum of Innovation. “The Evolving Genetics of HIV.” Stanford at The Tech:
Understanding Genetics. Accessed: April 16, 2015,
http://genetics.thetech.org/original_news/news13.
8
Singh, Maanvi. “In Life, Man Immune To HIV Helped Scientists Fight Virus.” NPR.org.
September 21, 2013. Accessed: April 16, 2015,
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/09/21/224506556/in-life-man-immune-to-hiv-helped-
scientists-fight-virus.
9
Gholipour, Bahar. “Only 1 Person Has Been Cured of HIV: New Study Suggests Why.” Live
Science. September 24, 2014. Accessed: April 15, 2015. http://www.livescience.com/48015-
berlin-patient-hiv-treatment.html.

70

bone marrow donor was genetically immune to HIV and, in response to the successful
transplant, Brown had regenerated healthy, HIV-free and resistant white blood cells.
10

Dubbed the “Berlin Patient,” Brown became a model for prospective curative AIDS
treatment.
Several aspects of this equation do not make sense. A lot goes unsaid when we
focus narrowly on AIDS as a medical problem. When diagnosed with HIV infection,
Brown benefitted from immediate access to Germany’s more encompassing system of
care, at least when compared to the U.S. model. His HIV treatment and subsequent bone
marrow transplant were subsidized by the German state. He had been on antiretroviral
medications and virtually free of side effects since his HIV-positive diagnosis. Prior to
his leukemia diagnosis, Brown was in relative good health and thus able to seek treatment
options. Worth mentioning is that bone marrow transplant surgery is usually successful
when performed between co-ethnics; that is, two subjects of the same racial/ethnic
background tend to facilitate a genetic match, which encourages the body to adapt rather
than reject the transplant. What this indicates is that white male gene-based therapies for
AIDS are not medically accessible or even universally applicable for the vast number of
non-white people living with HIV/AIDS. Brown’s procedure has not been successfully
replicated in other patients, even among other white men.
11
This raises a host of questions
about the biological and racial presumptions regarding genetics.

10
Ibid.
11
Engel, Mary. “Timothy Ray Brown: the accidental AIDS icon.” Hutch News. FredHutch.org.
February 20, 2015. Accessed: April 15, 2015, https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-
news/2015/02/aids-icon-timothy-ray-brown.html.

71

Moreover, while some scientists wish to proclaim Brown “the first person cured
of HIV,” this cannot be verified. Brown’s HIV status is “undetectable,”
12
which means
that HIV cannot be found in a sample of his blood using the available technology. An
“undetectable” viral load can be achieved when an infected person effectively uses
antiretroviral medications. It is significant that Brown no longer takes antiretrovirals to
suppress HIV. However, regardless of whether one is on medication, an “undetectable”
status does not prove HIV has been “eliminated.” (This also begs the question of whether
anyone is “free” of HIV given that our technologies can only test for antibodies or
declare the body “undetectable” for the virus.) When asked what the chances are for
someone who is “undetectable” to sexually transmit HIV, the response has been: “Our
best estimate is it’s zero.”
13
That zero is an “estimate” presents a profound scientific and
mathematical conundrum.
Importantly, while Brown’s case may be propped-up by scientists, his health has
experienced highs and lows. His leukemia rebounded and he had to undergo a second
bone marrow transplant. Brown has suffered neurological problems and other serious
physical ailments in response to chemotherapy and the transplant. In 2009, he was
mugged and “slammed to the pavement,” which left him severely injured and sent him to
rehab. Even then, he pushed forward out of a sense of responsibility to tour with doctors
to spread the story of the “Berlin Patient.” While Brown’s HIV status remains
“undetectable,” he could be infected with another strain of HIV to which his white blood

12
Ibid.
13
Clairns, Gus. “No-one with an undetectable viral load, gay or heterosexual, transmits HIV in
first two years of PARTNER study: Viral load suppression means risk of HIV transmission is 'at
most' 4% during anal sex, but final results not due till 2017.” National AIDS Manual: AIDSMAP.
News. March 4, 2014. Accessed: April 15, 2015, http://www.aidsmap.com/No-one-with-an-

72

cells are not resistant. Although he is a medical model, Brown admits his life is “far from
perfect.” He feels privileged, but would reconsider enduring such a physically jarring
treatment again to “cure” HIV. Nevertheless, it seems he experiences intense pressure to
represent the image of AIDS-free health, expressing in an interview: “I think that if I
were to become positive again, everything would be a failure. I know that cannot
happen.”
14

Scientists hasten to proclaim white men’s access to drugs, treatment, and, in turn,
their genetic therapy, as the medical answer—even when there is evidence to the
contrary. Meanwhile, the scientific establishment remains silent on Black experiences
with systemic medical neglect, sickness, and genetics research. In 1951, under a
segregated medical system, Henrietta Lacks sought treatment for cancer and doctors
removed cervical cells without her permission. Lacks passed away but scientists
developed and commercialized the infamous “HeLA Immortal Cell Line.” The HeLa
cells have been significantly used in cancer, human papillomavirus (HPV), and
HIV/AIDS research.
15
The capitalization on Lacks’ illness and death is part of a long-
ranging history of U.S. medical coercions against African Americans and people of color,
which includes the well-known Tuskegee syphilis experiment and the testing of nuclear
radiation poisoning on Indigenous and Japanese peoples in the Marshall Islands.
16

Medically induced vulnerability among women and people of color, especially
those who are Black and Indigenous, is fundamental to the commercialization of care.

undetectable-viral-load-gay-or-heterosexual-transmits-HIV-in-first-two-years-of-PARTNER-
study/page/2832748/.
14
Engel.
15
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Randomhouse, 2010, 212-
7.

73

The woeful and willful racist and misogynistic practices of scientific and technological
buildup has contributed to the United States’ global power. In the case of AIDS, activists
grew increasingly aware that a medical cure would not prevent structural inequities that
leave women, people of color, and the global south insistently susceptible to illness and
death. This phase of AIDS activism, however, led to a touted rift among ACT UP
members. More than halfway into the film, How to Survive portrays the momentous 1991
split in ACT UP where the Social Issues committee came to a head with the Treatment
and Data committee, then largely led by a group of white gay men.
17
By focusing almost
exclusively on the biomedical narrative of AIDS activism, the film remains silent on the
“social issues.”
Peter Staley, a featured activist in How to Survive, has discussed what the film did
not portray. In his recounting, the break-up over what formerly seemed a “happy family”
occurred when the Women’s Health Action and Mobilization! (WHAM!), which often
collaborated with ACT UP, and the Social Issue committee voiced concern that the men
of Treatment and Data were having dinner with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National
Institutes of Health (NIH). During this time, WHAM! and the Social Issues committee
were staging actions against the NIH. Miscommunications involving Treatment and Data,
coupled with accusations that the men of Treatment and Data were being elitist, drove
tensions. The conflict manifested in the departure of Treatment and Data and the
founding of the treatment action Group (TAG). Social Issues and WHAM! remained
interested in a continued fight against government and corporate officials or the

16
Skoong, Kim. “U.S. Nuclear Testing on the Marshall Islands: 1946-1958.” Teaching Ethics
Vol. 3, No. 2 (2003): 67-81.

74

continued marginalization of women and people of color in AIDS research and care.
Meanwhile, TAG, which included Staley, felt it was strategically necessary at the time to
work with state and pharmaceutical corporations to identify and implement medical
solutions. Staley concedes that, had Treatment and Data and Social Issues remained
together as a political body, the ACT UP movement would have been much stronger and
achieved even greater impact.
18

This split in the political body of the U.S. AIDS social movement underscores the
important and intense battles activists fought on the terrain of representation. Whether
AIDS was represented in the image of a biological body or as a social body meant the
difference between conceiving of activism as driven by medical innovations or by
significant, even radical, change in the system of care. Although these approaches need
not be mutually opposing, and the split was never as clean as How to Survive would like
to suggest,
19
these political contentions inevitably erupt when considering who, and what
issues, could be represented by the biological body.
On the one hand, the emphasis on biological representations of AIDS afforded
activists access to scientific “truth” and authority. By working with the government and
pharmaceuticals, TAG activists forced their foot into the entrance of the establishment in
hopes they would open the door for many. They sought incremental change,
demonstrated by the increase in treatment options, and measured by the chances of

17
Gould, Deborah B. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009, 339. Carroll, Tamar W. Mobilizing New York: AIDS,
Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015, 177.
18
Staley, Peter. Guest Speaker for “Peter Staley @ USC” for Professor David Román’s spring
2015 course, ARLT 100: AIDS & the Arts in America” at the University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA, April 8, 2015.

75

greater biological longevity. For example, Staley has stated off-screen that biomedical
interventions are successful but only with a functioning healthcare system where the
barriers for racial and gender minorities are removed. However, he remains convinced
these problems are being overcome and references the growing access to PrEP in the
global south as proof.
20
Representing the biological body as universal to human
experience means believing in the narrative of civilizational progress—that white gay
men were perhaps the first to receive AIDS treatment and care, but that this will
eventually translate into better care for all others. For the concrete and seemingly
immediate impact they made, TAG held a spotlight during the crisis and continue to
occupy our historical memory.
On the other hand, addressing AIDS as a social body meant activists struggled
with and through the social differences, economic inequities, and uneven power that
operated among them locally. As the crisis continued to devolve, especially among
women and people of color, activists also reckoned with the historical and structural
inequities that made AIDS a global condition and an enduring pandemic. By representing
AIDS as a social body, activists followed the diverging routes of the pandemic to tackle
the related and extensive issues generated through the persistent vulnerability of
minoritarian subjects. Following this course denotes a desire for systemic or even radical
change, but without a steady path to follow or immediate and empirical proof of the
desired outcome. Oftentimes, as I show in chapter one, those emphasizing a broad social
and economic justice AIDS agenda directed the spotlight instead of standing in it. Their

19
Conversation with ACT UP member and video activist Alexandra Juhasz and U.S. and Global
Policy Director for the Treatment Action Group, Kenyon Farrow, Los Angeles, CA, April 23,
2015.
20
Ibid.

76

deconstruction of biological universalisms and state and scientific authority meant their
labor was behind or away from the camera and relegated to seeming obscurity in the
annals of history.
By representing the social body the video footage from Voices make perceptible
the connections between white life and black death. These racial and gender terms for
biological survival hover in and out of the frame and moderate our visual interpretations.
The fine-tuning of AIDS activist video as an audio diagnostic tool for this racial and
gender discourse occurs through representations of silence that subtly operate to
obliterate the distinction between the body of the viewer and the surface of the screen.
Even when spliced and imported elsewhere, the feminist and queer of color video activist
footage holds an ailing social body as the collective site for diagnosing imperialism and
accounting its chronic violence. The footage audibly augments how the ideological and
material war that is waged at the cellular level is tied to racist and heteropatriarchal wars
fought within the United States and those imperial wars waged on the global stage. The
viewer becomes conscious to the myopia produced by the visual apparatus and must
strain to hear beyond the noise of scientific universalisms which occupy our popular
narratives for gay and AIDS progress.

Sound and the Racial and Gender Aporia of the Biological Body
In Voices, images of posters containing symbols and slogans play an important
role in visually staging AIDS activists’ political rhetoric. In particular, the pink triangle
(∆) above the white-lettered phrase “SILENCE = DEATH” appears frequently in the
backdrop and on the bodies of the filmic subjects (fig 2-3). The viewer is constantly

77

visually and aurally exposed to these representations of silence. They appear in the
background of the frame during interviews, are seen on the surfaces of activists’ t-shirts
and handheld posters, and are also heard in the interviews and chants of activists. Sound
and silence are also dialed up and down through visual and auditory editing processes.
The quick cutting and frenetic sequencing of separate events and interviews generates a
visual and aural palimpsest accompanied by a pulse. Fast-paced syncopation rouses the
din of activist discourse, followed by its aural evacuation when the pace is suddenly
slowed, say, for a series of titles. A musical soundtrack consisting primarily of rap music,
which involves the repurposing of technology, incorporation of industrial hums, and
recursive sounds and lyrical refrains, is used to stitch together an audiovisual mosaic.
Uneven and non-linear temporalization in Voices manifests a persistent and rhythmic
quality felt through the layered discourses and representations of AIDS absences and
silences. This postmodern stylistic and aesthetic approach to sound and silence makes
AIDS visual culture, including video activist footage, portable, byte-worthy, and easily
disseminated. AIDS visual culture instrumentalizes temporalities of silence and sound the
way the field of medicine uses it to gauge the percussive patterns of breathing, organ
vitality, and life expectancy.

78

Figure 2. Representations of SILENCE = DEATH at the September 14, 1989, ACT UP
action against AIDS profiteering halts the New York Stock Exchange.

Figure 3. ACT UP and founding TAG member Peter Staley is interviewed in Voices from
the Front (1992) with the inverted pink triangle, usually captioned with SILENCE =
DEATH.

79

Today, we see and hear the metonymic rhythms of AIDS activism through
popular reprisals of ACT UP merchandise and archival video activist footage, including
the significant amount of footage taken from Voices. Now iconographic, the pink triangle
and SILENCE = DEATH has become a highly recognizable sign in the visual economy
of gay, queer, and AIDS activisms. Arguably, even when the acronyms AIDS or ACT UP
appear alone, the pink ∆ and SILENCE = DEATH register faintly or peripherally in the
zone of vision because it is imprinted into the popular imagination and because the
silences can still be felt. When gayness or AIDS is visually represented, we are still
reminded of the pink ∆ and that SILENCE = DEATH. To understand how Voices footage
harness an archive of racial and gender silences, it is necessary to call forth the historical
course of late twentieth-century U.S. gay activism and its visual politics.
As discussed in the introductory chapter, the symbols adopted by both modern
science and gay political movements, such as the pink ∆, attempt to universalize
experiences of sexual marginalization and identity based upon the representation of the
white, gay, male, biological body as the image of health and personal empowerment. The
phrase SILENCE = DEATH accompanying the pink ∆ recalls systematic racial and
gender exclusions, even in, or especially at, the sites of gay (male) representational
incorporation into mainstream media, the medical establishment, and the nation-state.
The ACT UP metonym, first created by its unofficial propaganda ministry, Gran Fury,
does not simply flag our attention; it speaks. Or, stated more accurately, it speaks of and
through genealogies of silence. The politics of silence dismantles the overreliance on
visuality as a way of knowing. It undermines the veracity of images by drawing attention
to their varied and contextual meanings, especially when considering the role aural

80

perception plays in making images meaningful. The slogan SILENCE = DEATH is
seated at the bottom of the pink ∆, like a caption. The captioning of silence critically
engages the intermingling of the senses and also troubles their functions. Transcription
imitates the sounds and silences that we are meant to perceive, but it also interrupts what
we typically think of as speech and offers alternative aural discourse.
In representing silence through a caption, vision is disabled as the primary filter
through which the other senses are presumably coordinated. In the case of subtitling films
or television, there is always a slippage of meaning in the translation and its visual textual
reception across linguistic audiences. Subtitling also prompts the translation and
transcription of language specific and vernacular words, which forces recognition with
the incommensurability of varied cultural contexts. For instance, non-linguistic sounds,
such as a cough, sneeze, or a phone ring often interrupt speech and its cognitive
processing. The proliferation of texting through the use of digital devices has encouraged
the spread of formerly local and specific dialect but, arguably, fails to standardize their
usage and spelling. Put simply, silence proliferates sounds. Visually imitating silence
brings sight and sound to the logical end of their integrated functions and coordinated
capacity to communicate truthfully.
Visualizing silence underscores the false premise that a universal, biological, and
“healthy” body is shared and foundational to sensing and making meaning. For the
hearing impaired, closed caption television represents the “sudden quiet, the illusion of
speech (i.e. mouthed words), intentional loss of audio, and the cessation of sustained
sounds” with “[silence].”
21
Captioning silence intends to highlight how communication is

21
Zdenek, Sean. “Captioning silence?” Accessible Rhetoric. August 4, 2011. Accessed: April 2,
2014, http://seanzdenek.com/2011/08/04/captioning-silence/.

81

forged in the absence of auditory cues—a meaningful silent pause or the intentional
withholding of speech. The transcription of silence interrupts the visual field as the site of
knowledge production. Moreover, it intervenes into the scopic operations of power, or
what Foucault termed “power/knowledge.” Consequently, communicating silence
disrupts the unity and primacy of vision and siphons its capacity to hold truth. In short,
closed caption “[silence]” gives further pause to consider what it means to “speak truth to
power.”
22
To visualize silence facilitates a distortion in the circuitry of sense making
through which the scientific, juridical, and liberal category of the “human,” generates its
definition and wields power over other “beings.”
23

The breaking apart of the senses suggests a failure in the biological body, the
instability of its faculties, and its collapse as a discrete system. This biological failure
points to the aporia in what Ed Cohen historicizes as the “modern body” of the human.
Cohen submits that the figuration of the individuated modern biological body and the
ascent of the “human” atop the species hierarchy culminated during nineteenth century
Euro-American colonial, scientific, political, economic, and philosophical endeavors.
These colonial epistemological projects, he contends, were achieved by abutting the
practices of war and law. Liberal law is meant to preempt war while war is presumably
legally sanctioned through law. The inhering tensions and contradictions between law
and war are, Cohen goes on to say, seemingly resolved by the late nineteenth century
conceptualization of biological immunity: “Strictly speaking, where immunity exists

22
Speak Truth to Power is a 1955 doctrine developed by the pacifist Quaker organization,
American Friends Service Committee, to explore the capacity for non-violent social movements.
Ironically, one of its major contributors, Black gay civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, was not
credited for his authorship until 2012. American Friends Services Committee. Speak Truth to
Power. AFSC.org. Accessed: April 25, 2015, https://www.afsc.org/document/speak-truth-power.

82

there is no need of defense and where defending occurs there is no immunity.” The
scientific conceptualization of immunological defense, and its adaptations into everyday
thinking and being, formulates the contemporary conditions for the exercise of power, or
what Chandan Reddy terms “freedom with violence.”
24
The biological and national body
naturally defends against the extrinsic, but where the body intrinsically fails, defense
must be mounted.
AIDS activists understood the fundamental relationship between war and law as it
converged upon the terrain of immunological defense against and biological survival of
AIDS. The politics of AIDS representation were and are matters of life and death,
especially for those racial and gender minorities systematically excluded from the
protections of law and targeted by war. If audiovisual media reflects and communicates
the unity of the biological body, then it follows that mediating technologies should
simply extend our human capacity to see and hear. Yet, AIDS video activists were keenly
aware that, like the faultiness of biological thinking and being, media disarticulates as
much as it facilitates the senses. Their aims were not to forge monolithic and durable
narratives of AIDS, but instead to plumb the simultaneous verisimilitudes and
vicissitudes of video. Video activists exploited the correlations between biological
survival and technological mediation. They experimented with silence not to recuperate
the “normal” body and its senses, but to generate through media an experience with
radical vulnerability that helped reconceive of social relations and forge new political
imaginations. To do so, they drew upon discontinuities between images and sounds to

23
Foucault, Michel. “Prison Talk.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: The Harvester Press, 1980: 52.

83

engage viewers with the afterlives of sound that continue to speak against wars—wars
waged upon, in, through, and in the name of racial and gender minorities; wars that tie
the survival of racial/ethnic and gender minorities in the U.S. domestic sphere to
international sites of U.S. military incursions.
The breakdown in the cohesive functioning of the senses through AIDS activist
media points to a paradox intrinsic to liberal individualism. In presenting the correlation
between queerness and disability, Robert McRuer points out that the Oxford English
Dictionary’s definition of “able-bodied” includes the phrase “free from disability.”
25
This
conceptualization makes able-bodiedness “always dependent on disability in [the] same
way that heterosexuality is definitively dependent on homosexuality.”
26
Rehabilitation of
the sick body to its “healthy” and “able-bodied” state is equated with the capacity to sell
one’s labor in an industrial capitalist society.
27
This conception of freedom from
disability exposes how the operation of the liberal individual subject depends upon one’s
capacity to conform to the “normal,” “able-bodied,” “heterosexual,” “employable,”
“reproductive,” “white male” citizen. To represent those most vulnerable to the
pandemic, AIDS activists used video not to ascribe disability to the individual AIDS
ravaged body in need of personal recovery. Rather, AIDS video activists depicted
disability as a fact of biological and social existence.

24
Cohen, Ed. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern
Body. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 6-9. Reddy, Chandan. Freeom with Violence: Race,
Sexuality, and the U.S. State. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011; 1-33.
25
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New
York University Press, 2006, 7-8.
26
Palmer, Sara. “Old, New, Borrowed and Blue: Compulsory Able-bodiedness and Whiteness
in Avatar.” Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 31, No. 1 (2011). Accessed: April 7, 2015,
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1353/1473.
27
McRuer, 7-8.

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Since the material body tends toward deterioration, able-bodiedness is conditional
and temporary for every biological subject. Video activists’ sonic strategies initiate an
alternate perceptual apparatus whereby the body and its senses remain undone. There is
no integrity accorded the individuated body. Instead, there individual political power is
deemphasized. Tthe body and its senses are oriented toward disintegration and political
dissensus. The underlying vulnerability of all bodies to AIDS in an age of immunological
defense is underscored. Yet, in paying attention to how vulnerability makes us
interdependent, we are also pushed to hear this call differently than we would with a
liberal ear. In listening to AIDS silences we recognize that, while biological vulnerability
is shared, experiences with silence and death are not. The politics of silence and death are
borne of uneven forms of precariousness freighted by the lived realities and subjective
experiences accorded by the designs of race and gender.
When attuning our engagements with media to AIDS silences and deaths, we
perceive our common vulnerability but we listen specifically to lingering histories of
racialized and gendered states of precarity to the pandemic. Simultaneously, in listening
to the sonic afterlives of AIDS, we perceive genealogies of racialized and gendered
articulations of a queer radical imagination. The captioning of SILENCE = DEATH
makes the pink ∆’s meaning contingent upon that which it attempts but fails to bury. That
is, the sign asks us to consider a politics of silence principled not by who we see live, but
how we listen to the voices of those who have passed, or have been presumed to pass.
If SILENCE = DEATH, then the mathematical symbol “=,” meant to connote a
liberal notion of “equality,” and employed to represent the world’s largest corporate-
funded, U.S.-based lesbian and gay rights organization, Human Rights Campaign (HRC),

85

must reckon with how its assimilatory agenda favors white, able-bodied gays and
lesbians and enforces the absences, silences, and deaths of women, queer, and trans
people of color and global south peoples. In 2012, HRC, also known through its bumper
stickers, shirts, and other merchandise as simply =, honored the corporate giant Goldman
Sachs as a leader for lesbian and gay equality in the workplace,
28
in spite of the
corporation’s culpability for the 2008 economic downturn that displaced so many poor
and working class peoples, including queers of color. HRC’s support for major U.S.
corporations has only increased since, especially with its heavy investment and support
for the military defense industry
29
—further example of how contemporary narratives of
sexual empowerment are achieved through “freedom with violence.”
30
As Voices shows,
AIDS bears an inherent tie to U.S. military expansion, which will be further analyzed in
this chapter’s final section. U.S. military imperialism continues to play a central role in
spurring AIDS among communities of color and the global south. This claim is further
substantiated in chapter four.
If “=” equals social and economic equality, then how does SILENCE =
DEATH—as it pertains to the proliferation of AIDS among women and people of
color—point to a crisis in liberal conceptions of egalitarianism? We must turn to
alternative formulations of science and silence, especially those articulated through
representations of Black queer female sexuality and expressed in Voices, to attend to the
racial and gender contradictions in liberal representation. By listening carefully to the

28
Beaver, Andrew. “Why Is the Human Rights Campaign Honoring Goldman Sachs?.”
Huffington Post. Gay Voices. February 2, 2012. Accessed: April 25, 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-beaver/hrc-goldman-sachs_b_1257465.html.
29
Thrasher, Steven W. “Haaay to the Chief: The Military-Industrial Complex Conquers the
Homos.” Gawker.com. April 30, 2013. Accessed: April 25, 2015. http://gawker.com/haaay-to-
the-chief-the-military-industrial-complex-con-486133694.

86

echoes of Black feminist and queer voices in AIDS representations we attune ourselves to
the discourses of the queer radical imagination.

The Silence and Science of Black Feminism and the Queer Radical Imagination
Voices demonstrates how women of color generally, and Black women in
particular, explicate their absences and silences from the representational record of AIDS
activism. These articulations subtend further understanding for the opacity of women and
queer of color representations. Discussing the sonic interventions in Voices requires
understanding the confluence between women of color and queer of color genealogies of
silence and sound. Specifically, in this section, I show how Black feminist and queer uses
of silence and science recalibrate the functions of light and sound in technology to
challenge capitalist practices of sexual commodification. These strategies for
representation are utilized in Voices, and garner sonic afterlives in the archival footage
used to create How to Survive.
Cinema, as an art form and practice that is dependent upon light, has always
contended with sonic interferences. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart elucidates that, during the
late nineteenth-century postslavery “Great Migration” of southern Black workers to new
industrial urban cores in the north and west, “preclassical” silent era filmmakers were
troubled by how to effectively represent race in the face of emergent Black social and
economic mobility. Early silent film lacked narrative conventions, including the
techniques of sound that were later used to help drive the storyline. Instead, pre-existing
stereotypes, intertitles deriding Black colloquialisms, and depictions of racist violence
were utilized in early silent film to harness the racial vision of moviegoers. Segregated

30
Reddy, 1-8.

87

screening locales, disadvantaged access to technology, and denigrating representations
helped form cinema into a technology for surveilling and circumscribing Black
movements in public space. Film industry development reflected anti-Black attitudes that
were meant to entertain an imagined white audience.
31

Stewart also carefully illustrates how the advent of cinema brought racial
contradictions and instabilities to the fore, especially when representations of race
undercut rather than affirmed presumptions regarding racial purity, proper social
behavior, and class hierarchy. Preclassical films often depicted Black characters,
sometimes played by Black actors and sometimes by white actors in blackface. These
depictions transgressed social proscriptions more often than we might imagine. At times,
differentiations between white and Black racial representations were unclear.
Representations of Black women even seemed to challenge the authority of white male
characters.
32
What this indicates is that cinema had to compete with the multiple fronts in
which Black “cultural voices” waged contestations against racial, gender, and class
representations. This included Black creative literature, newspapers, cartoons, anti-
lynching movements, and so forth, which generated white social anxieties that were
expressed in filmmaking.
33
Early cinema consumption was not solely constituted by its
profilmic and visual qualities, but also by Black cultural and political movements that
demanded that “Black images should be read as being polyphonic, ‘speaking of’ and
‘speaking’ to constructions of Blackness produced by both whites and African Americans

31
Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 23-39.
32
Ibid., 39-49.
33
Ibid., 30-38.

88

at the turn of the twentieth century.”
34
Even as silent film helped produce postslavery
racialized subjects as the “other,” Black “cultural voices” rattled the frame of cinema—
well before the technological coupling of image and sound—and challenged the motion
picture capacity to reflect social realities.
With the advent of talkies, Black experiences were still often voiced and
embodied in white characters. The first feature-length film to use synchronized sound,
The Jazz Singer (1927), starred Jewish American actor and singer Al Jolson performing
in blackface. Co-optations of Blackness, consistent throughout American entertainment,
presume that white and other non-Black performers can represent the “Black condition”
as universal to the struggle for mainstream assimilation.
35
The underlying assumption is
that non-Black, but especially white, performers can “speak to and for” Blackness better
than even Black performers. However, if we only take stock of the formal characteristics
of sound used for film, then we miss much of what goes into the construction of
cinematic aurality. To analyze sound in relation to representations of race and
performances of power, it is crucial to consider how sound recording technologies prior
to cinematic adaptation were already undergoing scholarly interventions and cultural
experimentations by Black subjects. Postslavery Black subjects did not simply produce
and/or consume recorded sound. Rather, they found ways to manifest technological
silence that anticipated cinematic modernity. These tactics for silence intervened into
technoscientific advancement and persistently cast radical alterities for sonic self-
representation and social mobility.
Black self-representation reckoned with the way industrial technologies for vision

34
Ibid., 31.

89

and sound were generally geared toward a Victorian fascination with sex
36
and death,
37

specifically Black sexuality and death. As Jonathan Sterne has historicized, the early
nineteenth-century invention of the stethoscope for “mediate auscultation,” or
technologically aided hearing, reflected the shift from theoretical to empirical science.
During this time, the biological sciences were conceived and the body formed the
material terrain for affirming the medical uses of industrial listening. Rather than press an
ear to the chest, as was common medical practice of the day, French internist René-
Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec preserved the moral virtue of his female patients by
applying a tube instead. Laennec honed the instrument in 1809 into a crucial diagnostic
tool and symbol for medicine—the stethoscope—to detect respiratory and pulmonary
diseases, and overall health.
38
Jonathan Sterne describes how Laennec proved the
stethoscope’s effectiveness by performing autopsies on dead bodies. He writes,
[I]t was those findings [during autopsies] that retroactively confirmed the
diagnoses of mediate auscultation. It could thus be said in those first few years of
diagnosis by stethoscope that patients’ bodies were made to speak, but only
retroactively…mediate auscultation required visual proof for its legitimation…
but once established, it would take on a life of its own. The autopsy reference,
then, is not simply a metaphor: once legitimated, mediate auscultation enabled the
movement of the primary site of knowledge in pathological anatomy back from
the dead to the living. Hearing surpassed sight in diagnostic precision, and only in
the patient’s death could the regime of vision again take hold. This primacy of
audile diagnosis would continue into the 20th century.
39

35
Rogin, Michael. “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice,” Critical
Inquiry Vol. 18, No. 3 (1992): 417-453.
36
Carter, Julian. B. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
37
Cavicchi, Daniel. “Jonathan Sterne. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000” (Review). Journal of Popular Music
Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 (2004): 224. For a discussion on the logics of race and death in film, see
Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996.
38
Clending, Logan. Source Book of Medical History, First Edition. New York: Dover
Publications, 1960, 327.
39
Sterne, 126.

