The Papi Project by May Chien

THE PAPI PROJECT OLI RODRIGUEZ

TA B L E

2 3 10 14

O F

C O N TEN TS

P r o lo g u e J a n ic e R o d r iguez Oli R o d r ig u ez S e e k in g Me n who had Sex wit h m y Papi (D ad), 2010–2011

E m a ils

In t e r v ie w : O ne of t he m en I m et

Vid e o S t ills : A not her m an I m et

L a n d s ca p e s : C r uis ing Spot s , 2011–2012

A r ch iv a l Im a g e s , 2012–2013 Essays

P a u l M p a g i Sepuya

102

Kemi Adeyemi

106

J o v e n cio d e la Paz

P R OL OG U E Janice Rodriguez Oli Rodriguez

i was on claremont in chicago, living in a building my grandma and aunt shared with other family on each of the 3 story flats. in 1977, i got a job at francis parker school on clark st. doing janitorial duties where i met my boss, peter. he was vibrant, eccentric — always laughing and dancing around. i thought he was nuts, but in a good, honest way. smart, too. we married on april 29, 1978 and then he moved in with me on the 3rd floor. we both worked, i as secretary for a canned food co. and he for a jewelry store. we’d meet for lunch, sometimes shop, and always go home together. on april 12, 1979, i had a big baby boy, philip, who was full-term. with peter there next to me, labor was induced and at 10lb 4oz, he was stillborn with diabetes at st. joseph hospital, sending us both into a whirlwind of grief and sadness. it was traumatic for us, but together we found ways to make it through. we would often go to dance at gay clubs because they had the best music. i met many, many great friends of peter’s at these clubs, their home parties, and outings: pride parades, shopping sprees, the beach, birthdays — you name it. we also hosted many overpacked parties at our own 4 room apt., friends often spilling out into the porch. life seemed good again.

6 PROLOGUE / JANICE RODRIGUEZ

music was peter’s passion. he’d memorize songs and artists almost instantly and announce them like a real dj every time he put a record on the turntable — all recognized him for this passion. it was his kindness, understanding, and generosity, sometimes to the wrong people, that made him so well-loved by his peers. then on september 5, 1980, we had a premie baby girl that we named vanessa olivia (i used your old name, should i?), who was born at 27 weeks old. she had to be incubated to survive, but by mid october, weighing 4 lb 12 oz., she came home, still tiny and fragile. to me, peter was most brave in caring for her while i was scared of her. he was the first to hold her at the hospital after she was born. i was weak in the knees, he was resilient. we were married a couple more years before things fell apart. peter had a male friend that he would see and care for. a homeless man he met at grant park named eric savory. he would often give him clothes and food. this was maybe in may of 1982? he would go to peter’s job on lasalle st. in chicago, where peter was a janitor, and let eric stay there during his shift. eric would call the house to speak to peter, and at times wanted to talk to me and meet me. this was odd to me. i didn’t really get it or want to get it, not sure which, but they had stayed together at a hotel on michigan ave. i met eric downtown and we spoke about peter — he knew we were married. i couldn’t see what peter would want with this guy. i was still naive then, but i did finally ask eric if what i thought was true and he was honest. so, i ended it with peter. i was devastated. i had a baby with this man. we had a happy life, i thought, but i was wrong. i was also very angry. i felt so cheated and failed on. it was hard to stop caring. i did not talk to him for about 4 years, not until vanessa was about 5 years old. reluctantly i let him back into her life. they seemed to care about each other. he would spend time with her as much as he wanted. it was good for them. we also became friends again and returned to the gay clubs to dance and socialize: bistro too, sidetrack, paradise, roscoe’s, to name a few. during the years 1982-1986 we lived our respective lives, and in late 1985, i met ruben. the three of us would go dancing often at bistro too on north clark st. and when ruben and i got married june 1, 1988, peter joined us at court, restaurant, and boat ride. it was then that we had learned from a mutual friend that peter was hiv positive. it was crushing news for all that knew him. so many of peter’s close friends had passed from aids, too many to name, many still in their twenties. peter was very much saddened by the loss of his many close friends and partners, who were all dying so quickly and close together. most were gone in the ‘80s and ‘90s. peter lived 5 years as hiv positive, and made changes to help his health stabilize. he quit smoking, cut down on his drinking, rode his bike. he worked really hard to well himself.

in january 1993 he handed me papers to take care of his belongings and burial. peter died on march 30, 1993 at chicago house. to my surprise, he had made all arrangements on his own, everything was in order. ••••• i forgot that between may 1982 until august 1985, i was with carlos vega. he would often chase me around on his bike, so it started there. he was kind to vanessa. he would braid her hair so perfectly, i remember it well. he passed in dec. 2001. he was quiet, too quiet at times. i don’t have much else to say about this. in november 1985, i met ruben r. on ashland & division. i stopped to talk to him, said i was having a party if he wanted to come. liz, my friend was with me. we laughed. we’ve been together ever since, got married on june 1, 1988. ••••• what did liz think of the aids epidemic? she was profoundly shocked of what peter had gone through, having seen him once in awhile, during his decline and up until his final days. she would always say how just one sex act could be your death sentence. she felt very bad for peter, and would tell her friends, “protect yourself, i watched a great person die from aids and i will never forget his sufferings.” why did some get meds? and some not? i do not know. during the time of peter’s illness, he didn’t get meds. i knew that if you were diagnosed hiv positive, you were supposed to be immediately put on ssi disability and provided medical coverage. i wonder how much doctors work on halting the spread of hiv? i don’t know what progress has been made. it seems that those affected with this virus are doing well with the meds they have now. i know a man, johnny, who lives in our old neighborhood who has aids. he’s on meds, drinks alcohol every day, and is still doing well at 68 years old. pat knows him, they were neighbors, and i believe he’s been positive for about 15-20 years. ••••• getting back to the disco scene, peter and i so looked forward to nights out. in the mid ‘70s, i used to frequent zanadu’s with stephanie, a disco on far north broadway. it was bi-level with a wild crowd, crazy fashion, good music, a diverse mix of people, and a good dj, too. the flashing lights and see-through plexi-glass railings gave the illusion that you were falling through to the level below. it had great appeal, and a very wild crowd. also, in the same area and same time, we went to coconuts. it was similar to zanadu’s, but not as decorated. they were short-lived, however, and closed up shortly after one another. •••••

