A&U Magazine - January 2022

art & understanding for 31 years

• A Rediscovered AIDS-Themed Play

by Edward Albee • Musician Emily Wells • Writer Matt Caprioli Poetry by

Nathaniel Rosenthalis Nonfiction by

Bruce Bromley • Artist Boré Ivanoff

sean

SAN JOSÉ

Honors the Realities of HIV/AIDS Through the Magic of Theater

JANUARY 2022 | ISSUE 327

IMPORTANT FACTS FACTS FOR FOR BIKTARVY® BIKTARVY® IMPORTANT

This is is only only aa brief brief summary summary of of important important information information about about BIKTARVY BIKTARVY and and does does not not This replace talking talking to to your your healthcare healthcare provider provider about about your your condition condition and and your your treatment. treatment. replace

(bik-TAR-vee)

MOST IMPORTANT IMPORTANT INFORMATION INFORMATION ABOUT ABOUT BIKTARVY BIKTARVY MOST

POSSIBLE SIDE SIDE EFFECTS EFFECTS OF OF BIKTARVY BIKTARVY POSSIBLE

BIKTARVY may may cause cause serious serious side side effects, effects, including: including: BIKTARVY

BIKTARVY may may cause cause serious serious side side effects, effects, including: including: BIKTARVY Those in in the the “Most “Most Important Important Information Information About About  Those BIKTARVY” section. section.

BIKTARVY” Changes in in your your immune immune system. system. Your Your immune immune  Changes system may may get get stronger stronger and and begin begin to to fight fight infections infections system that may may have have been been hidden hidden in in your your body. body. Tell Tell your your that healthcare provider provider ifif you you have have any any new new symptoms symptoms healthcare after you you start start taking taking BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. after Kidney problems, problems, including including kidney kidney failure. failure. Your Your  Kidney healthcare provider provider should should do do blood blood and and urine urine tests tests to to healthcare check your your kidneys. kidneys. IfIf you you develop develop new new or or worse worse kidney kidney check problems, they they may may tell tell you you to to stop stop taking taking BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. problems,  Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis),  Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is is aa serious serious but but rare rare medical medical emergency emergency that that can can which lead to to death. death. Tell Tell your your healthcare healthcare provider provider right right away away lead you get get these these symptoms: symptoms: weakness weakness or or being being more more tired tired ifif you than usual, usual, unusual unusual muscle muscle pain, pain, being being short short of of breath breath or or than fast breathing, breathing, stomach stomach pain pain with with nausea nausea and and vomiting, vomiting, fast cold or or blue blue hands hands and and feet, feet, feel feel dizzy dizzy or or lightheaded, lightheaded, or or cold fast or or abnormal abnormal heartbeat. heartbeat. aa fast Severe liver liver problems, problems, which which in in rare rare cases cases can can lead lead to to  Severe death. Tell Tell your your healthcare healthcare provider provider right right away away ifif you you get get death. these symptoms: symptoms: skin skin or or the the white white part part of of your your eyes eyes turns turns these yellow, dark dark “tea-colored” “tea-colored” urine, urine, light-colored light-colored stools, stools, yellow, loss of of appetite appetite for for several several days days or or longer, longer, nausea, nausea, or or loss stomach-area pain. pain. stomach-area The most most common common side side effects effects of of BIKTARVY BIKTARVY in in clinical clinical  The studieswere werediarrhea diarrhea(6%), (6%),nausea nausea(6%), (6%),and andheadache headache(5%).

(5%). studies

Worsening of of hepatitis hepatitis B B (HBV) (HBV) infection. infection. Your Your  Worsening

healthcare provider provider will will test test you you for for HBV. HBV. IfIf you you have have healthcare both HIV-1 HIV-1 and and HBV, HBV, your your HBV HBV may may suddenly suddenly get get both worse ifif you you stop stop taking taking BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. Do Do not not stop stop taking taking worse BIKTARVY without without first first talking talking to to your your healthcare healthcare BIKTARVY provider, as as they they will will need need to to check check your your health health regularly regularly provider, for several several months, months, and and may may give give you you HBV HBV medicine. medicine. for

ABOUT BIKTARVY BIKTARVY ABOUT BIKTARVY is is aa complete, complete, 1-pill, 1-pill, once-a-day once-a-day prescription prescription BIKTARVY medicine used used to to treat treat HIV-1 HIV-1 in in adults adults and and children children medicine who weigh weigh at at least least 55 55 pounds. pounds. It It can can either either be be used used in in who people who who have have never never taken taken HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines medicines before, before, or or people people who who are are replacing replacing their their current current HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines medicines people and whose whose healthcare healthcare provider provider determines determines they they meet meet and certain requirements. requirements. certain BIKTARVY does does not not cure cure HIV-1 HIV-1 or or AIDS. AIDS. HIV-1 HIV-1 is is the the BIKTARVY virus that that causes causes AIDS. AIDS. virus Do NOT NOT take take BIKTARVY BIKTARVY if if you you also also take take aa medicine medicine Do that contains: contains: that dofetilide  dofetilide rifampin  rifampin any other other medicines medicines to to treat treat HIV-1 HIV-1  any

BEFORE TAKING TAKING BIKTARVY BIKTARVY BEFORE Tell your your healthcare healthcare provider provider if if you: you: Tell Have or or have have had had any any kidney kidney or or liver liver problems, problems,  Have

including hepatitis hepatitis infection. infection. including Have any any other other health health problems. problems.  Have Are pregnant pregnant or or plan plan to to become become pregnant. pregnant. It It is is not not  Are known ifif BIKTARVY BIKTARVY can can harm harm your your unborn unborn baby. baby. known Tell your your healthcare healthcare provider provider ifif you you become become pregnant pregnant Tell while taking taking BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. while Are breastfeeding breastfeeding (nursing) (nursing) or or plan plan to to breastfeed. breastfeed.  Are Do not not breastfeed. breastfeed. HIV-1 HIV-1 can can be be passed passed to to the the baby baby Do in breast breast milk. milk. in Tell your your healthcare healthcare provider provider about about all all the the Tell medicines you you take: take: medicines Keep aa list list that that includes includes all all prescription prescription and and over-theover-the Keep counter medicines, medicines, antacids, antacids, laxatives, laxatives, vitamins, vitamins, and and counter herbal supplements, supplements, and and show show itit to to your your healthcare healthcare herbal provider and and pharmacist. pharmacist. provider

BIKTARVY and and other other medicines medicines may may affect affect each each other. other.  BIKTARVY Ask your your healthcare healthcare provider provider and and pharmacist pharmacist about about Ask medicines that that interact interact with with BIKTARVY, BIKTARVY, and and ask ask ifif itit is is medicines safe to to take take BIKTARVY BIKTARVY with with all all your your other other medicines. medicines. safe

These are are not not all all the the possible possible side side effects effects of of BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. These Tell your your healthcare healthcare provider provider right right away away ifif you you have have any any Tell new symptoms symptoms while while taking taking BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. new You are are encouraged encouraged to to report report negative negative side side You effects of of prescription prescription drugs drugs to to the the FDA. FDA. Visit Visit effects www.FDA.gov/medwatch or or call call 1-800-FDA-1088.

1-800-FDA-1088. www.FDA.gov/medwatch Your healthcare healthcare provider provider will will need need to to do do tests tests to to monitor monitor Your your health health before before and and during during treatment treatment with with BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. your

HOW TO TO TAKE TAKE BIKTARVY BIKTARVY HOW Take BIKTARVY BIKTARVY 11 time time each each day day with with or or without without food. food.

Take

GET MORE MORE INFORMATION INFORMATION GET This is is only only aa brief brief summary summary of of important important information information  This about BIKTARVY. BIKTARVY. Talk Talk to to your your healthcare healthcare provider provider or or about pharmacist to to learn learn more. more. pharmacist

Go to to BIKTARVY.com BIKTARVY.com or or call call 1-800-GILEAD-5 1-800-GILEAD-5  Go If you you need need help help paying paying for for your your medicine, medicine,  If

visit BIKTARVY.com BIKTARVY.com for for program program information. information. visit

BIKTARVY, the the BIKTARVY BIKTARVY Logo, Logo, GILEAD, GILEAD, the the GILEAD GILEAD Logo, Logo, KEEP KEEP BEING BEING YOU, YOU, and and LOVE LOVE WHAT’S WHAT’S INSIDE INSIDE are are trademarks trademarks of of Gilead Gilead Sciences, Sciences, Inc., Inc., BIKTARVY, or its its related related companies. companies. Version Version date: date: February February 2021 2021 © © 2021 2021 Gilead Gilead Sciences, Sciences, Inc. Inc. All All rights rights reserved. reserved. BVYC0467 BVYC0467 06/21 06/21 or

RE EA A LL B B II K K TT A AR RV VY Y R PA A TT II E EN N TT SS P

KEEP BEING YOU. Because HIV doesn’t change who you are.

BIKTARVY® is a complete, 1-pill, once-a-day prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in certain adults. BIKTARVY does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS.

Ask your healthcare provider if BIKTARVY is right for you.

Watch their their stories stories at at BIKTARVY.com BIKTARVY.com Watch Featured patients patients compensated compensated by

by Gilead.

Gilead.

Featured

Please see see Important Important Facts Facts about about BIKTARVY, BIKTARVY, including including important important Please warnings, on on the the previous previous page page and and visit visit BIKTARVY.com.

BIKTARVY.com. warnings,

Contents

January

2022

20

GALLERY

Artist Boré Ivanoff Reimagines Paris in His Paintings and in His HIV Advocacy

COVER STORY

28

A&U's Hank Trout Talks to Sean San José About the Power of Theater to Piece Together a Quilt

34

FEATURE

A Never-Before-Published AIDS-Themed Play by Edward Albee Comes to Light

FEATURES

18 Nonfiction Farther by Bruce Bromley

38

48 Poetry My HIV Prevention Options by Nathaniel Rosenthalis

DEPARTMENTS 4 6 10

Frontdesk Digital Footprints NewsBreak

FEATURE

A New Album by Emily Wells Pays Tribute to the Creative Spirit of the Early Epidemic

viewfinder 8 14

cover photo by Saul Bromberger & Sandra Hoover Photography

Tribute: Richard Garcia Ruby's Rap Ruby raps with Writer Matt Caprioli

lifeguide 42 43 44 47

Money Matters Lifeguide In Brief The Culture of AIDS Lifelines

Frontdesk From the Editor

Justice for All

AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE issue 327 vol. 31 no. 1 January 2022 editorial offices: (518) 205-5024

J

ustified and Ancient. Remember the ‘90s song by KLF (infamous for torching one million British pounds on a remote Scottish island) and Tammy Wynette (“Stand by Your Man”)?

We’re justified and ancient because the existence of HIV has been known for forty years and A&U has been around for thirty years, and still no cure. Even with Bill Gates having poured billions of his own money to find a cure or vaccine to prevent HIV infection in all continents of the globe.

The current global COVID pandemic has attracted a lot of much-needed research attention, yet HIV/AIDS is deadlier——the virus has killed close to 60 million people on seven continents. COVID and its multiplying variants, on the other hand, are no match for science-based treatment, vaccine development, and even orally administered therapeutics from Merck and Pfizer, as of this writing.

I don’t begrudge these scientific advances and how they have saved lives. But both viruses demand our attention. Yes, thanks to antiviral medicines, most individuals living with HIV who are engaged in care and taking regimens consistently can expect a normal lifespan. However, AIDS isn’t over——managing HIV disease is not the same as curing the disease.

We’ve been advocating for a cure since the 1980s, as long as we have been trying to understand how to live with the disease——physically, but also emotionally, mentally, and, for some of us, spiritually. This month’s cover story interview with Magic Theatre artistic director Sean San José (written

by Senior Editor Hank Trout and photographed by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover) reminds us it has been a long road for many. He states: “Both my parents contracted AIDS. And at that moment. I was so overwhelmed with how to live, how to respond to the world. I was living in this country that was just fucking maddening, man, living through that piece of shit Reagan and watching people dying. And so when it finally happened….” His “cure” was to honor them and others with “Pieces of a Quilt,” a project that enlisted many playwrights writing about HIV/ AIDS, each offering a perspective on the realities we were facing. The plays were produced in the 1990s to acclaim.

Playwright Edward Albee was instrumental in helping San José and even wrote a playlet. Albee’s work remained unproduced (its acting requirements too hefty for a quick run) and it remained unpublished——until now. Special Projects Editor Lester Strong introduces Touch (an Improvisation) in this

Editor in Chief & Publisher David Waggoner Managing Editor: Chael Needle Senior Editors: Dann Dulin, Hank Trout Editor at Large: Chip Alfred Special Projects Editor: Lester Strong Arts Editor: Alina Oswald Fiction Editor: Raymond Luczak; Nonfiction Editor: Jay Vithalani; Drama Editor: Bruce Ward; Poetry Editor: Philip F. Clark; Copy Editor: Maureen Hunter Contributing Editors: Reed Massengill, Kelly McQuain, Lesléa Newman, Robert E. Penn, Nick Steele Contributing Writers: Ruby Comer, Alacias Enger, Claire Gasamagera, John Francis Leonard, Corey Saucier Art Director: Timothy J. Haines

issue and I couldn’t be more proud to bring this work to our readers.