90

Sterne’s passage underscores the contradictory ideas about life and death that emerged
with the advent of the biological sciences and in the face of industrial technological
progress. The percussive sounds registered by the stethoscope, and recorded by the doctor
prior to the patient’s death, reiterated the sicknesses of the patient’s body in life. This
medical technological innovation inaugurated an alternate set of spatiotemporal logics
that upset facile distinctions between life and death. The technologically mediated sound
took on “a life of its own” and far beyond what the eye could observe.
As a predecessor to recording and playback sound technologies, the practice of
mediate auscultation helped found the uses for documenting sound as proof of life. Yet,
this technoscientific intervention also suggested that bodily sounds are pathological; that
is, mediate auscultation amplified auditory irregularities that would indicate health
deterioration, even imminent death. So, even though death could be affirmed by the
medical examiner’s eye, the body could sonically return to life. The anticipation of sonic
returns denotes desire between the listener and the body of the sound source, as was the
case with Laennec and his patients. As the sounds of life are technologically recorded and
archived, their replay becomes the expression of the desire to hold that body in life. The
replay of the deceased’s technologically archived sounds insinuates desire for those
subjects. Here, life is not simply defined by the biological body, but instead by the
collective social investment in media representations of the body that outstrip its
corporeal existence. Conversely, those bodies that we do not recall through representation

91

remain dead not because they did not live, but because their mediated silence in the
archive submits them to social death.
40

Understanding that mediated silence = social death has been critical to the
recapitulation of Black feminist and queer voices. Historically, Black feminist “cultural
voices,” such as Ida B. Wells, remarked incisively upon the proliferation of Black death
and its representations. In doing so, they also articulated the silences produced
specifically regarding Black women’s deaths and how they are connected to white
supremacist and heteropatriarchal sexual discourse. By the 1890s, as shown by Gustavas
Stadler, the phonographic recordings of mob lynchings of Black men in the United States
became an early form of popular national sound entertainment that shaped the
development of the recording industry. Yet, according to Stadler, the early phonographic
recordings of lynchings are impossible given the mechanical constraints of the
technology at the time. Instead, these sounds were more likely recorded reenactments
combined with the scratchy effects produced on wax surface by the needle. Nonetheless,
Stadler maintains, this phonographic aural substance entertained because it indexed the
Black body’s location in the white national imaginary as the site of ritualistic violence
and the source for primitive noise.
41

These performances of “Blackness” in phonographic sounds were valuable to
Black and non-Black audiences, albeit for different reasons, and not merely because they
were perceived as authentic. Rather, they returned to the record the sexual violence
practiced against Black men and women through white supremacist heteropatriarchy. For

40
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1985.
41
Stadler, Gustavas. “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity. Social
Text 102 Vol. 28, No. 1 (2010): 90-98.

92

instance, Stadler points out that Black technology users exploited the audience’s
captivation with racial representations and Black death by selling phonographic listening
sessions of lynchings to largely white people who were simultaneously repulsed and
titillated.
42
Rather than address the systemic lynchings of Black people, the white-led
public debated over phonographic obscenity.
43
In this manner, the supposed
advancements of postbellum democracy and science could be exalted while racism
prohibiting Black mobility persisted. Meanwhile, Black cultural voices mobilized the
sonic record of performances of “Black” lynchings to expose the industrial
representational soundscape of the white national imaginary. Black intellectuals, activists,
and cultural producers mobilized around spectacular representations of Black death to lay
bare the “possessive investment”
44
in white masculinist sexual violence.
Ida B. Wells, women’s rights and anti-lynching activist, was already documenting
how the extralegal lynchings of primarily Black men simply accused of sexual
misconduct toward white women became a means to proscribe Black social, economic,
and political advances in the post-Emancipation era. Stewart observes that Wells was
neither surprised or particularly concerned with racist representations of Blackness in
early film precisely because she was less invested in the veritable quality of cinematic
images and more interested in the “interplay between voices, discourses, perspectives,
including those operative in the image itself.”
45
Black feminist voices, especially that of
Wells, forced phonemic awareness of an alterity to the racist conventions of recording
technologies. In a scathing critique written against white feminism and its promise to lead

42
Ibid.
43
Ibid., 91-3.
44
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

93

universal suffrage, Wells exposed how the women’s movement fanned the flames of anti-
Black lynchings. Frances Willard and other white women suffragists curried the favor of
white conservatives by “suppressing the Negro vote” and calling for the “safety of
women, of childhood, of home” against “great dark face mobs.”
46

Wells’ scholarship splits the listening ear of audiences to register both Black
sound and silence. Her discourse exposes the way the hypervisual representations and the
hypersonic “noise” of anti-Black lynchings is most immediately linked to white
supremacist calls to protect white heteronormative families and property. It also makes
apparent how the soundscapes of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and the production
of Black death are aurally produced and consumed through the mundane enforcement of
Black women’s silence. What titillates the white audiences of sonically recorded
reenactments of Black men’s lynchings necessarily entails the denial of Black women’s
representational and political agency, such as the right to vote, and the unfettered access
white men have to Black women’s bodies in material and discursive space, which is
premised upon the unchecked and extrajudicial power exercised by white male vigilantes
supposedly protecting the moral virtue of white women.
What Wells’ voice and the Black feminist voices before and after her tell us is
that the quotidian consumption of audiovisual recordings imagined as Black morbidity
involves the secreting of transgressions against Black women’s sovereignty. Put simply,
Wells critiques the narrative of liberal progress. She reveals how the brokering of rights
in piecemeal fashion, wherein white families are secured first, fundamentally relies on
Black downward mobility, particularly the dislocation of Black women. Rather than

45
Stewart, 30 (quoting Ella Shohat and Robert Stam) and 31.

94

change a racist and misogynist system, narratives of progress work to conversely sustain
the possessive investment in whiteness and heteropatriarchy. Wells’ protests against
white feminists are consistent with those levied nearly one hundred years later by Black
lesbian feminist Audre Lorde against late twentieth-century white feminists and white
gay and lesbian activists.
47
These articulations are also embedded in Black lesbian
feminist and AIDS activist Cathy Cohen’s cautions against the whitening of queer
politics. Cohen argues against fixing queer politics and theory in opposition to
“heterosexuality.” She warns that this binary formulation of sexual politics defaults
“queerness” to white gay and lesbian experiences and concerns. In doing so, queer theory
and politics elides the interlocking of systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism, and
classism. Instead, AIDS and queer scholarship and activisms must consider the historical
denigration of Black sexuality, Black families, and Black mothers.
48
In speaking out
against representations of anti-Black violence and death mobilized through popular and
liberalist discourse, Wells and today’s Black feminist and queer scholar-activists made
silence a powerful alterity for the expressions of Black queer female sexualities.
To perceive Black feminist and queer alterities, we must approach audiovisual
recordings by watching and listening without assuming rational prescriptions. Concerned
with representations of Black female sexuality, and especially the invisibility and silence
regarding Black queer women’s experiences with AIDS and death, Evelyn Hammonds
conjures “black holes” not simply as a metaphor for Blackness, but as a paradox in

46
Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991, 151-2.
47
Young, Hershini Bhana. Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body.
Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2005, 20.
48
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer
Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Vol. 3, No. 4 (1997): 437-465.

95

modern scientific thinking wherein Black queer female sexualities can be articulated. In
the scientific study of spacetime, black holes are a region in which no light passes
through. As the absence of light, black holes represent a radical unknowability according
to the logics of Enlightenment science. The limit line for seeing the interiority of a black
hole to verify its existence is called the “even horizon.” The event horizon functions like
a “ground zero” precisely because what lies beyond it cannot be seen. As an absolute
number and a representation for non-value, “zero” exists only in theory and yet has a
functional place in rational thinking. Hammonds suggests that the sexual discourses
surrounding the Black female body not only structure the absence and silence of Black
women, but fold-in on themselves when confronted by Black queer women’s cultural and
political voices.
Hammonds writes, “The identification of a black hole requires the use of sensitive
detectors of energy and distortion. In the case of black female sexualities, this implies
that we need to develop reading strategies that allow us to make visible the distorting and
productive effects these sexualities produce in relation to more visible sexualities.”
49
The
productive power of Black queer female sexuality lies in its capacity to disturb the real,
the visible, and the normal. Its force is generated through contradictions in rational
thinking. The discourse of Black queerness is simultaneously within and without modern
sexuality, and is uncontainable by identitarian categories. Thus, she devises the term
“black (w)hole” to signal how the speech, desire, and agency in Black queer women’s
sexual discourse runs orthogonal rather than parallel to whiteness and heteropatriarchy.
50

49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.

96

How are black (w)holes sonically manifested in AIDS representations? That the
most efficacious and scalable drug at present to prevent HIV transmission, PrEP, can
only be described in rational terms as “the best estimate is zero,” prompts us to consider
the “event horizon” of biomedical interventions and scientific truths in relation to Black
queer women’s invisibilization and silence. This is not simply a call to include Black
queer women in AIDS research and care, but instead to radically perceive and reconceive
the way Black women’s sexuality is fundamental to the conception of scientific
knowledge. While this may seem lofty, this shift is enacted at the mundane level of AIDS
representations and the aural perception of Black sonic radical “breaks” in our individual
biological bodies. This recalibration in ideological perception is facilitated by Voices,
wherein the representations of Black women’s silence breach categorical distinctions,
such as biology/technology and viewer/viewed, to summon the queer radical imagination.
According to Fred Moten, the sonic radicalism of Black cultural forms function in
“American culture” much like what French post-structuralist theorist Jacques Derrida
described as “invagination.” The term is rooted in seventeenth-century Latin and formed
in relation to the term vagina, which described a “sheath” and female genitalia.
51
Later
adopted into the biological sciences, specifically embryology, “invagination” refers to the
moment in which an embryonic cluster of cells with a hallowed center folds inward to
form a cleavage and begins the multi-layered formation of an organism.
52
Derrida applies
this concept to the formation of genres, which he argues are essentially relational in

51
“Invagination.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed: April 24, 2015,
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=invagination&searchmode
=none. “Vagina.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed: April 24,
2015http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=vagina&searchmode=
none.

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manner and matter, forming “an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome
of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless.”
53
Moten turns
to the experimental sonic performances of Black radicalism in order to sound out how
Black feminist and queer valences disturb American culture from within and without.
Through Frederick Douglass’ foundational scholarly and cultural text, The
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Moten discerns an originary act of
objection to the dehumanization of Black subjects. He reproduces Douglass’ recounting
of the first moment Douglass realized himself a slave when he witnessed as a young
person his Aunt Hester being beaten by her enslaver and heard her scream. Moten returns
to this scene of horror to submit that Aunt Hester’s scream generates the sonic discourse
of a Black radical imagination vested with alternative cultural, social, and political
possibilities. Moten describes Aunt Hester’s scream as the “incorporation or recording of
a sound figured as external both to music and to speech in black music and speech.”
54

Performances of Black resistances to racial and sexual subjection are situated
concurrently within and beyond the realms of speech and sound. The cultural records for
Black sound are both the seat of American musicality, but also figured outside of it.
These sonic recordings are silent, silenced, and yet earsplitting. This splitting of the ear,
where both sound and silence are heard, is produced by Black women’s sonic acts, which
Moten calls the performances of the “radical break.” He maintains that this radical break
is what paradoxically enables and contests the appropriations of Black cultural forms into

52
“Invagination.” Medical Dictionary at TheFreeDictionary.com. Accessed: April 24, 2015,
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/invagination.
53
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 6 and quoting Derrida in 258n5.
54
Ibid., 6.

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mainstream and commercial uses, namely the co-optations of Black speech, sounds, and
music into global “American” popular culture.
We might consider Aunt Hester’s earsplitting scream as the aural registration of
Black queerness—that which is audible yet inaudible—when listening for histories of
racial and gender violence. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman describes Douglass’ intellectual
and cultural interdiction. She identifies a form of “aural literacy” that is taught to the
reader of Douglass’ text. Whereas Black sonic acts might be heard by the white listener
as simple or nonsensical, Stoever-Ackerman maintains that Douglass commands the
reader to listen with “double ears” to “double-voiced discourse.” She writes,
Douglass insists [readers] must somehow experience the sounds in their
own bodies, as themselves, yet ‘silencing’ their preconceived notions in
order to ‘analyze’ black sound on its own terms, no matter how
uncomfortable and ‘soul-killing’ it may be for white listeners to hear their
own culpability resonating ‘through the chambers’ of their hearts, minds
and souls. For Douglass, listening is not an unconscious, universal act, but
an embodied aural literacy: an intellectual, physical and emotional
openness to sound as a site of meaning and ethical involvement. When
listening, Douglass intimates, one always has some skin in the game.
55

Black sounds, Stoever-Ackerman suggests, can be nested within white bodies and
imaginations. What if we imagined anti-Black violence and screams of resistance as
sonically manifested in the presumably quiet recesses of our cavernous bodies and at the
microbiological level? Black queer women’s sonic resistance draws our senses toward an
invagination that is preformed in our own bodies. They point to the acts of racial, sexual,
and morbid violence committed against Black women’s queered bodies to nurture
cellular life. This radical reconceptualization of the biological and its relationship to the
social (w)hole demands that we remain conscious of the false dichotomy and hierarchy

55
Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer. “The word and the sound: listening to the sonic colour-line in
Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative.” Sound Effects Vol. 1, No. 1 (2011): 31.

99

installed between sentient and non-sentient objects and invested in racialization and
gendering processes.
56

Like a pocket, Black queer vocality holds and perforates the biological, social,
and sonic (w)hole, turning it inside out. The sonic purchase of a white cultural
imagination in contemporary media must contend with the aural (w)holeness of Black
queer female sexuality that yields cultural and social strategies for surviving in
dislocation to white capitalist and heteropatriarchal rule. As the first industry and
profession dominated by Black women, 1920s blues music became the soundscape for
expressing Black women’s sexual love, including same-sex love, as distinct from the
white, middle-class and heteropatriarchal expectations of personal or romantic love. In
articulating the Black feminist practices of blues music, Angela Y. Davis writes, “In the
context of the consolidation of industrial capitalism, the sphere of personal love and
domestic life in mainstream American culture came to be increasingly idealized as the
arena in which happiness was to be sought.”
57
Black women performed the blues to enact
affective and sexual relations not as “an idealized realm to which unfulfilled dreams of
happiness were relegated. The historical African-American vision of individual sexual
love linked it inextricably with the possibilities of social freedom in the economic and
political realms.”
58
These articulations of sexual love are responses to the silencing of
Black life as families were torn apart through histories of enslavement and industrial
capitalism, and as these practices of denigration proceed through the present-day AIDS
pandemic.

56
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2012.
57
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith,
and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage Books, 1998, 9.

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Black queer female vocality and musicality is the “unfolding…historical imprint”
of everyday practices of anti-imperialist marxism by colonized subjects, or what Cedric J.
Robinson the “black radical tradition.”
59
The Black radical tradition, Robin D. G. Kelley
submits, “transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more
importantly, enable us to imagine a new society…the cognitive maps of the future of the
world not yet born.”
60
In Voices, this Black radical imagination is conjured through the
soundscape of Black feminist and queer expressions that simultaneously articulate and
disarticulate their silences on film. If we watch and listen to the earsplitting silences in
AIDS video footage, then we hear the voices of Black queer female sexualities that pass
through the aporia in vision, sound, and biological being and conjure radical political
imaginations for shared vulnerability. These Black feminist and queer sounds draw
correlations between ideological, immunological, and imperial wars so that viewers
imagine how these wars live in their own biological bodies. As both a prior and a future,
Black queer women’s soundscapes reshape and resound how we embody sexuality and
susceptibility, socially and collectively.

Voices and the Black Feminist and Queer Soundscape
Voices carefully constructs its anti-racist, feminist, queer, and anti-imperialist
soundscape using non-linear editing to explicate multi-racial, multi-gender, and multi-
city perspectives that are queerly relational, yet specific and divergent, experiences with
AIDS. Unlike How to Survive, where many important people of color in the AIDS

58
Ibid., 10.
59
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2000, 125.

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activist movement are almost completely forgotten, Voices takes great painstaking effort
to show racial and gender minority perspectives. This includes extended dialogue from
DIVA TV’s Ray Navarro and Keith Cylar, who helped found the non-profit organization
Housing Works to address AIDS and homelessness. I focus on the few key instances of
Black women’s self-representations in Voices to show how the articulations of Black
feminisms in AIDS video activism tap into, or auscultate, the queer radical imagination.
Through their dis/articulations of representational silence in the record of AIDS activism,
Black women vocalize what the first chapter describes as a queer relation to corporate,
state, white, and heteropatriarchal power that underlies the vulnerability to neglect and
violence shared unevenly by marginalized communities of color and the global south. As
a means for prompting critical listening, the soundscape constructed by Black women in
Voices makes perceptible the correlation between U.S. wars abroad and the wars on
Black women’s bodies that are inculcated in our sense of biological selves.
Alexandra Juhasz explains that Testing the Limits and DIVA TV shared many of
the same artistic contributors and representational strategies.
61
This explains why footage
from Like a Prayer and Voices is heavily utilized in How to Survive. AIDS activist videos
like these oftentimes mimicked dominant documentary film and television.
62
Thus, the
footage could be easily adapted for audiences familiar with the format while couching
within the viewing experience critiques of mainstream representation. As Roger Hallas
illuminates, Like a Prayer and Voices imitated the “talking heads” format of news
television to interrupt the viewer’s habituated experience of AIDS misrepresentation. The

60
Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press,
2005, 9-10.
61
Juhasz, Alexandra. AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995, 80-81.

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stigmatizing and dehumanizing mainstream representations of AIDS were supplanted
with a “direct address” that moved beyond the liberal representation of giving AIDS a
“face” and a “voice.”
63
He contends that the somatic appearance of persons with AIDS on
film produced an affective and ethical demand of the viewer.
64
However, we should also
consider the momentary visual and sonic representations of Black women in Voices in
spite of Testing the Limit’s earnest and relatively successful attempt to augment women
of color’s voices. This underscores the way affective and ethical responses from AIDS
video viewers are always already marshaled unequally. We might even consider how
Voices fails to make fully legible Black women’s experiences with AIDS. This is not an
indictment of Voices, but rather a call to perceive the generative political valences of
Black feminist and queer “dissemblance.”
65

Exploring the silence of Black femme cinematic subjects, Kara Keeling explains
how an “attractive black female will become perceptible as a lesbian to hegemonic
common senses only when she announces herself as such.” However, a
counterhegemonic awareness of her queerness emerges because “her silence…directs
hegemonic senses…toward a recognition that there exist within them alternative
organizations of cinematic reality.”
66
Keeling reminds us that we do not yet know what

62
Ibid.
63
Hallas, Roger. Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 77-8.
64
Ibid., 92.
65
Hammonds, Evelynn. “Black (W)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality.”
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Vol. 6, No. 2-3 (1994). Accessed: April 4,
2011,
http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.albany.edu/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IACDocuments&
type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&docId=A17250598&source=gale&srcpr
od=AONE&userGroupName=albanyu&version=1.0.
66
Keeling, 131.

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freedom looks like because we have not yet been immersed in its experience.
67
However,
we can glimpse or begin to hear rumblings of a “radical Elsewhere” through the silence
of the Black femme image.
68
Thus, representing Black women’s silence and sexuality in
the pandemic cannot be achieved by populating the landscape of AIDS with their images.
Rather, we might perceive through Black women’s momentary appearances and brief
articulations how our sense of reality is turned inside out and rendered absurd.
In 1989, AIDS activist Dr. Iris Davis helped found AIDS Treatment Resources
(ATR). ATR was created as “an informal and unaffiliated committee directed toward
building coalitions within the endangered and neglected populations.” Davis “blamed the
failure of the established AIDS activist organizations to reach out to the minorities of the
lack of cultural sophistication and class prejudice pervading American society.” The
work of ATR exposed the ineffectual proceedings of AIDS clinical research, including
the profiteering of drug companies, and especially as it more heavily affected the growing
cases of infection and diagnoses among Latina/o and Black communities.
69
Davis and the
work of ATR go unmentioned in How to Survive. However, in Voices, she plays the
important role of the expert and ethical authority that narrates the racial and gendered
absences and silences of AIDS research and care.
Juhasz asserts that Voices and Like a Prayer both used “deconstructive montage
and humor…to mark misinformation…”
70
Spoken with a wry smile and injecting bitter
irony into her critique, Davis’ epigraph underlies the chromatic and temporal

67
I thank Kara Keeling for elucidating this point during her 2011 graduate seminar, “Black
Cultural Studies,” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
68
Keeling, 131-158.
69
Kahn, Arthur D. AIDS, the Winter War: A Testing of America. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1993, 217-20.
70
Juhasz, 91.

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dissemblance of Black female sexuality on film. To argue that “there never was a Gay
Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” displaces the fundamental argument that AIDS
is primarily the consequence of homophobic state, medical, and public neglect. Further,
to insist instead that AIDS is a “color” and a “green related immune deficiency
syndrome, based on money” exposes the capitalistic investment in biomedical progress.
Davis deconstructs the presumed unbiased rationalism of science, linking the color green
and its representation of money as part of a chromatic and temporal succession from
blackness, and black death, towards whiteness, and white life. In remarking upon the
fundamental racism and misogyny embedded in narratives of civilizational progress,
Davis appropriates Black women’s enforced silence to become the source from which the
film conjures “voices from the front.” Other AIDS activists fall back not because they are
simply politically regressive, but because Black feminist and queer articulations of
silence lead the way for imaginings of a “radical Elsewhere” (fig. 4).

105

Figure 4. “There was always an accompanying…Green Related Immune Deficiency
Syndrome, based on money.” Dr. Iris L. Davis, AIDS activist and co-organizer for AIDS
Treatment Resources, voices this chapter’s epigraph in Voices from the Front (1992).

From the space of absence and silence, a new spacetime is formed through the
articulations of Phyllis Sharpe, an HIV-positive Black woman who started the AIDS
activist organization Anger Into Direct Action (AIDA).
71
The struggles endured by
Sharpe, who spoke out often, are well documented in the AIDS historical record,
including the online ACT UP Oral History Project coordinated by AIDS activists and
video makers Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman.
72
According to fellow activists, Sharpe
made clear the particular challenges she experienced as a mother who battled drug
addiction and homelessness and was several times placed in a “Catch-22” situation by an
AIDS social service system not designed to meet her needs.
73
She appears in Voices and
the more recent feature-length independent documentary United in Anger (2012) by
Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard. In Voices, she explains that, in spite of knowing she
will likely not be represented in mainstream media, she persistently gives interviews to
reporters because “maybe somebody will get to hear what I have to say.” Still, How to
Survive, Vito, and most of the other recent AIDS activist films turn a blind eye and a deaf
ear to the appearances and voice of Sharpe in the archive.

71
Cohen, John. “Phyllis Sharpe.” John Cohen AIDS Research Collection. Accessed: April 30,
2015,
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cohenaids/5571095.0422.008?rgn=main;view=fulltext;q1=biography
+files.
72
Hubbard, Jim and Schulman, Sarah. ACT UP Oral History Project. Accessed: April 30, 2015,
http://www.actuporalhistory.org/.
73
King, Charles. “Interview with Charles King” by Sarah Schulman. ACT UP Oral History
Project, January 20, 2010, Accessed: April 30, 2015,
http://www.actuporalhistory.org/interviews/images/king.pdf.

106

Sharpe’s insistence on being heard rather than only being seen is best summed up
when she says in Voices, “
“Because I wouldn’t take pictures. It never makes the paper. Y’know what
I’m saying? And this is another thing: A mother with children. Most of the
time she’s going to fear going public.”

By emphasizing her dual desire to remain politically active while caring for her
children’s wellness, Sharpe exposes the hypocrisy of the growing AIDS bureaucracy that
responded primarily to the needs of white gay men and their visibility. Her status as a
single and homeless Black mother marks her as unsympathetic in the public eye and
shows how the representational focus on white gay men relied upon the historical
denigration, invisibilization, and silencing of Black women and Black families who
were/are, in Cohen’s words, rendered queer.
However, Sharpe’s feminist Black feminist and queer of color voice resounds in
the AIDS representational archive. Her constant willfulness to speak galvanized fellow
activists who selected her to represent them for a television interview on Nightline: Late
Evening News.
74
During the 1990 AIDS activist takeover of the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, Sharpe was recorded in the press stating, “They
[the NIH] do not want to save me or my child.”
75
That same year, Sharpe was a plaintiff
in a class action lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services for
denying federal benefits to women living with AIDS. Sharpe drew attention to the AIDS-
related illnesses that specifically affected HIV-positive women but nonetheless
disqualified them for the same Social Security disability benefits accorded to their male

74
Ibid.
75
United Press International. “60 Arrested in Protest by AIDS Activists.” Los Angeles Times.
May 21, 1990. Accessed: April 30, 2015, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-05-21/news/mn-
299_1_aids-activists.

107

counterparts. Referencing the disparities in AIDS research and care endured by women,
she declared, “You have to be half-dead to be declared disabled.”
76
Although Sharpe has
since passed on her testimonials survive as the sonic afterlives of Black feminist and
queer of color AIDS representations. Through her involvement in direct action and
movement building, newspaper and television news interviews, citations in oral histories,
frequent appearance in video activist footage, peoples’ living memories, and more,
Sharpe’s voice echoes and augments the Black feminist and queer cultural voices before
and after her. We also feel the impact of her political and representational work in
immeasurable and innumerable ways. Her voice lives in the digital sphere, where the
AIDS media of the past resurfaces. She demands that we re-think our definitions of
disability and vulnerability, especially when considering the bodies of Black women who
call for a revolution in our entire system of research and care (fig. 5).

76
Hansen, Susan. “U.S. said to ignore women with AIDS.” The Baltimore Sun. October 30, 1990.
Accessed: April 30, 2015, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1990-10-
03/news/1990276068_1_disability-benefits-women-with-aids-hiv.

108

Figure 5. AIDS activist and co-founder of Anger Into Direct Action, Phyllis Sharpe, is
interviewed in Voices from the Front (1992).

Conclusion: Resounding the Queer Radical Imagination
Voices does not attempt to exhaust the political speech of Black women and
neither will the analysis here. Importantly, Voices draws upon the soundscape of Black
feminist and queer voices to clarify how [mediated] SILENCE = [social] DEATH. The
soundscape of Voices reverberates “polyphonic” Black women’s representations,
“‘speaking of’ and ‘speaking’ to constructions of Blackness,”
77
through the medium of
video to force audience recognition of the vulnerabilities that lie within the social body.
Specifically, the silence of Black women in the social body is amplified so that we
continue to listen to their sonic afterlives. We hear the multiplying connections between

77
Stewart, 31.

109

the scientific individuation of biological bodies to the reiterations of white life and black
death. These cultural voices explicate how science and systems of health are designed to
care for whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and the nuclear family. They demand that we
reorient these institutions to care with and for non-normative families, genders, and
sexualities, including Black women, Black mothers, and Black families. These feminist
and queer of color sonic afterlives drive critiques against the category of the biological
“human” and expound a queer radical imagination formed through a shared sense of
vulnerability.
The soundscape of Voices makes perceptible the relationship between our own
bodies and war. Christina Hanhardt describes ACT UP as an organization “focused on
vulnerability, by highlighting whose bodies were vulnerable to the vagaries of the
medical establishment and federal policy but also by using the vulnerability of their own
bodies in dramatic direct actions…ACT UP also raises the question of how those
excluded from the category of [the human] might make a variety of political claims that
exceed the limited terms of recognition.”
78
After auscultating the processes of anti-Black
racialization and gendering that makes the social body ill, Voices portrays how activists
demonstrated with their own bodies the associations between the globalization of AIDS
and U.S. global militarism.
About three-fourths into Voices, the film depicts the increase in AIDS activists’
anti-war rhetoric. Dr. Iris L. Davis and others highlight how the closure of hospitals in
historically people of color and poor neighborhoods in New York City contributes to the
pandemic. Later, activists interrupt the 1990 sixth annual conference on AIDS in San

78
Hanhardt, Christina. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, 32.

110

Francisco to protest almost ten years of U.S. government neglect. The film pauses on a
close-up graphic of U.S. currency. Titles alternate on the screen: “5 YEARS OF
HEALTHCARE = 5 MINUTES OF DEFENSE SPENDING” (fig. 6). The footage cuts to
a fiery blast and the emission of smoke as a warhead launches from the ground into the
night sky. A title at the top of the screen frames the image: “…DURING PEACETIME.”
Meanwhile a voiceover in the vein of a television news reporter explains, “A scud missile
eludes the U.S. patriot missiles defending Tel Aviv” (fig. 7). The footage quickly
dissolves and we see and hear a familiar television program’s graphic and musical cue.
Dan Rather announces, “This is the CBS News...” However, the audience suddenly hears
“Fight AIDS, not Arabs!” We see the top of an AIDS activist’s head bob just below
Rather’s reporting desk as the activist is grabbed, presumably by the set’s crewmembers,
and forced off screen. The image of Rather fades to black for almost eight seconds of
darkness and silence before we hear commotion on the set and see Rather’s face light up
again.
The footage cuts to several protestors who are interviewed at the 1991 march for
the “Day of Desperation” in New York City. This includes Telia Virgin of the Persons
With AIDS Coalition who declares that she marches for “Black and Hispanic women,
women of color who are not getting the proper healthcare during this AIDS crisis. We are
the forgotten majority.” Juan Mendez of ACT UP New York states, “We want to tell the
world that this is a global crisis; that there are issues all over the place concerning AIDS.
That there are issues concerning housing, concerning needle exchange, concerning
insurance, concerning the Latinos, gays, and lesbians…” Other protestors angrily discuss
the U.S. government’s quick mobilization to “house people in Saudi Arabia for oil.” A

111

representative from the Community of Homeless Persons with AIDS staging a die-in
declares, “We’re not going to be silent because silence equals death!” Police are shown
as a hostile force against protestors throughout the video, and in this instance, dragging
the staged coffins away without regard, like they would a person with AIDS.