8 PROLOGUE / JANICE RODRIGUEZ

peter was a frequent visitor to some of the bath houses, mainly man’s country. he met many men there as friends/partners. he frequented this little park, that is now a big garden at fullerton, adjacent to the lincoln park zoo. it was on the north west side of the street. he had a name for it, something i can’t recall. he would tell me of the men he’d meet there for sex in a way that never ceased to make me laugh. ••••• stanley passed rather quickly in 1982 or 1983. robert passed in 1980 at 26 years old. karl passed here in chicago later in the ‘80s, maybe 1989. frankie passed in 1986. he was a wonderful, handsome man. he was italian, happy, energetic — one of my favorite people to have known. he was best friends with ms. larry. they had been at a party at our apartment on claremont. bernise was a very close, special friend of peter’s. he was quiet, shy, and peaceful. he passed quickly, it seemed. peter said, “i never knew he was sick, he never said he was positive or sick.” peter had watched so many of his close friends die to aids. charles was from michigan. peter would visit him there, and charles would come to chicago to see peter and all their friends. this is how i met so many of peter’s friends here and there, not so much on a regular basis, but when they all came together by peter or elsewhere to have a party. i believe charles died in 1987. juicy was a fireball: hilarious without trying, a redhead that always danced with his legs up in the air. he was such a fun person, and he was so kind to me, like all of them. he passed in 1989. it never got less sad. i never knew his real name. stanley was one of the the earliest, the very thin frail young man. he had the sarcoma sores on his face and arms, pretty bad. i didn’t know him very well, but he loved to dance, no surprise. they all loved to dance! and do their poppers, hahaha. so he passed around 1986. billy was not a personal friend of peter’s but he was in the same horizon house at the same time as peter. i met his mom, jerry, there, and he passed on april 1, 1993, two days after peter. mark was a roommate of peter’s on medill st. for a time, until he passed in 1990. he used peter, and yet peter was so kind to him. peter had records of who owed him money, and who and when they paid up. it was cute. myron was murdered in the apartment shared with peter and rene. it was nov. 27, 1986, i’ll never forget it. peter called me at about 8am. he said, “janice, there is blood all over and i think myron is dead,” his voice trembling. he was a nervous nut anyway. i said, “get out of the house and call the police.” myron had picked up george johnson at little jim’s for the night. whatever happened, george killed myron with a gallon full of wine over his head, he was tied up, he stole myron’s money and peter’s boom box. (peter always got his boom boxes stolen from him. he found this amusing). peter was questioned for 15 hours. anyway, 6 months later in may they found george johnson at his girlfriend’s apartment on north malden. he got 20 years — probably been out of jail for a while now if he’s still alive. myron was extremely hyper, energetic, and wild. it was very sad to see this terrible crime for nothing. max huertas was julie’s brother and migna’s uncle. he lived on greenview in a basement under liz at the time. he was seeing a prostitute, cookie, she had his baby. she was positive, as well as max, and they had a baby who was positive.

a girl named maria who is still alive but struggling with this. maria is now about 30 years old. i don’t have contact with her though. there are more i’ve not known about during the time that peter and i were not talking, about 4-5 years, but i know he suffered through many losses of those who meant so much to him. ••••• also, eddie dugan passed in 1987. he opened paradise on broadway in 1984, and then bistro too on clark in 1986. i wrote a comment on the paradise page about my times there. the bearded lady, he lived on north malden, died 10 years ago. he was very strange to me. he would hiss like a snake. i found nothing on alfie’s or fantasy, but am still searching. how many pages will your book be? good luck, i know you must be busy with this. bye, love you. watch out for the bears, ok? talked to ms. larry and got some more gay bars that i’ve been to so long ago, like 1980 or so and before. he reminded me of many more. carol’s speakeasy was a leather bar on 1355 n. wells st. (jeffrey dahmer hung out there, and found some of his victims there from 1978-1992). i used to go there with the guy across the street, hector. center stage on 3730 n. broadway. le pub on 1944 n. clark st. manhandler on 1948 north halsted st, in the heart of lincoln park — lots of leather and muscle men. there was also glory hole, i’ll get you the address. ••••• after peter and i separated in 1982, i started going out more — dancing at the disco and clubs, going to boystown, and watching drag shows, those were my happiest and most memorable times. liz and i would take the division st. bus, from her place, east to dance at mother’s. i met so many people, all ages. couples with kids, singles, even a few seniors. the music back then was all disco, non-stop. liz and i had money for the bus ride there and back. if we got lucky, someone would buy us a drink. but we mostly smoked pot before we went in, and it was good enough for us. it was like aerobics, dancing for hours straight. on those hot summer nights, after dancing for so long and being so hot, we’d all walk east on division st. to the lake just a few blocks down, jump in the water and cool off. to our surprise, there were other people from mother’s also there! i can still feel that chill of the water washing over me. sometimes we’d hang around the beach til 5 or 6 in the morning, then go have coffee at the nearby mcdonald’s on rush st. before heading back to liz’s place.

10 PROLOGUE / JANICE RODRIGUEZ

i also was talking to peter around 1986 or so and got introduced to boystown and some of the dance clubs that he liked. we frequented bistro too on clark st. (they were formerly on clark st. at hubbard & illinois st.), went to baton show lounge (great drag queen shows), chile pepper, sidetrack, roscoe’s (my fav), paradise (on broadway). i remember when we went to see grace jones at the park west on armitage & clark. we also went to berlin’s on belmont & clark, which was always too crowded, the music too repetitive, but we had fun there. they had male strippers on certain nights. there was a good variety of people, a great people-watching place. on the division st. strip, there also was poets club, shenanigans, p.s. chicago, hang-ups, and others. some of these did not last very long. mother’s is still there, but i heard it’s different now.

introduction by my ma, janice rodriguez Compiled via email at The Banff Artist’s Residency, Banff, AB