As Managing Editor Chael Needle discovers, musician Emily Wells also reaches into the past; her new album features a musical conversation with David Wojnarowicz and other artists, such as Bill T. Jones and Kiki Smith, who responded to the early epidemic.

“AIDS is not over” points to (among other things) the need for a cure, and it is another way of saying, AIDS is not history. And this month’s featured Gallery artist, Boré Ivanoff, is adamant about destigmatizing the virus with which he lives. He advocates for the AIDS community as a whole because, even in “enlightened” Paris, where he lives and works, AIDS awareness is marginalized.

The arts that we feature in the magazine, both literary and visual, are our victory over stigma——the uncured and defenseless situation that all of us face on a daily basis. It has been my sole goal to destigmatize people thriving with HIV/AIDS. In light of the fact that we have no cure for HIV/AIDS or the stigma heaped upon us, A&U will continue to fight back. Its activism will continue to showcase hope. Its activism will continue to seek justice for all.

Contributing Photographers: Davidd Batalon, Tom Bianchi, Holly Clark, Stephen Churchill Downes, Greg Gorman, Francis Hills, Tom McGovern, Annie Tritt, Tommy Wu National Advertising Director: Harold Burdick, Jr. Sales & Marketing: David L. Bonitatibus Advertising Sales Office: (518) 205-5024 National Advertising Representative: Rivendell Media (212) 242-6863 Subscription Info: (518) 205-5024 Board of Directors President: David Waggoner Vice President: Harold Burdick, Jr. Secretary: Richard Garcia Founding Board Members: Mark S. Labrecque, 1961–1992, Christopher Hewitt, 1946–2004, Mark Galbraith, 1962–2011 In Memoriam: Bill Jacobson, 1939–2005 Rhomylly B. Forbes, 1963–2011 • Chris Companik, 1957–2012 • Nancy Ellegate, 1959–2015 • Patricia Nell Warren, 1936–2019 • Jeannie Wraight, 1968–2021 • Robert Schelepanow, 1946–2020 • Richard Garcia, 1951–2021 A&U (ISSN 1074-0872) is published by Art & Understanding, Inc., 4 Hall Street, Hoosick Falls, NY 12090, USA. For A&U advertising information please call 518-205-5024; for subscriptions and address changes please call 518-205-5024; for letters to the editor and unsolicited manuscripts write A&U Magazine, 4 Hall Street, Hoosick Falls, New York 12090; or e-mail: mailbox@aumag. org. All unsolicited manuscripts that do not have a S.A.S.E. cannot be returned and will not be acknowledged. ©2021 Art & Understanding, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. A&U may not be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or in part, without written permission of the publisher. A&U and the graphic representations thereof are the registered trademarks of Art & Understanding, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Individual Subscription rates: $24.95 (12 issues). Institutional rates: $80.00 (12 issues). For subscriptions outside the USA and possessions, $30.95/Canada, $49.95/international, payable in advance in U.S. currency. First North American serial rights revert to contributors upon publication. A&U retains the right to anthologize work in further issues, as well as in microform or reprinting on the Internet within the context of each issue. Statements of writers, artists and advertisers are not necessarily those of the publisher. Readers note: subjects and contributors to A&U are both HIV-positive and HIV-negative. In the absence of a specific statement herein concerning the serostatus of any individual mentioned in, or contributing material to, this publication, no inference is made with respect thereto and none should be implied. Letters written to A&U or its contributors are assumed intended for publication. Art & Understanding, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for unsolicited submissions and does not guarantee the return thereof.

PostMaster: Please send address corrections to A&U Magazine, 4 Hall Street, Hoosick Falls, NY 12090 USA

Printed in USA • Visit our Web site at www.aumag.org DAVID WAGGONER

Digital Digital D ig igi git ita taal Footprints Fo Footprints ootpprint in nts ts

mostloved

Francis Hills photographed Donja R. Love, a perfect complement to Editor at Large Chip Alfred’s insightful cover story about the playwright and advocate.

mosttweeted Photo by Francis Hills

Write It Out! cohort participants Ebony Payne-English, Lee Daniels, and Alfredo Trejo III garnered a lot of love for their postive-centric plays.

mostshared A Gallery feature on the AIDS Education Posters Collection at the University of Rochester, now showcased in a new book, captivated readers.

@AmericasAIDSMagazine

6

@au_magazine

@au_americas_aids_magazine • JANUARY 2022

IN MEMORIAM Richard

Garcia

W

1951-2021

e were devastated to learn that (Louis) Richard Garcia had died this past Halloween. We offer our condolences to his partner, Tim Brockhum, and his younger sister, Arlene. Like them, we will miss his aimable nature and his gregarious spirit.

Funny and sweet and a bulldog in his fight against the cancers that tried to stop him, Richard was demonstrative and loved to engage others in conversation. He had the gruff voice of one of our cover story subjects, Harvey Fierstein, and I remember when Richard and I were manning a commerical booth at a gay men’s chorus “ and event in San José, California, ... and Harvey himself stopped by to say hello and pick up Richard was more copies of his issue. demonstrative When Richard and Harvey began talking, it became hard and loved to to tell them apart. Gravelly engage others in tones in stereo!

After he moved upstate conversation." from New York City to the Capital Region, he soon joined A&U, then in its early days, and quickly became indispensible to its operations, managing subscription and distribution databases and also performing the bookkeeping for our nonprofit. His dedication helped to strengthen the magazine and make it is what it is today. I cannot count the times when he saved the day. It’s hard to think of A&U without him, but we will soldier on in honor of his memory.

Funny Sweet

—David Waggoner

8

• JANUARY 2022

Without health justice, we cannot end the HIV epidemic.

Show your support at sfaf.org/shop

NewsBreak In Memoriam: Scott Robbe

10

His activism continued when he moved to the West Coast in 1991. He greatly assisted fellow ACT UP LA members Judy Sisneros and Lee Wildes, who they co-organized a protest at the Oscar Awards in March 1991, calling for visibility of PWAs and the AIDS crisis in film, which the studio system had ignored while thousands were dying. Also in the early nineties, he cofounded Out in Film, a group that sought to battle homophobia in Hollywood filmmaking. His extensive television credits include the first-ever LGBT comedy special for Comedy Central in 1993, called Out There, and hosted

by Lea DeLaria. Robbe was on the creative team for the groundbreaking initial iteration of Queer

Eye for the Straight Guy, which debuted in 2003.

He also produced shows for Lifetime, Comedy Central, VH1, Children’s Television Workshop, and American Playhouse.

“Scott was a fearless activist, always on the front lines, whether he was protesting pharmaceutical company greed or homophobia at the Oscars,” said ACT UP New York veteran Ann Northrop. “And he was a total sweetheart.” A celebration of Robbe’s life will be broadcast online early in 2022. Donations in Scott’s memory may be made to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and ACT UP New York.

• JANUARY 2022

photo courtesy Scott Robbe Estate

R

enowned television, film, and stage producer, and veteran AIDS and queer rights advocate, Scott Robbe died on November 21, 2021, of complications from myelodysplastic anemia, a blood cancer he had battled for more than a year. He was sixty-six years old.

Robbe was born on February 16, 1955, in Decorah, Iowa. He attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduating in 1978 with a degree in Theatre Arts. It was there he got his first taste of progressive activism, taking part in many student protests. He moved to New York City, living in the East Village, restoring the Orpheum Theatre, and producing plays at La MaMa ETC and other venues, including Harvey Fierstein’s Fugue in a Nursery (the middle section of Torch Song Trilogy) and, later, Fierstein’s Safe Sex on Broadway.

He joined ACT UP in 1987, taking part in numerous protests. He was a member of an ACT UP undercover team led by activist Peter Staley that secretly gained access to the New York Stock Exchange in September 1989. Their goal was to protest and publicize the record-high price of AZT, then the sole approved treatment for HIV/AIDS. Burroughs Wellcome eventually bowed to this nationally publicized activist pressure and lowered its drug price—— then the highest in medical history——by 20%.

Staley said of Robbe, “Scott didn’t flinch when our lawyers would warn us of all the possible charges and maximum sentences we’d face for infiltrating a powerful institution. When it came to fighting for his dying gay brothers, he’d always reply, ‘I’m in.’”

M•A•C Cosmetics teams with keith haring

M•A•C

Cosmetics, part of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., has teamed up with the Keith Haring Studio to celebrate M•A•C’s twenty-seven years of “giving back 100%.” To celebrate, and to honor Haring’s artistic and philanthropic legacy, M•A•C has created three special-edition Lipsticks in Haring’s signature primary color palette in Matte and Frost finishes for this year’s VIVA GLAM collection. Each lipstick is a pop art artifact in itself, embellished with Keith Haring’s iconic street-style imagery. One hundred percent of the selling price of VIVA GLAM Lipstick sold in the U.S. is donated to the M•A•C VIVA GLAM Fund, supporting healthy futures and equal rights for all. The funds raised go to support local organizations supporting women and girls, the LGBTQIA+ community and people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. This collaboration makes sense for several reasons.

For one, there are artistic parallels between Haring and M•A•C: Haring’s inimitable street pop art sprang into the epicenter of New York’s artistic subculture in the 1980s, right when M•A•C launched as the definitive rule-breaking Artistry brand. It’s the company's communal belief in equal rights and healthy futures for all that forms the most meaningful message for M•A•C VIVA GLAM x Keith Haring. “For our twenty-seventh anniversary, we’re thrilled to honor the late iconic artist Keith Haring and carry forward his mission of using his imagery to drive positive change for those most in need of support,” John Demsey, Chairman of the M•A•C VIVA GLAM Fund, said in a press release. “He was a true visionary who used his talent for purpose. While he sadly passed during the height of the epidemic, we are so proud that his iconic art and philanthropy lives on through VIVA GLAM.” The lipsticks are available in Red Haring Bright vibrant red (Matte), Canal Blue Bold blue with micro-pearlescent particles (Matte), and St. Marks Yellow Sheer bright yellow with pearlescent particles (Frost).

Suggested retail price is $19 USD each.

Since 1994, M•A•C VIVA GLAM has raised over $500 million globally. In addition to the three new, special-edition M•A•C VIVA GLAM x Keith Haring Lipsticks, every cent of the selling price of VIVA GLAM I Lipstick, VIVA GLAM II Lipstick and VIVA GLAM III Lipstick goes to support the health and rights of people all year around.

“Our partnership with M·A·C Cosmetics is really a perfect match,” says Gil Vazquez, Acting Director of the Keith Haring Studio. “Between the bold color palette and the ethos of the brand, we really appreciate the synergies here and can’t wait to see this all come to life.”

More information, including where you can find these lipsticks, can be found at www.maccosmetics.com.

JANUARY 2022 •

11

O

n World AIDS Day, December 1, 2021, former members of ACT UP/LA announced the launch of the ACT UP Los Angeles Oral History Project to capture the historic AIDS activism in the Los Angeles area from 1987 to 1997. In order to document the movement that dominated the gay community throughout the Los Angeles area for a decade, ACT UP members Mary Lucey, Nancy MacNeil, Jordan Peimer, Helene Schpak and Judy Ornelas Sisneros spent the past year planning the project, and have already begun recording interviews with other former members. The project is expected to take two to three years, and will present more than 100 interviews when completed.

The ACT UP/LA Oral History Project was mainly motivated by the continuing deaths of ACT UP/LA members whose histories have not been preserved.

“Not only were voices silenced by AIDS, but we are now continually at risk of losing the stories of the people who championed their fight——some with HIV/AIDS, some without——but all people who put their lives and freedom on the line to address this loss,” said Oral History Project member Nancy MacNeil in a press release.

She adds, “We need to ensure the stories get told by the voices that lived them. Everyone has the right to be the author of their own history.”

The project will preserve personal accounts of

valentine's day gift idea: amfAR

GALA

for Women and GALA for Men, two perfumes created for amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, were launched last year when the AIDS research nonprofit was unable to hold its annual gala in person because of COVID-19 concerns.

Both fragrances celebrate amfAR’s thirty-year history of fundraising in style and pay a heartfelt tribute to Dame Elizabeth Taylor [A&U, February 2003], amfAR’s founding international chairperson. amfAR partnered with Paris-based perfume house and licensor Parfums Parour in order to share the fragrances with the world.

12

former ACT UP/LA activists online so that people will learn the inside history of the organization’s actions. Some members have already been interviewed, providing hours of personal histories of activism in the face of endless cycles of grief. A sample of outtakes from three of these interviews can be seen at www.actupla.org.

One of the earliest chapters of ACT UP outside of New York, ACT UP/LA first organized in 1987, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose adACT UP/LA shutting down the Westwood Federal building ministration blatantly refused to in the Fight for the Living action (for AIDS drugs, emergency acknowledge the growing AIDS federal program, an end to HIV discrimination and healthcare for all) on October 6,1989. crisis. It differed from chapters in other cities in its focus on ward to County/USC Medical Center and pressured women and prisoners living with HIV/AIDS. Per their press release, “ACT UP/ the California Department of Corrections to address the LA marched on federal buildings, state buildings, healthcare needs of prisoners with AIDS. L.A. County and City government offices, insurance The ACT UP/LA Oral History Project needs companies, hospitals, churches, prisons, political donations to fund this important collection of fundraisers, the movie and television industries, interviews without which many histories of the aging homes of bigots and traveled out of town to protest community of Los Angeles AIDS activists will not be in Congress, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, the CDC, FDA, NIH, international captured and preserved.