Figure 6. “5 YEARS OF HEALTHCARE = 5 MINUTES OF DEFENSE SPENDING.”
Voices from the Front (1992).

Later that evening, the footage shows red and pink balloons are released at Grand
Central Station to float the sign “MONEY FOR AIDS NOT FOR WAR" (fig. 8).
Protestors scream, “Healthcare, not warfare! AIDS won’t wait!” and hold signs with
statements such as “ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS, NOT IRAQ” (fig. 9). We
hear Larry Kramer, David Falcone, Bill Monaghan, and others activists discuss how U.S.
wars in the Middle East diverts attention and money away from addressing the savings
and loans crisis, AIDS, housing, and healthcare. A medium shot lingers on a set of

112

protestors who are chanting, revealing several activists wearing what looks like variations
of keffiyeh scarves to allude to the solidarity AIDS activists felt with Palestinians
suffering from the U.S.-political and military support for the Israeli occupation (fig. 10).
Shortly thereafter, Keith Cylar proclaims, “I think the only way to end the AIDS crisis is
through direct action.” Taking statements from various activists speaking to the power of
laying one’s body on the line to underscore social vulnerability to AIDS, the film begins
to wind to a close.

Figure 7. Auscultating Black feminist silences and the body of U.S. war. “A scud missile
eludes the U.S. patriot missiles defending Tel Aviv.” Voices from the Front (1992).

113

Figure 8. Protestors at the 1990 “Day of Desperation” action in New York City release
balloons at Grand Central Station with the sign: “MONEY FOR AIDS NOT FOR WAR.”

Figure 9. Protestors at the 1990 “Day of Desperation” action in New York City hold
signs: “ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS, NOT IRAQ.” Voices from the Front
(1992).

114

Figure 10. Protestors at the 1990 “Day of Desperation” action in New York City wearing
variations of what looks like keffiyeh scarves, suggesting AIDS activist solidarity with
Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

The sounds of multi-racial, multi-gender, and anti-imperialist AIDS activism do
not merely accompany, or travel in place of, the images. They splice seemingly disparate
visual representations together, editing them into a loop wherein the disappearances from
mainstream AIDS narratives can be felt through auditory political discourse that
complicates and contradicts mainstream narration. That is, the recorded multi-racial,
multi-gendered, and anti-imperialist “voices” of AIDS crisis activism name, re-name,
announce, denounce, counter-narrativize, counter-memorize, and even remain
productively silent in the pandemic. As the footage and audiovisual practices of original
analog AIDS videos, like Voices, are coopted into today’s popular AIDS media
productions, feminist and queer of color sonic cues crosscut digital mediums and
theatrical settings, overwhelming, fragmenting, and reassembling commercial stories.

115

The sonic afterlives of Black feminist and queer silences do not rehabilitate the
images of women and queers of color to make them (re)presentable. Nor do they
recuperate women and queer of color visibility simply so these subjects can be included
in the charmed circle. The politics of silence form into sonic afterlives that challenge the
singularity of meaning, the authority of the image, and the evidentiary status of the visual
field by imitating, interrupting, and disabling the proprietary channels for representing
and speaking about AIDS. In doing so, political practices of silence reclaim the
technologies of expertise and power, including science and sound, from their
monopolized institutional uses. Loosening authority from its scientific and bureaucratic
grip reveals how the logics behind AIDS don’t add up.
To compare scientific knowledge to direct action by no means reduces AIDS
politics to these components. Nor does this formulation posit a simple binary between the
two. Instead, it indexes a revolutionary threshold in AIDS activism. The sonic afterlives
of feminist and queer of color AIDS activism interjects into the presumption that AIDS
protest was only about obtaining effective medication, or that pills address the disparities
wrought by uneven access to care that is induced by systemic racism and misogyny.
AIDS crisis activists critiqued racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism and U.S.-led global
imperialism. They showed how the war “inside” the body correlates with wars fought
against communities of color, especially Black women, and U.S. wars fought “abroad.”
AIDS activists challenged pharmaceutical profiteering, endemic homelessness,
moralization of intravenous drug usage, healthcare privatization, economic crises, police
hostility, and U.S. wars in the Middle East—issues that persist in the present—to forge

116

the spaces of racialized and gendered absence and silence into a queer radical
imagination that travels across time and space.

117

Chapter 3: Time Bends and Queer of Color Kinships in
Paris is Burning and Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place

Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe's documentary film Ke Kulana He Mahu:
Remembering a Sense of Place (2001) portrays the ways the mahu have remained
entrenched in Hawaiian culture and society, despite the collusion between capitalism,
whiteness, and heteropatriarchy to subjugate, or even eradicate, Kanaka Maoli (Native
Hawaiian) lives. The film asserts that “mahu” is a linguistic designation that once
referred to the “physical hermaphrodite” and “practicing homosexuality” during pre-
colonial times. Presently, the term describes “gay” and/or “transgender” Kanaka Maoli.
1

However, when considering the film’s structural and thematic interventions into the
spatiotemporal conditions of modernity, Ke Kulana renders “mahu” as a way of being
that is incommensurate with “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” or “transgender” categories of
identity. The film renarrativizes history using recorded interviews with scholars, activists,
cultural producers, and representations that connect mahu in the present to pre-modern
existence. Through visual and aural cues, including photographs, performances, chants,
and songs, Ke Kulana reverses the temporal gaze of history. It looks back at pre-colonial
Kanaka Maoli life through the chronicling of mahu subjectivities and kinships that

1
I use “Kanaka Maoli” instead of “Native Hawaiian” to reflect the film and its interviewees’
usage. I write “mahu” with a lower case “m” since I understand it as a category of affiliation
rather than a proper noun. Following Ty P. Kawika Tengan (2008), I do not italicize Hawaiian
words, as I do not wish to foreignize the language against an English standard. However, I do not
use diacritical markings (except when writing “Hawai‘i”), as I am not a Hawaiian linguist. I
deploy the phrase “pre-colonial” instead of “pre-contact” because it refers not simply to one
incident by which Kanaka Maoli cosmology and culture suddenly disintegrated. The term
underscores white and non-white settlement and colonization as ongoing events. Noenoe K. Silva
rejects the notion that the archipelago was insular, or that Kanaka Maoli only experienced contact
with whites through Euro-American imperialist seafaring. See Noenoe K. Silva. Aloha Betrayed:
Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 15-24.

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reclaim traditional practices in the present. Ke Kulana also connects mahu kinships in the
Hawaiian archipelago to queer of color kinships across the geopolitical landscape of
Euro-American empire. The film’s subjects participate in Ballroom subculture
2
made
popular by Black and Latina/o gay and transgender “houses” in the urban centers of the
U.S. northeast, as depicted in the documentary film, Paris is Burning (1990). Queer of
color kinships are proposed as a performance of anticolonial cultural politics.
This chapter compares Ke Kulana and Paris as two documentaries that bookend
approximately a decade of films comprising the New Queer Cinema (NQC) genre. It
examines these visual texts as critical demonstrations of how techniques used in NQC to
document queer of color lives generate representational strategies that forge communities
of survival in the face of AIDS. I begin with and focus on Ke Kulana as a more recent
feature-length documentary that echoes its well-known predecessor, Paris, to trace a
genealogy of queer of color representations. These film’s visual tactics, or what I have
been referring to as “queer visibilities,” overlap significantly with the late 1980s to early
1990s video activism during the AIDS “crisis” as examined in chapter one. The
experimental representational forms AIDS video activists developed to document the
disenfranchised racial and gender minorities of the U.S. epidemic are shared by, and
foundational to, NQC and its emergence in cinema. Furthermore, as I show in this
chapter, these feminist and queer of AIDS video activist afterlives have become central to

2
I follow Marlon M. Bailey’s designation of “Ballroom” culture as “Black and Latino/a LGBT
community” that “uses performance to forge and celebrate alternative gender and sexual
identities, kinship, and community and continues to create livable lives for Black LGBT members
in Detroit and throughout North America.” Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens Up in Pumps:
Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2013, x.

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today’s interventional uses of popular media to install anti-racist and feminist queer of
color cultural productions, kinship, and critique.
During the U.S. “crisis” period, women and queers of color constituted the most
underrepresented and misrepresented groups in early mass media AIDS depictions, which
in turn generated lasting deleterious affects on these communities. Women and queer of
color AIDS activists harnessed new, relatively inexpensive VHS camcorder technology
to stage and record protest. They created AIDS videos in analog format that were mostly
locally and non-commercially circulated to educate against AIDS misinformation and to
politicize its viewers.
3
Similarly motivated, the early producers of NQC films used their
broader audience reach through broadcast television, film festivals, and wider VHS
distribution, to interject queer of color images into the consuming public and confront
mass media ignorance and AIDS stigmatization. They formed styles and methods for
filmmaking that created a visual grammar for anti-racist and feminist political dissent and
queer of color coalition.
By comparing Ke Kulana at the end of the NQC movement to Paris, which was
produced in the genre’s earlier years, I track the steady commodification of queer and
AIDS representations as they enter commercial markets. More specifically, I expand
understandings of feminist and queer of color video activist afterlives by analyzing the
interferences queer of color AIDS images, sounds, and performace enact in the
production and consumption of NQC films. As I took-up in chapter one, recent feature-
length documentaries about historical AIDS activism, like How to Survive a Plague

3
According to AIDS media activist and scholar Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS videos were designed to
circulate in ways that were “local and specific” and was meant to politicize its producers and
viewers. Juhasz, Alexandra, Presentation: “AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative

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(2011), adapt archival analog AIDS video activist footage to spread the tale of white gay
male activists’ biological survival through today’s digital media. Yet, these films
inevitably conjure, through brief appearances of queer of color images, the insurgent
affective relations and politics for anti-racist, feminist, and queer of color AIDS activism.
Without archival AIDS activist footage by and about women and queer people of color,
today’s popular AIDS documentaries could not be made. Likewise, women and queer of
color AIDS filmmakers helped create NQC while also interceding into its largely white
gay male dominated representations. I track here how women and queers of color use
experimentations in documentary filmmaking to intervene into their marginalization. In
addition, their mechanisms for creating enduring queer of color representations
anticipated the increased commercialization of NQC films throughout the 1990s as they
reached popular cinema audiences. At the start of the NQC movement in the late 1980s,
films were screened through VHS, theaters, and television. Later, they were more widely
screened in digital format through television, theaters, and DVD distribution. More
recently, they have become accessible through Internet-based video-on-demand, like
Netflix.com, where someone with a subscription to the service can select and “Watch
Instantly” Paris. Put simply, without the advent of the NQC genre and its attendant
women and queer of color innovators, mainstream AIDS films like How to Survive would
not have a commercial market in which to thrive.
I identify in this chapter specific strategies for representing the magnitude of the
ongoing crisis among queers of color as they tie-in with longer histories of colonial
violence and gender oppression. By constructing a visual grammar for AIDS as a colonial

Video” for “Oxy VideoCinematheque: 1967-2014,” Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, March
27, 2014.

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legacy, queers of color across featured in and viewing different NQC visual texts
communicate with one another in spite of and through the global circuits of capitalist
commodification. Women and queer of color NQC filmmakers draw upon models for
AIDS representational collectivity that interlaced subjects, audiences, and politics across
different films. I show in this chapter how Ke Kulana and Paris, which span the “crisis”
and “post-crisis” eras of AIDS, use queer of color images to “touch” and “bend” space
and time, thereby constituting queer kinships among its interview subjects and viewers
that span geography and history.

The Queer of Color Moving Image in New Queer Cinema
In 1992, B. Ruby Rich coined the phrase “New Queer Cinema” (NQC) to
describe the late 1980s through 1990s increased independent circulation of “Homo
Pomo” films, “irreverent” and “excessive” in style, “full of pleasure,” reworking history
and identity politics.
4
However, Rich later argued that, with the success of films such as
Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Kimberly Pierce’s Boys Don’t Cry in
1999, NQC lost its “radical impulse” and was relegated to a “niche market.” This led
Rich to decry NQC as more a “moment than a movement.”
5

4
Rich, B. Ruby. “New Queer Cinema,” New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michele
Aaron. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 16. Originally published as “New Queer
Cinema,” Sight & Sound, Vol. 2, No. 5 (1992).
5
As B. Ruby Rich argues, “The era was defined by two other major but utterly unrelated events:
the survival of the Aids (sic) virus (but few of its victims) past the original crisis into a second
decade and the proliferation of small-format video as a medium for both production and
distribution. To these should be added the new alliances forged between lesbians and gay men in
the wake of Aids (sic) organising, along with an exponential growth in gay and lesbian film
festivals servicing emotionally spent communities in need of relief and inspiration.” Rich, B.
Ruby. “Queer and present danger.” Sight & Sound Vol. 10, No. 3 (2000). Accessed: 3/19/14,
http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/80.

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In the commercialization of films labeled “NQC,” there was also a stark shift
away from the subject of AIDS by the late 1990s. According to Rich, NQC evolved from
AIDS, the small-format video, and new political alliances between lesbians and gay
men.
6
In other words, NQC films are not “queer” merely because they represent lesbian
and gay subjects. Rather, queerness designates the relationship among subjects politicized
by AIDS and the confrontational tactics of AIDS activism that involved innovative uses
of video. Together, AIDS activism, queer relationality, and video documentation forged
the political sensibilities and enabled the production, distribution, and consumption
networks for the NQC moment.
7

If queer relationality follows the paths of the pandemic, then the stories threaded
together through NQC films are not monolithic. Nor are they easily made into a singular
narrative. As Bill Horrigan notes, history did not always appear linear or progressive in
AIDS media. He submits that camcorders employed during the earlier years of AIDS
protests and educational campaigns underlie a “fracturing of perspectives”

about the
pandemic.
8
Both AIDS and camcorder video have been described as quintessentially
post-modern. Hence, in describing NQC as united by a “Homo Pomo” style, Rich

6
Ibid.
7
Julianne Pidduck contends, “AIDS and queer activism of the 1980s and 1990s were pivotal to
the development of this independent circuit—an aesthetic, institutional and cultural basis for self-
representation not directly reliant on commercial funding…Festivals and feminist/queer
distributors facilitated innovative self-representation and assembled engaged audiences. The
audiences, aesthetics and expertise that developed in these contexts have been pivotal to the
genesis of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon. Community-based festivals are part of a ‘queer
public sphere’…Urban activist and arts contexts that include film festivals and other media have
inspired new ways of looking, acting and being that fuel the distinctive energy of the New Queer
Cinema (emphasis included).” See Pidduck, Julianne. “New Queer Cinema and Experimental
Video.” New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Aaron. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2004, 89.
8
Horrigan, Bill. “Notes on AIDS and its Combatants: An Appreciation.” Theorizing
Documentary, ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993, 164-173.

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proclaimed these films “don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary or strategy or
concern.”
9
Or, do they?
While NQC films may differ in content or aesthetic, José Arroyo and Monica B.
Pearl argue that HIV/AIDS constitutes an absent center.
10
That is, HIV/AIDS may not
appear explicitly in the content of these films, but necessarily underpins these films’
critical interventions into Hollywood cinematic narrative tradition through
reconfigurations of space and time, life and death.
11
By assessing NQC’s historical
antecedents and legacies in strategic queer of color representations, I assert that the visual
methods for representing AIDS among queer people of color endure in today’s ongoing
popular consumption of Paris and the offshoots of its queer of color imagery in Ke

9
Rich, 16.
10
In analyzing Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) as a quintessential film of New
Queer Cinema, José Arroyo states, “Idaho is not about AIDS in a conventional sense. The
pandemic is not even mentioned in the film. However…I would like to demonstrate… that the
pandemic is both Idaho’s absent cause and an important interpretive context (emphasis
included).” See Arroyo, José. “Death Desire and Identity: the Political Unconscious of ‘New
Queer Cinema.’” activating theory: lesbian, gay, bisexual politics, eds. Joseph Bristow and
Angelia R. Wilson. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993, 72. In citing Arroyo’s essay and his
contention that AIDS is the context for New Queer Cinema, Monica B. Pearl argues, “AIDS
needed representation, partly because it was considered unrepresentable. So, although there are
‘AIDS movies’…even independent films that are about AIDS, are often about AIDS indirectly
(emphasis included).” She goes on to say, “[W]hat makes [a film] New Queer Cinema is not the
ways it is overtly about AIDS, but the ways that it is preoccupied with death and time and
history.” See Pearl, Monica B. “AIDS and New Queer Cinema.” New Queer Cinema: A Critical
Reader, ed. Michel Aaron. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 23, 27-8.
11
Macarena Gómez-Barris assesses how documentary films can document absences about the
period of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile in the face of post-traumatic national
erasure. Specifically, Gómez-Barris is interested in how certain documentaries can “visually
conjur[e]” the “figure of muteness” to draw forth memories of authoritarian violence enacted
upon those who have disappeared (103). Analyzing Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto (1998),
Gómez-Barris describes the intersubjective space conjured through viewing the film, which
generates the affective condition for “a living, rather than finalized, death among families of the
disappeared…the experience of time for relatives of victims, namely bringing into relief the
contradictions between this time-sense and institutional notions of forgetting based upon linear
time…” In the film there emerges a space “to visualize a different conception of death, with more
porous boundaries between the dead and the living, than the Western imagining of death as
separation and finality (112).” See Gómez-Barris, Macarena. Where Memory Dwells: Culture and
State Violence in Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, 103, 112.

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Kulana and other pop cultural texts. These strategies for video activist afterlives appear in
AIDS video activism, but were also taken-up by NQC filmmakers.
AIDS video activism and NQC were confluent but also divergent in their aims
and distribution. As part of its political process, feminist and queer of color AIDS videos,
like DIVA TV’s Like a Prayer (1991), were produced by and screened for members from
these underrepresented groups. These videos were usually shown before small
audiences.
12
Sometimes, AIDS activist videos were shown on local cable access,
13
which
points to how distinguishing between NQC films and AIDS activist videos sometimes
seemed senseless. The tactics for AIDS video activist afterlives appeared in NQC’s
experimental queer of color films broadcast on network television, screened during film
festivals, and commercially distributed via VHS. Early NQC films, such as Marlon
Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) addressed the issues of racism, gender, and AIDS in the
lives of Black gay men while also challenging the linear telling of history.
For my analysis, I have selected two films that were made by lesbian activists
who were not members of the groups featured in the respective documentaries. Paris was
produced by Jennie Livingston, a white lesbian member of the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power (ACT UP). Kathryn Xian, the lead filmmaker in the production of Ke
Kulana, is a Korean American lesbian born and raised in the Hawaiian archipelago, but is
not Kanaka Maoli. I argue that, while the the identity of the filmmakers infuse these
documentaries’ politics, the queer of color subjects that appear in the films also perform,
represent, and map the coalitional possibilities embedded in the production and
consumption of NQC films. Like the representations I highlighted in chapter one, I will

12
Ibid.

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focus on queer of color images in Ke Kulana and Paris that engage in racial and gender
performance, display desire and pleasure, and intentionally avert linear histories. While
AIDS representations became more palatable in the mass market, the interventional
strategies feminist and queers of color NQC films also spread across media networks to
transmit queer of color kinships.

Companions: Ke Kulana and Paris
Set against the backdrop of the late1990s same-sex marriage movement and the
AIDS pandemic in Hawai‘i, Ke Kulana explores the settler colonial ideologies and
practices the films’ informants are faced with in modern times. It also emphasizes their
strategies of survival through mahu kinships formed alongside the normatively structured
home. The continued colonization of Hawai‘i has eroded the Kanaka Maoli peoples’
sense of kinship to the land, enforcing their consolidation into the heteropatriarchally
structured, nuclear family fold. Land dispossession has resulted in the social, political,
and economic disenfranchisement of the Kanaka Maoli, as well as the erosion of their
traditional spiritual practices. Instead, the tourist economy, Christian values, and a settler
society made-up of whites and non-Indigenous, non-whites, are privileged. In this
configuration of “local” life, mahu peoples are subjected to further marginalization as the
same-sex marriage debate rages between Christian-influenced conservatives and liberal
lesbian and gay civil rights activists. In particular, the mahu remain vulnerable to HIV-
infection and AIDS diagnoses.

13
Hallas, Roger. Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 99.

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According to the film, the mahu are the target of local tensions, their place in
Kanaka Maoli cultural and spiritual traditions undercut, while they are simultaneously
denied association with the largely white settler-led same-sex marriage movement. The
film addresses the maligning of the mahu as the work of Euro-American colonization,
which imposed bifurcated gender and sexual norms. The ideological diametric
oppositions between “female/male” and “gay/heterosexual” produced Kanaka Maoli, and
their multiple gender categories and non-nuclear familial associations, as “queer.” This
“queerness” is displaced onto, embodied by, and multiply inflected through the signifier
“mahu” and performed through mahu kinships. The film’s mahu subjects intervene into
Kanaka Maoli assimilation by laying claim to the role the mahu play in maintaining pre-
colonial cultural and spiritual traditions in the present. In addition, the film reveals the
ways mahu kinships develop anticolonial cultural politics and strategies of survival in the
face of AIDS by foregrounding their subjectivities as interstitial with other queers of
color. By mirroring certain practices of ball culture, mahu performances of queer of color
kinship connect the Hawaiian archipelago to the spatially and temporally distant gay and
transgender Black and Latina/o subjects living in the continental U.S.
Here, I concentrate on the collaborations between anticolonial, Indigenous mahu
subjectivities and queer of color kinships practiced by Black and Latina/o subjects living
in disparate cores of Euro-American empire. I argue that queer of color performances
across geohistorical imperial formations critically intervene into AIDS and colonial
regimes of race and gender. I consider the articulations, images, and performances of
mahu, portrayed in Ke Kulana as pre-colonial ways of being, alongside the
confabulations of class privilege, “realness,” and “reading” among the working-class and

127

poor Black and Latina/o gay and transgender subjects in the earlier documentary, Paris.
Ke Kulana operates as my primary text, while my readings of Paris build on analyses
made by other cultural theorists. In addition, I emphasize in my analyses Kathryn Xian’s
role in the production of Ke Kulana because my interaction with the filmmakers has been
chiefly with her, which I will explain later. Each film spans approximately a decade of
AIDS and queer activisms and queer of color cultural production. The linguistic and
performative excesses conjured together by the films’ depictions of “mahu” and
“queerness,” I assert, form into semantic and somatic projections that disturb modern
spatiotemporal constructions and identity constructs.
I begin by discussing my own relationship to Ke Kulana, the significance of each
film to New Queer Cinema, and the role of New Queer Cinema as a strategy for
surviving AIDS. Then, I turn toward an analysis of the structure and content of both films
to establish their resonances with one another. Finally, I draw upon Laura U. Marks’
sensuous media theory (“hapticism”), Elizabeth Freeman’s “erotohistoriography,” and
Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “the fold,” to analyze how the recorded performances of queer
of color kinships in both films generate a visual grammar that touches and multiply bends
time. These time bends efface modern spatiotemporal logics. Queer of color kinships, I
argue, circumnavigate the militarized Pacific and the colonial Atlantic to confront AIDS
and form political alliances between Pacific Islanders of the archipelago and Black and
Latina/o subjects living in the U.S. urban northeast.

AIDS, New Queer Cinema, and Strange Familiarity

128

My relationship to the film Ke Kulana stems from my previous role as the Gay
Bisexual Transgender Project Coordinator of Prevention Education at the Asian and
Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA) in New York City. During my tenure
from the early to mid-2000s, I was contacted by one of the film’s directors, Kathryn
Xian, who inquired about showing the documentary for the film series I curated for
APICHA. The “Queer Asian & Pacific Islander Film Series,” a program I inherited from
my predecessors, was developed as a tool for HIV prevention. Hourly employed peer
educators supported me with its running and I maintained it on a limited budget allocated
by funds from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The films
we screened addressed gender and sexuality in the context of Asian and Pacific Islander
lives. These films were often independent and/or foreign shorts with limited to no
distribution in the United States. Screenings were bi-monthly, free and open to the public,
and we often served food and refreshments without charge. Showings usually occurred in
small commercial or independent theaters in Manhattan’s East Village, a once thriving
artistic center of the United States that was devastated by AIDS. Due to space
restrictions, seating was limited to twenty to thirty people. The film series was oftentimes
co-sponsored with other community-based organizations, like 3rdI New York, the Gay
Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York, the South Asian Lesbian and Gay
Association, the Audre Lorde Project, and the International Gay and Lesbian Human
Rights Commission.
The program responded to the need for more Asian and Pacific Islander
representations and was aimed at building community in order to stem the effects of
HIV/AIDS. These might seem like lofty expectations to place on filmic representations—

129

if one only considers cinema as only a purely economic endeavor. In its conscious
incorporation of independent, foreign, and experimental film, the Queer Asian & Pacific
Islander Film Series reflected longstanding ideas about “politically motivated films as a
revolutionary act.”
14
Screenings were followed by discussions in which attendees
exchanged ideas about their viewing experiences. As facilitators, I, or the peer educators,
steered conversations toward addressing race, sexuality, power, and HIV/AIDS. As its
title points out, the film series drew from the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s,
which emerged out of the historical relationship between Third Cinema, feminist
filmmaking, and 1980s AIDS media activism.
15

Ke Kulana, Helen Hok-Sze Leung argues, breaks with Hollywood’s
mainstreaming of the queer. It exists as part of a set of films in the late 1990s and early
2000s “capable of resisting the commercialisation of New Queer Cinema and revitalising
the vision of Third World Cinema.”
16
The documentary combines themes about AIDS
with practices of gender transgression and non-nuclear family formations among queer
people of color, much like its forerunner, Paris. Paris documented the ball culture of
1980s gay, drag, and transgender Black and Latina/o subjects living in New York City. It
chronicles the history of “houses” made-up of non-normative kinships, the use of
signifying practices such as “reading” to constitute minoritarian solidarity through

14
Juhasz, Alexandra. AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995, 35.
15
Juhasz examines experimental videos among artist collectives who participated and
documented AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) 1980s and 1990s AIDS activism.
Camcorders were not just tools for observation, but part of strategies for direct action, confronting
both police and viewers. She argues AIDS alternative videos inherited from the practices of Third
Cinema and feminist filmmaking. Juhasz, 31-51. See also B. Ruby Rich. New Queer Cinema: the
Director’s Cut. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, 16-34.
16
Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “New Queer Cinema and Third Cinema.” New Queer Cinema: A
Critical Reader, ed. Michele Aaron. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 163.

130

relations of difference, and dance moves performed to parody or invoke the image of
white upper-class privilege, like “voguing.” Lucas Hilderbrand describes Paris as a “key
text” for New Queer Cinema that “achieved uncommon commercial success in its
national release and catalyzed significant ideological debate.”
17
He also places Paris as
part of the early 1990s emergence of New Black Cinema.
18
Ke Kulana He Mahu’s entry
into New Queer Cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century stokes the earlier
ideological grain that gave Paris its cultural resonance—its queer of color texture and
feeling. At the same time, Ke Kulana shifts different ground. It intervenes into a different
time and place, but never forgoes its relevance and relation to Paris.
Despite the distinct subjects, lives, and periods that each film addresses, Ke
Kulana and Paris echo one another structurally and thematically. Bringing Ke Kulana to
Manhattan’s East Village underscored this relation. These two films fold together two
moments of New Queer Cinema across different instances of the AIDS pandemic—the
“crisis” and “post-crisis” eras of AIDS. The queer reverberations between Ke Kulana and
Paris sifted the memory of the East Village’s richly creative queer communal past buried
beneath the high rents and expensive restaurants that came to dominate during the 1990s
in the aftermath of the AIDS onset, as depicted in the musical Rent. The screening of Ke
Kulana in New York City also generated a conscious identification between the mahu in

17
Lucas Hilderbrand. Paris is Burning: A Queer Film Classic. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press,
2013, 30.
18
Hilderbrand states that momentum in New Black Cinema gained after Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing (1989), citing the works of Manthia Diawara (1993), Paula Massood (2003), and Keith
Harris (2006). New Black Cinema in this context is characterized by “realism, contemporary
urban life, and masculinity.” See Hilderbrand, 113-114. However, in 1983, Clyde Taylor argued
that “new black cinema: emerged from the 1960s ‘black arts movement,’ marked by ‘its realness
dimension, its relation to Afro-American oral tradition, and its connections with black music.’”
See Taylor, Clyde. “New U.S. Black Cinema.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media No.

131

the film and the Black and Latina/o subjects of Paris, thereby conjuring a more expansive
racial/ethnic and geographical range for queer of color cultural politics that stretched
from the North Pacific to the Atlantic edge of the U.S. northeast, and beyond.
In February 2004, Ke Kulana was screened as part of a set of films that prompted
a unique and politically inflected occasion. Although themes about gender transgression
were regularly shown as part of the film series, this screening was co-sponsored and
promoted by a coalition of organizations, including the Transgender Asian Pacific
Alliance of APICHA, led by Sunny Shiroma, and the New York Association for Gender
Rights Advocacy, headed by Pauline Park. The collaboration resulted in films
specifically addressing Asian and Pacific Islander transgender and gender queer
experiences. Other films included Nina (Rolmar Baldonado, Australia, 2003), Gulabi
Aina (Sridhar Rangayan, India, 2002), and Androgynous Adventures of Captain Kitty
(Aron Cho, United States, 2003).
19
Filmmaker Xian was generous with her time and
patience throughout the organizing process. A Korean American lesbian activist born and
raised in Hawai‘i, Xian founded Zang Pictures in 1999 as a volunteer run company that
uses film “as social and community activism, as well as an integral forum for artistic
expression.”
20
Zang Pictures encourages a “high degree of community involvement,
which is evident in Ke Kulana, which draws most of its resources – funding, crew

28 (April 1983): 46-48, 41; also published online, Accessed: December 10, 2013,
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC28folder/NewBlackCinema.html.
19
“News, Events, and Happenings,” New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy,
Accessed: December 10, 2013, http://www.nyagra.tripod.com/events.html.
20
Tengan, Ty P. Kawika. “Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place (film review).”
The Contemporary Pacific Vol. 15, No. 123 (2003): 232.