12 PROLOGUE / OLI RODRIGUEZ

No one lasted more than a month at Chicago House. He was upstairs, facing west. I would sit and read and avoid, waiting for the sun to hit his windows. Waiting for evening. Waiting to leave. Only a few hours. Maybe 3? Maybe more. I was sitting with AIDS. There was a drag queen next door. His mother and mine fast became friends. His mother was a drag queen, too. He was such a loud patient, suffering from dementia, screaming for someone who was not there. My papi silently calculated his screams. My papi’s style was more stuffing the clock with tissues, quietly covering it as he said it clicked backwards. I don’t know how alert he was. AIDS is silent in its killing because it’s a wasting kind of kill. You cannot break through the core of fatigue. Everything runs through you. He was better now. No, not better. Quiet. It was winter — loudly cold, bitterly dark. There was a television on in the waiting room. I watched Jesse struggle with HIV on Life Goes On. I thought about the relationship of opera and AIDS: Patti Lupone and Maria Callas in Philadelphia. It was so much easier to watch Jesse die a TV death than to be witness to a real one. The last sound my Papi made was every liquid leaving him. ••••• From as early as I can remember — 3, 4, 5 — I lived through my version of the AIDS pandemic. It was an immobile, long witnessing of my Papi dying from AIDS. I was 12 when it ended. I found out in December 1992, and only three months later he died on March 30, 1993 of complications of AIDS with pneumonia. In those three months I got mono and pneumonia, and I thought for a long time in my child-brain that I had killed him. Dress-up was a mandatory event. He had so many hats! Construction worker, boa feather, baseball, ‘80s mesh, fedora, the black leather cap — that was my favorite. I learned the walk with that cap. I strutted through his apartment, while my other papis/father figures/AIDS figures and the dragboygirlqueens yelled their approval. It was a fashion show; a practiced, polished, queer strut. An owning swagger that my eightyear-old self had mastered while watching the drag queens and trans folk perform at gay bars. I had been kicked out of more gay bars than any other eight-year-old. I was proudly his sondaughter — gender fluid and a super gay, as my brother called me. Beyond gay: queered. I was a verb, an action. I routinely frequented cruising spots. My ass pressed hard against the middle bar of his bike — his arms holding me close — as we rode around. The cruising spots near the lake were my favorite. He would sit and smoke a joint with a new friend and I’d ride the greenery, enjoying the space amidst others who did as well. I was an epidemic child, not birthed but raised by AIDS. •••••

In the 1980s, Lincoln Park was mostly inhabited by queers, drug users, folks of color, and lots of Puerto Ricans. And then it wasn’t. The neighborhoods in Chicago include Humboldt Park, Lincoln Park and Boystown, where my Papi, Peter, lived. (Or Pedro, or Troy, depending on what neighborhood he was in.) I lived primarily Southwest of Lincoln Park in a neighborhood that had no name, until gentrification started in the early 1990s and then it did: West Town. Then I moved to Humboldt Park. Throughout the ‘80s, gentrification emptied Lincoln Park of Puerto Rican families, pushed west and flooded into the Humboldt Park neighborhood. The continuous push west then south then out. Lincoln Park in the ‘80s was comprised of queers, working class and people of color (POC folks). It was a cast off place. A no place. An unknown space. Similar to the cruising spaces that surrounded it. Where the butterfly museum is now. Called Knob Hill then. As one approached the hill the rise and fall of bodies were distinct. Everyone was fucking everyone — as my Ma put it. Belmont harbor. Doug Ischar photographed it. Cruising space of queers and kids. Working class families enjoying the beach with blow jobs beneath them on the rocks of the harbor. ••••• The Papi Project began on an airplane departing from New York City. I was on my way back to Chicago from performing in a Sharon Hayes piece called Parole. I had just spent a number of hours repeating a speech with Rebecca, another performer, putting a microphone to my lips and then moving it away. Negotiating my voice. I was reading the text from a speech that was presented at the first gay conference in Berlin, Germany. Hayes wanted a gender non-conforming/trans/queer person to read this speech. This 1900s text was a call for solidarity between gay men and lesbians, because there was such a separateness then. And there still is now, primarily between trans and gender nonconforming folks and the gay community. Through this performance, Hayes is essentially making a call for solidarity between marginalized groups. I made a queer trans call. Performing for Hayes prompted my own start of The Papi Project. As I was writing on the plane, I mulled my own birth into gayness and considered my ties to Gay and Queer rights: the pride parades; multiple gay father figures; gay communities of color; working class queers; Chicago in the 1980s and ‘90s, with the rise of gentrification and the AIDS pandemic; growing up in a gay disco as a gender queer child.

14 PROLOGUE / OLI RODRIGUEZ

I started by placing an ad on the internet that sought out men who had sex with my father, my Papi. I asked to meet them and maybe hook up? This search was destined for failure. When I told my Ma about it, she said, “Good luck, they’re all dead.” They meaning my father figures, queer men. The lack of responses are evidence of the massive absence from folks that died of complications of AIDS in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In my post, I was seeking that absence. This absence affects us all. This absence signifies the potential teacher, father, lover and friend we all could have loved, fought, and felt. AIDS devastated these potential connections, and these non-relationships are part of our daily mourning. Death opens up so much space. ••••• I recall my father throwing his birthday party in November of ‘87. He was 32 years old then. I was 7. He had many names: Peter, Dad, Papi, Pedro, Troy. He had also made many friends and companions at his cruising places, and they were all there at his birthday party too. One of his drunken friends had said to me, “your dad is a faggot.” I laughed, but I didn’t know what I was laughing at. I didn’t know what a faggot was, and I couldn’t tell what it meant either. I looked around. There were men holding each other. Laughing. Drinking. Dancing. Hugging. Kissing. Wasting. They supported each other: the stronger ones helping the weak to walk. If this was gay, I loved it. Or if my Papi was a faggot, then so was I. And so was my Ma. My Ma and I are both faggots, the only two left in our family.