For more information, or to donate, visit: AIDS conferences, and presidential campaigns and www.actupla.org or email the project at: conventions.” Such actions forced the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to add the first AIDS actuplaoralhistory@gmail.com.

Tell Me More: According to press notes, GALA for Women is a “sensual fragrance” that offers “a fruity citrus mix of bergamot, blackcurrant and mandarin, with notes of jasmine, Bulgarian rose, white musk and sandalwood.” It was created

by Created by Céline Perdriel.

GALA for Men is a cologne of “suave sophistication,” with notes of Australian sandalwood, patchouli, and black amber. It was created by Jérôme Epinette.

Who Benefits: amfAR’s AIDS research program and its COVID-19 fund. amfAR focuses its efforts on AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education, and advocacy. Since 1985, amfAR has invested nearly $600 million in its programs and has awarded more than 3,500 grants to research teams worldwide. In light of the recent coronavirus pandemic, the nonprofit has temporarily expanded its research to include COVID-19 treatments and how the virus

affects people living with HIV/AIDS. How Much: 150 euros.

How to Order: Log on to: Parfums-gala-by-amfar.com. Also check out https://amfar. myshopify.com for amfAR’s PRIDE collection and other gift ideas.

• JANUARY 2022

photo by Chuck Stallard

ACT UP/LA launches oral history project

by Ruby Comer

Matt Caprioli “The jockstrap. It’s comfortable. It’s stretchy. It’s generous on your waist. It will always make your butt look good. It’s makes me feel sexy…everyone at some point should wear a jockstrap”—Matt Caprioli on Netflix’s Worn Stories, episode four, “Growing Up.”

14

Ruby illustration by Davidd Batalon; photo by David Muller Photographyi

W

hen I heard these words uttered from this handsome, charismatic gent, I was captivated. (The series is compelling and innovative.)

The subject, Matt Caprioli, thirty-one, was authentic, candid, and just beaming with pride.

I sat there riveted to the screen watching his fascinating story about growing up gay in the conservative Alaskan prairie.

Come to find out, the jockstrap was his tool of the trade. You see, in Anchorage and New York City, Matt was a “hooker” (his word).

Hooking came about by accident. At nineteen, while living in Anchorage, Matt was perusing through a gay dating app. A guy contacted him then offered to pay him. Matt obliged, drove downtown to a hotel (the man happened to be the district manager of the hotel chain), and at the end of sex the guy paid him fifty bucks. Matt was astonished.

He thought, Hey, this was the quickest, and indeed a delightful method, to rack up capital.

He could continue offering his services and it would help pay for college tuition. He did and it did.

In 2012, Matt nearly graduated from UAA (University of Alaska Anchorage) with a literature degree, and a minor in psychology, but still had a math requirement to fulfill.

However, feeling overwhelmed because of nearsighted, bigoted right-wingers in Alaska, and because Matt was not completely accepted by his religious conservative mother (he came out to her at sixteen), he decided to move to a grander municipality——New York

• JANUARY 2022

photo courtesy Guest House Films

Ruby illustration by Davidd Batalon; portrait courtesy M. Caprioli

City! He was twenty-two.

Living in the metropolis, Matt met older guys who lived through the horror of the early days of AIDS. Matt first became aware of the disease at the tender age of seven when he watched Philadelphia, where Tom Hanks portrayed a character living with AIDS. The actor won an Academy Award for his performance.

Listening to his New York friends’ stories who witnessed the epidemic, Matt was intensely impacted. He believes it’s vital to keep these historical experiences alive for future generations. To honor those lives lost, Matt has read such memoirs as Paul Lisicky’s Later and Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time.

“Shook. My. Core,” Matt so eloquently states. He continues to delve into that generation’s soul, feeling a strong need to “be with and hear from those who lived that terror.”

Spending less than a year in New York, Matt returned to Anchorage. He partly returned because he wanted to receive his full double major degree, and partly because of a scary episode while hooking. We’ll scoot into that later.

In 2014, after graduating, Matt moved back to the Big Apple. He worked in product marketing, was a financial consultant and researcher at Blue Heron Research Partners, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College. In fall of 2020 Matt was hired by Lehman College (CUNY) English Department located in the Bronx. He’s a CCE-track lecturer in writing.

At Lehman, he’s co-advisor to the cleverly named Crystal Queer, the LGBTQ+ Club, where he projects an active voice about HIV and AIDS. Even though New York is a liberal city, Matt believes there aren’t enough spaces around to sanely converse about the HIV epidemic. On December 1, World AIDS Day, the group holds memorials in tribute to those who died from the virus.

Just when you think Matt can rest on his laurels, he bursts into student mode JANUARY 2022 •

again, pursing an MBA at Baruch College. My god, is there any stopping this go-getter, who’s brimming with pizzazz and chutzpah?! No! Just a few months ago his memoir, One Headlight, was published by Cirque Press.

The tome is a coming of age story that’s also a loving homage to his mother, Abby. Sadly, she died from colon cancer in 2017 at the age of fifty-four. Though son and mother had their differences, they were tied at the hip. And though thorny at first, Abby did evolve and eventually accept her son as gay, recognizing and even boasting to others about Matt’s then-partner, now fiancé, Adam.

Today, the couple lives in Queens, New York.

They met on Grindr and have been smooching for seven years. As Matt deliriously states, “It’s a modern fairy tale indeed!”

Matt’s past intrigues me, especially knowing what it was like being a sex worker in the new millennium and how he kept himself safe from STIs. I happen to be in New York doing work, so Matt and I arrange a meeting by the legendary Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, where hundreds of films have been shot. Matt gets there first and welcomes me with open arms.

Hooray for you! Talk about your first time being paid while in Anchorage.

Oh. Well, I had no idea how much to ask for.

He gave me fifty bucks, which at the time blew my mind. I made that much in an eight-hour shift as a cashier at a baseball park, working in the concession stand. He told me to buy my mother a nice dinner. Without thinking, I blurted out, “You want me to use money I made through prostitution to buy a dinner for my mother?” He smirked and changed the topic. He asked to see me again but I declined. …very endearing yarn. Say, how did you

Ruby Comer: May I say, my dear…you are more attractive in person ! [He blushes, and then I promptly insert with exhilaration] Tell me about hooking!

Matt Caprioli: Well, Ruby, you live in a fantasy world that is pleasurable, but not sustaining. [He cocks his cranium to one side, looks upward, and is briefly lost in a memory.] I was wined and dined, taken to Broadway shows, and one guy even flew me to Hawaii.

Marvelous. I understand, Matt. I dabbled in the biz early on in my career and found it was a positive guiding force in my life. [I pause, skimming my hand lightly upon the fountain water.] I always preferred being called a “whore,” so as to break the stigma. Just like some gays prefer “queer.” In my youth, “queer” was the worst thing one could be called.

I get it, yes. I struggled with the word “prostitution,” and the idea that I was devaluing myself. I once believed all that Pentecostal and Evangelical line of thinking.

I termed myself “hooker” early on but then when I was twenty-two someone suggested, “escort.” With my religious background, for some reason it made the future interactions easier or more “respectable.” [Matt pauses.] It’s so interesting how heteronormativity and shame factor enter into those titles. [With a pleasant smile, he concludes] For the most part, it was a remarkable opportunity and I value that more audacious whorish side of my personality.

stay safe during this period of escorting?

I was pretty good at screening clients. I didn’t hang out with clients who wanted to party and play or “snow” as one chap called it. I mostly catered to professors, C-List celebrities, academic administrators, bored psychologists, disgruntled mattress or computer hardware salesmen, finance brokers, younger straight men looking to experiment, and so. I’d say seventy percent of clients wanted to use a condom.

Screening that way can be limiting.

[Matt continues] I’m generally very trusting, which is both good and bad. I trusted most of them, cut off those who seemed sketchy, and I didn’t contract anything serious. In fact, what I did contract, Ruby, was from some hot guy I met at a

15

In my teens, I was part of a sex education group, RARE-T (Reducing AIDS Risks Effectively in Teens). [I perk up hearing about this group.] Our members gave presentations to de-stigmatize the illness. I’m still amazed at how many people had questions about toilet seats.

I wanna hear more about RARE-T. Did your high school sponsor it?

I believe the school sponsored it, but I actually don’t recall who funded it. It was school approved, but funding I guess was from a federal source, as my high school was fairly conservative.

I see.

Kids in RARE-T were known as loud people who were, counterintuitively, popular because they didn’t care about popularity. They stood up for what was right and always asked, “Why?” when someone cringed. I was surprised at how many students left one of our presentations who later said to me, “That presentation was completely eye-opening!”

trauma of AIDS, what one story sticks out the most?

It was a man who told me that when he was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, that during the summer he attended twenty-five funerals. [Matt gasps and then he swallows hard.]

Damn! [Chills scurry up my spine. There's a moment of silence between us.] Okay, Matt…lightning round time! One, name your favorite HIV-themed film; two, the daily website you visit; three, your first celebrity crush; and four, your hero in the epidemic.

[He ticks off with his fingers] Before Night Falls; LitHub; Enrique Iglesias [he says joyfully]!; and I have many heroes in the epidemic, but at the moment it’s Sarah Schulman [A&U, August 2021].

How do you keep yourself balanced and sane during this chaotic angst-driven COVID world?

bar——not a client. [He pauses.] I was definitely tested more, about once a month at a city clinic in Chelsea.

Before we get into testing, tell about the bad experience that led to hanging up your jockstrap.

It was May 2013. I was starting to lower my guard and didn’t really screen or ask questions of clients as I once did. A younger client visited me at home. He didn’t want to use a condom. I asked him to, he refused, I said we should stop, and he forcibly chose not to. That violation really shook me and was another factor in choosing to leave N.Y.C. the first time.

Tell about your encounter.

Super-nerve-wracking! The nurse asked some standard questions about the number of sexual partners I had, and I recall asking why that was relevant. I was out [of the closet] but uncomfortable answering info about my sex life. He was super curt and said the state needed the information and if I didn’t answer the questions then I couldn’t get the test.…What a jackass. [He scoffs, rolling his eyes.]

Oh, gee, tiresome.

16

[Gleefully I say] Adam! [Matt beams brightly when I mention his fiancé.] When you and Adam met, did you broach the topic of STIs? We talked about STIs before we stopped using protection. He had claimed that he never had anal sex on the first date, and I’m pleased to say that I broke his record.

You are too cute. Now when and where can I expect to be invited to your wedding?!

Probably Queens Museum sometime this year.

Splendid. Out of all the narratives you’ve heard from others about living during the

[He promptly declares] Masturbation…and reading.

I’ve enjoyed this time together, Matt. Tell me, what motto do you live by?

Follow your heart… but keep your head. [With that, we walk about five minutes to Strawberry Fields, and are now hovering over the mosaic memorial of John Lennon’s "Imagine," which illuminates off the sun. Fitting.]

Worn photo courtesy Netflixi

Whoa, I’m sorry you had to deal with that.

Back to testing…What was the motivation to test at sixteen, and where was it performed?

It was at 4As [Alaskan AIDS Assistance Association] in Anchorage. After a while [using protection] I had unprotected sex with my first boyfriend, plus I wanted the experience of being tested, too.

Ruby Comer is an independent journalist from the Midwest who is happy to call Hollywood her home away from home.

Reach her by e-mail at MsRubyComer@aol.com.

• JANUARY 2022

the AIDS activist project Faces from the frontlines of the fight against AIDS

sum

25 years in the making, over 60 portraits of the people who stood up and fought the AIDS Crisis.

Find out more & purchase your copy at www.theaidsactivistproject.org

NONFICTION

Farther

18

by Bruce Bromley Well, it’s the story of the 1980s.…I’m very aware that the younger generation of kids are growing up not knowing anything about this period.…And at the time it felt like it was normal to live life with this killer disease.…You have kids growing up now during the time of the coronavirus, and to them this is normal, that face masks and social distancing is completely normal.

It doesn’t make them blink.…People said we were the love that dare not speak its name. And then came along a disease that dare not speak its name. Double calamity.

Russell T Davies, interview about It’s a Sin (2021) Dr. Siegel says You’ve tested negative. His bottom lip sticks against his teeth on negative, as though he could hardly bear to let it go. But Dr. Siegel’s like that with words.

You remember——when you came before——the particular kind of quiet with which he met your nodding at his Harvard and Columbia degrees. The swimming pool trembled through the slatted blinds.

You recall the way he withdrew the needle from your arm: slowly, as if he wouldn’t let it go. Now, you see Dr. Siegel offer you his hand, hear him praise your luck, as Mrs. Siegel waves from the pool still visible through the window. Once she appears in the office, you greet her as a longtime friend of your parents, and she takes your hand. You remember the time before, when you tried to shake Dr. Siegel’s hand; he removed it quickly: he could only let it go.

As you walk through the waiting room on your way to the car, you’re trying to notice the receptionist’s smile, the copies of Ladies’ Home Journal, its recipes for casseroles and cookies waiting to be used. You’re not going to recall the last time you saw Douglas in the hospital, when you attempted to feed him some translucent broth from a little spoon. You didn’t recognize his mouth. Underneath the sheets, his legs were swallowed by the bed. You wiped the broth that ran down his chin. You felt the bone there.