132

members, as well as the performers, activists, and scholars interviewed in the
documentary – from the community the film aims to serve.”
21

Advertising for the special screening by the Asian & Pacific Islander Film Series
was conducted through organizational email listservs, Internet postings, and handbills
distributed at bars, clubs, and the New York City Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender
Center. The screening was also mentioned in the Gay City News. It drew a crowd that
exceeded room capacity, with persons taking to the floor and standing against walls to
catch a glimpse. The event brought together an unprecedented collection of peoples in the
years that I conducted the film series, including artists, activists, social workers, and a
variety of persons unaffiliated with the network of New York City community organizers
I had come to know. After the screening, the audience seemed energized. Discussion was
rife, with some sharing how grateful they were to see reflections of their lives while
others were compelled by representations of queer life that were otherwise
unrecognizable to them. Audience members drew connections between the films
screened that day, but also focused on Ke Kulana and referred to Paris. Xian fielded
questions with ease, providing context for the production and its explicitly political
agenda. The film and its screening created a lasting impression on me. I recall its subjects
and texts sensorially, through the images and sounds played in my head. I dwelled in the
film’s strange familiarity, as I thought about Paris, which I had seen as an undergraduate
student taking courses on queer cinema at the University of California, San Diego in the
late 1990s—the same time Ke Kulana was being filmed. Moreover, I was also moved by
the way the lives and performances depicted in Ke Kulana were distinctive. Yet, like
Paris, these queer of color performances made reality starkly strange.

21
Leung, 160.

133

Queer Familiars
What makes Ke Kulana and Paris strangely familiar is the way in which they
each peel back the veneer of reality to make the present seem disjointed. They converge
as similar media forms—feature-length documentary films that conjure alternate queer
worlds. Paris operates through the cinéma vérité documentary film tradition that
“generally refused to articulate a history by focusing on the present through
documentations of events and interviews.”
22
The camera follows its subjects while
spending time at parks, piers, and walking the sidewalks of New York City. Viewers are
led through venues where ball competitions are hosted. Oftentimes, the camera abruptly
shifted its focus and frame because it was in constant motion. Unlike most vérité films,
Paris was concerned with depicting history and the future. Some of the films’ subjects
speak about the past, as in the cases in where the more seasoned performers of the ball
scene, Dorian Corey and Pepper Labeija, are seated in their dressing rooms or at home
discussing different generations of ball culture. Sometimes, the interviewees in Paris
speak about the future, as in the cases where Venus Xtravaganza and Octavia Saint
Laurent are featured in medium-shots of their bedrooms discussing their life ambitions.
Generally speaking, Paris imagines queer of color futures in the present, sometimes
tempered with a sense of practicality but at other moments seemingly unbridled with
aspiration.
Ke Kulana presents an expository documentary with the occasional voiceover.
The film is didactic. It draws heavily on scholars, activists, community leaders, and
performers with renown to make its case about the mahu as part of Kanaka Maoli

134

tradition. Photographs are used to animate the past, although the viewer might wonder
from where these images derive, and if they merely illustrate key points or offer
evidentiary support for the film’s claims. The documentary maintains steady, close-up
shots of each of its interviewees, except when filming dance performances. In these key
moments of dance—portraying different instances of hula and drag—Ke Kulana begins
to shift to the vérité style reminiscent of Paris. The camera’s movement is particularly
loose during drag performance scenes shot inside a club. Sometimes the camera stands at
a distance from the performer. Other times, the audience is brought so close that viewers
may feel as if they are plunging into the image of the mahu subject. Arguably, the film
reverses history, beckoning the cultural and spiritual ways of the past to not recede from
the present. These resources from the past offer the present a way to perceive a
decolonizing future.
The films Paris and Ke Kulana bookend a historical period of queer of color
activism and cultural production—the late 1980s-to early 2000s. Paris, looking ahead,
and Ke Kulana, keeping its focus in rearview, structurally and thematically gaze back at
each other. Paris emerged in the midst of the AIDS “crisis.” Ke Kulana He Mahu
surfaced in what can be described as the “post-crisis” era, at least for those with access to
the effective combination therapy of HIV antiretroviral medications approved by the
Federal Drug Administration starting in 1997. Paris made its way through the film
festival circuit during the early 1990s, when AIDS and queer activisms were invested in
“transformative coalition” work, such as needle exchange and prison projects, in places

22
Hilderbrand, 40.

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like New York City.
23
By the end of the decade, gay activism increasingly turned away
from AIDS and toward issues of same-sex marriage and military inclusion, which
characterized gay rights organizing in Hawai’i during the late 1990s.
Although a self-identified person living with HIV/AIDS does not appear in Paris,
AIDS remains central to the film’s premise and its cultural memory. Livingston’s
documentary intention is informed by her participation in ACT UP. Paris was produced
in the height of the “Culture Wars” where funding for films featuring AIDS, specifically
Riggs’ Tongues, became the target of controversy by conservative politicians. Paris
contextualized the lives of ball participants in a particular scene showing ball performers
“voguing” for a primarily white audience during the 1989 Love Ball AIDS benefit that
raised over $350,000 to support research and housing for homeless persons with AIDS.
24

Still, many of those featured in the documentary continued to be homeless, engage in sex
work, were murdered, or died from AIDS-related illnesses. As a film about the impact of
AIDS on queers of color, Paris remains a “touchstone to the ball scene” and has been
“absolutely central to meanings of identity, queer-of-color politics, and the value of
pleasure as a survival tactic.”
25
Ke Kulana’s search for the past inevitably runs into Paris,
which anticipated the road ahead for queers of color with its measured hopefulness and
imaginative relay. Stretching across time and space, these films foment kinship with one
another through queer of color performances that operate as cultural resources for
survival in the continued pandemic of AIDS among people of color.

23
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer
Politics?” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G.
Henderson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 460.
24
Hilderbrand, 81.
25
Ibid., 32-33.

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The portrayal of the cultural politics of queer of color performance is necessarily
informed by the politics of its filmmakers as self-identified lesbians. Each film reflects
the politics of coalition-building. Simultaneously, the identity politics of the filmmakers
seem to contradict the queer sensibilities of the films’ subjects who challenge identity
constructs. Livingston has been criticized for not being self-reflexive enough as an upper
class, Ivy league educated, white Jewish woman portraying Black and Latina/o queer,
working-class, and poor lives.
26
Xian has discussed how she found it “odd” to be asked
why she, as an Asian settler in Hawai‘i, would align herself with anticolonial views in her
depictions of Kanaka Maoli lives.
27
Furthermore, Xian is running for Congress, is
supportive of same-sex marriage, and is an anti-human trafficking activist, which can be
understood as liberal causes that stand in contradistinction to the political views of the
films’ interviewees which can be interpreted as more radical. Yet, both Livingston and
Xian made clear their political stakes in depicting the lives of their film subjects, not
simply make a spectacle of them.
28

While it is important to interrogate the complex identities and politics of each
filmmaker, I maintain that the work of these films also occurs through their mutual gazes
as New Queer Cinema productions. The “outsider” status of these lesbian filmmakers
invokes the relationality of New Queer Cinema and AIDS activism. Lesbians were
absolutely fundamental to the developments of AIDS activism, New Queer Cinema, and
queer politics. White masculine men were oftentimes the focus of New Queer Cinema

26
Hilderbrand, 17.
27
Guillermo-Aguilar, Pauline. “PAYING ATTENTION: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING
‘MAHU.’” APIWellness.org (Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center website). Accessed:
December 10, 2013, http://www.apiwellness.org/article_being_mahu.html.
28
Hilderbrand, 17; Guillermo-Aguilar, “PAYING ATTENTION: THE IMPORTANCE OF
BEING ‘MAHU.’”

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productions like My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Living End (1992). However,
lesbian filmmakers, like Livingston and Xian, were politically driven to document queer
of color lives in the face of AIDS. The cultural politics of queer of color performances in
New Queer Cinema productions are underwritten by lesbian feminism, as well as by
gay/queer men of color filmmakers, intervening into AIDS. In Paris and Ke Kulana, the
acts of gender transgression and formations of queer of color kinships across time and
space are structured by the cinematic gaze of lesbian feminist filmmaking.
Queer of color reverberations travel through the visual texture of recorded
performances that solicit political engagement beyond the cinematic viewing frame. The
late 1990s representations of mahu in Ke Kulana and the late 1980s ball culture
participants in Paris, as I will show, are semantically and somatically cast onto the same
dance floor. As José Esteban Muñoz described, dance floors are “a stage for queer
performativity that is integral to everyday life.” The dance floor yields a “kinesthetic
experience through which we become, less like ourselves, and more like each other…a
queer communal logic overwhelms practices of individual identity…the communal
becoming.”
29
Although they may have never met or known one another, the subjects of
Ke Kulana and Paris are queer familiars. They arrive at a dance floor alternately
spatiotemporally configured by queer, feminist, and Third World cinema movements and
vogue—not just with each other, but also with past, present, and future viewers.

Touching, Bending Time

29
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York:
New York University Press, 2009, 66.

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Ke Kulana opens with an oli (chant) by Kumu (hula master) Hinaleimoana Wong-
Kalu. Before the first image of the film appears, before you see her standing at the island
shores, before you see her image cut across the tall buildings that line the modern,
militarized, and commercial horizon of Hawai‘i, you hear her voice resounding in the
darkness. Interspersed in montage sequence are establishing shots of the archipelago.
Images are overlaid with the song “Maunaleo” by Keali`i Reichel, which plays constantly
throughout the film. This song is a mixture of traditional chant and contemporary
Hawaiian music.
30
It exalts a well-known mountain in Maui, singing praises for its
beauty, paying deference to its power and strength, and expressing love for it as if it
could be intimately embraced.
31
Reichel

is known as mahu.
32
Long shots reveal
landscapes with varying fluorescence, dotted by signs of urban life, surrounded by open,
rolling waters. From its outset, the film visually and aurally foregrounds the relationship
between the mahu in the present, Kanaka Maoli kinship to the land, and memories of the
pre-modern past. The backdrop of the film includes the “militarized currents” of the
Pacific, where the structurally entwined colonial and neocolonial economies of militarism
and tourism are justified by the logic of modernization.
33

30
“Keali`i Reichel Biography.” MusicanGuide.com. Index of Musician Biographies. Accessed:
April 14, 2011, http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608004249/Keali-i-Reichel.html.
Many thanks to Ian Kaulana Paradis for this link to Keali`i Reichel’s biography.
31
“Keali`i Reichel.” Enyde009 YouTube.com channel. March 15, 2009. Accessed: April 4, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8L_sNPxLag. Also see Kanoa-Martin, Kaiulani.
“Maunaleo - Words by Keali`i Reichel & Puakea Nogelemeier, Music by Keali`i Reichel.”
Publication date unknown. Accessed: April 4, 2011, http://www.huapala.org/Maunaleo.html.
Thanks go to Ian Kaulana Paradis for pointing me to this translation of the song and for the
narrative of Keali`i Reichel’s life.
32
Ibid.
33
Shigematsu, Setsu and Camacho, Keith L. “Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonizing
Futures.” Militarized Currents: Towards a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, xv-xlviii.

139

The exposition continues with an interview with Wong-Kalu, overlaid with
conversations among other educators who retell the past. These stories do not merely
appeal for a return to pre-colonial ways, although the past operates as an object of desire.
The film and its constituents work toward reconstituting relationships between land,
Kanaka Maoli kinship, gender, and sexuality as pasts already in the present. Against an
emphatic call for a future rife with commercial development and U.S. military
occupation, the films’ subjects layout varying critiques of capitalism and Euro-American
imperialism through testimony and performance, engaging in discussions about Kanaka
Maoli history, including cosmology, language, western disease, family, and everyday
existence.
The chants, interviews, performances, images, and music narrate a history of
encounter, loss, and fortitude against the white heteropatriarchal precepts of “home” and
“family,” with varying strategies of kinship and survival that hinge on the social place of
mahu in pre-colonial and contemporary times. The film solicits a critical perspective with
an unveiled politicizing intent. According to Ty P. Kawika Tengan, the film proceeds in
three parts, some of which are designated by intertitles: “kaulana (place, station, status,
rank) in Kanaka Maoli society and culture of the mahu;” “modern times,” which
examines the lives of drag queens, queer kinship, ball culture, AIDS, and the same-sex
marriage debate; and, finally, “a story of aloha amidst Western exclusion,” which looks at
the historical strategies Kanaka Maoli deployed to sustain kinships and survive western
colonization and disease, including leprosy and the enforced quarantine of afflicted

140

Kanaka Maoli on the island of Molokaʻi in the past and AIDS and social exclusion in the
present.
34

With each segment, the film consults knowledge specialists on the Hawaiian past,
making central the social and spiritual “place” of mahu. The film attempts to embody a
living past that hovers in the present through mahu resilience and sensuality. Ke Kulana’s
ability to approach the event horizon of colonization and allow the viewer to peer into a
pre-colonial past is facilitated by the film and its subjects’ varying translations,
representations, and performances of “mahu.” Mahu presence prompts a historical
investigation to understand how language, performance, and film can generate a sensuous
experience with the viewer that heightens her/his perception of a past that remains with
the present. Taken as a whole, the film and its subjects suggest there is no singular
definition for “mahu.” It is a multivalent signifier that brings the past, present, and future
into the cinematic representations of mahu subjects. The film ends on a sentimental, yet
hopeful note, calling for the sustained practices of mahu kinship as the horizon for a
decolonizing future.
I focus on the second section of the film, “modern times,” to take up the specific
intersections between Ke Kulana and Paris. In the film, the linguistic and visual
deployments of mahu signal the queerness of past times that burgeon in the present. In
the semantics of Hawaiian language, “mahu” cannot be contained by textual or visual
representations. Noenoe K. Silva describes the conversion of the once exclusively oral
practice of Kanaka Maoli language into written text by Christian missionaries. She
proffers that the routenization of the Hawaiian language into written form challenged the

34
Tengan, “Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place (film review).”

141

inherently multivalent meanings of Hawaiian words in their oral tradition.
35
At the same
time, the technology of writing and printing allowed for Kanaka Maoli to generate an
archival history. Using western methods of science, the Kanaka Maoli could research,
document, and show material evidence regarding their genealogical past. Through this
research, they reestablished Kanaka Maoli genealogy and cosmology and reinstituted
Hawaiian time, their place in the universe, and the recalling of their traditional practices,
such as hula. Silva argues that the recovery and public performances of hula at the end of
the late nineteenth century, in spite of its ban by the white oligarchy for its licentiousness,
strengthened the Kanaka Maoli imagined community.
36
In short, the Kanaka Maoli
utilized the tools of Euro-American domination, such as historiography, to create
performance as a critical methodology for anticolonialism. These performance
methodologies included the subversive usage of western thinking and the engagement in
dance to conjure alternate cosmologies.
In Ke Kulana, the visual and aural representations of mahu draw upon the critical
methodology of performance. Through recorded performances, “mahu” generates a
signifying force that overwhelms its textual and visual representations. We see Wong-
Kalu as Kumu, or hula educator, lead other mahu performers in hula dance. Drag
performers, like Sami LA Auna and Skeeter Mariah Crackseed, also stage dance floor
performances at bars and clubs that are sometimes irreverent and other times dramatic.
The excesses of the multivalent embodied and performative enunciations of “mahu”
reverberate mnemonically. In Ke Kulana, recorded performances of mahu strain the

35
Silva, 25-33.
36
Silva, 87-122.

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syntax of the representational grammar of the documentary film genre. Put simply, mahu
depictions in the film exceed the logics of representational identity politics.
A definition for “mahu” cannot be easily summarized after viewing the film.
However, “mahu” can be read through a series of what Muñoz calls “queer gestures”—
“atomize[d] movements” that “transmit ephemeral knowledge of lost queer histories and
possibilities within a phobic majoritarian public culture.”
37
Shortly after the film begins, a
montage sequence of informant Sami LA Akuna's nightclub performances depicts him
dressed as neither clearly in “feminine” drag or “masculine” drag, yet more feminine than
we see him during sit-down interviews. In the film, Akuna is also known as “Cocoa
Chandelier” and “Pinka Lush,” among other names that communicate his multiple
subjectivities. For this scene, Akuna is shown lipsynching and moving to a somber
version of Madonna's “Open Your Heart” with several other dancers following his lead
(fig. 1). Meanwhile, overlaid are interviews with several other mahu performers who
comment on the content of Akuna’s character as they are seated in dressing room
settings. The comments pause in time for the viewer to hear a line of the song: “one is
such a lonely number.” Now seated on the floor with the other dancers, Akuna closes his
eyes. His lips cease to move during this song’s line. With an index finger raised in the
“one position” and extended above his head, he leads the other dancers in a silent reverie.
Gazing at first directly into the camera’s frame, he brings his finger close to the camera
as if to first stroke the camera lens. He then begins to bow his head and angle the finger
until it almost points at the screen, gesturing toward the viewer (fig. 2).

37
Muñoz, 67.

143

Figure 1. Sami L.A. Akuna in a cross-gender performance set to a rendition of
Madonna’s song “Open Your Heart to Me.” Courtesy of Zang Pictures.

Figure 2. Sami L.A. Akuna caresses the camera frame. He touches and multiply bends
time. Courtesy of Zang Pictures.

Akuna’s finger creases the space and time of the film, folding together the viewer
and the films’ subjects. According to Elizabeth Freeman, in literary and filmic tropes,

144

fingers are a means of “indexing” time. The finger invokes a sensuous response from the
reader or viewer when imaged figurally.
38
She also argues that, in “queer vision,”
wrinkles represent how time folds when “our sexually impoverished present suddenly
meets up with a richer past, or as the materials of a failed and forgotten project of the past
find their uses now, in a future unimaginable in their time.”
39
Stated otherwise, sexuality
is not merely the embodied experience of the viewer, but is the wrinkly, textured space
between the film and the audience. In film, wrinkles seek sensuous apprehension in the
folds of their skin. Here, looming large, are Gilles Delueze’s notions of the “prehensile”
cinematic images of hands, those that grip the viewer, and the “haptique”—optics that
grab the image
40
—or what Laura U. Marks has called “hapticism.”
41
The idea of “the
fold,” as conceived of by Deleuze, is an inherited feature or “trait” from the Baroque era
in which twists and turns like pleats in fashion, architecture, painting, music, and art,
unfold and enfold matter to infinity.
42
Images and haptic vision stretch toward each other
across time, tugging at, caressing, pressing-up against, fingering each another. In other
words, in the age of cinema, time touches infinitely, and it does so temptingly.
The image of Akuna’s finger starts by grazing the wrinkles on what we imagine
as the surface of the viewer’s face, indexing the ages.
43
Like the photographs we run our

38
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 105-123.
39
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Introduction” to special issue “Queer Temporalities.” GLQ: Journal of
Gay and Lesbian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2-3 (2007): 163.
40
Gilles Deleuze. Cinema-2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989, 12-13.
41
See Marks, xvi-xvii, 1-20.
42
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1992, 3.
43
In Laura U. Marks’s discussion of “haptic vision,” the viewer’s face is often the imagined site
in which tactility is produced. See Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory
Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 1-20.

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hands down as we turn each page of an album, Akuna’s finger leaves the viewer’s face
and begins to feel the textured intersubjective space between the viewing frame and the
audience. His finger stretches to greet the fingers of the viewer in haptic encounter. Time
is bent multiply, producing manifold time bends. These fingerings investigate what is
around time’s bends. In the grammar of the film, Akuna and the viewer trace queer
histories through these visually tactile, performative gestures, or what Freeman calls
“erotohistoriography.”
44
Tacitly, Akuna turns to touch what time took.
Akuna and his dancers’ performance stir together the present and the past. They
challenge the viewer to reconsider how an individual subject occupies space and time.
This is where the viewer glimpses what is around time’s bends. Against capitalist notions
of progress, their performance intervenes into the idealization of individualism. With his
finger gesturing at “you,” the viewer, he breaks the fourth wall, filling the space of the
viewing experience with multiple times. Fingers that are used to count the capitalist linear
progression of time instead gather together mediated subjectivities across myriad milieu.
The image of Akuna with his finger extended in first “one,” then lowered to gesture at
“you,” implicates at least “two,” or duplicity, and the interminable un/enfolding of time
across interstitial sites of queer lifetimes. There is at once an implication of, and an
invitation to, the viewer. Akuna’s role as “house mother” invokes a networked
connectivity from through mahu kinship, raveled around the viewing experience. The
recorded performances of pre-colonial mahu kinships in the presence of the viewer
entwine with queer of color kinships of the past and future.

44
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography.” Social Text 84–85, Vol. 23, Nos.
3–4, (Fall–Winter 2005): 57-68.

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The filmic embodiments and performances of mahu open onto a spatiotemporal
location outside the U.S. nation-state imaginary. Akuna’s use of the visual does not
merely enable the practices of surveillance over non-normative bodies and subjects to
discipline them as subjects of the nation. Instead, it calls for a system of accountability
for those whose access to social and material privileges are foreclosed. Akuna and his
dancers’ performance beseech the viewer to imagine a kinship that is not managed or
mediated by the institution of marriage. It also draws attention to the displacements of
Kanaka Maoli by the military occupation of the archipelago. References to Akuna as a
“house mother” denotes a reconfiguration of family, a mitigation of private space and the
sequestering of intimacies. Mahu kinship is an exercise in material redistribution set
against prescribed heteropatriarchy and capitalist consumption.
What makes this moment of Akuna's performance striking is its conscious
association with Black and Latina/o balls and houses in Chicago, Detroit, and New York
City. Chandan Reddy has already made the case in his analysis of Paris that queers of
color, whose complicated histories and experiences with the home space and the
architecture of the house as a “structure of dominance,” appropriate notions of house and
home to refashion a queer of color kinship network and sense of belonging.
45
This
refashioning is not just a matter of redecorating the interior, like in Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy, or leaving the house to “come out,” if one has a house to speak of, to be
happy. For queers of color, whose relationship to this normativizing architecture of
dominance is tenuous, the house must take on a different structure and meaning, such that
a house is not what embodies, but instead, is a place anchored in the embodiments of

45
Reddy, Chandan. “Home, Houses, Non-identity: Paris Is Burning.” Burning Down the House:
Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George. Boulder: Westview Press, 1988, 367.

147

queer of color kinships. In other words, as Ke Kulana explores, being mahu is “a sense of
place” in a queer of color kinship network.
In Ke Kulana, queer gestures function as citational practices in the critical
methodology of performance, referencing other forms of kinship across geohistorical
spaces.
46
They also point to ellipses in popular texts. In the early nineteen nineties,
Madonna’s song, music video, and performances of “Vogue” appropriated house music
and ball culture iconography to celebrate mid-twentieth century, classical white beauty.
Akuna re-appropriates Madonna to infinitely un/enfold the mutual constitution of Black,
Latina/o, and Pacific Islander subjects through Euro-American conquest. “Open Your
Heart” is recast not as a song about a universal desire for love, but about the anxiety in
the white imaginary at the sense of loss felt as the result of global capitalism’s unmet
promise to bind; love unrequited. Through a performance of queer of color
erotohistoriography in the film, time is at once indexed, wrinkled, and ceaselessly bent.
What is enabled is, in Reddy’s words, are “other subjective logic mappings of ‘home’”
that expose what is otherwise an un-navigable circum-Atlantic-Pacific queer of color
imaginary.

Effacing Modernity
In Ke Kulana, the queer of color imaginary remains polyvalent according to the
film’s close attention to the multivalent textual and visual representations of “mahu.” In
particular, mirrors are used in the film to multiply inflect, reflect, and deflect notions of
unity. Both cohesion and fragmentation work together in the film to subject the audience

148

to a viewing experience that decenters the gaze through infinite mirroring. The mirrors
underscore the narrative structure of the cinematic viewing experience, but also ricochets
the representations of mahu performers in unexpected ways that I argue are critical for
understanding queer of color kinship as a critical visual intervention into AIDS.
The mirroring scenes build tensions between the politics of identity and queer
non-essentialist relationalities. They expose the representational privilege of white gale
male identities in cinema and the strategic deployments of queer of color visibilities. The
political tensions between sexual identity and queer relationality occur at the level of the
image, the film genre, and what I have been describing as the visual grammar for the
queer of color circumnavigation of Euro-American geopolitics.
While the film explores the lives of mahu subjects in various settings, two scenes
involving mirrored projections bookend the depictions of mahu drag culture inside the
nightclub. The setting of these scenes also gesture at moments in Paris where performers
Dorian Corey and Pepper Labeija are each seated before or next to a dressing room
mirror. In Ke Kulana, the scenes entail a mahu subject facing a mirror while preparing
their drag look in what can be presumed to be a backstage dressing room. Both instances
involve mid-shots from behind and off to the side of the mahu subject, directing the
camera’s gaze into the mirror where the viewer encounters what at first seems to be the
lone face of the performer as she applies make-up and discusses her relationship to other
queer subjects. In each dressing room scene, the mirror is brightly lit while the rest of the
room is sunken in darkness. When considering Ke Kulana and Paris together, one could
argue that the mirrors that each films’ subjects look into endlessly reflect each other

46
Judith Butler theorizes about the citational practice of gender as a performance that refers back
to other instances of gender performance. See Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

149

across the films, creating the effect of a cascading and interminably nested discursive
presence for queer of color performance.
The cinematic projections for queer of color performance are also conjured in the
lesbian feminist subjectivities mirrored by the filmmakers. In Ke Kulana, the phrasings
for each scene involving the mirrored images of drag performers are punctuated with
sonic articulations that cut across time and identities. Each drag performer speaks
specifically from a local, mahu queer context, and yet what the subjects say is applied
more broadly to a liberal, mainstream gay culture. Their speech includes queer
colloquialisms, like Araya Sunshine’s use of the address “Mary” to refer broadly to gay
men. This is a reference that is at once familiar yet outdated in contemporary gay culture.
The term is spoken with a local inflection, or what could be called a queer Hawaiian
pidgin. The visual and aural articulations of the mahu performer creates what Freeman
calls a “temporal drag,” an anachronistic embodiment of queer cultural sensibilities from
the past, often attached to the sign of the out-of-mode lesbian.
47
The anachronistic
deployment of “Mary” draws into association the mahu representation and its viewer with
the lesbian feminist cultural politics of anachronism, once again reflecting the interested
perspective of Xian whose goal was to recall the memory and survival of mahu lives.
The temporal drag of Ke Kulana occurs as an intertextual practice of New Queer
Cinema. Xian replicates Livingston’s directorial investment and technique in Paris. The
lesbian identities and directorial gazes of Xian and Livingston also touch, reanimating the
critical intersection of lesbian feminist and queer politics in the crisis and post-crisis
phases of the AIDS pandemic. One could even make the case that lesbian feminist

Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
47
Freeman, Times Binds, 89.

150

filmmaking contributions to NQC through films such Paris and Ke Kulana are coalitional
precisely because they reflect the struggles for lesbian representation. In cinema and
politics, both lesbian and other queer of color bodies are placed under duress by a white
heterosexual male gaze and the primacy of white gay male representation. In fact, more
recent documentaries about the AIDS crisis, such as How to Survive a Plague (2012) and
We Were Here (2011), among others, are invested in representing white gay men to the
extent that they engage in the near representational erasure of women and people of color
from the cultural memory of AIDS activism, which includes their labor and activism
behind and before the camera. Ke Kulana and Paris consolidate and refract lesbian
feminism, mahu kinship, and queer of color performances to generate a coalitional
politics for video activist afterlives in the face of the revisionist histories of AIDS
activism that privilege white gay male perspectives.
The mirroring of the performers in Ke Kulana and Paris and the filmmakers for
each documentary obliterates the parsing of space and incremental divisions of time. A
discursive corridor is opened through which identity politics and queer non-essentialisms
travel toward an emergent representational grammar for feminist and queer of color
video activist afterlives. The viewer is taken down this path through the endless mirroring
and the un/enfolding of time not only by the viewing experience of a decentered gaze, but
also by the inducement of a heightened consciousness of the camera’s technology as
itself operationalized through reflective surfaces that spin the image around and around
before producing it on the surface of the screen. In these mirrors, the un/enfolding of time
through the apertures of queer of color subjectivities reconstructs processes of subject

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formation, perverting the sensibilities of identity and belonging to the geographically
bounded U.S. nation-state.
The performance of queer of color kinship renders the logics of identity,
language, and vision contradictory, opening up an alternate dimension for imagining
heterogeneous and multiplicitous identifications with subjectivity, time, and place. In the
visual grammar of queer of color kinships between Ke Kulana and Paris, the viewer’s
face encounters the strangeness of the modern clock. Drawing from Henri Bergson to
produce a theory for postcolonial film, Bliss Cua Lim analyzes clocks as “translation
machines” that reduce heterogeneous time into modern, linear time. Language, in Lim’s
analysis “reduces sensation to the lowest common denominator of known experience,
making the ineffable into something stable and resulting in a colorless, degraded
experience suited for life.”
48

In Ke Kulana, the viewer is not simply hailed into modern time. There are no
actual clocks represented and the film is expressly concerned with cohering the past with
the present. Instead, the viewer is asked to face time. Faciality, according to Gilles
Deluze and Felix Guattari, is “the form of the signifier in language, even its units, would
remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide
his or her choice (‘Hey, he seems angry...’; ‘He couldn’t say it…’; ‘You see my face
when I’m talking to you…’; ‘look at me carefully…’).
49
The face is a screen, and the
screen of cinematic experience operates as a face. However, faciliaty is not simply an
envelope slipped onto machines, but instead is a machine itself that generates the

48
Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, The Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009, 10-17.
49
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 167-182.