Compiled in Janet Desaulniers’ Constructing with Miniatures class at SAIC Finalized at The Freehold Art Exchange 2015

SEEKING

MEN

(D A D )

PA P I

WHO

HAD

SEX

2010â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2011

Emails Interview: One of the men I met Video Stills: Another man I met

WITH

I sought out men who had both survived the epidemic and had sexual relations with my father, and I asked them to decide what kind of consensual mediated contact we would have together. I wanted this contact to be intimate and potentially sexual: to reenact relationships with my lost father figures and the men who had been with my papi. These men had full documentative power, as well as full power to dictate our interaction. To initiate these meetings, I posted on gay/queer oriented hook-up websites for men. The emails usually began with a brief conversation about my father, but often became a dialogue about the mass devastation the AIDS epidemic had had on queer men, and the impact their absence has had on the rest of us today.

EMAILS

28 INTERVIEW

O: And then... there’s the time code. So you, and then this right here is for me. In case it’s not picking up all the audio I have a backup. So this is just an audio thing. Is that..? U: Yeah, that’s fine. O: Yeah? Okay. Because a lot, or, a huge thing about this is about consent. I don’t want this to be something that’s not okay with, you know what I mean? With both of us. U: Yeah, I think that there is very little involved on my end. O: Right, and that’s, that’s… but the thing is the conversation is a just as important part of it then, as well as… Is the light? Is it okay? U: So… Yeah. So that’s what I was wondering about; there’s that really bright light on top of you. So, I don’t know. O: You can either get closer, or… how ‘bout that? U: Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll see how that work. O: Okay, sounds good. U: Yeah that’s much better. O: Okay, good, so… so let’s recap. So I found… well you found me, right? U: Yeah. O: -do, is that okay to talk about? And I put it out there now for since November. U: Mhmm. O: And then we, we got, we corresponded- we corresponded for a while actually? U: Yeah, we… O: Our schedules are really bad, hahahaha. U: Yeah, we are mutually exclusive all of us. O: And how did you… how did you find, can I ask you… about? Is that? U: It was on Craigslist. Yeah, and I was just very curious as to what’s going on in your head. Why did you want to hook up with people, haha… who were around your dad. And I actually don’t know how old your dad was, or like… O: When he died? U: Or like how old he would have been if he was still alive… O: If he was still alive? He would be, in his sixties. He would be and he died in his early thirties. A little older than I am, but I started the project on his birthday, and I’d been thinking a lot about him, and about loss. And I how I could… U: And how old were you when he died? O: I was twelve… going on thirteen. U: And you remember all of this from that time? …Or is this stuff that you put togeth er afterwards…? O: You mean in terms of, like, the whole culture? Or like… U: Your memories of your dad and understanding of what he’s dying of? O: That’s a big question. I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me that. Like to be serious. I didn’t know what he was dying of. I didn’t get. U: He probably didn’t know at that time what he was dying of, at that time. O: It was ‘92…

U: Yeah. O: It was… no, no I’m sorry it was ‘93. I mean. He had been positive for a while he just hadn’t, he hadn’t told us. U: Yeah. O: Anybody. U: Oh. O: And he also hasn’t commented because he was… gay, queer. U: And you were still a family like…? O: No, no. He… came out around when I was like two or three. And then, then ob viously they, they split. But, he… I mean in terms of the death... No, I don’t think he knew what he was dying of either. I mean. There was just so much, in this epidemic that was happening. I mean, in asking that question you can tell that you know, hahaha. You know? Not many people in his lifetime were in this kind of circle that he lived. I don’t, I knew it was a gay disease. I mean, well that’s how it was described to me. But at the same time, … th- that wasn’t necessarily true. It was affecting other people. U: Okay. O: That answer your question? U: , well yeah. It answers that question. (Both laughing) O: But there’s more, and that’s great. So why don’t we share? Hahaha. (Continued laughter) U: Yeah, so. Yeah, so then. I think, I guess the other questions was though, so you probably put together a lot of this stuff together about your dad retrospectively, like after he died…Uh, as you grew older. O: Right. U: Now, I can just be asking the obvious, but, I’m presuming that you’re gay too. O: I am too. Yes, yes, haha. I am. It is this kind of re-doing, and also, I am not necessar ily a part of hook-up culture. , and you can attest to that, again I didn’t know, where to go, today. Hahaha. I feel really bad about that today, I’m sorry. But, I think it’s a part of, or kind of want to be a part of that. In that, I kind of want to be, I kind of want to redo that aspect of his life he was a part of. U: Huh, okay. O: Is that? U: Yeah, yeah. O: ‘Cause it, it, it was a lot, I think it was a lot more… I mean. Another part of this project is me photographing a lot of a lot of older gay bars that used to exist in Chicago… or hook-up spots. U: Like what?

30 INTERVIEW

O: Like Grant Park used to be a huge place to pick up folks. There used to be Belmont, right, right off of the Belmont Harbor. And also, where the Butterfly Museum is now, they used to call it Knob Hill. And it’s just a lot of like, a lot of these places existed and, I mean I had access to them because like my mom was definitely also partying with my dad. In a weird way, after some time… went by. They, became very great at it. She would go out… to these places. U: Partying, and then..? O: Like out to bars… Dancing. U: Okay. O: Yeah. , and a lot of these places… U: Partying is a very loaded term the way it’s used in gay cultures, and... O: Yes. U: My understanding that it inherently involves drugs. O: I think for her it didn’t. It might of for him, it might of for him. Yeah, I mean. I wouldn’t say all the time but, definitely drinking or smoking. But, you’re right. I-I-I do mean speak about that. For her no, she had been married. She has, she was still pretty wild, but it was mostly like the “have a friend” aspect because, you know. U: And she wasn’t infected, right? O: No she was not, no she was not. And she was very lucky, I think, because he was definitely doing things with men… dating to when it started. Possibly before that. U: Okay, so em. You said you want to be a part of hook-up culture. O: I do. U: There are so many ways to do it. O: Right. U: Why hook up with people your dad hooked up with? O: Well… U: And also… O: That’s a good question. U: You’re aware that some of them might actually be… O: Positive. U: Yeah. O: Yes, I am. U: Okay. O: Well, well, I do want a generation of men that he would have been with. So I’m in terested in heading toward that direction. U: But the way you’re approaching this is they wouldn’t be on camera, you would. So how would you… convey that generational thing? O: What do you mean? Like, how, how could, how could people watch and tell that? U: Yeah, yeah. O: Well, I mean. I’m very specific in describing this project. And, I mean, folks can read about the specific issues I’m walking around in. Or read about, who, what demographic I’m looking at or men that I’m interested in pursuing and their connection to my father for the stated example.