Driving home, you take Town Road because it cuts through the rye fields, where you can see the few houses hunched under a sky that won’t go away. When you make the left turn too fast, crows fly low, out of the rye——they brush against the windshield. You could have hit them.

You can’t want to be back with Douglas for the last time that you remember him walking. You can’t want the rye to be long and green and glimmering, as it was

when you struggled to follow the footpath around the fields. His left hand hung from your shoulder: walking, he slid his feet across the ground.

No farther, he said.

You park the car, approach the house, and are about to unlock the sliding front door when you find your face reflected in the glass. It arrived there before you. Through that face, you spy the coffee mug in the dish drainer, the plate on the kitchen counter, the linoleum floor under the four coats of wax that you gave it last night because you couldn’t sleep.

Before, when you were awake, you’d sneak downstairs and sit at the kitchen table. You’d hear Douglas pad along the floor, feel him curve his lips around one of your ears. The last time, he simply stood there before you, almost murmuring——I’ve been tested.

Through those pajamas, his legs gleamed, thick with hair and veins. They seemed to be planted in the ground.

After you take off your clothes in the bedroom, you look at that negative of your body in the mirror, at the road of chest hair traveling down to the crotch, at the taut thighs between which your cock stands, without the ability to remember. The hair on your calves forgets him; it grows without thought. You think you want to say——I don’t know how to live. You try to say it.

But you can’t.

Bruce Bromley is the author of Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) and The Life in the Sky Comes Down: Essays, Stories, Essay/Stories (Backlash Press, 2017), nominated for the 2018 Victoria & Albert Best Illustrated Book Award. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in Out Magazine; Open Democracy; Gargoyle Magazine; Fogged Clarity: An Arts Review; Environmental Philosophy; 3:AM Magazine; Cleaver Magazine; Entropy Magazine; The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. He teaches writing at New York University, where he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence.

• JANUARY 2022

THE

LIFECHANGING CAMP EXPERIENCE FOR KIDS WHO NEED IT MOST

Summer camps for youth impacted by HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ young people, and children experiencing homelessness Providing a safe community for those in need is more important than ever before. Give the gift of camp today to ensure camp is here for young people facing stigma and isolation.

www.oneheartland.org

A Path

Through Paris Artist Boré Ivanoff Embraces the City He Loves Through Painting & HIV Advocacy

B

by Chael Needle

oré Ivanoff claims Paris not only as his long-term home but also as a locus of higher education——the city has taught him about art, about life.

Now, others would surely see the émigré as one of the city’s professors.

His paintings of Paris scenes, with their reflective facets reassembled into mesmerizing visual bricolage, certainly show us new perspectives of the City of Light. And, through his advocacy, he has something to teach about dismantling HIV stigma and the empowerment of individuals living with HIV/AIDS. In the fall of 2021, Bulgarian-born and Paris-based artist Boré Ivanoff curated an exhibit at Galerie Marie de Holmsky with an eye to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS [A&U, September 2021]. ArtPositive featured his work and the work of other artists living with HIV/AIDS: Adrienne Seed, Nacho Hernandez Alvarez, and Philipp Spiegel. He had been in part inspired by his participation in a 2019 art exhibit organized by The European AIDS Clinical Society at the 17th European AIDS Conference in Basel, Switzerland.

As an artist, Ivanoff has exhibited in France, Bulgaria, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom in both solo and group shows. He is represented by Galerie Marie de Holmsky.

A&U recently had the opportunity to correspond with the self-taught artist.

Chael Needle: Last August, we first connected when you were preparing to open ArtPositive.

What has been the response, at the gallery and online?

Boré Ivanoff: I am really thrilled to talk about this experience. ArtPositive was a kind of historical event for Paris. For the first time we, HIV-positive artists from different European countries, met and exhibited our art in a classy art gallery in the most chic and artistic part of Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Prés Quarter. So, an event like this definitely cannot happen without being noticed. I can say that we the HIV-positive buddies were really happy to meet each other as artists and to show our art there. We had real fun at the vernissage.

A good number of people from all different walks of life came. But, unfortunately the event has not been well covered by the French mainstream media. Despite the fact that we had sent them the press release, and we had some important personalities and AIDS activist organizations as partners, the public interest was not significant. The impression here in Paris is that the topic HIV/AIDS is no longer on the same level of importance and interest as it has been and as it should be. Unfortunately this is the reality, which will logically lead to negative consequences regarding societal AIDS awareness, HIV testing, and reaching the objective of ending AIDS by 2030. Many people here in Paris are just not interested in testing, treatment, and fighting HIV-related stigma and discrimination. And this is due to the whole new reality related to another virus and another health

20

Opposite page (clockwise from top left) Nos Pépites Parisiennes, Saint-Germain-des-Près, 2020, oil on linen, 60 by 60 centimeters Les Deux Magots, 2021, oil on linen, 80 by 60 centimeters Arts sur Place des Vosges, Paris 3ème, 2017–2018, oil on linen, 70 by 70 centimeters Louvre-Saint-Honoré, Paris 1er, 2019, oil on linen, 70 by 70 centimeters

• JANUARY 2022

a&ugallery

JANUARY 2022 •

21

priority that started in the beginning of 2020 and the exclusivist media and social attention focused on it. But, of course, we will not give up and we’ll continue our fight and mission.

ArtPositive is not over just after the first exhibition. We had really considerable international online reactions. We have been covered by some very important AIDS activist magazines from the U.S., such as The Advocate, Positively Aware, A&U, and some other AIDS activists’ websites and personalities from France, U.K., Italy, Canada, Spain, Austria, Bulgaria. Even UNAIDS has been interested in our exhibition and we received some good press on their website. I have been contacted by several HIV-positive artists from other countries and they have asked me how to join the next edition of ArtPositive [link at the end of the article]. All these facts are very inspiring and make me even more determined to continue the fight against HIV-related stigma, discrimination, and this new societal ignorance. We are working on organizing the next edition of the ArtPositive exhibition once again here in Paris. But this time we will try to find a bigger venue and to invite more artists willing to exhibit their art and to add their voices to our mission. So if among your readers are visual artists living with HIV and willing to participate in the ArtPositive exposition in Paris, please feel welcome to contact me and I will be glad to give you the details and eventually have you on the team for the next exhibit.

“...it’s all about the FEELING, intuition,

some unknown INNER

FORCE/drive

that guides my hand, my eyes and mind from the beginning to the end of the creation of my artworks.”

The environment of Paris figures prominently in your work. I especially like how the architecture serves as a mirror that shows different perspectives. When did you first discover buildings and streets as a subject for painting? What attracts you to architecture?

Yes, indeed the mirrors of Paris through the vitrines, waters, and reflective metal are my very speciality when it comes to my best paintings. I often call this style “Hallucinatory Figuration.” It also allows me to break the limits between abstraction and realism. And it is so sophisticated and such a puzzle-like subject matter that I become addicted to working on such motifs. In fact I can say that in some way, I am painting portraits of Paris in the same way as Francis Bacon painted his deformed but magical human portraits and compositions. The reflections are like a designer drug for me, and, as much as the chosen motif is complicated and “impossible,” my pleasure, my inspiration, my trip to wonderland are stronger. I can’t say why that is. Just artistic intuition, something cerebral, I guess. I like to enjoy and win impossible battles.

Also I love to represent in my paintings the multifaceted wonders of Paris. This city is like a never-ceasing source of inspiration and transcendence for me. Paris is

22

for me also the best university to study life and art. Here I find everything I need in order to create what I feel I have to do, to express myself via my art.

The architecture of Paris is so eclectic and eye-addicting for any artist. It is like a living organism.

And the reflections make truly great visual and perceptional miracles.

There is a saying that through a mirror we can see into another world, we can see into our inner world. The mirror is a very powerful and omnipresent symbol found in all traditions and magical realms. Even in psychoanalysis....Especially Jung, whom I read and admire a lot, and even Freud were particularly interested in investigating this topic. Painting cityscapes and landscapes is my original passion, way before I came to live in Paris. But once I began my journey here, it was simply impossible to not fall under the magical spell of the City of Light. And since 2012 I have been almost exclusively painting Paris. Paris as Narcissus, who never stops looking at his reflection in the mirror. Because it is beautiful and he cannot help but admire his own beauty. So, as summary I can say that my Baconesque portraits of Paris are my highest tribute to the irresistible magic of the most beautiful and cosmopolitan city of the world. This is my own opinion of course, but I am sure that anyone who visits Paris will agree. It is a dream come true for me. And I feel most at home right here in Paris. Perhaps this is why, most of my artworks representing Paris are so touching and appreciated by many gallerists, collectors, and casual viewers, wherever I show them. Paris is my dearest and ever-changing muse. I could write a lot more about it, but I prefer to represent it with my paintings.

Your paintings are indeed technical wonders and they draw me in for a long time. Take Les Deux Magots, a painting of the famous café that has been a hangout for famous writers and artists, for example. Or, La Cinémathèque française. Perhaps I am able to visit Paris for an afternoon in your paintings!

Dare I say that you must build the painting? What is your process like? How do you go from beginning to end with a painting?

You are right. There is some kind of building [going on]. It’s like finding a raw stone and shaping it until it becomes what I feel is good enough to stay like that. But on rare occasions I’ll discover after several months that a given artwork needs some retouching. It just happened today with a painting that I have finished earlier this year, and now I have to modify it a bit.

Here’s the essential thing——it’s all about the feeling, intuition, some unknown inner force/drive that guides my hand, my eyes, and mind from the beginning to the end of the creation of my works. From first finding the right motif up to the final touches with the brushes. It’s like a sacred rite, for me. Paris is so rich and such an irresistible source of motifs. They are everywhere. One just has to open one’s eyes and artistic radar to spot, capture and sublimate them by translation on the canvas, through the artist’s filters, charging it with one’s personal vibes, before sharing it with the world.

For me, even finding the “right” motif, which talks to me and enchants me to go for it and paint it, this is a kind of creative process, an art. Once I

• JANUARY 2022

a&ugallery

La Cinémathèque française, Paris 12ème, 2016, oil on cloth, 61 by 46 centimeters JANUARY 2022 •

23

Conte Mirifique, Fondation Cartier, Paris 14ème, 2015, oil on cloth, 61 by 46 centimeters

24

• JANUARY 2022

a&ugallery

spot a treasure like that, I just know that it’s The One, the right subject matter to paint. So, I shoot at least fifty photos, and then I get so impatient and excited to go back home and start selecting. Even the very selection and the digital modifications of the final source image before I feel that it’s okay and ready to get translated onto the white canvas, that is another creative process itself.

Sometimes I already like the photo, which is my first sketch work for the future painting, and I often think that it is worth keeping it as [a finished piece], ready to share with the world, artwork. But, of course I go further, with the pencil on the canvas. Making the skeleton, the armature of the future building, the painting, by drawing the real preparatory sketch. It takes me sometimes a week or more, just for that. But it’s a part of the ritual and I just don’t care about how long or complicated it is. I become a different person during my creative sessions——a kind of obsessed or schizophrenic being, I guess. All that matters is the process. Yes, the process is much more important and essential than the finished painting. Perhaps this is why I look intuitively for “impossible,” extremely sophisticated motifs. Because they are the ones which make me feel good and high....After each session of painting, I feel just like I feel after a good trip or intense sexual encounter.

One more little technical secret is that I fragment my canvas, dividing it into smaller separate paintings to create the big picture. And I work on each one, trying to abstract it completely from the rest of the untouched part. Otherwise it would drive me crazy if I try to analyze it as a whole during my work sessions.

It’s absolutely necessary to try to switch off from the rest of the world and the rest of the painting and to focus on the the specific fragment. And just like that, fragment by fragment, brick by brick, the house is built. And the armature, the sketch, is the most important [guide] to help me not get lost. Of course, very often I am creative in adjusting, modifying, adding or skipping details, colors, compositions. But I am always maniacally faithful to my artist’s intuition, which, in combination with my obsessive tenacity and ritualistic delight from the process of painting, is kind of my technical/spiritual formula behind my recent artworks. As they say, “it is not so important to find the Holy Grail, but the Quest, the Path toward it, is all that matters.”

For myself, Paris is the right place to follow the Path in search of self-realization and artistic accomplishment.

So, Paris is in your heart. Have you found a community here, too?

Something different than you were able to find in Bulgaria?

Sacha Guitry once said, “Being a Parisian is not about being born in Paris, it is about being reborn there.”

As I said already, Paris is my greatest life and art university. Paris is my home. The real one. And this is not only because it’s such a beautiful, cosmopolitan and cultural hub from a global aspect, but also because here I always feel these positive vibes, here I found almost immediately appreciation for and recognition of my art. Which was unthinkable in Bulgaria and even in South Africa, where I spent three years of life before I came to Paris. In Paris I found the refuge, the tolerance, and acceptance for my identity as an HIV-positive individual. The necessary anonymity and solidarity. In Bulgaria, this is simply impossible, especially for HIV-positive people. Of course I found in Paris a new constellation of contacts, fellow artists and friends from all over the world.

But I cannot say that I am not confronted——even in Paris in the twenty-first century——with some cases of stigma, prejudice, and discrimination associated with my health status and especially with HIV. Since I had my “coming out” in 2019 I can say that I lost some friends, online and in life. Some just maintained a comfortable distance and, especially now with the current health crisis and isolation, they have a perfect alibi to keep an even stricter distance from me.