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apparatus for sense making. Yet, for Walter Benjamin, the face was the last site in which
one could still encounter the “aura” of a piece of artwork during the mechanical age of
reproduction in which the function of art was for its reproducibility.
50
Deleuze, Guattari,
and Benjamin are both in contradiction and in synch. In Ke Kulana, the face is both the
site of loss, as a pre-colonial world gave way to modernity and identity. The face is also
the focal point of expression of that loss. The film’s focus on the interminably mirrored
drag face generates the viewer’s confrontation with the viewer’s own face. In effect, the
face, as the essentialized point of contact for sensuous experience and knowledge
production in modernity, is also effaced. Through this mode of effacement, the viewer is
prodded to consider her/his own time outside the logics and relations of modernity and
capitalist accumulation. The viewer is inducted into the time, imaginings, and social
worlds of queer of color kinship (fig. 3).

Figure 3. Araya Sunshine reflects upon her own embodied performance and relation to
her “house mother,” Sami L.A., Akuna, while seated before a mirror.

50
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” The Nineteenth-
Century Visual Culture Reader, eds. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski. New
York: Routledge Press, 2004, 68.

153

Queer of color kinship and its logics embrace the viewer and radiate multiple
connectivities, times, and meanings. Inducted into this realm of belonging, the viewer is
privy to semantic and somatic rehearsals and performances that utilize meanings rooted
in contemporary English and cast through technologies of vision, while also undermining
their intents and effects. In common parlance, the modern clock has a “face” that directs
and synchronizes time. One reads a clock to know what time it is. We can also again
consider Freeman’s notion that wrinkles on faces in literature and film solicit a sense of
touch that wrinkles time. When we read a clock, we must stop to look at and question
time, all the while producing a wrinkle in the logic of a single temporal duration. In drag,
and in ball culture, which Paris reminds us, “reading” is an act in which a queen throws
“shade” by making fun of the way in which someone exhibits social difference in
(visibly) marked and consequential ways. “Reading,” in one sense, is a mechanism for
paying heed to the forms of difference that are violently targeted. This also points to the
fact that, according to modern knowledge regimes, articulation of difference is
necessarily constituted through the coincidence of language and the field of vision.
“Clocking” (versus “outing” a person as “gay”) is the moment in which someone who is
presumably normatively gendered renders the transgender or drag queen, through a
critical look or comment, as out of place. Unlike “outing,” there is no revelation of the
“real;” what is highlighted is the problematic conditioning of place and time. Attention is
drawn to the manner in which place and time is synchronous with the face of the clock.
Like many queer and transgender homeless youth of color in urban settings like New

154

York City, those who lack place (read: lacking a residence and lacking in belonging) are
also out of time (read: unemployed and with barred access to health care).
“Giving face” is when a subject in ball culture features their face as the aesthetic
center of their look. It is a consciousness regarding the ways in which forms of proper
presentation and social mobility pivot on faciality. While performing in drag, “giving
face” also has the effect of effacing the logics of faciality. During drag performance,
lipsynching draws attention to the movement of the face, and in particular the lips,
dislodging sound from oration. What is also produced in the process is an injunction
between affect and temporality in the sense that the singer is not present, but the emotions
of the imagined singing subject are constituted excessively and coterminously by the drag
performer. In turn, subjectivity is also disarticulated from narration. Lipsynching, as
represented in the film by Akuna, brings the viewer’s attention to another temporal
disjunction, reminding the viewer that sound is recorded through a different medium than
the visual and must be re-introduced and/or synchronized in the post-production phase in
order to make the cinematic experience cohesive.
An exploration of queer of color kinship performance by the film traverses the
history of Paris, and beyond into pre-colonial times. This circumnavigation of the
militarized Pacific and the colonial transits across the Atlantic forges a method for queer
of color kinship across geopolitical space and historical eras. In particular, Ke Kulana, in
its co-articulation with/through Paris through the lesbian feminist filmmaking practice of
New Queer Cinema, generates a queer of color imaginary in which the past exists in the
present and social and temporal relations remain unbounded by modernity and the logics
of capital. Together, “mahu” and “queerness” index a pre-colonial past that proceeds in

155

the contemporary through the cultural politics of queer of color alliance in the face of
AIDS. Modernity is effaced in that the progression of the AIDS pandemic among people
of color is foregrounded as the collision between colonial regimes of race and ongoing
U.S. military occupation. Feminist and queer of color video activist afterlives is a
strategic method of visual critique and coalitional representation and production that
emits heterogeneous and even seemingly contradictory possibilities heading toward
something of an imagined, pure place and time that can be remembered.

156

Chapter 4: Masculinity and Militarization:
Representations of AIDS and Gay Men of Color in New Media

In March 2009, U.S. Army infantry officer and West Point Military Academy
graduate, Lieutenant Dan Choi, appeared on the The Rachel Maddow Show to speak
against the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy banning “out,” gay military
servicepersons. A Korean American, and founding member of Knights Out, the West
Point alumni, faculty, and staff organization supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) rights, Choi appeared on the show to represent the organization and
to urge President Barack Obama to strike the provision (fig. 1). DADT was adopted in
1993 under the Bill Clinton presidential administration and was eventually repealed in
2011 by the Obama administration. However, following his 2009 television appearance
and while DADT was still intact, Choi received a letter from the U.S. Army declaring he
would be expelled from service because he “publicly admitted [he is] homosexual” and
compromised the “good order and discipline” of his unit.
1

After Choi’s discharge, he became a prominent figure for the national campaign
to overturn DADT. Choi continued to give interviews and record public service
announcements for the television and the Internet. He penned open letters to Obama,
spoke before large rallies, and led direct action protests before the White House on a
variety of gay rights causes.
2
In 2010, Choi interrupted a Washington, D.C. event for the
world’s largest and massively funded LGBT lobbyist organization, the Human Rights

1
Choi, Dan. “Rachel Maddow Interviews Lt. Dan Choi - Fired by the Army for being gay.”
Courage Campaign YouTube.com Channel. Uploaded May 19, 2009. Accessed: October 7, 2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kthMCIqc72A.
2
Montopoli, Brian. “Lt. Dan Chi Arrested at White House during Gay Rights Rally.” CBS
News.com. March 18, 2010. Accessed: November 9, 2013, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-
503544_162-20000740-503544.html.

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Campaign. He summoned people to follow him and other activist servicepersons to the
White House where they chained themselves to a fence to call attention to the struggle
against DADT. The following month, Choi and others ramped up DADT protest,
heckling Obama during a Democratic Party fundraiser.
3
They chained themselves for a
second time to the White House fence.
4
In 2011, Choi’s activism led him to Moscow,
Russia, where he stood in solidarity with international gay rights advocates and was
subsequently arrested.
5

During the 2008 election year, then gay porn actor, François Sagat, was depicted
in a series of photographs clad in leather-made military fetish gear urging U.S citizens to
vote for Obama. The images were shot by Florida-based photographer, Gio Spano, and
circulated across the Internet the month before the scheduled election.
6
Born and raised in

3
Hetchtkopf, Kevin. “Obama Heckled by Gay Rights Protesters (Video).” CBWNews.com. April
20, 2010. Accessed: November 9, 2013, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002928-
503544.html.
4
Montopoli, Brian. “Dan Choi, Other Gay Rights Protesters Arrested After Chaining Selves to
White House Fence.” CBSNews.com. April 20, 2010. Accessed: November 9, 2013,
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002942-503544.html.
5
For a video of Choi’s testimony regarding his purpose for traveling to Moscow, see Choi, Dan.
“Daniel Choi @ MoscowPride2.wmv.” GayLiberationNetwork YouTube.com Channel.
Uploaded May 26, 2011. Accessed: August 10, 2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cQbrjRWcx4. For information about his arrest, see Park,
James. “Updated: Dan Choi and other gay rights activists arrested during Moscow
Pride violence.” PinkNews.co.uk. May 28, 2011. Accessed: August 10, 2013,
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/05/28/video-dan-choi-and-other-gay-rights-activists-arrested-
during-moscow-pride-violence/.
6
One of the photographs appears as a clickable image from a list titled “Y? Headshots” created
by photographer profile “Y?” on ModelMayhem.com. Clicking the link below the image of Sagat
leads to Gio Spanda’s photographer profile, Gio Photography, on ModelMayhem.com, where the
image was presumably originally posted. See “A list by Y Not: Y? Headshots,”
ModelMayhem.com. No Publication Date. Accessed: October 8, 2013,
http://www.modelmayhem.com/list/115628. Clicking on the image of Sagat from the list “Y?
Headshots” allows one to then click on the “Details” of the image, which titles the date for the
image upload as December 26, 2008. See “Profile > Portfolio > Editorial – Art Album,”
December 26, 2008. Accessed: October 8, 2013,
http://www.modelmayhem.com/portfolio/pic/9876605. However, QueerClick.com posted three of
the images with Sagat holding the Obama adorned Jones bottle on October 9, 2008, and crediting
Gio Spanda for the images. See QueerClick.com. “Caliente” section. “François Sagat Invita a

158

France, and reportedly of Slovakian and Lebanese ancestry,
7
Sagat posed in the
photographs holding a Jones soda bottle that featured Obama’s image. The bottle
advertises a smiling Obama, presumably looking into an audience during a public
appearance. Underneath him are rows of words: “JONES,” “PURE CANE SODA,” and
“YES WE CAN COLA.” At least three variations of this photograph with Sagat handling
or drinking the Obama-brand bottle have surfaced on the Internet.
In 2011, after reaching iconic gay pornographic status, Sagat retired from porn
and parlayed his career into art, performance, and politics.
8
Sagat has been featured as the
subject of “activist art” in U.S.-based gay media.
9
He has starred or appeared in a number

Votar.” October 9, 2008. Accessed: October 8, 2013,
http://www.queerclick.com/espanol/archive/2008/10/francois_sagat_invita_a_votar.php. Several
other photos of Sagat in the same outfit, but without the Obama adorned Jones bottle are featured
on Gio Photography in a series called “Leather Dream.” The date listed for these photographs is
October 7, 2008. See “ALLURING MEN,” “Francois Sagat,” “Leather Dream.” October 7, 2008.
Accessed: October 8, 2013,
http://giophotography.zenfolio.com/p157365169/h589c9316#h589c9316,
http://giophotography.zenfolio.com/p157365169/h63e29b79#h63e29b79, and
http://giophotography.zenfolio.com/p157365169/h6e822351#h6e822351. One of the photographs
also appears on the blog “ilbonito blog 2007” with a posting date of October 10, 2008. See “Porn
politico: He doesn’t kiss babies.” ilbonito blog 2007. October 10, 2008. Accessed: October 8,
2013, http://ilbonito.wordpress.com/2008/10/page/4/. These appearances suggest that the images
were circulated in early October 2008 to tap into the public conscious about the impending U.S.
presidential election on November 4, 2008. Sagat re-posted the three images on his own website
on November 6, 2012, in time for the second election of Obama, with a link to help U.S. citizens
find their nearest voting location. See Sagat, François. “To my American friends…,”
FrancoisSagat.com, November 6, 2012. Accessed: October 8, 2013,
http://francoissagat.com/blog/2012/11/06/to-my-american-friends/.
7
“Biography for Francois Sagat,” IMDb.com. Accessed: November 12, 2013,
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2088684/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm#trivia.
8
Kinser, Jeremy. “The Queerty Interview: Francois Sagat Opens Up On Gay Porn Suicides And
Why He Quit The Business.” Queerty.com. May 20, 2013. Accessed: October 8, 2013,
http://www.queerty.com/francois-sagat-opens-up-on-suicide-in-gay-porn-and-why-he-quit-the-
business-20130520/.
9
Mulvihill, Evan. “Work-Of-Art Porn Star Francois Sagat Offers Master Class At NYC
Museum.” Queerty.com. November 18, 2011. Accessed October 28, 2013,
http://www.queerty.com/169644-20111118/. Sagat was painted in the likeness of Caravaggio’s
Crucifiction of St Peter (1600) by artist Ross Watson to protest the Vatican’s stance against
homosexuality and its ban on condom use. “The Vatican inspires a provocative painting of Gay
Porn Icon as Saint,” Franccoissagat.com. Media Release. April 10, 2007. Published online on

159

of French and U.S. independent and mainstream films, including Homme au bain (Men at
Bath)(2010) by Christophe Honoré and L.A. Zombie (2010) by Bruce LaBruce, and Saw
VI (2009) by Kevin Gruetert. A documentary film about him, SAGAT: le documentaire
(SAGAT: The Documentary)(2011), was also produced. In 2011, Sagat taught a “master
class” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, where he addressed the role
of masculinity in “the art of being Sagat.” A three-day retrospective of his work,
including the documentary film, was exhibited simultaneously.
10
Capitalizing on his porn
star-cum-artist-activist status, he launched his own line of t-shirts called “Kick Sagat,”
among other merchandising ventures. The year of DADT’s repeal, he modeled for
controversial photographer Terry Richardson wearing a low-cut singlet adorned with the
U.S. flag, alongside a variety of other military-inspired apparel, and an arsenal of war
weapons as props. True to his tongue-in-cheek form, temporarily inked on one bare
buttock were the words “Don’t Ask,” and on the other, “Don’t Tell” (fig. 2).
11

April 28, 2010. Accessed: October 28, 2013, http://francoissagat.com/blog/2010/04/28/the-
vatican-inspires-a-provocative-painting-of-gay-porn-icon-as-saint/.
10
Ibid.
11
Debord, Matt. “Drafted: François Sagat Is Terry Richardson’s All American Hero.”
Queerty.com. February 27, 2011. Accessed: October 8, 2013, http://www.queerty.com/francois-
sagat-is-terry-richardsons-all-american-hero-20110227/.

160

Figure 1. Screenshot from “Rachel Maddow Interviews Lt. Dan Choi - Fired by the Army
for being gay.” Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kthMCIqc72A.

Figure 2. Screenshot from “Francois Sagat Photoshoot” with Terry Richardson. Source:
http://vimeo.com/20374269.

Choi and Sagat appear as gay activist men of color through the neoliberal
consumerist space of the Internet. Internet-based gay news, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr

161

accounts, and so on, have created a global stage for their political personas. Their
activism revolves around digital media campaigns for gay inclusion in the military,
HIV/AIDS prevention, and, in the case of Choi, same-sex marriage. Much of this media
appear as video clips, posted on file sharing sites like YouTube.com and Vimeo.com, and
embedded in online news stories and blogs. The clips, as well as photographs, are shared
through social media networks, posted by individuals, activist organizations, and/or by
Choi and Sagat. There are also websites, ltdanchoi.org and francoissagat.com, which
represent Choi’s and Sagat’s thoughts and opinions.
The constructions of these men as global sexual citizens emerge in response to the
policing and disciplining of sexuality on the Internet. The Internet constitutes a
complicated intersection of public and private interests, where socially proscribed sexual
fantasies and activities are enabled by the privatized, commercial space of the Internet. In
the post-AIDS crisis moment, the sexual interaction facilitated by Internet traffic poses a
concern for public health officials who identify it as a primary source for ongoing HIV
transmission. “Closeted” gay men of color, women sex workers, and transgender sex
workers are several of the Internet-based HIV “risk” groups identified by public health
authorities.
12
The public health response to this anxiety is to deploy Internet-based social
marketing strategies for HIV prevention, largely targeting women of color and queer
people of color. Choi and Sagat’s Internet presence correspond with the increased
monitoring of the social and sexual behaviors of women of color and queers of color
online. The online activist campaigns in which they engage trace the roots and routes of

12
“STD Communications Database Interviews with Non-Gay Identified Men who have Sex with
Men (NGI MSM): Final Report.” Submitted by ORC Macro Staff to Division of Sexually
Transmitted Disease Prevention. National Institute for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention. Center for

162

the state’s surveillance of AIDS through the Internet. Their appearances as exemplary
sexual citizens allay fears about inappropriate practices of consumerism and HIV
transmission among people of color, facilitated by online social networks.
I address Choi and Sagat as representational neoliberal multicultural subjects.
That is, they each embody what Jodi Melamed describes as “the ethic of multiculturalism
as the spirit of neoliberalism [that] dissimulates the reality of the racialized social
structure of globalization.”
13
She uses the term “neoliberal multiculturalism” to “discern
the characteristic logics of liberal race formations after World War II in relation to the
development of transnational capitalism. Specifically, [she] refer[s] to the contemporary
incorporation of U.S. multiculturalism into the legitimating and operating procedures of
neoliberalism, conceived as a world-historic organization of economy, governance, and
social and biological life.”
14

Postwar economic policies, cold war diplomacy, and latter-day multiculturalism
form a triad in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism. The Internet poses as the site for the
convergence of these ideologies, promising global connectivity through the interaction
between commodified representational identities. I deploy the concept of neoliberal

Disease Control and Prevention. January 2005. Accessed: October 10, 2013,
http://www.cdc.gov/std/healthcomm/ngi-msmcompletereport.pdf.
13
Melamed defines “neoliberalism” as “a set of economic regulatory policies including the
privatization of public resources, financial liberalization (deregulation of interest rates), market
liberalization (opening of domestic markets), and global economic management.” Melamed
argues further that “neoliberal multiculturalism” is “a still-consolidating development of liberal
race hegemony. I note that neoliberal multiculturalism seeks to function for U.S. global
ascendancy now as racial liberalism did for U.S. global power after World War II. It is a central
ideology and mode of social organization that seeks to manage racial contradictions on a national
and international scale for U.S.-led neoliberalism. It does this through a form of official
antiracism, now often reduced to a nonracialism, which hinders thinking about or acting against
the biopolitics of global capitalism.” See Melamed, Jodi. “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From
racial liberalism to Neoliberal multiculturalism.” Social Text 89, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter 2006): 1,
3, 14-15.
14
Ibid., 15.

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multiculturalism to address how discourses of race and gender are marked and managed
through the online representational politics of gay men of color in the long shadow of the
cold war, the “war on terror,”
15
and in the post-crisis era of AIDS. Choi and Sagat’s
representations of global sexual citizenship rely on neoliberal multiculturalist rhetoric
that elides the histories and persistence of racism and sexism. Their racial representations
pose as flexible while their gender depictions remain tethered to a set of masculine
norms. Even as their racial identities celebrate multiculturalism, they embody national
ideals about biological maleness and masculinity.
Choi and Sagat’s representations reinforce a social hierarchy according to a
historical narrative about race and gender: Racism and sexism are things of the past, and
homophobia is the last bastion of discrimination. By separating homophobia from racism
and patriarchy, discrimination toward gay men is rendered legible above all other forms
of oppression. In this masculinist and developmentalist narration of U.S. history, the
violences of Indigenous erasure, anti-Blackness, misogyny, xenophobia, and imperial
wars become the acceptable foundation for a modern democracy. The story of progress
reinforces the exceptional place of the United States, justifying its past, present, and
future violences in the global advance of neoliberal multiculturalism. In this allegory of
the post-racial, post-feminist nation, these two masculine gay men of color represent a
final chapter in the spread of freedoms framed by neoliberal economics. The fight against

15
For a discussion on the cold war triangulation of U.S., Russia, and the Middle East, and its
ongoing effects in the “war on terror,” see Khalidi, Rashid. Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and
American Dominance in the Middle East. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. For another perspective on
this geopolitical triangulation, and the ongoing racial and gendered hegemony of cold war
politics, see Kim, Jodi. The Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

164

DADT and HIV/AIDS highlights the formation of global sexual citizenship within the
domain of U.S. imperialism.
Chandan Reddy argues that the DADT policy derives from assertions of U.S. state
sovereignty achieved through its monopoly over violence. He asserts that the deployment
of the policy is inflected with a desire for military omniscience—to be able to see and act
upon the racialized enemy in the war on terror beyond the U.S. state’s actual
technological and conceptual capacity. Hence, homosexuals serving in the U.S. military
become targets for what Reddy calls “racial cruelty.”
16
Seeking out and expelling
homosexuals in witch-hunt fashion are part and parcel to U.S. military expansionism and
the irrational violence it enacts in order to deal with what it deems an unreasonable,
terrorist “other.” The global exercise of U.S. military power entails the search for “proof”
of homosexuality to penalize homosexuals. This is why Reddy claims: “Every conviction
of homosexuality under ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ proved homosexuality to be a racial
offense.”
17
The offense is that homosexuality weakens the U.S. state’s ability to wage
war against the racial enemy. In other words, the war on terror has helped construct the
air of suspicion about homosexuality, the proverbial gay “closet.” We have seen this
characterization of homosexuality before, during postwar anti-communism where the
U.S. government persecuted federal employees perceived to be homosexuals because
they posed a security risk.
18

Rather than counter the gay closet, the online political discourse about DADT
extends the technological and conceptual capacity of U.S. military omniscience. It invites

16
Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011, 238-246.
17
Ibid., 242.

165

the intervening eye of the U.S. state to participate in the construction and policing of
sexual rights. Central to gay rights advocacy is the supposition that homosexuality is
legally protected by a right to privacy.
19
Sexuality occurs in the private zone of the
bedroom, in the home, and away from the public, which presumably guards against state
interference in the domestic sphere. However, in order to maintain its exclusive authority,
the state is compelled to peer into the private lives of its sexual citizens. As I will
demonstrate, Choi and Sagat’s online performances of global sexual citizenship consent
to military omniscience even as it paradoxically demands that the state avert its gaze.
Instead of refuting military omniscience, Choi and Sagat’s representations eroticize it
without much irony. Their discourses about gay desire and love collude with U.S.
corporate and state interests. The bearing of their personal lives online asks for the U.S.
state to recognize their desirability as men of color who model the proper affective and
gendered dimensions of consumer citizenship. However, as I will also show, their

18
See Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians
in the Federal Government. Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 2004.
19
Rather than question the logic of “racial offense” in the global war on terror, gay rights
advocates seek to defend and even more deeply entrench the right to privacy. They aim to protect
the individual right to “come out of the closet” by claiming a public sexual identity that relegates
sexuality to the private sphere. As demonstrated by David Eng, arguing for the legal protection of
homosexuality under the right to privacy proceeds on the grounds of a perceived racial threat.
Eng analyzes the U.S. Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which held that
criminalization of sodomy violates the fourteenth amendment that protects an adult citizen’s right
to privacy. Hailed as a landmark decision in gay rights history, the U.S. Supreme Court presiding
overturned the previous ruling of Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld anti-sodomy laws in
the state of Georgia where Carl Hardwick was arrested in his own home for homosexual conduct.
Eng points to how fears of a Black man in the neighborhood originally led police to the door of
Hardwick. In Eng’s words, anti-Black racism “underwrites” the right to privacy. Furthermore, it
racializes the terms of intimacy. The historical exclusion of Black persons from property
ownership makes the figure of a Black person a perceived threat to the gentile neighborhood.
Protecting sexuality as the right to privacy also means protecting property ownership from racial
“others.” See Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of
Intimacy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 35. I would add that the historical relegation of
women to the domestic sphere, and their exclusion from property ownership, produces the private
sphere as a space negotiated by maleness and transferred as property between men.

166

attempts to call forth the AIDS video activist past generates feminist and queer of color
afterlives which upend notions of gay and AIDS progress, particularly as it pertains to
questions about race, gender, and desirability.

Stonewall 2.0: Lt. Dan Choi
I first encountered Lt. Dan Choi in the late spring/early summer of 2010 as I stood
in the doorway of Novel Café on Traction Avenue in an eastern section of downtown Los
Angeles, an area more recently named the “Artist District,” which is wedged between
Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights. Scanning a stand for the café’s usual display of flyers,
handbills, postcards, and lifestyle magazines advertising food, art, and culture, an image
of a “PRIDE” magazine caught my eye. It was unusual to see a person, whom I presumed
to be a man of East Asian descent, adorn the front cover of a glossy magazine,
nevertheless a lesbian or gay publication. My eye followed the cascade of teasers across
the cover advertising the issue’s content: “ORGANIZED and LGBTs”; “KEYBOARD
COMMANDOS / INTERNET ACTIVISTS”; “THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT?”—referring
to a popular film about a white middle-class nuclear family headed by a lesbian couple;
“ART THAT’S TOTALLY QUEER”; “LT. DAN CHOI: A YEAR’S TRIAL BY FIRE”;
“WHY PRIDE STILL MATTERS [IN MOSCOW].” Transnational LGBT political
organizing, activism on the web, a film about queerness and kinship, and queer art. The
issue signaled everything that is important to me about culture, art, social movements,
and queer political possibilities.
Inside was an article headline that referenced Black poet, musician, and activist
Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 soliloquy, “THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED.”

167

“BUT IT WILL BE BLOGGED,” the article proclaimed. The piece cited another reporter
who described the “explosion of online LGBT activism” as “Stonewall 2.0.”
20
Profiled
were several bloggers. Notably, this magazine is now entirely available online and I’m
currently showing you screenshots I’ve taken of the online images. Two pages later was
Dan Choi’s feature. “SOLDIERS On,” exclaimed the title. Following was an image of
Choi being held down, mouth cuffed, eyes glistening. The photos staged him as if he was
being beaten, tortured. He suffers not only physically, but from psychic repression as
well—he is not allowed to speak.
The juxtaposition of article images implies a sudden and violent intrusion into his
peaceful reverie, perhaps while he was lying on the training ground or basketball court of
a military base. This soldier, who is figured in the U.S. popular imaginary as an agent of
U.S. democracy, is being denied his freedoms. The images play upon fears about hate
crimes and sexual abuse. Arguably, the pictures of Choi also comingle with images of
Iraqi prisoner torture that have circulated in popular media since 2003 and uncovered
(and are still uncovering) incidences of racial and sexual violence committed by U.S.
military officers.
According to the article, Choi was raised in Anaheim city in Orange County,
California, right next door to my hometown of Fullerton. His parents “left a war-ravaged
[Korea]…for the United States. They were drawn by a promise of freedom, democracy,
security—and the American dream.”
21
Like my own experiences as a person of East
Asian descent and child of immigrant parents, Choi lived in a conservative part of

20
Jervis, Joe. “THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED BUT IT WILL BE
BLOGGED.” PRIDE Issue 10 (2010): 23.
21
d’Adesky, Anne-Christine. “Lt. Choi SOLDIERS On.” PRIDE Issue 10 (2010): 29.

168

Southern California in the 1990s. We both received “racial taunts and slights” from
school kids growing up. The article described Choi as living a “double-life;” as someone
who was plagued with questions on how to identify as a person of color with queer
desires. The article continued to describe a life of activism prompted by bouts with
discrimination.
Following the footsteps of his father, who is multilingual and a reverend, Choi
became an Arabic linguist with the desire to do Christian missionary work in Israel and to
promote interfaith healing.
22
Instead, he followed a different path. His racial and sexual
shame steered him towards becoming a U.S. infantry officer. He felt becoming a military
serviceperson would demonstrate his patriotism, combat the stereotype that “all Asian
men are effeminate,”
23
and prove that he belonged. However, Choi was booted from the
military in 2009 for coming out as “gay.” According to the article, this is when he
became a full-fledged “gay activist” and appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show. The
writer of this article describes Choi as the face of contemporary LGBT activism: “In our
instant media of YouTube and Facebook, Choi seems handpicked by central casting to
play the role of the handsome, qualified, well-spoken soldier with the standout record
who takes a moral stand, suffers, and in the end prevails…At 29, he’s also a good-
looking gay icon: Army-fit and sporting some serious style.”
24

Choi seemed to represent something familiar about East Asians in general, but
proffered something new about gay East Asian men in the United States. He conjured
longstanding ideas about certain Asians serving as a “model minority” which
demonstrates for other people of color how to presumably overcome racism in

22
Ibid., 31.
23
Ibid., 32.

169

“America.” He also represents an emergent market segment of gay men recognized by
big business as a highly profitable demographic in the new millennium on online
consumerism. Choi is the image of masculinity, health, intelligence, and upward class
mobility underscored by his media savvy and sense of style. He also marshals an image
of heroic resistance to the status quo. Choi seemingly epitomizes contemporary
consumerism and activism merged together to conjure Web 2.0’s new gay lifestyle
activist.
To be clear, I do not read Choi as the architect of contemporary gay social
movements. He is one representation in a set of gay men of color involved in the repeal
of DADT and active on the Internet. I examine at least one other in the chapter. My goal
is not to simply evaluate Choi’s personal history or politics, or to discount the significant
ground covered by the activism that led to DADT’s repeal. Nor is my goal to ignore the
important work of women and trans people in fighting the policy. I focus on Choi’s rise
to the forefront of gay social movements through his work on DADT. In particular, I
explore here how Choi is claimed and represented by media as the quintessential image
of the healthy, properly masculine, and self-responsible gay activist man of color against
the backdrop of online HIV prevention campaigns that represent women of color, queer
and trans people of color, and “down low”/closeted Black men as subjects who are at
“high risk” for HIV transmission. In other words, Choi is a “safe” gay.
Examining the afterlives of AIDS as they circulate online provides a critical
method for understanding how gay military activism and AIDS are entwined in the
sexual politics of Stonewall 2.0. Searching the Internet, one finds a slew of interviews
and opinion pieces authored by Choi. This includes reportage and writing in more

24
Ibid., 30.

170

mainstream media outlets like ABC News and Huffington Post, but also independent and
LGBT-oriented print and online publications, such as the Advocate, Queerty, Towleroad,
blogs, and so on. In addition to his Facebook page and other social networking profiles,
there is the website, ltndanchoi.org. One of Choi’s earliest video recordings of his
activism posted online is the C-SPAN broadcast of his speech before the 2009 National
Equality March in Washington, D.C. In a speech he declares “a message from the Middle
East,” delivered before the Washington, D.C. Capitol Building during a rally for the 2009
National Equality March, Lieutenant and Arabic linguist, Dan Choi, begins reciting lines
from Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran’s Sand and Foam (1926)(fig. 3). Choi’s
speech was broadcast on the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) and is
available on YouTube. In it, he delivers the poem’s lines in Arabic first. He then offers
his translation in English. He states,”
You are free / you are free before the noonday sun / and you free before
the moon / and you are free before the stars / and you are free where there
is no sun / where there’s no moon / and where there isn’t a single star in
the sky / but you are a slave / you are a slave to the one you love because
you love him / and you are a slave to the one you love because he loves
you back
25

Choi wrenches the lines from the context of Gibran’s poem to universalize a notion of
love. This love forms the affective wellspring that cultivates freedom. Love and freedom
are the political foundation for his speech supporting gay military service. Yet, Choi
limits the racial and gendered subjects who can be represented by his incantations of love
and freedom. His translation immediately invokes a nation of men where same-sex love
is the tie that binds. Furthermore, love between men is formed as the sadomasochistic

25
Choi, Dan. “National Equality March Rally: Lt. Dan Choi speaks.” Inside, Looking Out
YouTube.com Channel. Uploaded October 11, 2009. Accessed: October 17, 2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-eUfCA2gJo.