U: Huh, hahaha. O: And also, I mean, certain things will be visible. I mean in terms of if they are hold ing the camera. I mean, yes it is going to be on me, but there are also going to be parts of their body I believe. U: Yeah. O: That can lead towards, you know. U: Uh-huh. O: But also, I mean. Thinking about it yeah literally, like did they really have sex with him or, you know, are they this age or this age. Like it, it’s going to be a range… of ages. , and also, in terms of response it’s going to be a range of people that are like “Yeah , you know, I’m thirty” or “in my twenties” or something, and I’m like, yeah right. Well let’s meet and talk about it. You know what I mean? So, it’s like, I understand that people may not be telling the truth or they may be like, “ I think it was him”, or “Is his name Tom?” or you know what I’ve heard, you know. And, and that’s fine. I’m like, “Well let’s talk about it. Let’s meet up and let’s do it”. U: Actually. I would be very, very interested in knowing if you actually run into a single person who you really think that… O: That’s… Yeah. I-I’m meeting someone Tuesday that I actually do think, I really do ‘cause he was like well, did he used to go to Bistro too or did he used to... and he started naming places that he had been, which doesn’t make it, doesn’t make it absolutely true. Then he’d be like well did he used to do this or did he wear this or, you know what I mean? Just little, like, clues. U: And what is this project for? O: What’s it for? It’s a, it’s, it’s my performance video project I’m doing. U: Mm, say that again? O: It’s a video performance I’m doing along with a photography component. I and I continue to make art projects. U: And this is something you show your students? O: Mm-hmm. U: You having sex with older men? O: Yes. U: Okay, haha. O: Yes, I mean. I don’t necessarily teach my work. I teach other things. U: Okay. O: If they did see it would probably be in the context of my website or a gallery open ing. But, I also anticipate that, it won’t just be sex. Like, I’m really looking forward to this kind of conversation. You know what I mean? U: Yeah but, there, I-I will, yeah. I don’t know what it will be like. So, hahaha. O: Right, but do you know what I mean? U: Yeah. O: Like, i-it won’t all be explicit. U: That I understood, but there will be parts of it which will probably end up being explicit.

32 INTERVIEW

O: Yes. Probably. Yes. And, I mean, I’m okay with… some art being pornographic or involving sex. U: I mean, to be honest, if you do really meet people who were around at that time I have a feeling it will be…. I hate to say it, very, very depressing more than anything else if they talk about what was going on at that time. O: Yeah. U: I have a feeling most of them are just kind of obsessed with you, hahaha. O: Yes. (Both laughing) U: Alright. O: Yes, yes. It is… likely. Yes, but it’s also the idea that they’re responding to this ad. Do you know what I mean? Like, they could have respon- it could be easily, like, I could easily put a craigslist post out and I’m like, “here’s my stats, let’s do it”. You know what I mean? It-I think it takes a certain individual to actually, read it, think about it, and respond to it. Where it’s not just a random hook-up. You know? U: Yeah. O: ‘Cause you could, I mean. Anyone could respond to that kind of ad. It’s all over craigslist. It-it-it’s what, you know, it’s what Craigslist is used for a lot of the time. I mean, not just sex, but… it is used for it. And, I mean, they could easily pick someone who doesn’t have this whole paragraph. U: Yeah. O: You know, with a picture of, you know. And asking for some photo, pictures in return. And also, I will say that I crosslist it. So it’s not just in the sexual ads… so, it pops up in the artist spaces. But, I have to say it’s mostly flagged and removed in all of them. U: Really? O: Yeah. I think it violates something… or people just don’t, don’t, well don’t want it out there. U: Yeah… I don’t know. I mean I think there are people that are just systematically flagging things and… that’s their only reason to flag stuff. O: Yeah, right. U: But, okay. That’s fine too. And it’s flagged in the art section as well? O: Yeah. ‘Cause I am, I mean I don’t. I used to write out, like, sexual acts and they took that out. And then I was like I’m open for a drink, for dinner, you know. I’m open after to any ideas, or something like that. It doesn’t mean anything sexual at all. So, but… U: Maybe that’s why it’s getting flagged… (Both laughing) O: But, it does say no reciprocation needed. Because a lot of this is about me giving. And that’s what interested them. U: Yeah. O: I mean, when you read it, what did you think?

U: I… to be honest, well. I don’t know what I thought. It’s- I don’t know what my initial reaction was. It was mostly wondering, is this someone who actually… This will sound very weird, but, it’s like, is this someone who actually wanted to sleep with his dad. And… O: Yeah. U: Trying to do that by proxy him out. O: Right. U: Uh, that was the- the first thought. I mean it was just curiosity more than anything else, haha. O: Well I’m glad that, you know, we’re here. I’m glad we’re having this dialogue. And I mean, I can respond definitely to… that. , I do make a lot of dark work. U: Yeah, uh, that, that was very- that darkness was very obvious. But if there was dark ness, then there was darkness. O: Yeah. U: Yeah, oh yeah, this is definitely not a happy project. O: ... U: By any stretch of the imagination. So, yeah, yeah. There’s- it’s not just dark. There’s a… perverseness to it. and… O: There is, there is. U: So… And that’s okay. O: Yeah, and, I mean, I get that. And I also get the idea of a lot of folks not necessarily liking it and possibly flagging it. And I’m also interested in people that are like, “what the hell are you doing?” You know, or “tell me know about it”. And I’m not necessarily interested in having sex with him, but I am interested in people who did have a bodily connection with him, I am. U: I mean, so you have to go back a step and say, “why?”. O: Right. Well, I mean, it is about loss. (Enter house cat) (House cat obstructs scene) O: You want me to…? U: I don’t care. O: (Moves house cat) Let’s stay away from… Fisher! It is a lot about loss and I think it’s a lot about me doing a reenactment. And… them, I think, helping with closure. U: Them? …Or you? O: Them. Them helping me. U: You with closure. O: Right. Because I don’t think I necessarily had a language or words or understanding of what was happening at that time. U: You were twelve. O: Mm-hmm. U: Did you have any interaction with your dad? O: To me growing up? U: Yeah.