But being an artist is usually a lonely path, so I am used to living a lonely life,

JANUARY 2022 •

despite the fact that I have a lot of contacts with artists, collectors, fans and a few close friends. Almost always, after the buzz of the openings of my shows, at the end of the day, I find myself alone with myself. But I don’t blame anyone for that. In some ways I feel blessed to be HIV-positive. It’s a bittersweet twist of fate——I really began living and seeing and painting my best art right after I had been diagnosed with HIV. And Paris is the perfect place for an international artist, living with HIV. What’s next for you as an artist? What’s next for ArtPositive?

Whats coming next? Well, as with every artist, the most important thing is to continue painting and at the same time look for any opportunitiy to show my art. To share it with the world. I am kind of fortunate to live in Paris——the dream place for any artist. It gives me a lot of inspiration, and possibilities to show my art, to see other art, to meet and exchange with other artists from all over the world. A real cosmopolitan art hub where I feel right at home.

Of course naturally one of my high-priority goals is to look forward to organizing a next edition of ArtPositive exposition. Things will be clearer about dates, venue and artist team come March 2022. And there is another curatorial project on the table, as for a long time I have had this idea to reunite artists from Eastern Europe and to show their art in Paris. So, the time has come for this project. Presently, I’ve selected a group of seven visual artists who originated from Eastern Europe, most of them living in Paris, and we have already set the dates and secured the venue of the exhibit, which is titled “East Wind.” The Marie de Holmsky gallery, which is my principal art dealer in Paris, will be the place where “East Wind” will be on show from mid-September to mid-October 2022. We are artists from Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia and I am sure that we will not disappoint the exigent Parisian public.

This is my fifth curatorial project here in Paris, reuniting a constellation of international artists, so I think I have the necessary experience and self-confidence to keep me cool and on the right path to make the show a success.

Looking any farther ahead is not so easy in these troubling and quite unpredictable times in human history. But, I am tempted to reveal another exciting project that we have discussed with my gallerist, which is to organize a major solo exhibition in my Parisian gallery, right before the Olympic Games in 2024, when Paris will be a really busy and popular place. And of course I will never stop painting and fighting for societal sensitization and awareness about HIV-related stigma, discrimination, ignorance. We the HIV-positive people, we don’t deserve all these injustices and pain that we are experiencing today.

Boré Ivanoff wishes to thank all the partners and media outlets that have helped promote and cover ArtPositive: Élus Locaux Contre le Sida (France); The Austrian Cultural Forum, Paris; the EACS (European AIDS Clinical Society); Brussels, UNAIDS, Geneva; and, in the U.S., Advocate Magazine, Positively Aware Magazine, and A&U; the Marie de Holmsky Gallery in Paris, the City Hall of Paris, and all other private and public personalities and organizations who helped realize the project.

For artists living with HIV/AIDS who would like to participate in ArtPostive, visit: https:// artpositivehivexpo.wordpress.com. For more information about Boré Ivanoff, visit: https://boretzart.wordpress.com.

Chael Needle interviewed Up Against the Wall coeditor Jessica Lacher-Feldman for the December 2021 Gallery.

25

IMPORTANT FACTS FOR BIKTARVY®

This is only a brief summary of important information about BIKTARVY and does not replace talking to your healthcare provider about your condition and your treatment.

(bik-TAR-vee)

MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT BIKTARVY

POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF BIKTARVY

BIKTARVY may cause serious side effects, including:

BIKTARVY may cause serious side effects, including:  Those in the “Most Important Information About BIKTARVY” section.  Changes in your immune system. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that may have been hidden in your body. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any new symptoms after you start taking BIKTARVY.  Kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys. If you develop new or worse kidney problems, they may tell you to stop taking BIKTARVY.  Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious but rare medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat.  Severe liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain.  The most common side effects of BIKTARVY in clinical studies were diarrhea (6%), nausea (6%), and headache (5%).

 Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. Your

healthcare provider will test you for HBV. If you have both HIV-1 and HBV, your HBV may suddenly get worse if you stop taking BIKTARVY. Do not stop taking BIKTARVY without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to check your health regularly for several months, and may give you HBV medicine.

ABOUT BIKTARVY BIKTARVY is a complete, 1-pill, once-a-day prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults and children who weigh at least 55 pounds. It can either be used in people who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before, or people who are replacing their current HIV-1 medicines and whose healthcare provider determines they meet certain requirements.

BIKTARVY does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. HIV-1 is the virus that causes AIDS. Do NOT take BIKTARVY if you also take a medicine that contains:  dofetilide  rifampin  any other medicines to treat HIV-1

BEFORE TAKING BIKTARVY Tell your healthcare provider if you:  Have or have had any kidney or liver problems,

including hepatitis infection.  Have any other health problems.  Are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if BIKTARVY can harm your unborn baby.

Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking BIKTARVY.  Are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed.

Do not breastfeed. HIV-1 can be passed to the baby in breast milk.

Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take:  Keep a list that includes all prescription and over-the-

counter medicines, antacids, laxatives, vitamins, and herbal supplements, and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist.

 BIKTARVY and other medicines may affect each other.

Ask your healthcare provider and pharmacist about medicines that interact with BIKTARVY, and ask if it is safe to take BIKTARVY with all your other medicines.

These are not all the possible side effects of BIKTARVY. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any new symptoms while taking BIKTARVY. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.FDA.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Your healthcare provider will need to do tests to monitor your health before and during treatment with BIKTARVY.

HOW TO TAKE BIKTARVY Take BIKTARVY 1 time each day with or without food.

GET MORE INFORMATION  This is only a brief summary of important information

about BIKTARVY. Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist to learn more.

 Go to BIKTARVY.com or call 1-800-GILEAD-5  If you need help paying for your medicine,

visit BIKTARVY.com for program information.

BIKTARVY, the BIKTARVY Logo, GILEAD, the GILEAD Logo, KEEP ASPIRING, and LOVE WHAT’S INSIDE are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. Version date: February 2021 © 2021 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. BVYC0370 04/21

DIMITRI LIVING WITH HIV SINCE 2018 REAL BIKTARVY PATIENT

KEEP ASPIRING.

Because HIV doesn’t change who you are.

BIKTARVY® is a complete, 1-pill, once-a-day prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in certain adults. BIKTARVY does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS.

Ask your healthcare provider if BIKTARVY is right for you.

See Dimitri’s story at BIKTARVY.com.

Featured patient compensated by Gilead.

Please see Important Facts about BIKTARVY, including important warnings, on the previous page and visit BIKTARVY.com.

PIECES of the QUILT Sean San José Talks with A&U’s Hank Trout About The Magic Theatre’s Memorial to Those Lost to AIDS Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover Photography

28

• JANUARY 2022

JANUARY 2022 DECEMBER 2021• •

29

H

Sean San José is an impatient man.

e was too impatient for the usual route of training for the theater in New York City “because every class I audited, I was like, I can’t see myself doing this every single day.”

He was too impatient for the years-long “rightful process of where, you’re going to do Shakespeare, and do Molière, and then you’re going to do Williams, then you’re going to do Miller, and then one contemporary [play]. Well, I’m too impatient for that.”

And once he became more invested in a life in the theater, he became impatient with theater companies that put on expensive productions that didn’t reflect the world beyond the proscenium, had no relationship to life as it was lived in the real world, life as he knew it growing up in San Francisco’s Mission District. With that in mind, don’t look for Sean at a “jukebox musical” like Jersey Boys.

His impatience, his need to be doing something, may be one of the keys to his widely applauded success at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

A native San Franciscan (“I’m one of the few, the proud——born in San Francisco and still live in San Francisco”) Sean grew up in the predominantly Latinx Mission District. His parents migrated from the Philippines and settled in the Bay Area. He was raised in the 1970s in a large, loving family. “My mother was one of eight, and I’m one of thirty grandchildren, so we have a big, beautiful family. We had a lot of aunties who raised us, and of course my mother and grandmother, so we always had a lot of family around.” His upbringing seems to have been typical of immigrant, working-class families making their way in an American city that didn’t always welcome them.

When I first started researching Sean’s work at the Magic Theatre, I assumed that anyone of Sean’s stature and reputation in the theater community simply

30

• JANUARY 2022

“Both my parents “Both my parents contracted AIDS. contracted AIDS. And And at that at that moment, I was so overwhelmed moment, I was so with how to live, overwhelmed with how to respond to how to live, how the world.” to respond to the world.”

Sean hugs a photo of his parents, Eduardo Nathan and Delfina San José, taken in 1990.

must have been a theater kid in school. “No, not at all,” he corrected me. “We know [the city] now for all of its cultural offerings, but as a kid in a working-class immigrant family, a lot of those offerings were never made to us. Even going to school, I was never aware of them. I went to public schools in this city, and there were sports and the band, but no theater, no shows. So I just wasn’t aware of it. We would see the buildings——on the 47 bus line on Van Ness Avenue, you see Davies Symphony Hall, the Opera House, the War Memorial Building, and on the 38 Geary bus you see all the theaters, the Alcazar, the Curran, the A.C.T. Theatre. But those buildings weren’t for us. For us, it was more the old movie theaters along Market Street. No idea that people could be doing live entertainment in them. We were very culturally naïve.”

Well, maybe not quite completely naïve: “I had read plays and I had seen Raisin in the Sun, the movie, and I loved it, I was so moved by it. And I had seen A Streetcar Named Desire, the movie. Someone explained to me that those movies came from plays, and plays do this. It made sense, even though I didn’t really know what it meant.”

His cultural horizons burst open when he was eighteen years old. A friend took him to a revival of Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child at the Magic, which had premiered the play in 1978.

The experience was revelatory for Sean. When he first entered the theater, though, he didn’t expect much.

“Even though the Magic back then was kind of funky, there was still this class difference involved with theater and a race difference. It was all white people in the audience and obviously all white performers back then.

It was not welcoming in that regard. So the culture shock JANUARY 2022 •

of that was not brand new for me. It certainly was not something that I thought would change me.”

After he settled into his seat and the lights went down, he experienced something that he describes as relevatory. “Seeing, not only seeing but feeling, another live human being telling stories in a space like that——it was an epiphany, nothing short of that, really.”

He says that he is sure part of the reason for the play’s life-changing effect on him is that it was specifically a Sam Shepard play, awakening him to the fact that live entertainment could also be a probing, illuminating exploration of the world around us. “In my head, entertainment was never that, even movies, especially with movies. I think the idea that entertainment is a form of reflection didn’t translate for me conceptually.

“I saw what theater is in its basic element——live human beings telling you a story,” he said. “There’s a kitchen, and there’s a relationship that is obviously a family thing——I sort of got that on a basic level. And then seven minutes into the play, Shepard’s language explodes and he takes you on a journey. And it’s too late to turn back, you’re already in there. It did so much to show me the basic power of what theater can do. I could see something, I could relate to something and respond to something, but more than that it was the realization that the little stage was a re-creation of the real world.”

He also immediately understood the larger power of theater to enhance our humanity, our compassion, our understanding of other people. “I understood on some unconscious level that I was sitting next to people that understood the ritual of this theater that I knew nothing about, and yet we were responding to the same thing.

31

So, in that moment, I sort of ‘got’ the power, that we could come and commune in this place and respond to the same things in different ways but at the same moment. So for that moment in time, we’re all reminded that we’re all in the same world together. And I think that’s an amazing thing.” He also recognized the healing power of theater for each individual in the audience, “just emotionally what it can do to you, that you have a place to really feel things that this world really just doesn’t deal with, especially in the States. So for a stupid young boy, that was really helpful. By ‘stupid’ I mean, someone who’s not in touch with their feelings, coming from a family of color, emotionally closed off, with the gauze of immigrant thinking of let’s keep this close here, let’s not reveal too much. But I realized that all of that shit I feel inside can go somewhere, or I can be connected somewhere.”

32

That epiphanic experience of Sam Shepard as an audience member led naturally to Sean’s becoming active in theater himself. “With no education in theater, or no rearing in it, from my first participation as an audience member I was pretty much hooked. I was able to start messing around with new playwrights right from the beginning, when I was only eighteen years old. I jumped right into it headlong. And from then on I haven’t stopped doing it.”

The Magic Theatre became his home. It was where he got his Actor’s Equity card as a performer, giving him a profession and a union. It was where he studied as part of the company, gained inspiration and ambition, and developed his desire to work predominantly new plays, new playwrights. In June 2021, after twenty-five years of finding, nurturing, and producing, directing, and acting in new plays, he became the Artistic Director of Magic Theatre in April 2021.

• JANUARY 2022

The Magic Theatre was founded in 1967, with a production in Berkeley’s Steppenwolf Bar of Ionesco’s The Lesson. In 1971, they produced the West Coast premiere of Sam Shepard’s La Turista; Shepard would join the Magic as Playwright in Residence in 1975, and the company premiered several of his plays, forever establishing the Magic’s bona fides.

In 1982, the Magic was nominated for a Tony Award as Best Regional Theatre in America. San Francisco’s theater-going community would agree full-heartedly with that approbation.

In October 1996, the Magic Theatre premiered "Pieces of the Quilt", a collection of new, short, one-act plays designed both to mourn and to celebrate those people who had died from or were living with HIV/AIDS, a testament of hope and an offering of love. The event was conceived, produced, and directed by Sean, a memento mori as well as a memorial.