171

confluence of pleasure and pain. In this imaginary fraternity, love and freedom
paradoxically permeate and exist beyond the horizon of the nation. Freedom, in this
conception, is not fully realized until gay men’s love attains juridical recognition. Choi’s
rhetoric for freedom is constructed through an adaptation of U.S. civil rights discourse.
Specifically, he borrows directly from Black struggles for freedom only to deny them.
By referencing slavery, Choi invokes “racial cruelty.”
26
In this account, slavery,
and its abolition, are fashioned as part of the narrative for U.S. social and political
progress. Black struggles for selfhood merely form the historical backdrop for uniting the
nation. Choi dismisses Black radical and internationalist movements that have, and
continue to, challenge U.S.-European empire. By consigning racism to the past, his
representation of civil rights obscures the persistent operations of race and racism in the
structuring of a global economy. Specifically elided in the above passage is the steady
hand of anti-black racism that shapes U.S. political and popular discourses. Emancipation
is presumably achieved for Black subjects and denied to lesbian and gay people. The tacit
assumption is that Blackness now stands in the way of progress, a point I continue to
return to.

26
Reddy, 238-246.

172

Figure 3. Screenshot from “National Equality March Rally: Lt. Dan Choi speaks.” Choi
delivers his "message from the Middle East" at the National Equality March, 2009,
Washington, D.C. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-eUfCA2gJo.

Choi delivered this speech at least one other time on May 30, 2009 during the
Meet in the Middle for Equality rally in Fresno, California, which is also available on
YouTube.com.
27
In this earlier iteration of the speech, he explicitly refers to the political
struggle for gay military service as civil rights history in the making. Throwing up a

27
Choi, Dan. “MITM4E Rally - Lt Daniel Choi Speech.” SeanChapin1 YouTube.com Channel,
Uploaded May 31, 2009. Accessed: October 16, 2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exTbETG_Kv0. Originally found through link on
http://www.ltdanchoi.org/press.html. I have transcribed this portion of the speech as follows:
“I’m not asking anymore. I am telling, I am telling. Asking is over. I am telling. Asking didn’t
work for my parents when they came across the ocean forty years ago. Asking didn’t work for all
ya’lls parents when they came across the borders and all the oceans. Asking didn’t work for César
Chávez. Asking didn’t work for Rosa Parks. Asking didn’t work for Dr. Martin Luther King.
Asking didn’t work for President Barack Obama. Asking didn’t work for me. Asking doesn’t
work for us. We’re done asking. We’re telling. Will you tell with me! Let’s tell. And let’s never
stop telling. I want to thank you behalf of all the soldiers who are not free to tell, who are not free
speak, who are not free. And it’s for them that we speak, it’s for them we stop asking, it’s for
them we keep telling. Thank you for meeting in the middle. Meet me on the high ground.”

173

single, right-handed fist balled tightly in the air, Choi proceeds with Gibran’s proem,
using the colloquialism “ain’t,” instead of “isn’t,” in his English translation this time.
Choi’s momentary change in vernacular ventriloquizes images of Black resistance. His
hand gesture resonates with the “Black Power Salute” for which African American
athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos received criticism from U.S media for using
during their medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympic Games. Michelle and Barack Obama
were linked to Black aggression and militancy for engaging in a “fist bump” during a
2008 presidential campaign speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. Conservative news reporters
conjured Michelle Obama as a figure of 1970s Blaxploitation film, like “Foxy Brown,”
who was played by Pam Grier.
28
Fox News called the hand greeting a “terrorist fist
jab,”
29
underscoring the Islamophobia leveraged against Malcolm X and Black Muslim
movements more broadly. Although Choi exploits the images and sounds of Black
radicalism, he misappropriates them as liberal multiculturalist representations.
After reading the poem, Choi names César E. Chávez, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Barack Obama as the quintessential precursors to the gay political present,
despite the fact that several of these figures were very public in their opposition to U.S.
military imperialism. It has been pointed out that King’s assassination occurred as he
escalated his protest against U.S. wars.
30
Chávez, during his 1971 anti-Vietnam War
speech at Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, explained that the boycott of grapes

28
Rivers, Caryl. “Bad, Bad Michelle.” HuffingtonPost.com. June 24, 2008. Accessed: November
24, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/bad-mad-michelle_b_108713.html.
29
Beam, Christopher. “The ‘Terrorist Fist Jab’ and Me.” Slate.com. July 14, 2008. Accessed:
November 24, 2013,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2008/07/the_terrorist_fist_jab_and_me.
html.
30
This claim was uttered during Questlove’s voiceover narration in the documentary film The
Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1976 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011). See specifically, 0:15-0:16.

174

correlated ideologically with anti-imperialism. Critiquing masculinism, aggression,
military service, and gun violence, he denounced domestic violence toward women and
the killing of poor farmers by other poor farmers.
31
Yet, by drawing upon neoliberal
multirculturalist rhetoric, Choi fallaciously aligns gay military service with anti-racist,
labor rights, and immigrant rights movements. He references his Korean immigrant
parents and “others” who have crossed the “borders and all the oceans.” The historical
U.S. economic and military interventions that have resulted in mass migration to the
United States are obscured.
The foregrounding of the United States as an immigrant nation naturalizes settler
colonialism and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous subjects. Choi misguidedly
invokes gay military service rights within a narrative of multiracial, multi-issued political
progress. Recognition for the “out,” gay, uniformed patriot seems the next logical step in
this contrived developmentalist history of the nation. The legacy of non-violent
resistance—reverberating through Blackness and Obama’s cooptation of Chávez’s
organizing slogan, “¡Si se puede!”/ “Yes we can!,” for his presidential campaign—
ironically (or not) becomes the representational force for U.S. imperial violence via the
gay activist.

31
At the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association in Washington, D.C., during
the Activism Caucus’s panel, “Boycott as a Non-Violent Strategy of Collective Dissent,”
moderator Curtis Frank Marez pointed to Chávez’s anti-Vietnam War speech to underscore how
boycotts draw together issues and histories of non-violent struggle. Marez, Curtis. “Boycott as a
Non-Violent Strategy of Collective Dissent.” Panel at the Annual Meeting of the American
Studies Association. February 22, 2013. Washington, D.C. Marez played Ricardo Dominguez’s
reenactment of Chávez’s speech. See “Ricardo Dominguez Performs Cesar Chavez.” Critical
Commons: For Fair & Critical Participation in Media Culture. Publication date unknown.
Accessed: November 24, 2013, http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/cmarez/clips/ricardo-
dominguez-performs-cesar-chavez.

175

Stonewall 2.0: François Sagat
Although gay porn icon François Sagat donned military duds dutifully in support
of gay U.S. servicepersons, his fame derives from his racial sexualization first and a
sensationalized representation of gay politics second. His notoriety stems from the
multiple racial identities he subsumes, which allows him to be branded with various
ideological and commercial messages. Sagat started his porn acting career in France, but
gained international gay porn fame when he signed to U.S. companies Raging Stallion
and Titan Media. The intrigue about Sagat revolves heavily around his muscular body,
and the multiple markings of race inked across portions of his skin and signaled through
his performances. Figured prominently on his upper back is a tattoo that couples a
crescent moon and a star to signify an Islamic nation-state flag. Positioned on the crown
of his baldhead is another tattoo shaped like the haircut known as a “fade,” which Sagat
attributes in his Internet-based interviews to Black and Latino men in the United States
(fig 4-5).
32
Digital media featuring Sagat can be found in the form of print magazines and
DVDs, but his consumers are more likely to encounter his images and clips on the
Internet through video-on-demand porn sites, video sharing sites, and more recently, his
blog and Instagram account. His earlier French porn filmography consisted mainly of
work with the company Citébeur (literal translation: “Arab City”
33
), which specializes in

32
When asked in a 2007 interview about the tattoo on his head, he stated, “If you're asking me
[for] the inspiration of its design, [I] answer that I was inspired by the hiphop black and Latino
guys who slightly shave their heads and design each angle at the top of their forehead like that –
JayZ, Usher, PDiddy. But I'm not black; the effect is different on lighter skin with the blue tone of
the tattoo.” Lucido, Jeremy. Starrfucker.net. Publication date unkmown. Accessed: October 8,
2008, http://www.starrfucker.net/blog/archives/2007/09/starr_profile_f.html.
33
The name “Citébeur” combines the French words cité (“city”) and Beur (generally referring to
“Arab,” but specifically to “first- and second-generation French citizens of Maghrebi
background”). See Provencher, Denis M. Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual
Citizenship in France. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007, 184.

176

depictions of sex between Arab, Black, Latino, Eastern European, and other men
racialized as working-class. Sagat’s U.S. porn filmography includes Orientalist titles, like
Arabesque (2005) and the less imaginative Lebanon (2006).
Sagat’s multiracial valence is a casting device that allows his employers to
straddle various niche markets. That is not to say that Black, Latino, Arab, and Muslim
identities are complementary or precisely the same. Threaded throughout the assemblage
of these signs are various kinds of masculine ideals that are imagined as historically
working-class, uncivilized, or ghettoized under a western imperial gaze, availing Sagat of
a similar identity but never eliminating from him a sense of refinement or upward
mobility. In Sagat’s alliance of racialized masculinities, there is a spatial re-arrangement
of geopolitical affiliations, whereby colonized subjects living in geographically disparate
colonial cores are consolidated. Tunisian, Moroccan, and Algerian Maghrebi Arabic-
speaking French communities are brought figuratively and spatially in close proximity to
Black and Latino peoples in the United States—much like contiguous ghettos where
bodies of color are historically sexualized, corralled, and policed to demarcate whiteness
and to delimit potential threats to its degeneracy.
34
The structure of geopolitics remains
unchanged. The working class status of these racialized identities and their spatial
containments are rendered natural.
Sagat’s embodiments and performances of racialized masculinities are
representative of a significant shift in the transnational marketing strategies of gay porn

34
For example, see Treuer, David. Rez Life. New York: Grove Press, 2012; Barghouti, Omar.
BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: the Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2011; Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los
Angeles, 1879-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006; Davis, Angela Y. Are
Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003; Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides:

177

since at least the mid-2000s. Although porn companies include their countries of origin as
part of their branding strategies, the actors they employ follow an aesthetic that blurs
contemporary racial/ethnic distinctions, thereby expanding the companies’ prospective
market reach. These racial/ethnic crossings are achieved in the signaling of colonial
histories, which includes sixteenth century Iberian proto-racial formation and its trans-
Atlantic circulations.
35
In these films, Italian actors can stand-in for Lebanese while
Latino actors can generally substitute for Arab, as is the case with the films Arabesque
(2005), Lebanon (2006), and Arabian Fist (2007). The cast of these films includes actors’
names such as Collin O’Neal, Dirk Jager, Martin Mazza, Manuel Torres, Tony Serrano,
Said, and Hussein. Blackness and other racial/ethnic affiliations are remembered, but
only so they become part of an amalgamated past. Racial amalgamation generates for gay
porn audiences an imagined, multiculturalist network of masculine bodies that traverse
geo-historical boundaries while preserving them just the same.
This multivalent racialization strategy is also used by Russian immigrant and
U.S.-based Zionist filmmaker, Michael Lucas, who is able to brand Israeli gay porn, like
Men of Israel (2009), without drawing into question the white supremacist logic of Israeli
nationalism, which includes the occupation of Palestine and the exclusion of Palestinians
from full citizenship. The appearance of the actors in Lucas’s films is meant to conjure a
fantasy of racial amalgamation, particularly among white, Latino, Middle Eastern, and
“Mediterranean” men, thereby eliding the racism of Israeli apartheid. Israel is posed

Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
35
For a discussion of the construction of race in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see
Martínez, Maria-Elena. “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence,
and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico.” The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 61, No. 3
(July 2004): 479-520.

178

instead as a serene, gay oasis in a region otherwise represented in media as a site of
Muslim-insurgency and homophobia. Sagat and Lucas may never work together, because
of Lucas’s generally racist, and specifically anti-Arab and anti-Muslim antipathies.
However, Sagat is exemplary of the kind of racial/ethnic amalgamation Lucas relies on to
proffer Israel as a gay tourist destination. In other words, U.S. gay porn represents
conflicts in the Middle East as a racial blur, naturalizing U.S. military and economic
interests in the region, and bolstering its ties to Israel.

Figure 4. Screenshot from "MB - CCM - Interview François Sagat - HD." Source:
http://vimeo.com/15557261.

179

Figure 5. Still from "MB - CCM - Interview François Sagat - HD." Source:
http://vimeo.com/15557261.

Gay porn production and consumption is central to U.S. geopolitics. Lucas is a
leader in the efforts known to supporters of Palestinian self-determination as
“pinkwashing,” the branding of Israel as a liberal, gay-friendly bastion amidst a
presumably medieval and violently homophobic Muslim-dominated Middle East. His
Islamophobic political stage is propped up by his involvement with United States gay
pornography and its lucrative consumer participation. Luca’s production company, Lucas
Entertainment, is profitable to the extent that he has been lionized as “porn royalty.” He
is known for having the highest production budget ever for a single gay porn film. From
his base in New York City, he wields broad business and political influence.
36
Lucas
writes for major publications, including the Huffington Post and The Advocate.
37
In 2011,

36
Van Meter, William. “The Lion of Chelsea.” NYMag.com. October 25, 2007. Accessed:
October 2, 2013, http://nymag.com/movies/features/23146/.
37
Lucas, Michael. “The Monument to Muslim Terrorism.” The Adovcate.com, August 9, 2010.
Accessed: October 28, 2013, http://www.advocate.com/politics/commentary/2010/08/09/michael-
lucas-monument-muslim-terrorism. Lucas, Michael. “Should Israel Strike at Iran while it Still

180

he was able to convince the New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Center
to cancel the event, “Party to End Apartheid!,” organized by the Palestinian solidarity
group, Siege Busters.
38
To be able to capitalize on his porn and political endeavors, Lucas
has leaned on the United States’ pro-Israeli and interventionist policy in the Middle East.
More importantly, he relies on the popular representational consumption of a blurred
Middle Eastern racial and geographic aesthetic in gay porn.
Likewise, Sagat’s physical and discursive mobility across geographical borders
rests on his U.S. boosterism and commitment to its military imperialist exploits. He
seems to evade ideological contradiction by avoiding in his art and activism the violence
directed at Arabs and Muslims in the global war on terror, or by drawing out the erotic
dimensions of the terrorist “other.” For instance, in the Vimeo-based online video clip of
Sagat’s pro-U.S. military photo shoot with U.S. fashion photographer Richardson, the
crescent moon and star tattooed between Sagat’s shoulder blades are hidden behind a
strip of camouflage that runs down the back of his elastic singlet. At another moment, he
dons aviator glasses, a trench coat, and flashes himself to reveal explosives taped around
his half-naked body.
39
Political tensions dissolve into a mélange of violence and sex,
which is the style of Richardson, who, according to feminist blog Jezebel.com and other
news sources, stands accused of building his career off the sexual exploitation and

Can?” HuffingtonPost.com. April 9, 2012. Accessed: October 28, 2013,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-lucas/the-nukes-of-hazard-should_b_1400270.html.
These are but a few examples of Lucas’s raucous writings about gay and Middle East politics.
38
Thrasher, Steven. “Gay Center Axes Israeli Apartheid Week Event After Boycott Threat by
Porn Activist.” Blogs.VillageVoice.com. February 23, 2011. Accessed: October 29, 2013,
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/02/apartheid_week.php.
39
“François Sagat is Terry Richardson’s All American Hero.” Qeerty.com. February 27, 2011.
Accessed: October 28, 2013, http://www.queerty.com/francois-sagat-is-terry-richardsons-all-
american-hero-20110227/.

181

degradation of young women.
40
In short, taking a stand for gay military servicepersons
remains commonsensical for a U.S.-based gay porn consuming audience, particularly
when it is branded through the sexualization of the “terrorist-enemy” figure. In tow,
consumption of this racial sexual image supports the Israeli colonial occupation of
Palestine, specifically, and U.S. global military occupation, broadly. The commercialism
of multivalent racialized male identities in gay porn forms a masculinist media platform
upon which the U.S. gay military service movement, in its dogged pro-war patriotism,
makes its stand.

Transgression and Containment, 2.0
In Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Eric
Lott explains that nineteenth century blackface performance operated within a libidinal
economy that celebrated and exploited perceptions of Black sexuality. In minstrelsy,
there is the “simultaneously drawing up and crossing of racial boundaries.”
41
Blackface
performance provided for the “transgression and containment” of the “color line” so that

40
Sauers, Jenna. “Meet Terry Richardson, The World’s Most F—ked up Fashion Photographer,”
Jezebel.com. March 6, 2010. Accessed: November 10, 2013, http://jezebel.com/5494634/meet-
terry-richardson-the-worlds-most-fked-up-fashion-photographer. Also see Sauers, Jenna.
“EXCLUSIVE: More Models Come Forward with Allegations against Fashion Photographer.”
Jezebel.com. March 18, 2010. Accessed: November 10, 2013,
http://jezebel.com/5495699/exclusive-more-models-come-forward-with-allegations-against-
fashion-photographer. Also see Davies, Caroline. “Fashion photographer Terry Richardson
accused of sexually exploiting models.” TheGuardian.com. March 19, 2010. Accessed:
November 10, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/mar/19/terry-richardson-
fashion-photography-pornography. Most recently, Richardson is credited for Miley Cyrus’s
racially tinged and sexually charged controversial teen-pop-demolition do-over. See Adams, Guy.
“Miley Cyrus makeover: the truth about photograph Terry Richardson.” ColoradoNewday.com,
October 13, 2013. Accessed: November 10, 2013,
http://www.coloradonewsday.com/national/22295-miley-cyrus-makeover-the-truth-about-
photographer-terry-richardson.html.
41
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005, 6.

182

white anxieties and desires for Blackness, which implicates same-sex interracial desires,
could be projected onto a Black figure and then surreptitiously embodied by white (male)
performing subjects.
42
In the representational economy of stage acts, blackface
performance evokes sympathy and disgust, disdain and pleasure from a white viewing
public. It is a lasting structure of visual domination that is affectively charged, and
enables tactile titillation from imagined contact with Blackness. This fantasy of racial
encounter derives from the commercial relations between property and sexuality designed
by chattel slavery—a kind of possession of “blackness”—that Lott calls the “racial
unconscious.”
43
The spectacle of sexual and cultural miscegenation, Lott maintains, has
continued throughout the development of twentieth century U.S. cinema and popular
music.
Scott Lauria Morgensen interjects into this discussion by asking us to consider
how race and sexuality are structured through the architecture of settler colonialism. He
argues that white supremacist settler colonialism creates modern sexuality. That is,
Native peoples are produced through the colonial project as queer subjects. In turn, white
settlers experiencing marginalization as a result of their non-normative sexual status (e.g.,
white gays and lesbians) are cast as queer. In turn, sexually marginalized white settlers
lay claim to queer politics by imagining sexuality in a primitive register. Morgensen
points out that queer white settlers’ demands for inclusion into settler society distances
them from the struggles of disenfranchised Native peoples. He argues, “Non-Native

42
Ibid, 234.
43
Lott, Eric. “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy.”
Representations No. 39 (Summer, 1992): 23-50.

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queer modernities form by gathering a multiracial, transnational constituency as a
diversity that exists in a Non-Native relationship to disappearing indigeneity.”
44

Examining the cases of Choi and Sagat, we see how white supremacist settler
colonialism is structured through a visual narrative of racial amalgamation. Gay male
sexual citizenship is invested in the desire and love for the image of racial amalgamation.
Choi and Sagat’s representations entail the invisibility and evisceration of Native peoples.
They also function through the hyper-visibility and hyper-surveillance of Black subjects.
Other non-white subjects of U.S. empire are collapsed into a multiracial framework that
elides anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violences instead of elucidating the interrelatedness
of racialization processes. Each gay media figure conjures representational spectacles of,
and indulges the desires for, sexual and cultural miscegenation that is rendered legible
through co-optations of Blackness. Performing Blackness becomes an exercise of gay,
masculine male identity that celebrates racial amalgamation while maintaining the
historical narration of U.S. white racial and heteropatriarchal domination.
This restrictive deployment of love, as an affective principle that orders the
universe, is “the reproduction of the national ideal.”
45
To gain access to sexual
citizenship, one must develop sexual desire into a positive identity that mirrors state
interests. That love for self and other reflects one’s love for the nation, a necessary
condition for manifesting sexual citizenship. Created as an object of affection in the
political rhetoric of Choi and Sagat, Obama embodies the possibility of multiculturalist
gay male love for the U.S. nation-state. Obama’s election campaign of “hope” and

44
Morgensen, Scott Lauria. Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous
Decolonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 32.
45
Ahmed, Sarah. “In the Name of Love.” Borderlands e-journal Vol 2, Nov 3, 2002. Accessed:
November 3, 2013, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no3_2003/ahmed_love.htm.

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“change” is vested with his multivalent racialization as a mixed-race Black man who was
born in Hawai’i, where multiraciality is a selling point for tourism that obscures the
project of settler colonialism on Native lands.
46
Focusing on Obama as the individual
most responsible for promoting or detracting state homophobia, Choi states in an
interview:
With a swash of his pen, Obama could say [to gays], “You are a legitimate
minority.” That's what the 1948 order recognized…This guy that I thought
was so amazing, he can hurt me more than anybody because there's
nobody who can hurt you more than the one you once loved, and continue
to love. He knows that.
47

By referring to former President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 issue of Executive
Order 9981 to desegregate the U.S. armed forces, Choi aligns gay rights with a history of
the struggle for U.S. racial equality. He appeals to Obama through a racialized,
masculinized narrative of homosexual love that resonates with his reference to Gibran’s
Sand and Foam. Choi presumes that racial equality has been achieved vis-à-vis
desegregation. He also implies that the appearance of the head of state as a Black man
provides further evidence. Choi intimates what he believes is a painful irony that Obama
should somehow be better equipped to address discrimination because of his Blackness,
punctuating his plea with: “He knows that.” He casts Obama as an abusive homosexual
lover who simply won’t let Choi be the man that he wishes to be, which is an out, gay
man engaged in battle for the Middle East. Obama’s Blackness is placed in a genealogy

46
Tavia Nyong’o writes that the “hope” and “change” invested in Obama’s multiraciality was
“not just the effect of recent pre- and post-millennial effusions…[but] was already visible, for
instance, during the antebellum struggle to abolish slavery.” See Nyong’o, Tavia. Amalgamation
Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009, 9-10.
47
Coker, Matt. “Lt. Dan Choi Not Celebrating Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.” OC Weekly
Blogs. September 20, 2011. Accessed: November 3, 2013,
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2011/09/lt_dan_choi_not_celebrating_re.php.

185

of sexual conservatism, which includes the figure of the “down low” Black man who
engages in same-sex sexual activity, refuses to admit that he is gay, and should be held
personally responsible for the spread of HIV. By hailing Obama as a closeted gay lover,
Choi is able to momentarily stabilize his own masculinity as proper to what could be a
gay-inclusive state.
For Sagat, love is bound to a more explicitly articulated racial fetish object. When
asked during interviews published online about his attractions toward men, he
complained that gay men are not often manly enough to capture his affection. He stresses
his appeal for “straight acting guys.”
48
To be even more specific, he desires men whose
racialization presumably places them at immediate odds with western notions of gay
identity. He proclaims,
For ‘everyday sex’, I really love Arabic guys……[sic] but it’s sometimes
hard to have a relationship. I loved someone who was supposed to be
straight—we had sex two times, but he didn’t want to admit his gay side, I
would say. For him, being straight was being a ‘top’—‘I’m top, so I’m
straight. I don’t get fucked, so I’m straight!’
49

Unlike Choi, Sagat does not see possibility in love with other gay-identified men.
However, like Choi, he sees that the roadblock to love is the denial of gay identity by
those who engage in homosexual activity. While a contradiction seems to exist in Sagat’s
discourse on gay male love, his articulation of love reveals how desire is not easily
narrativized. Stated otherwise, desire does not necessarily manifest into a rigid sexual
identity. By extension, the affirmation of sexual identity does not guarantee one will love

48
Evers, Rob. “FRANÇOIS SAGAT: THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK | PART I” Beautiful
Mag. July 2007. Accessed: November 3, 2013,
http://beautiful.blogs.com/beautiful/2006/07/franois_sagat_t.html.
49
Lucido, Jeremy. “Starr Profile: Francois Sagat.” STARRFUCKER MAGAZINE: ANOTHER
HOMOSEXUAL THEMED TUMBLR.” Publication date unknown. Accessed: October 11, 2008.
http://www.starrfucker.net/blog/archives/2007/09/starr_profile_f.html.

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or be loved. Hence, Sagat’s gay identity demonstrates that love and marriage do not make
sense, as gay marriage activists would otherwise proffer. Furthermore, Sagat’s admission
of love points to how the racial fetishism of the Middle East in gay porn helps to
rationalize U.S. military violence. Representations of Sagat’s love for Arab men, coupled
with his erotic display of U.S. militarism, suggest that U.S. empire will result in the
expansion of sexual freedoms for Arab peoples and gay access to Arab men. This is
evidenced by the racial fantasy that Sagat inhabits, as well as the articulation of this
fantasy as his own. Sagat is simultaneously the object of, and an agent for, sexual
conquest. He invests in U.S. politics in order to remain loved by many, and in the hopes
that he may one day find personal love.
Sagat’s love for the United States is illustrated in his ad campaign for the election
of Obama, featuring the “YES WE CAN COLA.” In these photographs, we see Sagat
“jones-in’” for the would-be president (Fig 3). His love for heterosexual men of color
plays an important role in the visual coding of these three photographs. Queerclick
Caliente, the Spanish edition of the popular gay porn blog, Queerclick.com, arranged the
photographs like frames in a film reel to depict the scene’s action. In each frame, Sagat is
seated wearing only a black leather garrison cap, hunter’s harness, and thong. In one
photo, Sagat brandishes an open bottle with a wry smile. The word “VOTE” appears next
to him. In the following two photographs the bottle is brought to his lips and then its
contents consumed. Queerclick Caliente’s caption points out that the bottle’s content may
be urine. The humor of these images lies in the conjuring of a mixed private and public
space known for its traffic in gay and heterosexual men looking for homosexual sexual
contact: the public restroom, otherwise known in gay parlance as the “tearoom” (fig. 6).

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In the scene of bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism (BDSM), Sagat’s
willingness to drink Obama’s urine demonstrates his submission to Obama. The practice
of “piss play” most often occurs by urinating directly onto the sexual submissive. Sagat’s
knowing smile suggests that the act of piss play with Obama has already taken place,
with the proof in his hands and mouth. Sagat is, literally, homosexually consuming a
representation of Obama. That act is hidden from public view, contained to the privacy of
the home or the semi-private space of the public bathroom, but once again consumed by
the Internet viewer. Although sex between Sagat, as a gay-identified man, and Obama, as
the national embodiment of heterosexuality, is not portrayed, it is representable and
consumable. The bottling and merchandising of Obama’s urine as a product to promote
voting literalizes the relationship between gay representation, consumerism, and
citizenship. These photographs entice the prospective consumer by appealing to the
senses. What does “American” freedom taste like?
The product promises the experience of crossing the threshold of the racial
“Other” through the act of representational consumption. For both Choi and Sagat,
BDSM contours the dimensions of desire between men. Sagat’s leatherwear invokes
bondage play, which raises the historical specter of slavery if not always, then at least in
the context of Obama’s pending election as the first Black president, whether intentional
or not. Sagat’s image emits the tacit plea to be released from gay suffering imposed by
society, likening gay oppression to the institution of human bondage. As sexual
performances, BDSM and piss play trouble the division between private and public
spheres. Crucial to BDSM is the eroticization of humiliation, which imagines the
lowering of one’s social status in the eyes of the public resulting from the act of being

188

dominated. Although BDSM or piss play may be conducted out of public view, erotic
energy is drawn from the play with power derived from the crossing of social boundaries.
The public may not see the sexual play, but they are the imagined audience. Public
restrooms are spaces particularly littered with public interest. They are the sites in which
race and gender are heavily policed.
50
Yet, public restrooms are also the spaces that
facilitate cross-class social and sexual interaction, particularly between men.
51
Piss play
is imminent to tearoom action and represents bathroom sex in the context of Sagat’s
photos. The risk of getting caught for bathroom sex and being publicly exposed for one’s
sexual transgressions significantly constitutes the thrill of this scene.
While BDSM performs the possibility of traversing social norms, hitching non-
normative expressions of desire to national love functionally delimits transgressions of
power. Rather than “gesture toward the possibility of encountering specific historical
moments viscerally, thereby refusing…the closure of pastness,” as Elizabeth Freeman
argues,
52
the deployment of BDSM within the narrative of national love renders
Blackness as the abject past. For both Choi and Sagat, the presumption is that chattel
slavery ended out of love and resulted in unmitigated freedom and dignity for the
formerly enslaved. This form of neoliberal multicultural consumption poses consumerism
as the exercise of post-racial freedom. It recognizes subjecthood as the ownership of
property that is protected by the law, conditions that were predicated upon slaves as
property, but also denied as rights to freed Black persons even in the Post-bellum period.