34 INTERVIEW

O: Yes. I met him when I was five. U: Mm-hmm. O: After they… because they had parental wars. And, I- I was interested in him though, just as, well as my dad. I had just met him. I was like, okay I’m excited. I’m going to see him regularly, like once a week. And it was very friendly, it was very party atmosphere. Or we’d go ride bikes in cruising spaces and there was a lot of men always. And so, essentially, it wasn’t just him, kind of, being just like, this parent . It was most of these men as well. And as I got older, more like e-eight I think I remember was when each one started dying. So the partners he would get with would soon be gone. And, then I remember, I remember the sores and I remember seeing what was happening. And someone was like, “well, you know that your dad’s gay”. And I was like, “I don’t know what that means”. U: Mm-hmm. O: So I asked, I asked a woman next door who was gay as well, and I asked her what that meant. And then she kind of avoided the question, but she had me draw, you know, like one of my favorite… films or something and I drew like Freddy Krueger and then, then I went back to the party and I remember one of his friends came up and was like, “your dad likes men”. U: Mm. O: And I was like, “okay”. And I then asked my mom I it was true and I mean I was eight, and she was like, “yeah”. So after that it was just kind of like (shrugs) “okay”. U: Mm-hmm. O: And it wasn’t something that was made wrong… it wasn’t something that was wrong. You know? And I really appreciate that it wasn’t approached that way. That it was just, that’s how it was straight away. It was- it was just another way. So yes, we did have a lot together, but not… I wouldn’t say it was, very focused on father-son. U: Yeah, I think. I mean, yeah. It’s, uh, yeah. Haha. O: And I mean, I’m just… you know. U: Yeah, I mean. I was, I was trying to respond to that in some way but I don’t think I have anything meaningful to say, haha. O: No it’s fine. And, and if, and if this is like, please by any means- if this gets a little, like, too personal we can move on. If, this, this isn’t- this is about you just as much as it is about me. U: I’m… not sure. (Both laughing) O: Which is great, we can just talk. Ahah. U: Yeah. O: And also and be conscious of time. And any time that you wanna’, like… U: Yeah. O: Need or want to go or need a refill, like really let me know. U: Yeah.

O: Haha. U: So, … So, like, your… I mean, I, uh, obviously people know you’re doing this. Your friends and…. O: Yeah, I mean. U: Or not…? O: Well most of my friends are artists as well. And so, like… U: Well, so, how have they reacted to it was going to be my question. O: Most of them are very positive about it… yeah. But, uh, also, again they work... not along similar lines but I think they definitely have had a lot more exposure to things in art school that are pretty racy. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? U: Yeah. O: Some. I’ve…definitely seen things… a lot… “worse”. Hahaha. But not, I mean, I don’t think of it as worse, but uh, I think like a general public would definitely respond to that and have a lot more reactions than… going to art school and being a part of that for so many years or being a part of an institution where you see performances with like, flu- bodily fluids and, and blood you know, but you know… or explicit sex or someone showing their, uh, cervix or, you know what I mean, like? These things are kind of… not normal but definitely an exper- an experience. U: Yeah. And then, your, your roommate… he knows that this is the project you’re working on and that you’ll have these people… over and into the house, and? O: Well… yes, he does. , I mean we definitely talk about it and it’s something that like I’m like, “okay well I’m going somewhere and I’ll text you where I’m going and if you don’t answer me within an hour…”. So we have like a safety kind of thing. , I haven’t necessarily brought someone home. Someone’s coming Tuesday, I mentioned, he’s okay with it. U: Mm-hmm. O: But, I mean in terms of, like, people knowing or people aware… U: Yeah. O: I mean it’s on my web site, it’s definitely a part of… U: Mm. And what do you teach? O: I teach photography. U: Oh, okay. O: Mhmm, I’ve been an adjunct for a few years. U: And what about your own personal life? Are you single… or, partnered? O: I- I’m partnered. U: Wh-Wh-What? O: We-we’re open. U: You, you have to be! (Both Laughing)

36 INTERVIEW

O: I mean, he’s well aware of… I mean we talk about everything. Uh, in terms of like, sexual or non, but, I was very clear about the project with him and, he… I mean he’s been very supportive. I mean, he’s also an artist… which, doesn’t make it okay, but, it’s good to have someone… but, I… I think it… I think there’s an element of danger that, I think he worries about. That I worry about too. Like, I’ve not really done this before... like, consensually. You know what I mean? Like, this sort of contact with someone for an actual sexual way of getting off. So I feel like, it- it’s kind of way of exploring craigslist and hook-up culture, which differed from my dad… and how he did it… then. U: Oh yeah. (Both laughing) O: So, I am… pretty much using the Internet like hook-up places or bars or clubs used to be like… U: Like… the rest of the world. (Both laughing) O: Right, and right, right. And ‘cause these don’t, you know, really exist any longer. Like, these back rooms, or… I mean I’m sure they… U: They do. O: They do. U: But for the explicit purpose. O: Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, and… U: Oh, they definitely do exist. O: Yeah… Just, I think it’s a lot fewer. U: Because there’s no need… O: Right. U: …To have that anymore. O: Right, right. U: Yeah. O: So… U: Have you…? Well, I guess if you’re trying to meet people who connected with your dad and your dad lived in Chicago, there’s no reason to explore anything outside of Chicago, but I have a, a feeling there, uh, a lot more men from that era sort of left behind San Francisco and anywhere else… O: Yeah. U: And they still have their… O: Yeah. U: ...Those tashes. (Both laughing) (Microphone Battery Beeps) O: … My battery’s low… U: Do you want me to stop this while you change the battery? O: Yeah.

VIDEO STILLS

LAND S C A P E S : C R UIS IN G

S P OT S ,

2011– 2012

These landscapes capture the contemporary remains of ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s public cruising spots in Key West, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Berlin. With the accessibility of the internet to the public in 1993, and the concurrent generational loss of queer/gay men to the AIDS epidemic, these green spaces were symptomatically lost. As a mark of the era, I chose to use the once-popular tourist 110 camera as the medium for documentation.