Living in San Francisco during the 1980s and ’90s, Sean was of course aware of the devastation that the AIDS pandemic wreaked on the city. “Back then, we were more aware communally of the epidemic before the rest of the country. I would go down Castro Street every day, and you could see information posted in business windows, you could see sadness, change, uprising. So the epidemic wasn’t something ‘out there,’ it was right here with us.”

But not even all the available knowledge in the world could keep AIDS away from Sean’s life.

“One of my mom’s friends who ran a bakery got AIDS. And he died fast, it was just crazy fast, and I was just a kid, so even the idea of death was like, What?! We had watched a decade of it and saw it just go, and go, and go.”

And then the pandemic got even closer to Sean.

“Both my parents contracted AIDS. And at that moment,” he said, “I was so overwhelmed with how to live, how to respond to the world.

I was living in this country that was just fucking maddening, man, living through that piece of shit Reagan and watching people dying. And so when it finally happened….

My dad had been living with AIDS for quite a while; he was one of the odd pre-cocktail patients who was surviving. When my mom got AIDS, she was in UCSF almost immediately and pretty constantly after that.” Both parents

died of AIDS-related causes.

For some time prior to his parents’ deaths, Sean had volunteered for various HIV/AIDS-related groups, what he humbly disparages as “my little volunteer shit, for ACT UP and others.” But by 1994 the volunteer work was not emotionally or spiritually satisfactory for Sean; he knew he had to do something more.

He did some soul-searching for answers. “I was thinking about it one day, and I thought, what do you do and what can you do? Well, what I do is, I tell stories.

I hadn’t been doing theater very long, but long enough to know that’s the only thing I can do. I also realized it’s not those of us who are being affected by and are losing people who need to know about it, it’s us as a community that needs to be aware that we need to come to a place where we can acknowledge the JANUARY 2022 •

epidemic together. I could use what I do to try to make an impact.”

Even as late in the pandemic as 1994, when Sean began thinking about what became "Pieces of the Quilt," producing a play about AIDS was a risky proposition, even riskier for Sean’s conception of a truthful production. “It was a time when people were thinking, Should we talk about this? Should we not talk about this? So there was a lot of allegorical work going on. I read a lot of new plays where a vision would appear or a ghost would make an entrance and make some statement. Y’know, I’m all for metaphor and I’m all for symbolism, but I’m also overwhelmed by actual deaths of actual human beings that I actually know. And so, can we tell some of those stories?”

He conceived of "Pieces of the Quilt" as a collection of short plays that could be packaged thematically, performing one or two or six of the pieces, for a specific community, in a church, a basement, a library, or even an actual theater.

And since Sean loves working almost exclusively with new plays, the first task was collecting those pieces to quilt together. He and a friend began soliciting new works from emerging and established writers——including the notoriously contrary Edward Albee. “Edward Albee is Edward Albee! He was also just amazing, because after just talking with us, he said, okay I’ll do it, and I’ll tell others.

He got Lanford Wilson to write for us. He asked who else we had invited, and we gave him the list, and he was like, Let me see. And a week later, Okay, I guess I’ll write one too. So contacting Albee was very successful.” Although the Albee play was not included in the premiere of "Pieces," Lanford Wilson’s was. [Editor’s note: Read Albee’s play in this issue.] The other playwrights whose work made the cut for the premiere were Erin Cressida Wilson, Philip Kan Gotanda, Migdalia Cruz [A&U, July 1998], Danny Hoch, Octavio Solis, and Naomi Iizuka.

The Magic Theatre already had an extensive history of doing LGBTQ plays, AIDS-related plays. Still, there was no guarantee that they would be interested in "Pieces of the Quilt." Sean approached then Artistic Director Mame Hunt with his idea. “So I said, On Monday and Tuesday, if there isn’t a show, and we wouldn’t affect any of the lighting or the set, could I do a benefit and perform these stories with people? And Mame was the key. She heard the idea and said, No, we can’t do that. We’re not going to push this into the corner for just one night, this needs to be lived and seen and supported, and it needs to have a full theatrical life.”

"Pieces of the Quilt" received great reviews in both the gay and straight press. Robert Hurwitt, Drama Critic for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote, “Lanford Wilson’s contribution alone is a major event: an apparently confessional playlet written as if in answer to all those who have criticized him for not dealing with gay themes, AIDS in particular, often enough in the past.”

True to Sean’s dedication to his community, all of the proceeds from the premiere went to two HIV/AIDS-related service organizations in San Francisco, Project Open Hand, and the NAMES Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt.

If Sean is still impatient these days, it’s because as the new Artistic Director of the Magic Theatre, he’s busier than ever, still working to make intimate theater accessible to all. “That’s always been the thing that draws me to theater.

The real heart of theater is that reflection point, reflecting the city and the world in the work. That’s always been the most interesting to me. I think the thing I’m most excited about, being at Magic Theatre, is how much more expansive we can be by bringing more people in. If I hadn’t had that one day that someone brought me to a play, who knows what would have happened to me. I want that to become the norm, that more people are invited in along the way. That’s the way it should be.”

For more information about the Magic Theatre, log on to: magictheatre.org.

For more information about Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover, visit: www.saul-sandraphoto.com. Follow them on Twitter: @saulsandra.

Hank Trout, Senior Editor, edited Drummer, Malebox, and Folsom magazines in the early 1980s. A longterm survivor of HIV/AIDS (diagnosed in 1989), he is a forty-one-year resident of San Francisco, where he lives with his husband Rick.

33

Touching quilt the

An Edward Albee AIDS Moment

by Lester Strong

E

dward Albee is not known for writing about AIDS, and certainly not in his plays. Yet during the mid-1990s, with the AIDS crisis at its height but about to reach a turning point with the introduction of a new class of drugs, he responded to a request that went out to playwrights around the country for short scripts centering on the disease. The request came from the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, and was spearheaded by a young performer named Sean San José, who had lost both parents to AIDS. These days San José is Artistic Director of the Magic Theatre. When interviewed recently about what he hoped to accomplish all those years ago when he conceived of the project eventually titled “Pieces of the Quilt,” he replied: “Losing both my parents to the disease was devastating emotionally. I wanted to show the human face of AIDS to others, a task for which theater is well suited. So I solicited playwrights for short pieces that would do just that.”

Among the playwrights contacted were Edward Albee, Jon Robin Baitz, Sandra Bernhard [A&U, October/November 1993], David Henry Hwang [A&U, May 1998], Craig Lucas [A&U, November 1998], Maria Irene Fornes, Greg Sarris, Tony Kushner [A&U, June 2012], Ntozake Shange, Roger Gueneveur Smith, Erin Cressida Wilson, Philip Kan Gotanda, Migdalia Cruz [A&U, July 1998], Danny Hoch, Octavio Solis, Naomi Iizuka, and Culture Club. According to San José, Albee also convinced Lanford Wilson to contribute.

“You need at least a year and a half to get a full production up and running,” said San José. “I had in mind an evening of short, one-act plays, with the proceeds from the sale of tickets going to organizations like the NAMES Project [the AIDS Memorial Quilt] and Project Open Hand [a group providing nutritious meals to the sick and elderly in the Bay Area, among them those living with AIDS]. But the plays didn’t come in all at once, so they were put on as they arrived, mostly in local community spaces. Then eventually we grouped seven of them together under the overall title ‘Pieces of the Quilt.’ Those were performed together at the Magic Theatre here in San Francisco in a five-week run, and I think in shorter runs in Los Angeles; at the University of California, Santa Cruz; at Solano College in the Bay Area, and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There may have been other venues as well.”

The seven plays included in “Pieces of the Quilt” were as follows: • Erin Cressida Wilson’s My Girl Is in Front, about a rooftop encounter

34

between a young bisexual man and a teenage girl who cruises for anonymous sex in imitation of her adored dead father; • Philip Kan Gotanda’s Beans, about a young man trying to connect to his dead parents by cooking a family recipe; • Migdalia Cruz’s So . . . , a series of monologues by people with a friend, lover, or family member who has AIDS; • Danny Hoch’s Clinic Con Class, a comic piece about a young black man waiting with his Latino friend in a New York clinic to take an HIV blood test and their misconceptions about how AIDS is spread, how you wear a condom, and what kills the virus; • Octavio Solis’s Silica, about a guy whose lover has died and bequeathed him a pair of glasses that allow the guy to see the world through his lover’s eyes as a big, joyful, crazy, phantasmagoric ride through San Francisco; • Lanford Wilson’s Your Everyday Ghost Story, inspired by one of Wilson’s real life experiences, about a man who runs into a friend who has AIDS and because of the man’s inability to cope with the news tries to blow his friend off; • Naomi Iizuka’s Scheherazade, about a dying mother and the harried doctor who works to secure a few more days of life for her.

Curiously, Albee’s contribution Touch (an Improvisation)——it’s so short it should be labeled a “playlet”——was not included among the pieces produced in “Pieces of the Quilt,” and it’s not just curious because Albee’s preeminence in the theater world should have qualified him for a preeminent position among the selected works. According to an October 20, 1996, article written

by Jesse Hamlin in the San Francisco Chronicle and quoting Mame Hunt, then Artistic Director of the Magic Theatre, Albee was an enthusiastic promoter of the project who “unlocked a lot of doors” to the participation of other playwrights, including (as already noted) Lanford Wilson. But Touch, despite its seemingly simple structure, would have required a prohibitively long rehearsal time to “do it in a way that wouldn’t emotionally wipe out the actors [each of whom was supposed to tell a real-life personal story about their contact with the disease]. . . . It’s draining enough to be in all these plays that deal with AIDS, but to talk about your own personal story night after night….”

The scripts of four of the pieces were sent to A&U for publication——Edward Albee’s Touch (an Improvisation), Tony Kushner’s A Prayer, Lanford Wilson’s Your • JANUARY 2022

Edward Albee. photo by Michael Childers, 2012. courtesy Edward F. Albee Foundation Everyday Ghost Story, and Migdalia Cruz’s So…. The magazine did publish Migdalia Cruz’s So…. But as can sometimes happen, the other three scripts simply disappeared in the piles of paper one can usually find in publishers’ offices, not to re-emerge until recently when the magazine was preparing to move its main office to another location. They were sent to me with the request to “see if you can track down permission to publish them at last.”

Albee himself died in 2016, so I contacted the Edward F. Albee Foundation, located in New York City, which oversees Albee’s literary legacy as well as providing writers and visual artists with time and space to work undisturbed at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center (better known as “The Barn”) in Montauk, at the far end of Long Island east of New York City.

When I mentioned Touch (an Improvisation) to Jakob Holder, Executive Director of the Albee Foundation, I was surprised to learn he had never heard of the play. Clearly Albee had not brought it to anyone’s attention, even though it was discussed in the 1996 San Francisco Chronicle article mentioned earlier in this Introduction. Moreover, in an interview with Albee by David Richards published in The New York Times on June 16, JANUARY 2022 •

1991, two days after the world premiere of Albee’s play Three Tall Women, Richards wrote: “AIDS continues to cut a large swath through his circle of friends, but Mr. Albee has yet to raise the issue in a play.” Then he quotes the playwright (who was gay himself) as saying: “I’ve written gay characters in plays. But I don’t feel a responsibility to write about AIDS.” Clearly something changed in Albee’s thinking from 1991 to 1996 about writing an AIDS-related play, let alone becoming an “enthusiastic promoter” of “Pieces of the Quilt” to his playwright friends.

We’ll probably never know why Albee changed his mind. But this short play does present quite a different picture of Albee than other of his pieces that were not to everyone’s taste—— for example: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? Instead of portraying angry, bitter individuals in conflicted relationships that veer between reality and illusion, Touch offers a path into sympathy, empathy, and compassion for those stricken with a frightening, highly demonized, incurable——and at the time considered medically uncontrollable——disease.

The vehicle for traversing that path as Albee

presents it is the AIDS Quilt.

Traditionally quilts are created as tokens of love and affection for family members and friends. The patches of the AIDS Quilt, on the other hand, are intended as loving tributes to family members and friends people have lost to the AIDS plague.

Near the end of the play, Albee writes: “None of us hasn’t been touched; all of us have touched the quilt; Join us; touch the quilt.”

Touch the Quilt. Remember the losses, and mourn them. Remember the dead, and honor them. Touch (an Improvisation) is a fitting tribute by a great American playwright to a medical catastrophe that has damaged all of us. A&U magazine is honored to have brought this admittedly small and until now forgotten part of Edward Albee’s dramatic oeuvre to the world’s attention.

Read Touch (an Improvisation) on page 36, this issue.

The editors of A&U would like to thank Jakob Holder, Executive Director of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, for securing the Foundation’s permission for the magazine to publish Touch (An Improvisation).

Lester Strong is Special Projects Editor of A&U.

35

Touch (an Improvisation)

DRAMA

by Edward Albee (1996)

36

(I see this brief play as a controlled improvisation. Use as many actors as you have, or as few as you like——though 4 should be a minimum.)

(No set needed, except a table on which are several [twice the number of actors] pieces of the quilt—— cut into sizes maybe 6 inches by 12.)

(Let one actor address the audience as the others watch him/her——and the audience.)