50
Hom, Alice Y. and Eng, David. “Introduction.” Q&A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1998, 1-2.
51
For an in-depth examination of cross-class sexual contact between men in semi-public spaces,
see Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University
Press, 2001.

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The underlying notion is that the essence of freedom—of Obama as the embodiment of a
progressive racial history—can be contained and consumed. It can be bought and sold as
property. “YES WE CAN COLA” is the wellspring of love, but it comes at a cost.

Figure 6. “Gio Photography hace un ensayo muy divertido con el porno star francés
François Sagat. Es obvio que él mismo no vota en América, y mientras los actores de
Hollywood hacen un vídeo invitando a los ciudadanos Americanos a votaren, Sagat hace
un chiste bebiendo de una botella algo que luce como piss. ¿Piss de Obama?” (Gio
Photography creates a light-hearted photo essay with French porn star, François Sagat. It
is obvious the he does not vote in America, and while Hollywood actors make videos
inviting American citizens to vote, Sagat makes a joke by drinking from a bottle with
something that looks like piss. Obama’s piss?) Source: “François Sagat Invitar a Vota.”
Queerclick Caliente. Source:
http://www.queerclick.com/espanol/archive/2008/10/francois_sagat_invita_a_votar.php.

52
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities and Queer Histories. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010, 42.

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Choi punctuates his “message from the Middle East” with a commentary about
the cost of love. After he finishes his translation of Gibran’s Sand and Foam, Choi makes
the pronouncement:
Now I know that there are many things that are worth fighting for and I
have fought for many of them and I will tell you that some of those are
very, very expensive. But of all those things that are worth fighting for,
love is worth it! Love is worth it! Love is worth it!
53

The idea that love is worth the fight references the social movement discourse of
“struggle.” However, it once again alludes to the need for U.S. military intervention
abroad as the stage for love among gay men. The choice to consume “YES WE CAN
COLA” will be available to people of the Middle East once gay military personnel are
permitted to serve the United States without homophobic backlash. The irony that
freedom can be bought and sold is perhaps not lost on Choi or Sagat. One might even
argue that Choi and Sagat are cynical of the U.S. political process. However, the support
they throw behind gay military service undercuts any critique they may have of the state.
Instead, censure of the U.S. political system is directed specifically at Obama. Political
possibility is relegated to the sphere of representational consumption.
In the narrative of neoliberal multiculturalist consumption, race and racism are
situated in the rearview. Simultaneously, they are the conditions for the calls to manifest
global sexual citizenship via gay military service. Choi’s “message from the Middle
East” places the movement for gay rights in the arena of U.S. political culture and folds it
into the geography of cold war legacies and U.S. neoliberal economic imperatives. He
claims to speak not only for the rights of U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East, but
also for the liberation of the subjects of U.S. military occupation. Embedded in the logic

53
Choi, Inside, Looking Out YouTube.com Channel.

191

of U.S. military annexation is the presumed evisceration of Indigenous peoples and ways
of life, in the United States and abroad, as part of the necessary violence of a civilizing
project. Meanwhile, Sagat epitomizes the imagined outcome when U.S. military and gay
commercial expansion efforts join together—a kind of “queer modernity.” The result is
the exportation of the mechanisms for appropriating Blackness and various racial
“Others”; the lifting of racial signifiers that leaves the structure of domination and
genocide intact. Sagat’s racialized desirability is enabled by the imaginings of Blacks and
Latinos as domestic threats and Arab and Muslim peoples as worldwide terrorists. His
emergence in global gay media raises the specter of a coalition between Palestinians and
the Indigenous peoples of settler societies, only to be deterred by his avid support for
U.S. domination.
As a form of racial excess, Blackness—in its amalgamations and appropriations—
becomes a vehicle for racial transgression. At the same time, racial excesses are
contained by its representational expropriation from Black and other non-white subjects.
Both Choi and Sagat perform Blackness while yielding to the violences Black and
“Othered” racial subjects are subjected to. These Black appropriations consolidate a
racial and developmentalist history. They provide the basis for eliciting sympathy for
personal sufferings while registering individual sexual desire and desirability. “Acting
black” functions as a means by which to archive the “self.” This archive makes legible
individual subjecthood as a recurring narrative for struggles for freedom. At the same
time, Choi and Sagat are not the embodied targets of Indigenous dispossession and
persistent anti-Black violence. They represent “foreign others” who petition for inclusion
in the U.S. nation through a love for the racial fantasy of U.S. empire.

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The archive of the gay male self, of racial appropriation, lays the groundwork for
these men’s potential individual transformations through love. That transformation of self
through love insists upon the immutable structure of racial domination. Racial difference
is used to both transgress and contain queer desires. The space of neoliberal consumption
allows the traversing of the space between private and public through sexuality. Choi and
Sagat cultivate their own brands of empowering gay identity by asserting a sense of love
which foregrounds sexual identity in the public sphere while relegating sexual acts (like
piss play) to the domestic sphere. The privatization of rights in the discourse of gay male
love produces masculinity as a flexible, transferrable property between men, regardless of
histories of racialization. Flexible racialized masculinity and maleness function as the
proper representational medium through which to appeal for state recognition. Race, in
Choi’s formulation, appears momentarily and only to make the case for a post-racial,
post-feminist state built on the sanctity of homosocial and fraternal relations. This course
for the transformational gay male self is best evidenced and mapped when we consider
the depictions of race and gender in the context of AIDS and the shifting media platforms
for its depictions throughout the last three decades.

Loving after AIDS
RuPaul, the well-known Black drag queen whose film, television, fashion, and
pop music career launched in the early 1990s, disappeared from public view in the late
1990s. In 2008, RuPaul returned to the public eye with the LOGO television show
RuPaul’s Drag Race, noting that, during the last eight years,
We became, sort of, held hostage by this fear, hysteria in this country.
And, gender issues, as it pertains to men and femininity, have to go

193

underground because nobody is wanting to hear from any man prancing
around in a dress when this country is involved in this fear, hysteria.
54

Put simply, that fear and hysteria, characterized by the George W. Bush administration
and military aggression, demanded of the public rigid forms of gender expression. I
would argue that those past eight years were marked by both gender and racial
inflexibility even while sexuality became seemingly more open under the sign of white
male, middle- to upper-class masculinity. Much of these changes can be attributed to a
sharp change in the discourse of AIDS at the end of the twentieth century.
In the 1990s, there was a sharp change in the representations of AIDS. While the
1980s was dominated by the image of the disintegrating body of the white gay man
diagnosed with AIDS who faced a failing healthcare system, the 1990s saw the (re-
)emergence of the white, gay healthy, masculine man in mainstream media. HIV
treatment innovations in the mid-1990s extended the lives of HIV-positive people who
had access to the medications. By the late-1990s a cosmetic medical industry expressly
addressing the aesthetics of AIDS “symptoms” for those who could afford it also
emerged. Images of out, gay white masculine male beauty began to appear more
frequently in mainstream media. By the late-1990s, mostly gay white men’s and some
white and bi-racial lesbian images gained more mainstream visibility in film and
television while narratives explicit about HIV/AIDS dwindled. These films include As
Good As it Gets (1997), In and Out (1997), and Object of My Affection (1998), among
others, while television shows got a later start with Will and Grace (1998-2006), Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007), Queer as Folk (2000-2005), and The L Word

54
Interview with RuPaul on March 4, 2009 interview on The View. I thank Frisley Juarez for
directing me to this video clip. See “RuPaul on The View.” Living Out Loud with Darian (blog).

194

(2004-2009). Each focused largely on upwardly mobile white, propertied, and properly
gendered gay and lesbian subjects seeking love.
Meanwhile, during my work in HIV/AIDS social services since 1999, I saw an
increase in social marketing campaigns that link women of color and queer people of
color to anxieties about HIV/AIDS. This increased focus on people of color is directly
tied to the marriage between state interests and neoliberal economics in the
corporatization of HIV/AIDS social services. During the post-AIDS crisis era, the
government outsourced its public service responsibility by funding AIDS service
organizations to undertake prevention and treatment efforts. These organizations operate
under tight restrictions and constant scrutiny by state entities that can audit and de-fund a
program or an entire organization. Smaller scale organizations, oftentimes women and
people of color organizations, remain most vulnerable because they are largely
government funded. Meanwhile, goliath organizations, such as the AIDS Healthcare
Foundation (AHF) in Los Angeles, subsist through significant individual and corporate
sponsorships.
During the late-1990s, targeting women of color and queer people of color with
HIV/AIDS prevention intensified. While this was generally seen as a positive shift in
AIDS policy, the byproduct was the increased state surveillance of marginalized
communities through AIDS social services. Government contracts called for proposals
for HIV “intervention” programs that developed effective strategies for “behavior
change” among women of color and queer people of color that would reduce the rate of
infection among “at risk” groups. Outreach campaigns involved marketing and branding

Posted March 6, 2009. Accessed: March 12, 2010, http://loldarian.blogspot.com/2009/03/rupaul-
on-view.html.

195

strategies that conceived women of color and queer people of color as AIDS social
service “consumers.” The Internet was targeted as a racialized space for HIV “risk,” since
it connected many people, especially “closeted” and “down low” men of color, and
facilitated anonymous sexual activity.
In the late-1990s, the government spearheaded initiatives to increase HIV testing
and “prevention with positives,” with particular attention paid to women of color and
queer people of color. Campaigns include “HIVStopsWithMe.org,” which has run
nationally since 2000.
55
The site is described as a “multifaceted national social marketing
campaign that aims to prevent the spread of HIV while reducing the stigma associated
with the disease.” HIVStopsWithMe.org “has been nominated for Best Advertising
Campaign by the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and received a Webby
Award for Best Health Website.”
56
The site features the personal stories of “real” people,
almost exclusively racial minorities, who represent the organization’s vision for effective
HIV prevention and de-stigmatization. Their marketing slogan reads: “I TREAT MY
HIV WITH MEDICATION, CONDOMS, RESPECT.” The solution to the pandemic is
boiled down to an HIV-positive person of color’s adherence to treatment, the endless use
of latex barriers, and the personification of the virus. The HIV-positive person of color is
supposed to develop a relationship with HIV—to respect HIV—as if the virus is an
affectively charged, living being that should be treated with a code of morality. The
moral implication is that there are dire consequences for disrespecting HIV.

55
New York State Department of Health. HIVStopsWithMe.org. Accessed: November 10, 2013,
http://hivstopswithme.org.
56
New York State Department of Health. HIVStopWithMe.org. “About.” URL:
http://www.hivstopswithme.org/about. Accessed: November 10, 2013.

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In 2009, the AHF, the world’s largest AIDS organization, began the “Man Up”
campaign, which featured African American actor Blair Underwood. Ads targeted “down
low” Black men. The campaign, which can still be seen on Los Angeles billboards in
2013, emphasizes Black masculine men’s “sex appeal” and “personal responsibility” for
the AIDS pandemic. It directs viewers to HIV testing resources at
www.FreeHIVTest.net.
57
These campaigns draw upon stereotypes and anxieties of Black
male sexual predation: he lurks, lies, and carries HIV. Instead of challenging homophobia
and transphobia, the AHF campaign encourages masculinism and patriarchy by calling
upon Black men (and other men of color) to “man up.” It imagines that a Black man will
respond to doubts about his gender presentation by logging into the Internet and selecting
an HIV testing site. The systemic conditions of racism and sexism that shape the course
of the pandemic are reduced to neoliberal racialized masculine representations. The
pandemic is localized onto the figure of the queer man of color. Stemming the pandemic
is less about intervening into the systematic unequal distribution of wealth and services.
Rather, HIV prevention efforts focus on the person of color’s in/ability to overcome
structural discrimination.
By 2011, I began to see bus and billboard ads across Los Angeles presenting a
menacing-looking green and yellow virion image of HIV floating freely. There were no
representational bodies attached to these virus images. The message in the ads pointed the
public to EraseDoubt.org, which is a “multi-media advertising campaign aimed at
fighting the spread of HIV and AIDS in Los Angeles County,” sponsored by the Los

57
AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “Blair Underwood’s ‘Man Up’ Ad Campaign Promotes Free
HIV Testing Services.” April 15, 2009. Accessed: November 10, 2013,
http://www.aidshealth.org/archives/news/blair-underwoods-man-up-ad-campaign-promotes-ahfs-
free-hiv-testing-services.

197

Angeles County Department of Public Health and Office of AIDS Programs and Policy.
58

EraseDoubt.org is filled with images of men of color (and a few images of their “at-risk”
female partners) and asks: “Is HIV in You?” The virion image drifts across the page and
is also lodged in the eyeball of Black and Latino men.
59
This campaign reveals how
representations of the Black body and other bodies of color have become inseparable
from the medical imaging of HIV. The link between the stylized medical images of the
virus to bodies of color is representationally concretized. In the present, the
rationalization of HIV includes not only the tracking of sexual behavior among people of
color, but instead the surveillance of the queer body and its desires. Disciplining queer
desires entails the micromanagement of the queer body’s “inside”—her/his feelings,
identity development, and the way s/he “sees” the world through her/his own eyes (fig.
7).

Figure 7 “Is HIV in You?” EraseDoubt.org.

58
“LA County Launches Advertising Campaign to Encourage HIV Testing.” April 15, 2011.
EndDoubt.org. Accessed November 10, 2013, http://erasedoubt.org/about-us/erase-doubt-in-the-
news/la-county-launches-advertising-campaign-to-encourage-hiv-testing/.
59
EraseDoubt.org. URL: http://erasedoubt.org/lets-stop-hiv-together/. Last accessed: 11/10/13.

198

In the first decade of the new millennium, the fashioning of the image of a healthy
gay white male body juxtaposed by the images of “at risk” people of color populations
has sharpened racial, gender, and class boundaries in the time of post-crisis era of AIDS.
Images of white masculine gay men free from HIV/AIDS in film and television grow
while women of color and queer people of color are represented in social marketing
campaigns as HIV-positive persons who need to cultivate self-care and individual
responsibility in order to stem the global impact of AIDS. The emergence of a post-AIDS
crisis visual and temporal schema locates white gay men in the activist past and the
foreseeable gay future while figuring people of color, and in particular working-class, un-
propertied, and HIV-positive people of color, as anachronisms. In the post-AIDS crisis
time, white gay male masculinity has been posited as universal and desirable, escaping
and even overcoming the representational stigma of AIDS, while people of color
represent the lack of personal accountability for the AIDS pandemic.
Within this visual schema of commonsense, Choi and Sagat are striking because
they represent gay activism as individual responsibility for AIDS. This is a marked shift
from the previous decades of AIDS activism that focused on government accountability
for AIDS proliferation. Choi and Sagat represent gay men of color’s willingness to live
their lives before public media as “out” and vocal men who remain healthy precisely
because they speak about personal accountability for the pandemic. Representing ones
self as an out gay man of color is equated with HIV prevention.
During 2009, the New York City Council partnered with HIV/ADS organizations
around the five boroughs of New York City to launch the YouTube-based HIV/AIDS

199

awareness campaign called “I Talk Because…” The campaign stresses “open and honest
conversations” as the means to “prevent new infections and reduce stigma attached to
people living with this disease.”
60
This campaign focuses on challenging the stigma
associated with HIV, which is what I felt was an important aspect of AIDS work in the
first decade the twenty-first century. However, to promote individuals to “speak out” all
too often invokes neoliberalist ideas about personal empowerment as a response to a
pandemic bound-up in structural discrimination.
“I Talk Because…” featured Choi in the campaign on a YouTube video posted in
2010. In the one minute, twenty-three second clip, Choi stands in a dimly lit room
wearing a dark suit jacket with a U.S. flag pinned to his lapel (fig. 8).
61
After a self-
introduction, he remarks,
I talk about HIV/AIDS because silence is the reason why we still have the
disease. People remain uneducated about the prevention and the things
that we can do stop it. There are still people that are dying in our country
and in the world because they don’t know about how to prevent the
disease. I’m not HIV-positive, but I’m also not afraid of people who are
HIV-positive. There is nothing to be afraid about. There’s no reason why
we should feel ashamed to talk about it. In fact, there should be more
shame for people who are afraid to speak about AIDS, for people who are
afraid to talk about and educate people about the disease. Shame on them
for staying silent, shame on them because people will look back on us and
say: How did you guys feel shame when there were people that were
dying in other countries? And, so you were ashamed to even to talk to
people who were HIV-positive? There’s more shame in silence than there
is about having a disease. Silence itself is the disease.

The “I Talk Because…” campaign focuses on challenging the stigma associated
with HIV, which has been an important aspect of the AIDS activist fight against state

60
“I Talk Because…” Gay Center Blog. December 1, 2009. Accessed November 14, 2013,
http://www.gaycenter.org/centerblog/2009-12-01-i-talk-because/.
61
Choi, Dan. “Lt. Dan Chi Talks About HIV/AIDS Because…” Italkbecause YouTube.com
Channel. Posted February 4, 2010. Accessed November 4, 2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-lJ8UQ7bnE.

200

neglect since the 1980s and early 1990s. However, Choi’s testimony about “speaking
out” promotes ideas about personal empowerment as a response to a pandemic bound-up
in structural disparities. Choi stands wearing a dark suit jacket with a U.S. flag pinned to
his lapel.
62
The camera is shaky and abruptly pans in and out. This connotes a mood of
improvisation and the immediacy and urgency of AIDS, much like the liveness conveyed
in original AIDS activist videos depicting street protests. This representation of Choi’s
testimony focuses on the relationship between silence and shame, proposing that silence
produces shame. Some of his words resonate with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
(ACT UP) slogan, “Silence=DEATH,” initiated about three decades before. However,
that slogan is modified in Choi’s video.

Figure 8. “Lt. Dan Choi Talks About HIV/AIDS Because...” Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-lJ8UQ7bnE.

62
Ibid.

201

Rather than think about how AIDS stigma produces silence and makes socially
marginalized groups vulnerable to infection, the video suggests Choi imagines there is
someone, or a set of individuals, who are actively maintaining a code of silence and
shame. Reflected here is the rhetoric of “Gay Shame,” a movement that developed in the
early 2000s to challenge the commercialization of “Gay Pride.” Yet, according to Jack
Halberstam, gay shame romanticizes a singular gay past. It dismisses the subjectivities
and interventions staged by queers of color, and instead presumes a white gay male
identitarian model of internal struggle.
63
Furthermore, it narrates the pandemic as an
individual’s moral battle. “Speaking out” demonstrates self-empowerment—it presumes
the ability of the gay men of color to be self-responsible as a person perhaps affected, but
uninfected by HIV. Unlike other closeted individuals who represent abject shame, Choi’s
representation casts AIDS as a matter of personal crisis rather than the result of structural
inequities and systemic persecution.
“I Talk Because…” is part of a shift in HIV prevention strategy that began in the
late-1990s. During my work in HIV/AIDS social services since 1999, there was an
increase in social marketing campaigns that sought to link women of color and queer
people of color to anxieties about HIV/AIDS. Outreach campaigns involved marketing
and branding strategies that conceived women of color and queer people of color as
AIDS social service “consumers.” The Internet was targeted as a racialized space for HIV
“risk,” since it connected many people, especially “closeted” and “down low” men of
color seeking anonymous sex, trans people possibly or presumably engaging in sex work,
and women of color who are partnered with at risk men.

63
Halberstam, Judith. “Shame and White Gay Masculinity.” Social Text 84–85, Vol. 23, Nos. 3–4
(Fall–Winter 2005): 219-233.

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It has been said that Sagat “plays a valuable role in the area of HIV/AIDS
prevention and education” because he insists on wearing condoms in films when actors in
gay pornography today are paid considerably more to engage in anal penetration without
a condom, an act also known as “barebacking.” He has recorded a French, web-based
public service announcement demonstrating how to use a condom. Sagat’s face will be
featured on a condom line produced in association with the U.S. gay porn company
Titan.
64
In 2010, Australian artist Ross Watson sought to memorialize Sagat’s gay porn
iconographic status by painting him in the likeness of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St.
Peter (1602) as an affront to the Vatican and its stance against condom use.
65
The
narrative of sainthood in Catholic mythology recalls Peter as a leader among Jesus’s
apostles who, upon his crucifixion by the Romans, requested that the cross he bears be
turned upside down since he did not deem himself worthy of the martyrdom of Jesus
Christ. Laying Sagat on his back and turning him on his head both highlights and
obscures two tattooed points on his body—the crown of his head and his upper back
where the Black/Latino and Muslim signifiers sit, respectively. The upturned figure of
Sagat gestures at his multiracial and multiculturalist valences. However, his whiteness is
foregrounded. He is melded into the image tradition of white Christian sainthood
precisely because he stands-in for individual responsibility for safer sex practices and
health in an era in which only gay persecution is presumed to persist. His persecution as a

64
Kinser, Jeremy. “Francois Sagat Opens Up On Gay Porn Suicides And Why He Quit The
Business.”Queerty.com. May 20, 2013. Accessed: November 4, 2013,
http://www.queerty.com/francois-sagat-opens-up-on-suicide-in-gay-porn-and-why-he-quit-the-
business-20130520/2/.

203

gay man—his own gay shame—is transformed so that he is the subject of veneration (fig.
9).

Figure 9. Untitled 01-10 (after Caravaggio, 1602; featuring Francois Sagat)
by Ross Watson, 2010.
Attending to the afterlives of feminist and queer of color AIDS video activism
allows us to critically “see” how the image of self-responsible, masculine, patriotic gay
soldier in Choi and Sagat coalesce state and AIDS surveillance on the web. As desiring
and desirable subjects of love, Choi and Sagat’s representations are distanced from the
representations of gender and sexual transgressive people of color with AIDS. This
sanitized image of gay men of color allows for a modicum of social mobility for gender
normative subjects but intensifies the air of suspicion about those who do not comply
with gender and sexual norms. Gender conformity and healthy consumerism appear as

65
“The Vatican inspires a provocative painting of Gay Porn Icon as Saint” (media release),
Franccoissagat.com.

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mutually reinforcing. Specifically, gay male masculinity represents the force of a healthy
immune system.
Our ability to represent ourselves as healthy and happy is tied to our beliefs about
the immune system. For Ed Cohen, modern personhood was shaped by the late-
nineteenth century merge between European legal, economic, and scientific theories to
create the concept of biological immunity. As a form of natural defense, immunity
became foundational to contemporary definitions of individual and state sovereignty.
66

This concept was updated in the 1990s when, as Emily Martin argues, ideas about
flexibility were integrated into our understanding of the immune system. Guided by the
belief in the flexible immune system, individual adaptability became the principle for
survival. Cultivating a flexible “personality, body, and organization” formed the
fundamental strategy for sustaining life, thereby intertwining the existence of humans,
corporations, and governments.
67
Martin cautions that this development adapts nineteenth
century Darwinism, where some are said to have the ability to adapt and survive while
others do not. This idea proffers that anyone, regardless of race/ethnicity, gender, or
ability, can adjust to and survive challenging conditions. Our individual subjectivities,
she contends, are shaped in the image of immune system flexibility.
68

Understanding how AIDS has became essential for neoliberalism, I submit,
requires examination of how portrayals of race and gender have changed as gays and
lesbian representations have increased in mainstream media in the post-crisis era of the
pandemic. As figures of neoliberal health and consumerism, Choi and Sagat embody

66
See Cohen, Ed. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the
Modern Body. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
67
Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of
Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beach Press, 1994; xvii.

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what Lisa Duggan calls “homonormativity,” which arranges a hierarchy among queer
people by placing gender-conforming gay men at the top.
69
They also represent what
Jasbir Puar refers to as “homonationalist” subjects in the “war on terror.” Their
performances of sexual citizenship alleviate public fears about the “out” and masculine
gay man while pointing the finger of suspicion at queer(er) people of color and terrorist
“others.” However, the figurations of Choi and Sagat do not erase the homosexuality
and/or queerness of the racial “other,” as Puar agues about homonationalism.
70
Instead,
Choi and Sagat propose that the terrorist “other” and other gay men of color are
identifiable, desirable, and commodifiable as gay men of color who are poised to become
global sexual citizens. They model how gay desire and love should function for sexual
citizens, and their online representations demand they be consumed as objects of desire
and love.
Consuming Choi and/or Sagat’s online representations facilitate participation in
the construction of global sexual citizenship. These representations activate the neoliberal
fantasy that the world will become more connected if the ideologies of privatized rights
and property ownership are farther flung. Interactive technologies, like personal
computers and smartphones, are supposed to connect users through the Web to the global
market for U.S. gay consumer culture. When participating in this consumer culture, one
imagines connectivity to a transnational gay community. As neoliberal multiculturalist
representations, Choi and Sagat are points that illuminate the transnational constellation
of U.S.-based global gay consumerism. They represent multiculturalist brands in the

68
See Martin, 1-19, 143-160.
69
Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, an the Attack on
Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

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online market of gay identities. The increase of racialized masculine gay male
representations alongside white masculine gay representations seems to “level the playing
field” for those perceived as formerly excluded from neoliberal consumer citizenship.
Under this pretense, following racialized representations of masculine gay men online
rather than exclusively white masculine gay men implies an exercise of will in the field
of consumer choice.
Digital interactivity seems to enact a “democratic challenge to the economic,
political, cultural, and social hierarchies of mass society,” a “revolutionary spirit” of
which Marc Andrejevic is critical.
71
That Choi and Sagat participate in gay political
campaigns online suggests that personal identification with them aligns the consumer
with a multiculturalist ethos. In the making of their activist media personalities, Choi and
Sagat function as exemplary representations of neoliberal consumerism. They become
racial “brands” for gay activism that the consumer can choose to follow. Accessing Choi
and Sagat as online representations—to connect to the representations of their desires,
loves, and lives as gay men of color activists—becomes in and of itself participation in
global community.
72
As Sarah Banet-Weiser contends in her discussion of “self-
branding,” in consumer culture, identity becomes an entrepreneurial subject position
rather than a response to structural forms of discrimination.
73
In the neoliberal age of

70
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007; 70-165.
71
Andrejevic, Marc. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2007; 16.
72
Lisa Rofel has addressed the way in which lesbian and gay subjects in post-socialist Chinese
engage in neoliberal desire to imagine a global gay identity. See Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China:
Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press,
2007; 85-110.
73
Banet-Weiser agues that branding consumer citizens and the shift toward the market as a site of
liberal freedoms occurred in the postwar period. For instance, the marketing of feminine products

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capitalism, identities are branded as “flexible.” Even as they rely on a multicultural logic,
branded identities are not necessarily critical of structural forms of racism and sexism.
Instead, branded identities operate under the presupposition that we live in a post-racial
and post-feminist world where the individual can overcome experiences with
discrimination.
74

Crucial to the flexibility of these branded identities is the public display of one’s
emotions for market consumption. Banet-Weiser argues that “self-branding” in the digital
age uses affect as a post-Fordist strategy of flexible accumulation, where the potential for
commodification is heightened and the opportunities for consumption are increased.
75

She refers to Foucault’s notion of the “technology of the self,” which describes how
forging the “self” has become central to “happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality.”
76
She explains further that neoliberal strategies of flexibility rely on the
immateriality of affective labor that is embedded in a “moral framework, where each of
us has a duty to ourselves to cultivate a self-brand.” Self-branding entails the “ensuing
quest for visibility,” which is “an ever more normative practice,” and “a commodity that
gains value through self-empowerment.”
77
Hence, key to self-brand is to make one’s
feelings legible. Representing one’s life and sharing one’s feelings online fulfills a post-

toward women invited their participation in the market, thus linking identity to the act of
consumption. The private, domestic sphere, which women were hitched to, became a site for
mass consumption. During the 1960s and 1970s, marketers borrowed from the language of anti-
racist and feminist movements to create segmented, niche market identities. Banet-Weiser
maintains that transforming identity into a product has consequences: “Commodities like gender
or race become hegemonically constructed things rather than relational, intersectional qualities
that are constantly subject to reinvention.” See Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic™: The Politics of
Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2012; 35.
74
Ibid., 48.
75
Ibid., 17.
76
Ibid., 17, 55.
77
Ibid.