46 LANDSCAPES (Previous image) #13, Belmont Harbor, Chicago, Illinois

#21 and 22, Belmont Harbor, Chicago, Illinois

LANDSCAPES

#24 and 23, Belmont Harbor, Chicago, Illinois

54 LANDSCAPES (Previous image) #22 and 4, Key West, Florida

#12 and 1, Key West, Florida

LANDSCAPES

#13, Key West, Florida #12, Los Angeles, California

60 LANDSCAPES (Previous image) #6, Berlin, Germany

#8 and 7, Berlin, Germany

AR C H IVA L

IM A G ES,

2012– 2013

In an attempt to investigate the non-traditional family, I curated archival images from thousands taken by my father â&#x20AC;&#x201D; ones that include his queer family, children, and pets. They span the years from 1978â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1993, and document the demise of his/my queer/gay male family to the AIDS epidemic. They occur before any major gentrification and mark the changing landscapes of several Chicago neighborhoods, namely Humboldt Park, Lincoln Park, and what is now referred to as West Town. They also reveal the vacancy that the loss of these men had marked in real estate, and are presented here as a symbolic act to rebuild what was destroyed by the AIDS epidemic.

6 6

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#2: Kitten Eating a Raw Chicken #39 and 40: Infant eating a chicken bone and woman eating a cantaloupe slice

6 8

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#71 and 80: My Eagle Scout son and International Mr. Leather lover #75: The Kiss

7 0

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#43, 37 and 38

7 2

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#6 and 7 #54 and 53

7 4

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#55 and 64

7 6

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#49 #72 and 73

7 8

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#74 and 99 #86 and 87

8 0

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#94 #116 and 117

8 2

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#3 #79 and 81

8 4

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#129 and 13 #112

8 6

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#121 and136

8 8

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#146 139 and 151

9 0

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#295 and 157 #160 and 161

9 2

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#177, Lincoln Park #195 and 69

9 4

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#218 and 219

9 6

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#220 and 225

9 8

A R C H I VA L I M A G E S

#63 and 77 #232 and 233

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Oliverio Rodriguez is looking for his late father, his Papi.

T H E M O N S T R O U S / R E V E L AT I O N S O F T R U T H / PA U L M PA G I S E P U YA

He is looking for Papi first through his mother, Janice. In a series of emails she tells of her youth in Chicago and of meeting Peter aka Papi. The routine of their early marriage, the nights out in the gay discos with his friends, and the heartbreak at the stillbirth of their first child in 1978. She recalls how he cared for her at her weakest point, how the family and community of Papi’s friends supported them, and the terror of the premature birth of their second child, Vanessa (Oliverio was born Vanessa Olivia). There is her discovery of his homosexual partners and the initial breakup of their marriage, then reconciliation as friends five years later, learning of HIV status at the celebration of her re-marriage in 1988, and his death in 1993 from AIDS related complications. Rodriguez was only 12 at the time of this death, and there was no closure. Though he was introduced as a child to Papi’s lively gay social scene — his male partners, friends, and even one-night stands — much about Papi’s life was left unspoken. Papi never “came out” to his ex-wife and daughter, and disclosed his HIV status only three months before death. Papi presided over, ironically, an exuberantly social, open and fluid life in a way that today’s mainstreaming and normalization of homosexuality would not so easily allow. But tidy endings are not what Rodriguez is in search of with his Papi. Closure, however complicated, is what he is seeks. So beginning in 2010, on each anniversary of Papi’s death, he began a new aspect of what became The Papi Project. Through excavating and reprinting the photo albums Papi left behind, he searches for flashes of familiar faces, of men long disappeared or passed. Rodriguez presents a personal selection of these photographs as “a symbolic act to rebuild” the generations lost to the plague. There’s no doubt that many of the men Janice lists in one of her most heart-wrenching emails are included in the albums. Papi left behind a collection of some three thousand snapshots from the 1970s to ‘93 that provide evidence of the loving and celebratory life that these men and their partners — both men and women — and their children had led. It is a photo album much like any other: we find birthdays and barbeques, Johnny and Carlos in bed together, pets and travel snapshots, a child standing proudly in a Scouting uniform. And then we find images of Mr. Gay Leather, the cruising sites, snapshots taken during sexual encounters. So Rodriguez is looking for Papi by retracing the Chicago parks, lakefronts, and bars frequented by Papi and these men. He re-photographs them but these photographs, like the albums, only accentuate what is lost, what has changed. Nostalgia, for queer artists, is a complicated business. What are we nostalgic for, here? We celebrate with a fetishistic nostalgia the sexual openness of the late 1970s and early ‘80s: the discos,

Steam Works, the golden era of Falcon pornography, the aesthetics of cruising. We hoist the banners of ACT-UP and other protest movements that actively engaged visual arts and graphic design, now providing a wardrobe ready to be raided, relegating AIDS to a status survived rather than one we are still surviving. Most likely we pay tribute to the deceased, but what happens when we try to make contact across the divide between nostalgia and death? Oliverio Rodriguez is looking for Papi, most viscerally through reenacting by approximation the sexual aspect of Papi’s life. The monstrous, in its latin root monstrum, is “a sign or potent that disrupts the [presumed] natural order.” Not evidence of divine displeasure, but as for the philosopher Seneca, the monstrous as a “visual and horrific revelation of the truth.” How does a queer trans man connect with his late Papi? What if this man has sex with Papi’s male lovers? Have they survived and how does he make contact ? What does he learn from the encounters with these men that will help to complete his understanding of the father he lost to AIDS-related complications 22 years ago? “LOOKING FOR REAL MEN NOT WALKERS.” That’s the entire message. It was sent by a stranger to Rodriguez in response to this personal in a Craigslist M4M board: Seeking men who knew this man. – m4mm – 33 (Chicago). Click on the ad, posted regularly from February through December of 2011, and you would have found the following: I am looking for men who had sex with my dad. He was known as Troy, Peter, Pedro and other aliases in the late ‘70s / ‘80s / early ‘90s, before his death from complications of AIDS in ‘93. I am his son and I want to hook up with you. I’m open to a drink, dinner or other ideas? I am giving, but no reciprocation. Below is his picture. If you had relations with him, please contact me. The man responding to this ad may as well be saying, “LOOKING FOR THE UNTOUCHED LIVING, NOT A REMINDER OF OUR DEATHS.” I am thinking of walker as in The Walking Dead. It’s a pointed choice of an insult, walker, to describe the artist, and by extension, his project and overall practice as it concerns the bodily inhabiting, re-animating, and intimate pursuit of the deceased. I understand now the term walker refers to men who do not follow through with their email intentions, and not zombies or disease, but I hold onto the disturbing allusion. You were there that night I was kicked out of the gay bar. I was 8 years old. Rodriguez is asking these men, in their 50s and 60s to look back decades ago and remember what may have been a one-night stand or even a wished-for encounter with an elusive fellow cruiser. This man presents himself seductively, suggesting that I am your lovechild, asking recognition that I am the evidence that this happened, drawn