ACTOR Pieces of the quilt? Have you seen the quilt? Have you seen it in Washington——laid out down the mall on it looks like forever? Maybe you’ve done that; maybe you’ve seen a piece done for someone you’ve known——someone you’ve loved. Maybe you’ve made a piece yourself. I’m sorry; I’m sorry you had to, but I’m glad you did it. We’ll all be able to stop someday; someday we’ll be able to roll the quilt up—— all endless miles of it, or we’ll be able to disengage it, give the individual quilts back to those who made them out of their love, out of their loss. But not yet; not yet.

(Points to table) There are pieces of a quilt——a quilt of the kind we make when we have to.

(The other actors move to the table, each taking two sections.)

We want you to touch them; we want you to feel the fabric, rub your hands on it, put it to your cheek.

And we want you to speak out if you want to——share with everybody if you want to——or just be silent.

(Speaker refers to other actors.)

None of us hasn’t been touched; all of us have touched the quilt. Join us; touch the quilt.

(All the actors move into the audience with their two quilt pieces. Let those actors who have lost people tell the audience about the loss——generally, or one person at a time. Let the actors begin singly and then talk freely, covering each other. Have the actors pass the pieces of the quilt through the audience, encouraging participation, asking if anyone wants to speak. When the participation seems completed, let the actors return to the stage, return the quilt pieces to the table, take their original positions, and say to the audience——one actor at a time——quietly.)

Thank you.

END

• JANUARY 2022

Regards to the End

Composer & Musician Emily Wells Creates a Musical Dialogue Between Artists on the Front Lines of the Early AIDS Pandemic and Queer Contemporary Life

by Chael Needle

“David has a problem, he feels pain being alone but can’t stand most people.How the fuck do you solve that?” ­—David Wojnarowicz, unpublished journal entry, 1991

I

photo by Rachel Stern

wrote ‘David’s Got a Problem’ after reading Olivia Laing’s chapter on him in her book The Lonely City,” notes musician and composer Emily Wells about their musical tribute to East Village writer, AIDS activist and artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992). “I was on tour in Europe, staying with a friend in Brussels where, on the first floor, there was a piano and a giant gothic church looming outside the windows. In the book Laing describes how Wojnarowicz would throw out grass seed inside the piers, creating a living work of art, ephemeral and gentle in its nature. I was captivated by this image and by the essence of someone who would carry out such a simple, generous act. At its heart it’s about being loved. It was one of the first songs I wrote for the album, and in a way informed my process for the rest of the album’s creation.”

Listening to some of the songs on Regards to the End, an album by Wells that pays tribute to AIDS activists and artists who were first responders in the early years of the pandemic, reminds me of the simultaneous sense of connection to what has come before and the creation of something new that is at the heart of renga——a Japanese literary practice where one writer’s haiku prompts another writer, who spins off the next poem from an image or mood from the first. In this ways, renga produces a chain of linked verses and proceeds not in linear fashion but in more of a zig zag pattern, a poetic conversation that celebrates sameness and difference.

38

• JANUARY 2022

The photograph by Andreas Sterzing, “David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo at Pier 34, New York City 1983,” is featured as the single art for “David’s Got a Problem.”

40

• JANUARY 2022

Wells’ music creates a similar resonance.

The songs are haunted by the past but strive to breathe life into the present. For example, “David’s Got a Problem” echoes Wojnarowicz’s “simple, generous act” with a minimalist composition, a powerful, plaintive melody. At the same time, the song seemingly reframes the seeding of grass within the singer’s concerns about the environment and personal relationships. As their artist’s statement notes: “My work bridges pop and chamber music and explores concepts around human relation to the natural world rooted in a love for both.”

In this way, Wells links the two eras across the album’s songs through a question: What are the ways in which early AIDS activism can speak to and energize our present-day climate change responses? According to press notes, the album is also inspired by “Wells’ own experience as a queer musician born from a long line of preachers. “ Wells is a classically-trained violinist, singer, composer, producer, and video artist.

Albums include In the Dark Moving; This World Is Too____...; and In the Hot, among others.

“I am interested in the ways performance and recordings influence one another and I work in both realms,” their artist’s statement reads.

“My work also interacts with my video practice through projection at performances which intersects imagery of contemporary dance, extreme weather and effects of climate crisis, and protest footage from ACT UP.” Recorded in 2020-21, Regards to the End (Thesis & Instinct via Secretly Distribution) releases on February 25, 2022.

A&U had the opportunity to correspond with Emily Wells about their latest album.

Chael Needle: Looking at the single art, for “David’s Got a Problem” with David and Mike Bidlo at Pier 34, which they helped turn into a space for art while it also served as a cruising spot, made me think about the ways that queerness and art may inform each other How do they inform each other for you?

Emily Wells: I love this photo and I’m so grateful to Andreas Sterzing for lending it to us for this song. Truly such an honor to attach this image to my song, and one I don’t take lightly.

The two are lying in the very grass the song mentions, and I think the thing that strikes me the most is the feeling of effortless companionship, the way in which they look to be at ease with one another and their surrounding. Queer friendship, companionship, and love are always at the center of my work because these relationships inform process and outcome alike. It is partially through my connection to the people I love that my work expands and transforms.

These relationships are crucial to my work in JANUARY 2022 •

both their simplicity and complexity. Also queer culture, aesthetic, and thought have taught me so much about being an artist and I think, and, quite simply, what brilliance looks, sounds, and feels like.

Regards to the End is inspired by visual artists and choreographers who have responded to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. How did you first decide to explore this theme through your music?

The project is born from a single question I began asking more than two years ago. “What can we learn from the activists and artists working at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the face of climate crisis?” This began a dive into the history of ACT UP and Grand Fury, and slowly became a form of communion with artists such as Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, Alvin Baltrop, Bill T. Jones, Jenny Holzer, and Gregg Bordowitz, among others. I turned to writers such as Olivia Laing and Sarah Schulman to expand both practical and emotional understanding of not only the beginning of AIDS but its wake, and its impression on the present.

As you mention, your songs embrace Jenny Holzer and Félix González-Torres (“I’m Numbers” is so powerful, by the way), Kiki Smith, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, and others. What compositional/musical choices did you make on the album as a whole to pay tribute to these artists?

What was your approach?

Many times songs came from the experience of reading or looking. It’s not that these songs attempt to tell the stories of these artists; rather they are responding to those artists and continue to tell my own story. For instance, I wrote “Arnie and Bill to the Rescue” after reading Bill T. Jones’ memoir Last Night on Earth. The song tells the story of a day in my home with my partner during lockdown. In it I describe telling her about a passage in the book, the sun goes down, we are mesmerized by our own mortality and the grand expanse of time that holds us so briefly. And always the refrain “Arnie and Bill, Arnie and Bill, to the rescue.” Because they were in fact saving me through their story and their absolute belief and commitment to their work and collaboration. “I’m Numbers” was the first song I wrote after the pandemic began, and I, like so many others, was obsessed with numbers. I was struck by how blank and ambiguous they were, how they were without humanity. It brought to mind Félix González-Torres’ piece Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), in which a pile of candy weighing 175 pounds, the weight of Ross in good health, is placed in the corner of a gallery. Viewers are invited to take a piece and the pile slowly diminishes. Here González-Torres places such

humanity on a number. Likewise, the song borrows a line from Jenny Holzer’s Laments: “I want to lie front to back with someone who adores me.”

You have some tour dates lined up in April and May. How did you spend your time during various lockdowns? Did you connect with fans during various lockdowns? Go into creative mode? Watch TV? I would say all of the above. For instance, I finally watched The Wire. It was a period of artistic freedom and development that I hold dear. There was no more contemplation of what to say yes or no to in terms of professional or social commitments. In that way I was able to work without interruption or the need to inhabit different brains. In this way, my companions were the artists we’ve been discussing. It was such a testament to how people stay alive and present through their work. This is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Wojnarowicz, because he is so intimately at the surface of everything he made, and through this he makes his viewer, his reader, less alone.

But circling to back to the notion of friendship and community helping to shape work, I did so sorely miss the ways in the simple act of being around people could influence me and the songs in subtle and overt ways. While working on albums in the past, I’ve always done little tours in favorite cities, where audiences tend to forgive me for playing new material.

This gives songs grow from the experience of being performed, and responded to, live. While I did have some pretty phenomenal moments of connection through virtual performance, nothing can substitute people in a room together and a good sound system.

What do you hope listeners take away from Regards about HIV/AIDS? I hope listeners are introduced to, or are reminded of, these artists who influenced the songs and that people spend time with their work. In doing so I wish mostly that they internalize two things: collective action is power, and that making art is an act of hope and a belief in the future. Also, that AIDS isn’t over.

Watch “David’s Got a Problem”: https://youtu. be/Y7za_W34TvM. Preorder Regards to the End: https://emilywells.lnk.to/RegardsToTheEnd. Find Emily Well’s music on all streaming platforms. For more information about Emily Wells’ music, including tour dates, visit: emilywellsmusic.com.

Chael Needle interviewed AIDS activists for a feature on A&U’s thirtieth anniversary for the December 2021 issue.

41

MONEY MATTERS

by Alacias Enger

lifeguide

January is an optimal time to press the reset button on our financial lives, setting ourselves up for success throughout the remainder of the year and beyond. The first step is to take stock of where we’re at. Leah and John overcompensated for a rough year by consistently overspending their entertainment budget which resulted in also overspending at Christmastime. Where they didn’t used to have any credit card debt, they have now incurred balance of a little more than $2,000. Furthermore, Leah’s student loan payments, which have been paused over the duration of the pandemic, will once again enter repayment after May 1. So, like millions of Americans, Leah needs to prepare her budget for those monthly installments to be reinstated.

The 50/30/20 Budget, popularized by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), represents a simple way to prioritize your spending. This categorizes monthly spending into three basic categories: Fixed Expenses, Flexible or Lifestyle Expenses, and Goals

called lifestyle spending because it tends to be largely composed of wants and other expenses that can be cut down on if needed. Under this budgeting system, 30% of your after-tax income is allotted to lifestyle spending, leaving 20% to Goals.

Once Leah and John calculate how much of their after-tax income should be allocated to each general category, they need to determine what goals they want to focus on. They identify the need to pay off the credit card, prepare to start making Leah’s student loan payments again, and save for retirement. They both have access to 401(k) plans at work and are contributing up to the match. This leaves more than enough remaining in that category to reabsorb Leah’s student loan payment and pay extra to the credit card. Once the payments resume, they should only pay the minimum student loan payment, focusing the bulk of their extra funds on eliminating the credit card balance. If they want to expedite matters even further, they might look for places they can save money in the lifestyle category. Some places to investigate possible savings might include checking for cheaper cell phone plans, meal planning to save on groceries, or temporarily cutting back on subscription services. While some of these measures might be strictly temporary, others, such as cell phone plan reductions, can yield a significant ongoing savings. These savings can serve to reach financial goals much more quickly.

Once the credit card balance is paid off, they should turn their attention toward eliminating Leah’s student loan balance, achieving debt freedom.

Her balance is just over $30,000 which can feel like a mountain to climb, but with focused application of funds from the appropriate budgeting category, they should be able to achieve debt freedom in no time. Once debt freedom is achieved, they can increase their retirement savings and turn their attention toward a new set of goals.

A new year represents new opportunities for sculpting our present as we build the future we desire. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming; just stick to the fundamentals and prioritize goals that lead to the future you deserve.

Fixed Expenses are generally needs like mortgage or rent payments, health insurance or medication costs. This category should represent no more than 50% of your after-tax income so as to leave enough space in your budget for other priorities. Flexible Expenses is oftentimes also

Alacias Enger is a performing artist, writer, and educator. She lives with her partner in New York City, and is the founder of blogs “Sense with Cents” and “Travel Cents.” If you are living with HIV/AIDS and would like to stay on top of your personal finances, emailquestions to au.moneymatters@gmail.com for possible inclusion in Money Matters. Follow her on Twitter @sense_w_cents.

NEW YEAR, NEW GOALS Pressing Reset on Our Financial Lives

A&U

reader Leah is married to John, a department store manager. She also has a high school aged stepson, Wesley, whose living arrangement is split equally between both of his parents. Leah is an office manager whose company supplies her with a 401(k) and health benefits which she couples with a copay program for her medications. During the pandemic, John was temporarily laid off, and was able to focus much of his attention on helping his son Wesley to be successful with remote learning.

Fortunately, between John’s unemployment and Leah’s steady income, they were able to make ends meet, and just as Wesley has returned to learning in the classroom, John has returned to managing his department store.

Although Leah and John have weathered the financial storm associated with COVID-19, their ability to cash-flow any extras was greatly diminished. This was further complicated by the additional spending John and Wesley did out of boredom while they were at home. John found himself spending more than usual on entertainment, games, and the like. Subsequently, John and Leah relied on their credit cards for holiday spending, which they admit they may have overcompensated on, and are carrying forward a balance as a direct result.

42

• JANUARY 2022

L I FEG U I D E

Long-Acting HIV Treatment and Prevention Housing Project Resources in Chicago

I

njectable HIV regimens may soon supercede once-daily oral pills as the most accessible treatment option, considering that these regimens require far less dosing. In addition, while PrEP has been available for about a decade now in a pill form but recently the FDA has approved a long-acting extended-release injectable, Apretude (cabotegravir).

However, questions remain about the breadth and depth of awareness and potential uptake barriers related to these long-acting products among individuals who may want to consider them.

As part of its Infectious Diseases Initiative, the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law announced a new Long-Acting HIV Treatment and Prevention Policy Project.