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racial, post-feminist moral imperative, for it demonstrates that the individual has the
ability to participate in consumer culture, to care for ones self, and to (potentially)
surmount all psychological, social, and economic barriers.
78

In gay activist organizing, love is the affective principle at stake. It poses as both
the work and product of gay activism. Love is the emotional labor of gay subjects to
presumably heal the nation. Simultaneously, it is the promised fruit of one’s own labor: If
I love hard enough, I will be loved back; ultimately, the state and civil society will love
me. This rendering of love conjures a romantic vision of the past in which one could
produce and consume in equal measure, like life on a small farm. What this obscures,
however, is how the affective work of love is routed through commercial representations
of maleness and masculinity that immediately alienates the affective work of racial and
gender subjects regarded pathological. Those whose gender expressions and desires are
not socially sanctioned do not enjoy the equal distribution of state-sponsored love. Or
worse, their love is made socially and juridically illegible, which draws further suspicion
from the state that renders their social and sexual expressions as prohibitive, and lacking
in the moral capacity to cultivate self-love. The need to develop self-esteem, self-love,
and proper social and sexual relations is at the core of HIV-prevention marketing
messages.
In the cases of Choi and Sagat, their personal pursuits of love and freedom online
forward a flexible strategy for racialized gay identities, performed through a masculine
love for Obama and for the U.S. nation. They represent how love operates through a host
of masculine men of color. As flexible racialized masculine subjects, their expressions of
self-love and love for racial “others” are deployed to paradoxically transmit and contain

78
Ibid., 86.

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queer desires. The assertion of same-sex desire, and the proper channeling of that desire
into love, demonstrates the recovery of individual health in the face of previous decades
of perceived promiscuity and social havoc that marked the AIDS crisis era. The
representations of Choi and Sagat as gay activists with flexible racialized masculinities
constitute acts of rehabilitating love in the neoliberal display of suffering and redemption
in the online theater of gay activism, 2.0.
79

The representations of Choi and Sagat as global figures for gay activism rely on
the presumption that the Internet is a democratic public sphere that should be increasingly
privatized. Their expressions of love denote the proper channeling of their affective
energies toward online global consumer citizenship. Moreover, the individualized moral
sense of responsibility each maintains to engage in safer-sex practices promotes the idea
that HIV/AIDS is not a systemic problem, but instead a matter of personal behavior.
What the idealization of gay activism in the figure of the healthy, loving gay man of color
proposes is that engaging online with his image manifests a positive gay identity for all
representational consumers. That is, by desiring and consuming his image, those in the
general public have participated in a politicized act that supports gay identity
development. In particular, it suggests that if a gay man invests desire in representations
of gender normativity, then he becomes socially mobile in a world circumscribed by
neoliberal multicultural consumption. He must develop desire into love, manifested
through an identitarian conception of sexuality. Normatively gendered same-sex love
should result in monogamy and/or marriage. At this point, one has manifested
homosexual desire into a mature, gay, consumer-based identity. Within this logic,

79
McCarthy, Anna. “Reality TV: a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering.” Social Text 2007 Volume
25, Number 4 93: 17-42.

210

marriage becomes treatment for HIV/AIDS, which former Tempe, Arizona mayor and
Chief Executive Officer of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Neil G. Guiliano, argued
in his article, “How Marriage Equality Helps Fight HIV.”
80
In other words, if one can
effectively represent their self as a gender normative, gay consumer citizen, who desires
and loves within the moral bonds of monogamy and marriage, race will no longer matter.
HIV/AIDS will no longer exist.
Choi and Sagat follow the activist roots and routes of the previous decades of
AIDS activism. They draw upon the activist ethos of AIDS politics during the crisis
period, with Choi even staging in direct protest actions that echo both civil rights and
ACT UP activisms. However, their representations as self-empowered, gay men depart
from addressing AIDS as a pandemic rooted in racism, patriarchy, poverty, and uneven
global economic development. As AIDS organizations corporatized, HIV-positive
persons were no longer the center of its politics. Instead, people of color became “at-risk”
and or “people with AIDS” categories of social service “consumers.” Social marketing,
and especially online campaigns, became vehicles in which to demonstrate how
individual people of color should flexibly adapt and survive even as the conditions for
healthcare, poverty, and education worsened. The representations of Choi and Sagat
make the archetypes of risky people of color rational as consumable images precisely
because they embody and practice conquest through representational consumption.
Simply put, Choi and Sagat are representational consumers. They naturalize the
link between the war on terror and the war on AIDS. After 9/11, the intensified
retrenchment of rights and the divestment of public monies resulted in the diversion of

80
Giuliano, Neil G. “How Marriage Equality Helps Fight HIV.” HuffingtonPost.com. June 18,
2013. Accessed November 10, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-g-giuliano/how-

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AIDS funding to gay marriage and military service. In this milieu of increased insecurity,
privatized sexual citizenship rights seems achievable above structurally remedying a
pandemic that still looms large for people of color. The figures of Choi and Sagat bring
state governance and privatized consumption into an intimate embrace, rationalizing
Orwellian dystopia by making militarized representations of gay men of color desirable.
The modification of the queer man of color’s sexual behaviors and the maturation of his
desires into love performs flexible racialized masculinity in the terms of what Paul Amar
describes as the “sexualized gender” of a “privatized and securitized ethics of the self.”
81

He epitomizes the self-surveilling global sexual citizen. He promises love will bring more
security. Looking for love online, he polices his own gender and the gender of others.
That citizen internalizes the message of personal responsibility for corporatized
HIV prevention. The sexual citizen believes the narrative of racial progress, and supports
the exceptional violence of the United States to advance liberal freedoms. Choi and
Sagat’s representations as global sexual citizens exemplify the notion that racial and
gender differences, and AIDS itself, can be absolved if we simply love the gay masculine
man of color and represent him as part of our nation-building efforts. By 2008, the year
of Obama’s election, the queer desires, loss, and rage of the previous decades of AIDS
activism were transformed into the gay middle-class culture of personal responsibility,
morality, and love. Systematized racism and patriarchy were no longer seen as obstacles
to addressing the AIDS pandemic. Gay shame should be overcome with self-cultivated

marriage-equality-helps-fight-hiv_b_3456564.html.
81
Amar, Paul. “Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of ‘Men in Crisis,’ Industries of
Gender in Revolution.” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall
2011, 42.

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gay pride. Monogamous love and love for the nation are the gay activist’s panacea for
social ills.
For gay military and marriage activists, loving after AIDS is a self-fulfilling, self-
empowering act of representational consumption. What the depiction of online flexible
racialized masculinities affirms is that sexual desire should be experienced in one’s
home, facing the glow of communication technologies, with the promise that one will be
connected to an imagined global network of people in identitarian similitude. In this
global consumer community, love seems possible for anyone, regardless of race or
gender. Love poses as an endless affective resource in a neoliberal economy precisely
because all of its workers are also its consumers: If I love this image enough, it will love
me back. The neoliberal multiculturalist revolutionary ethos for online interactivity
obscures other forms of non-normative gendering and sexual desire, which includes the
desires of and for gender transgressive subjects. Furthermore, the promotion of global
sexual citizenship presumes equal access to technology and online communities rooted in
U.S. consumer culture. In the branding of sexual citizenship, global homogenization of
queer desires through the consumption of flexible racialized masculine representations,
embodied in figures like Choi and Sagat, creates neoliberal multiculturalist gay male
identity as a force for imperialism.

Out of Love: Unanticipated Alliances
In a study of homosexuality and the Nazi state, Halberstam argues that
homosexual male masculinism is a fascist antecedent to the gender normativity of gay
male identity in the present. Halberstam points out that the masculine homosexual

213

German male subject was constructed in opposition to feminized Jewish subjects who
were unable to achieve citizenship within the Nazi state. Halberstam writes,
In early twentieth century Germany, where the patriarchal state, male
bonding, and homoerotic fraternity were cast as continuous with one
another, the effeminate or cross-identified man was vilified by all sides.
As I have already noted, this does not mean that the Nazis condemned
homosexuality tout court; indeed the masculine homosexual was in
complete concordance with the state’s anti-Semitic and misogynistic
conceptions of masculinity and femininity…So while the Nazis’ position
on male sexuality in particular was very tolerant, it was in relation to
feminization that they expressed moral outrage.
82

Halberstam issues a caution against the stabilization of sexual identity and sexual
citizenship achieved by enforcing gender norms. Masculine male homosexuality is not
exceptional to modern statecraft; it is constitutive of patriarchal power and white
supremacy. This understanding should give us pause to consider whether representing
gays and lesbians as properly gendered citizens serve the aims of liberation.
The fraternity of gay male masculinity and the expression of it through militaristic
accouterments draw our gaze toward what Susan Sontag calls “fascinating fascism.”
There is a fine-line between playing with fascist iconography, as in the case of BDSM,
and promoting it as the libidinal expression of state sovereignty, as in the case of hailing
Obama as an abusive and “down low” homosexual lover. A “fascist aesthetic,” Sontag
maintains, transforms “sexual energy into a ‘spiritual’ force, for the benefit of the
community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most
admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse…Fascist aesthetics is
based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in.”
83

82
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 161-2.
83
Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” The New York Review of Books. February 6, 1975.
Accessed: November 12, 2013,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/.

214

If, in the allegory of the nation, abstaining from sex with women defines the heroic status
of the masculine man, then reserving that sexual energy to be shared with one’s fellow
man can be interpreted as a divine act. Rehabilitating queer desire into the patriarchal
norms of love poses as the individual gay man’s ultimate sacrifice for the nation.
Specifically, he fulfills his erotic impulse through the consumption of representational
masculinity and the disavowal of feminine and other gender non-conforming subjects,
such as the masculine woman, the Black drag queen, and the “down low” Black man.
The politics of masculine love affectively hinges gay rights to U.S. imperialism.
Idealized representations of masculine gay men of color emblematize the potential
recovery of supposed U.S. democratic ideals in spite of challenges to its hegemony. Choi
and Sagat’s online expressions of flexible racialized masculinities embody U.S. state
surveillance. They represent the sexual citizen’s consent to self-police and to police the
racial and gender expressions of others on behalf of the U.S. state. Whereas decades
before, the queer body was figured before the public eye as the effeminate, sickly, and
gaunt man dying alone from AIDS, the post-AIDS crisis queer of color body has been
reformed into the self-loving, same-sex-loving, and nation-loving masculine gay man of
color. The bearing of his love before the digital public demonstrates that he has properly
cultivated his sexual desires and curbed his pathological behaviors. Those who cannot
comply with this representation are forced to bear the responsibility for HIV/AIDS and
experience ongoing social and state-sanctioned exclusions.
While representations of flexible racialized masculinities allow for a seemingly
broader set of gay men to participate in the cult of masculinity, there are stark
contradictions that also arise from the cases of Choi and Sagat. We also see in these two

215

case studies that the desire for inclusion in a gay male fraternity is still mediated along
the lines of race. That is, while Choi clings to expressions of proper masculinity to
articulate his politics, Sagat and U.S. gay porn companies generally omit East and
Southeast Asian men from their cadre of racialized masculinities. This is no coincidence.
There is a generative tension in the gendering of racial difference that reveals the
problematic stakes and limitations of politics invested in gay male masculinity. Put
simply, not all gay men of color are equally gendered. In particular, East and Southeast
Asian men are inflected as feminine against other male masculinities. Choi’s desire for
masculine recognition as a gay man, and Sagat’s refusal to recognize masculinity in gay
men, generates an endless deferral for the appearance of masculine authenticity.
Proclaiming a natural desire for masculinity among gay men of color actually unsettles
the authenticity of masculinity, the bodies to which it could be bound, and opens onto
other forms of kinships and intimacies that can be shaped by engaging masculinity as a
playful ruse.
The rise of post-AIDS crisis flexible racialized masculine representations among
gay men changes little of the relationship between whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and the
nation-state form. Instead, it generates visions of properly gendered, responsible, gay
citizens of color poised to enter into nuclear family formation, war, or both. However,
Choi’s desire to construe masculinity as a normative gay male characteristic, and Sagat’s
disavowal of gay men’s ability to attain “true” masculinity, points to the construction of
gender in a way that is generative of other possibilities for kinship. In the post-AIDS
crisis visual landscape, we also see, through the prism of queer kinship, the terms of race,
gender, sexuality, and national belonging bend more than flex in other queer media

216

depictions that emerged around the same time, such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, which began
its television run in 2008. If longing for national inclusion does not translate into a sense
of belonging, as is the promise of global sexual citizenship, then different forms of queer
of color kinship can be (and are) imagined.
Flexible racialized masculinities generate a state optic that puts under erasure
non-normative bodies, queer of color social worlds, and their histories, while filing into
visible, representational order the proper gay, male citizen, the property-owning nuclear
family, and the racist, masculinist terms of national belonging. In the wake of the AIDS
crisis, recuperating the gay masculine man of color as an object of love enables the public
to pare down an imagining of freedom to the mere assertion of personal choice in a
globalized free market economy that privileges corporations over public welfare while
violently denying the histories and legacies of racism, sexism, and classism. The choice
to be out in the military and the choice to consummate same-sex desire through love and
marriage become indispensible to securing individual rights against the backdrop of
corporate welfare policies. Gay activism takes-up the early twenty-first century
representational mission of settler colonialism and global U.S. military aggression.
Choi and Sagat are representational bodies of knowledge about HIV/AIDS. They
demonstrate how the social and epidemiological terms of the AIDS pandemic function
through a visual and representational logic. The archives of Choi and Sagat’s online lives
map the neoliberal reorganization of race, gender, and sexual politics in the post-crisis
economy of HIV/AIDS. The flexible racialized masculine representations of these gay
activist figures constitute the ideological and imagistic link between HIV/AIDS and the
“war on terror.” Women of color and queer people of color in the United States represent

217

the lingering virus within the national body that threaten to suppress the immunological
defense of U.S. empire. The terrorist “other” represents the viral menace that lurks
anywhere and everywhere, including in “sleeper cells” that could, at any moment, rupture
to launch unanticipated attacks. Some masculine gay men of color consolidate the threats
from within and without by becoming sexual citizens who patrol global, social, and
economic borders in the interest of U.S. domination. Like antiviral agents, sexual citizens
stimulate American immunity by relieving the challenges to United States hegemony
through the exercise of neoliberal consumerism. Flexible racialized masculinities even
pose as potential vaccine—as model global consumers reformed from a queer prior,
much like the way antigens are created out of modified and inactivated viral pathogens.
Those who wish to survive in the U.S. nation are compelled to follow suit as disciplined
consumers of these vaccine antigens. But, vaccines do not always work. They do not
remain efficacious. Sometimes, they even cause sickness.
The online archives of flexible racialized masculinities thread together a global
gay network that outlines the structure of U.S. consumerism, militarism, and empire as
well as its potential divergences through the routes of undisciplined desire and unruly
consumerism. In the following chapter, I continue to pursue viral ways of seeing by
investigating how the visual documentation of queer of color performance cultures reveal
strategies of survival not by rehabilitating the AIDS body, but through the pathological
engagement in non-normative kinships and disorderly media consumption. Viral ways of
seeing also constitutes a visual language by which queers of color build alliances and
forge kinships across historical time and geographical scale.
While representations of flexible racialized masculinities allow for a seemingly

218

broader set of gay men to participate in the cult of masculinity, there are stark
contradictions that also arise. As Choi himself submits, East and Southeast Asian men are
inflected as feminine against other male masculinities. In the world of dating 2.0, there
remains the constant refrain in gay male online profiles: “Not fats, no femmes, no Blacks,
no Asians.” Even as Choi clings to expressions of proper masculinity to articulate his
politics, his East Asianness is excluded from the cadre of racialized masculinities. This is
no coincidence. There is a generative tension in the gendering of racial difference that
reveals the problematic stakes and limitations of politics invested in gay male
masculinity.
To turn toward rather than away from the afterlives of AIDS is insist on feminist,
anti-racist alliances. We can look to queer of color theorist Hoang Tan Nguyen’s framing
for the politics of “bottomhood” as “erotics,” where a “bottom positioning refract[s] the
meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality, in American culture.” In moving
towards rather than deflecting the stigma of femininity and HIV-risk attached to being the
“bottom,” or vaginally or anally receptive partner in sex that has been stigmatized for
high-risk for HIV transmission, “adopting” the politics of “bottomhood” opens onto
addressing a feminist and queer relational position that allows for possibilities between
women, gay men, and queer/trans peoples to forge political alliances. [SLIDE]
We must conjure the afterlives of queer of color AIDS images forged through
feminist alliances during the crisis. That means we must refuse separation between the
healthy and ill, the living and the dead, and those who are “morally rephrensible” and not.
Instead we must hold these images and peoples. Through the feminist practices of AIDS
videos and queer of color AIDS images, we are forced to rethink political and national

219

investments in biological endurance that consistently ignore the realities of the protracted
crisis among women, people of color, and the global south. Rather than invest in the
image of the masculine, healthy, gay activist man of color to “heal” the nation, we must
draw upon feminist and queer of color relationality to move in the marginalia of state and
corporate discourses and find among the images of “high risk” trans people of color,
women of color, and “down low” men the ways in which life is collectively sustained in
the face of increased corporate, state, and consumer surveillance. By feminist practices of
caring for the afterlives of AIDS images, we find points of alternative contact,
connection, and collectively.

220

Conclusion: Queerness and Virality

In the spring of 2015, a few months before completing this dissertation, I sat in
the office of a University of Southern California Student Health a white male doctor who
specializes in Men’s Sexual and Reproductive Health. I was interested in getting tested
for HIV, so he engaged me in a risk assessment by going down a list of questions. He
would make his inquiry in a rather brisk and robotic manner. His eyes rarely left his
computer monitor. With each question, I felt I was disappearing in the room and
becoming a statistic. He came upon questions about using online gay social networking
sites. When I said I did use such sites that is when he piped up and became alarmed.
“You use Grindr?”
“I have,” I responded.
“You know, when people use Grindr that makes them high risk.”
“Using Grindr automatically means I’m at risk for HIV? How is that possible?” I
was confused.
“Well, the statistics show that people who use Grindr and other gay apps tend to
engage in riskier sexual activity.”
I prodded, “How is it more risky than if I go to a gay bathhouse?”
“People don’t go to bathhouses anymore,” he proclaimed. “These apps destroyed
those kinds of meeting places.”
“Well,” I said, “I think people still go to bathhouses precisely because they can’t
hook-up on Grindr. If you’re not young, white, masculine, and fit, then you don’t often
get a chance to meet people on these apps. This is especially true if you’re Asian or

221

Black. The description in a lot of user profile goes: “No fats, no fems, no Blacks, no
Asians.” And, of the handful of people I have met using Grindr, I didn’t necessarily have
sex with them.”
We volleyed back and forth further about AIDS, race, socioeconomics, and risk. I
grew increasingly agitated. He initially held fast to the idea that the statistics showed that
I am “at risk.” I told him I felt uncomfortable and no longer wanted to be examined. The
conversation ended with him apologizing and asking me to help him learn more about
people of color. He told me that, as a gay man, he cares. Afterward, I sent him an email
sharing with him my thoughts about my experience with him. He was courteous and
thanked me. We did not engage further.
Thinking back to Thomas Miguel Guerra, it seems that the text messages and
videos used as evidence were already overlaid with a narrative about his irresponsibility.
In spite of the impossibility to scientifically pinpoint the moment of viral infection,
Guerra was nonetheless deemed guilty. The imagined moment of virus transmission is
correlated with his supposed misrepresentations of “self” and his sero-status when using
social networking apps and digital technology. His social interactions in the digital circuit
were cached with information that included a date, time, and location stamp. This digital
information operated as documented proof of his malicious and successful intention to
infect others with HIV.

Geolocating Identity and AIDS
The development of smartphone technology has given rise to geosocial
networking applications that utilize radio signals to locate the “real-world” coordinates of

222

a digital object or technology user. This includes apps that facilitate social and sexual
encounters between gay, bisexual, and “curious” men. In 2009, Grindr became the first
gay app to combine geolocation, profile description, and images to approximate the
distance of users and to represent this aggregated data in the form of a viewable grid that
fit within the smartphone visual frame. Grindr, and subsequent gay apps, have been
celebrated as connecting diverse gay men across the globe. Joel Simkhai, Grindr’s
founder, has been touted as a “culture-changer” and “activist” for connecting like-minded
men, especially those men in presumably more homophobic locations like Saudi Arabia.
1

Yet, the apps provide limited flexibility for self-representation. Users can submit a photo
and select categories identifying their race, age, height, weight, body type, HIV-status,
and, in extremely restrictive ways, gender. In the case of Grindr, the character space for
self-description is severely limited.
Grindr has been criticized as an app that privileges users who approximate ideal
representations of whiteness, masculinity, affluence, and normative beauty.
2

Furthermore, and as with the advent of Web 2.0, sexual uses of the new media
technology has raised public health concerns. Grindr, and other gay apps, have been
identified as high-risk spaces facilitating HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted
infections, particularly among men of color.
3
It was reported recently that the National

1
Baer, Drake. “CEO OF GRINDR ON THE POWER OF SIMPLICITY AND BECOMING AN
UNINTENTIONAL ACTIVIST.” Bottom Line. January 24, 2014. Accessed January 15, 2015,
http://www.fastcompany.com/3025128/bottom-line/ceo-of-grindr-on-theg-power-of-simplicity-
and-becoming-an-unintentional-activist.
2
Raj, Senthorun. “Grindring Bodies: Racial and Affective Economies of Online Queer Desire.”
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies: E-Journal. Vol 7.2 (2011). Accessed: January 15, 2015,
http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/171V7.2_3.pdf.
3
Landovitz, Raphael J., et al. “Epidemiology, sexual risk behavior, and HIV prevention practices
of men who have sex with men using GRINDR in Los Angeles, California.” Journal of Public
Health. Vol. 90, No. 4 (Aug 2013): 729-39.

223

Institutes of Health sponsored a costly study to determine “how sexual negotiation and
[HIV] serostatus disclosure occurs” on Grindr and whether the app augments “risky
sexual behavior.”
4
With increased commercial sponsorship, heightened surveillance, and
targeted HIV testing ad campaigns, Grindr and other gay app administrators have begun
to prohibit the sexual explicitness of photos and encourage or even require HIV-status
disclosure in user profile descriptions.
Yet, we should not be alarmist about gay apps or nostalgic for a pre-digital
networking past. It is vital that we consider how gay apps constrain user racial and gender
identities and representations, particularly for queers of color, in relation to HIV
surveillance and stigmatization. Yet, we should also consider how users circumvent these
limits for social networking through alternate representational strategies. This includes
coded language; photographic experimentations; the creation of websites, Tumblrs, and
Instagram accounts disparaging racist, trans/femme-phobic, body conscious, and HIV-
phobic profiles; and the production of blogs and videos critiquing or parodying gay app
social interactions. In seeking out productions by queer of color users, we encounter the
afterlives of feminist and queer of color AIDS video activism. In turn, we might find that
geolocational HIV surveillance and stigmatization through geosocial networking apps
produces dissensus and a powerful tool to critique the liberal narrative of gay progress.

Queerness without Guarantees
The return of AIDS video activism through mainstream media makes possible
feminist and queer of color afterlives that reconfigure space and time. These AIDS

4
Wee, Darren. “US government spent nearly $500,000 to study Grindr.” GayStarNews.com.
January 23, 2015. Accessed: January 29, 2015, http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/us-

224

images take a backwards point of view of official History-making and make possible
future feminist and queer practices for videos that “go viral.” These methods for
afterlives make contact between minoritized, bottom positions and powerful modes of
mainstream representation. Feminist and queer of color afterlives challenge individual
biological survival as the basis for political agendas. Instead, they follow the wily and
persistent paths of a pandemic that resists rationalization and narration. This method and
framework draws together, through pleasurable images and sounds of racial and gender
performativity, otherwise obscured social and political connections between places,
subjects, and times.
The afterlives of feminist and queer of color AIDS video activism unsettle
progress. They remind us that the pandemic reflects the unevenness and multiple
temporalities of postmodern life. Mobilized against the disciplining of bodies and the
sedimentation of identities, AIDS video activist afterlives offer what Stuart Hall, in his
criticism against vulgar determinist interpretations of Marxism, might call queerness
“without guarantees.”
5
In discussing postmodernism and cultural studies, Hall reminds us
that social movements are forced to adopt the language of the popular religion to
“connect the past and the present” and remake history; to “turn the text upside-down” so

government-spent-nearly-500000-study-grindr230115#sthash.TD3RnbNG.dpuf.
5
Stuart Hall argues that readings of marxism have taken his Karl Marx’s criticism of ideology as
deterministic. That is, those who operate within the system of capitalism, rather than resist it, are
duped by ideology. Following the arguments of Antonio Gramsci about the changes in hegemony
through different historical blocs, Hall argues that ideology is not static. Instead, in order to
grapple with marxist materialism, ideology must be theorized and problematized to understand
how it shifts and changes through different historical epochs. See Hall, Stuart. “The Problem of
Ideology - Marxism without Guarantees” in Journal of Communication Inquiry. Vol. 10, No. 2.
(June 1986) New York: SAGE Publications; 28–44.

225

minoritized groups remake themselves as “new political subjects.”
6
AIDS video activism
takes on grand religious narratives, turns heroes on their heads, and sends out new
political agents.
Referencing AIDS, Hall argues
[Cultural studies] holds theoretical and political questions in an ever
irresolvable and permanent tension. It constantly allows the one to irritate,
bother and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical
closure.

…AIDS is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation. In
addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there
are the many people dying who are never spoken of. How could we say
that the question of AIDS is not also the question of who gets represented
and who does not? AIDS is the site at which the advance of sexual politics
is being rolled back. It’s a site at which not only people will die, but desire
and pleasure will also die if certain metaphors do not survive, or survive in
the wrong way. Unless we operate in this tension, we don’t know what
cultural studies can do, can’t, can never do; but also what it has to do,
what it alone has a privileged capacity to do. It has to analyse certain
things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself,
about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a
site of life and death.”
7

“Going viral” is not simply the figurative language for media networks.
8
It is the
force of life and its feminist and queer of color social and political possibilities that
escape through representation. AIDS signals the queerness of late twentieth-century
racial, gender, and sexual politics, but also conjures a theory about the infectious category

6
Hall, Stuart. “On Postmodernism and articulation: an interview with Stuart Hall.” Ed. Lawrence
Grossberg. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morely and Kuan-
Hsing Chen. New York: Routledge, 1996; 143.
7
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen. New York: Routledge, 1996; 272-3.
Juhasz also cites this passage from Hall. See also Juhasz, Alexandra. AIDS TV: Identity,
Community, and Alternative Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995, 26.
8
Tony Sampson argues, “Virality is no metaphor. It is about all the forces of relational encounter
in the social field.” However, he also argues that we should understand virality through a
“nonrepresentational approach.” By dismissing representation, Sampson also dismisses how
bodies of color are central and yet disappeared through narrative representations of virality, and

226

we call viruses as it came into being. In its resistance against rationalization and
narration, the virus exists as a “problem of ideology.” Entering through media
technologies that trace the social and economic unevenness of the pandemic, AIDS
videos reach into the racialized and feminized forgotten colonial past to generate it as
orthogonal and queerly connected to our present. The virus refuses ideological closures
by infecting narratives of progress and sending out new, intractable and politicized agents
of infection. Hence, the meanings and functions of queerness cannot be fixed or
guaranteed. It must move virally through the feminist and queer of color artist-activist
and scholarly networks that do not fear its infection, or shy from stigmatized feminine
subject positions in favor of narratives of masculine and biological recovery.
These viral networks hold queerness and its absented and silenced representations
with care. This carefulness keeps theoretical and political tensions taught in the demand
and anticipation for something better. According to José Estaban Muñoz, present-past
queerness “instructs us that the ‘here and now’ is simply not enough.”
9
The failures of the
feminist and queer of color AIDS video activist afterlives to perform the living keeps
audiences expecting its (re)emergence. Regarding queer futurity, Muñoz says, “We are
left waiting but vigilant in our desire for another time that is not yet here.”
10
Going viral
in the queer context for popular culture is the work of desire without guaranteed
representation. It refuses ideological ends. In the failures to narrate resolution, there is
pleasure in the constant coming.

particularly HIV/AIDS. See Sampson, Tony. Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012; 4.
9
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New
York University Press, 2009; 170.
10
Muñoz,182.

227

AIDS provides a critical vocabulary for queer language—intellectual thought,
political action, and the generation of a visual grammar for social non-normativity.
Unlike contemporary images of monogamous same-sex love, marriage, nuclear families,
child-rearing, and nation-state assimilation, the queer social worlds of AIDS are not
easily represented, repressed, or tracked. The promise in these narratives of progress lies
in their inevitable failures and the moments of shared vulnerability that produce social
contact. The virus is traceable as a scientific, sub-microscopic technological image, but it
is also an indeterminate sign of infection always already escaping surveillance,
signposting the futurity of queerness without guarantees.

228

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract AIDS and its Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination examines how AIDS activists’ experimental videos produced during the U.S. crisis period (1980s to early-1990s) continue to intervene into contemporary popular culture and social movements. While the stigma of AIDS associates it with death and abjection, crisis period activists faced with the massive loss of women and queers of color invented new political imaginations and representations of life. This research builds on AIDS media studies and feminist and queer of color critiques by arguing that the queer of color images forged by feminist video activists in the crucible of the crisis continue to circulate and install a “queer radical imagination.” Analyzing contemporary and historical activist documentaries, New Queer Cinema films, and Internet-based HIV prevention campaigns, I theorize how queer of color AIDS images attain “afterlives” through their appropriations in popular media. These afterlives interweave visual texts, performing a method for representational and materialist analyses. They contextualize the present-day political shift towards gay inclusion in military and marriage as correlated with U.S. expansion, privatization, and online HIV prevention campaigns demanding personal responsibility among women and queers of color for AIDS. Meanwhile, they manifest kinship and coalition among dispossessed communities through cultural reverberations between documentary films that entwine the lives of gender nonconforming subjects across different sites and periods of U.S. empire. AIDS afterlives, I submit, guide understanding of how the tactical employment of analog camcorders to stage direct action, counter police violence, and document the AIDS crisis converge with contemporary handheld digital devices used to record, broadcast, and expand protests through “viral” videos, thereby stoking the queer radical imagination.

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