Made possible by grants from Gilead Sciences, Merck and Company, and ViiV Healthcare, the project will rely on community stakeholders and policymakers, including in this advisory group Damián Cabrera-Candelaria, NMAC; Kenyon Farrow, PrEP4ALL; Tim Horn, NASTAD; Vanessa Johnson, Positive Women’s Network – USA; Antoinette Jones, SisterLove, Inc.; Oscar Lopez, Poderosos; J. Maurice McCants-Pearsall, Human Rights Campaign; Jim Pickett, AIDS Foundation Chicago; and Bamby Salcedo, TransLatin@ Coalition. The project will build on work already done in partnership with amfAR in 2018.

“Maintaining regular community engagement around long-acting HIV treatment and prevention is important. I am particularly excited that this project will enable us to establish community stakeholder working groups with whom we will create a two-way dialogue to educate communities about emerging products and research findings and identify questions and policy issues to be addressed,” said Sean E. Bland, senior HIV associate and project lead, in a prepared release.

JANUARY 2022 •

A

IDS Foundation Chicago knows that housing is healthcare—— that it is an extreme challenge for individuals living with HIV/AIDS to stay on top of their health while they are experiencing homelessness and unable to secure stable employment and income and thus food and medicine. Midwestern winters compound the problem and many are left vulnerable without safe, decent housing.

That’s why AIDS Foundation Chicago has made ending homelessness a priority in its project to end the HIV epidemic. The AIDS service provider was recently named one of twenty local governments and nonprofits to receive a HOPWA (The Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS) grant.

Distributed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s office of HIV/AIDS housing, the $2,250,000 grant will help AFC strengthen its already successful efforts, particularly through the Center for Housing and Health (CHH), an organization that has partnered with AFC. CHH’s defines its mission on its website: “Housing first is a philosophy that links people experiencing homelessness to safe and affordable permanent housing quickly and with minimal barriers, so people can start their journey to a healthier life sooner.”

Through its Flexible Housing Pool (FHP) program, CHH and AFC have housed 285 households in 2021 (an increase from 133 households in 2019 and 2020 combined). Currently 395 households are housed and the organizations forecast that at least 425 will have been housed by the end of 2021. FHP’s rentention rates are stellar: 99.5% of households remain in housing at the 6-month point; 96.6% of households remain in housing at the 12-month point.

For more information about the housing resources provided by AFC and CHH, visit: www.housingforhealth.org or aidschicago.org.

43

BO OKS BOOKS

Unprotected: A Memoir

by Billy Porter Abrams Press

I

f you watched the 2019 Oscar broadcast, you most certainly witnessed the dazzling red-carpet entrance by Billy Porter wearing Cristian Siriano. If you think the black tux/black gown creation was just another transient sartorial choice, clothes-maketh-man moment, think again! True, he made an impression, but he also commanded the stage, so to speak. A vision of empowerment, by design. Activsim, in black velvet. “I think that we as artists…have the power to change the molecular structure of people’s hearts and minds and change the world,” he said in a Variety interview. “That dress changed the world.”

If you want to know how Billy Porter found——or rather, created——his sense of self, his powerful voice, read his beautiful and powerful memoir, Unprotected, which he starts with an analysis of the transformative power of fashion.

As a child he was no stranger to stepping outside of gender norms, loving “all the wrong clothing,” the wrong colors, the wrong fabrics, and particularly floored by the apex of finery reached by the women in his church and their hats. He explains: “Later I would come to understand that the finery donned by Black churchgoers was a powerful form of resistance. Many of them were employed during the week as domestic servants, or security guards, or custodians, and were required to wear uniforms meant to reinforce their status as less-than. To dress impeccably and regally on the Lord’s day, then, was to insist on their own dignity and worth in a world that sought to systematically strip them of both.”

The arc of the memoir, from hardscrabble beginnings in Pittsburgh to the Tony, Grammy and Emmy-winning turns of the last decade, traces this path toward making visible Porter’s own dignity and worth and the forces that aimed to mute or even destroy it.

Porter details these forces, providing context and consideration so that the reader understands and hopefully relates to his journey (they will). A stepfather who sexually abused him as a child leaves Porter struggling with trauma and its tricks of the mind and its stranglehold on his voice, literally. Growing up within a religious ideology that damned his sexual orientation and gender expression creates a strain on his relationship with his devout mother. Schoolmates try to punch the sissy out of him.

The systemic racism and gender normativity that structure his childhood interactions also structure the theater. Art becomes a mode of survival. His early entry into the world of musical theater brings much needed refuge from the sting of the world, and he is given a chance to shine and develop his craft. He wins early success on Broadway as part of the Miss Saigon ensemble, but his rise is not as meteoric as it should be. Art is also a mode of devaluation, with race an “unspoken roadblock” in the audition process and gender casting is tradition-bound as a fairy tale. Porter finds himself time and time again in a familiar and exhausting trap of being praised and

44

punished for his talents and, ultimately, for just being himself. From an early age, he learned that “[j]ust because a stage was rightfully mine didn’t mean I would be allowed to mount it....I learned that day that if I wanted to stand in that light, I would have to fight for it, wage a fierce and tireless struggle with all my heart and soul and might.”

He does find mentors and allies along the way; he begins creating a space for himself by writing. He begins to heal.

Part of this trauma he experienced as an adult, a result of experiencing the loss of friend after friend after friend to HIV/AIDS. He is invited to join in an ACT UP march, and he quickly rolls up his sleeves to fight back: “I went from theater queen to gay activist in 3.5 minutes flat and never looked back. And we been fighting ever since. Thirty years later...? Those of us who did survive know how to fight to the death. Past it. But we don’t know how to live...”

His AIDS activism continued and he also becomes a tireless fundraiser for organizations like Broadway Cares. And while he doesn’t dwell on his positive diagnosis, the reader understands how the threat of HIV/AIDS has been hovering nearby all of his life. Gay men of a certain age will understand this. As a reader I do wish Porter spent more time discussing the importance of Pose in relation to documenting the history of HIV/AIDS, especially among Black and Latinx individuals of trans experience, but that is a minor quibble in a well-written book full of honest, heart-healing passages.

—Chael Needle Chael Needle is Managing Editor of A&U. • JANUARY 2022

Amida Care is here for you, as always. When you’re ready, our Medicaid health insurance gives you access to: $0 monthly premium and low/no cost copays A large network of doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, dentists, and more

Treatment and preventive care for a safe, healthy sex life, including PrEP and ARVs Health advocates to help you every step of the way Help with housing referrals, job training, and other support programs

HEALTH. ADVOCACY. CARE.

www.AmidaCareNY.org

STANDING STRONG with you and for you.

Contact us for confidential answers: 1-855-GO-AMIDA (1-855-462-6432), TTY 711 Amida Care complies with Federal civil rights laws. Amida Care does not exclude people or treat them differently because of race, color, national origin, age, disability, or sex. ATENCIÓN: si habla español, tiene a su disposición servicios gratuitos de asistencia lingüística.

Llame al 1-800-556-0689, TTY 711. 注意：如果您使用繁體中文，您可以免費獲得語言援助服務。請致電 1-800-556-0689, TTY 711.

Stock photo with model.

A Calendar of Events

lifelines

JANUARY 2022 •

left to right:

Linda Clifford, Martha Wash & Norma Jean Wright

47

photo by Hush Hush Shoot/Pose Las Vegas/Kat Armendiaz

I

t’s time to hit the dancefloor and help raise funds for AAP— Food Samaritans, now in its thirtieth year of service to the Coachella Valley community. The First Ladies of Disco——Linda Clifford [A&U, June 2016], Martha Wash [A&U, January 2012] and Norma Jean Wright (formerly of Chic)——will perform at the Palm Springs nonprofit’s 27th annual Evening Under the Stars Gala on April 30, 2022. Two special surprise guests will join these iconic songstresses on this Saturday night of feverish fun.

Along with hip-shaking performances, guests will be treated to cocktails, community awards, dinner, and, of course, dancing.

Festive attire redolent of the era is encouraged. The gala, which takes place on the grounds of the O’Donnell Golf Club in downtown Palm Springs, is presented by Eisenhower Health. Proceeds from the gala will directly support AAP—Food Samaritan’s nutritional support program, which provides services for low-income people living with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses in the desert communities.

This gala follows in the footsteps of earlier iterations of the theme, First Ladies of Disco. Produced by James Washington, the inaugural show in 2014 was based on James Arena’s book, First Ladies of Disco, which showcased thirty-two female vocalists who became shining lights on the disco horizon. Some of the book’s featured singers took to the stage that night, including the women of Chic, who sang on stage together for the first time in nearly twenty-five years.

Corporate and individual sponsorship as well as program advertising opportunities are availble.

For tickets, visit aapfoodsamaritans.org or call (760) 325-8481.

POETRY

My HIV Prevention Options In this period of my life, posters hadn’t yet appeared in subways and extant phone booths advertising HIV is untransmittable, if undetectable in a person’s blood stream. Whose faces will appear in these advertisements is not an open question, begging a resemblance to my inner pressure to understand my families. A sin in the questions: “Who are your people?”

“Who are your enemies?” To joke that the ability to tell such jokes about such a topic denotes a certain distance from or intimacy with the topic doesn’t pick up the trash in cans, receptacles, bins that shimmer on every corner, in summer. Summer that’s around the corner where it hurts to be outside. So laughers in the advertisements are only people showing their white teeth. Amazing dental work. I shouldn’t be so heavy. If I understand the expectations that the world has of me, as well as you, but since I do, is it henceforth described, that I must like people doing flowers? Let’s you and me tally them, nurture them, catalogue their lifespan, their disappearance. My mom’s last name as a girl was Senra, which I have to look up before I learn that it is a kind of flower. To this day I haven’t seen it in real life. All talk of tribe aside, the question of belonging still exerts a force like you’d recognize if you were to stand by the sea and actually observe the patterns of spray. You’re there, what else is there to do? The problem with thinking of invisibility and action as interrelated starts to be clearer, I think, if you move away from interpreting what medicine does, which I try to do when I’m in the doctor’s office talking about my HIV prevention options. Instead, think toward a present moment like standing out in public, watching faces pass you in a blend of the two; they are visible and active, as opposed to their minds, which may not appear to be doing anything than working the body to be aligned, chew, spit, walk, stroll, push the wheelchair along, attend to the outside. The outside includes the absence of an elm, a black plaque on the side of a building near the doctor’s office. The elm used to be here, it became extinct because of a widespread disease, says the plaque. Soon to be on that list of the gone is the bee, and for me and my people, our families.

Taking the heart seriously, be it in love or genetic bloodlines, I don’t understand myself, or when I feel I start to, I still choose to stay in bed, as if I’m devoted to maintaining a presence in the place of sleep, in the mornings, jerking off to an unreal number of scenarios. I don’t need to conjure much by way of high blue skies in order to feel the backsliding I do, in mud, in my mind. The way that you speak with your hands may or may not remind me of my people, may or may not mark you as an enemy——I pause here because the word enemy is so strident and at the time of all this I probably disown it, but in retrospect I take seriously the difference between us when I face people who would tell me by my nature I shouldn’t exist. I work to become sinewy, and strong. On the page I let my oddnesses stand as an instance of humdrum human particularity. I slow my roll through parks to notice bees: that’s the program for a restorative day. I never last as long as I could. If I just chose to slow down like that more often, of course I would become a park. Very public. For the opting into. In a stead, I prop myself. I’m up in a commercial space like a cafe, with a book of Shakespearean sonnets, in order to connect my own mind to one that existed well before mine.

Regularly and without my worrying about HIV Family names Ability: I walked off I had to stay outside, with the laughers However heavy I’ve described it before Senra is a flowering plant in the tribe.

What is a sea? We crossed one, so “I love people that can blend in no matter the scenario” Its elm, its bee, its personal families I sleep so I can better conjure “You have to speak with your hands” Sinewy oddnesses A restorative day Slow response, Shakespearean —Nathaniel Rosenthalis Nathaniel Rosenthalis is a poet and critic whose work appears in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City, where he works as an instructor at Baruch College, Columbia University, NYU, and Fordham University. He’s the author of several chapbooks, including 24 HOUR AIR (PANK Books, 2022). “My HIV Prevention Options” is an excerpt of a longer piece.

48

• JANUARY 2022

Brian had his HIV under control with medication. But smoking with HIV caused him to have serious health problems, including a stroke, a blood clot in his lungs and surgery on an artery in his neck. Smoking makes living with HIV much worse. You can quit.

CALL 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

#CDCTips

HIV alone didn’t cause the clogged artery in my neck.

Smoking with HIV did.

Brian, age 45, California

HOW DOES HIV TREATMENT WORK AS HIV PREVENTION Starting and sticking with HIV treatment every day helps lower the amount of HIV in your body. It can get so low it can’t be measured by a test.

That’s undetectable.

Less HIV in your body means it causes less damage. And according to current research, getting to and staying undetectable prevents the spread of HIV through sex.

It’s called Treatment as Prevention. Or TasP for short.

There’s no cure for HIV, but if you stick with treatment you can protect yourself and the people you care about.

Talk to a healthcare provider and watch It’s Called Treatment as Prevention at YouTube.com/HelpStopTheVirus

GILEAD and the GILEAD Logo are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. © 2020 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. UNBC7269 08/20