106

into an incestuous role-play with men who, decades earlier may have in passing noticed a little girl hanging around, sent off to play before the transaction was made, and then not given another thought.

T H E M O N S T R O U S / R E V E L AT I O N S O F T R U T H / PA U L M PA G I S E P U YA

Do you remember me? That tomboy on my papi’s handlebars out cruising with him in Humboldt Park at night… that was me. How does Rodriguez see these men today? Does he see flashes of men from the photo albums, reincarnations of pre-sexual crushes represented today in longing desire? In what appears to be a non-sexual meeting that was documented and transcribed as a result of his online postings, an unnamed man questions Rodriguez on why he is doing this project, what he is looking for. Does he know the potential effects this project will have on his friendships, romantic relationships, his health and safety? The conversation lasts the length of the digital video, and there is no explicit sexual activity happening in its duration, and ends abruptly. O: But, um, I think it’s a part of, or kind of want to be a part of that. In that, I kind of want to be, I kind of want to redo that aspect of his life he was a part of. And… them, I think, helping with closure. U: Them? O:Them. Them helping me. We do not know if the unnamed man knew Papi but we know he responded to the craigslist solicitation. We don’t know, and I doubt Rodriguez knows, if he will ever meet a man who for certain had sexual contact with Papi. But that’s not the real point of closure here. The closure of Rodriguez’ project is the birthing of a queer monster of our collective history. It is the reengagement with the survivors of the lost generations as sexual equals, as both sons, fathers and lovers. A vision of truth as mundane and grotesque as any sexual encounter, along with the magical and the transformative power it holds as a testament to being.

The Monstrous / Revelations of Truth Paul Mpagi Sepuya

108 LANDSCAPES OF A QUEER LIFE LIVED / KEMI ADEYEMI

The devastation that HIV/AIDS began to wreak on LGBTQ communities beginning in the 1970s radically altered the geographies of same-sex sex in the United States. Throughout the late 1980s, Oliverio Rodriguez’s parents lost a number of their people due to complications from the disease when, in 1993, Rodriguez’s own Papi was himself taken. Recuperating the lives lost to the disease has long been the subject of (queer) art-making since that time, and artists ranging from David Wojnarowicz, Robert Blanchon, and Felix-Gonzalez-Torres to collectives such as Gran Fury have variously memorialized their loved ones and indicted the virtual collusion between the US government and pharmecutical companies who were extremely slow to respond to the growing epidemic. In The Papi Project Oliverio Rodriguez examines the intertwining spaces, affects, and embodiments that emerged from this mass extermination of queer bodies from the perspective of a queer child raised in its midst. His series Landscapes: Public Cruising Spots 2011-2012 specifically revisits the hookup sites that his Papi quietly traversed throughout the HIV/AIDS epidemic, capturing the parks, benches, piers, and bedsides where he sought the sex, love, and companionship of the men that he ultimately left Rodriguez’s mother for. In empty and foggy images, “Landscapes” gently expands outward to move beyond documentation of a father’s ghostly queer past to speculate on the queer childhoods it gave rise to. Sex, to be sure, is where The Papi Project begins, and sex is the lens through which Rodriguez recreates, examines, and intervenes upon the story of his Papi in Landscapes. With a candidness inherited in part from his mother Janice, whose introduction to this volume recounts her own experiences of loving and losing in Chicago’s queer community with sobering care, Rodriguez documents the sites of his Papi’s sexual transactions in images that are sparse and disquietingly haunted. The photographs look onto the clandestine cruising spaces of Chicago, Berlin, Key West, and Los Angeles. These sites are always pictured on edge: concrete slabs abutting the waters of Lake Michigan, graffitied park benches surrounded by shrubs where men slipped into and under one another, dead end streets that drop into the ocean. The objects within his images often appear as blurry asides as Rodriguez instead hones in on the small clearings and crevasses where the bodies of those we’ve lost strayed away, arm-in-arm with one another. In both #7 and #8 in Berlin, the camera glimpses a rumpled blanket and a bicycle lying on its side in the low grass of a Berlin cruising ground. These remnants of presence peek into the frame that focuses more steadily on the nearby thicket, as if tracing the paths of the tangled men who laid in the publicity of this green space before leaving for the shroud of the trees. There are two figures standing on the pier jutting into the ocean in #12, Key West, Florida, their far-off bodies balanced by a rock formation around a young Palm tree that grows in the foreground. We are left to wonder if this veritable “X marks the spot” is a memorial to those who spent their nights walking between the sand and the ocean.

Landscapes puts his Papi’s cruising grounds in conversation with one another to reveal an international geography of queer intimacy that is always on the edge of being unveiled. As a tourist apparatus, Rodriguez’s camera would have been an incredible intrusion into these spaces 30 years ago, exposing men standing, sitting, and lying strategically in wait, but his images are grainy and sometimes out of focus, the result of the 110 film he loaded into the generic point-and-click camera he used for the series. This analog setup comes to protect the furtive nature of these sites and men like Rodriguez’s Papi who roamed them. The series contextualizes his father’s surreptitious sex life at the same time that the photographs rehearse a silence about what happened within the landscapes being documented — a silence that followed Rodriguez’s father’s cruising, illness, and death. In balancing context and protection, Rodriguez insists on the complexity of the full picture; the productive illegibility of the full picture. Rather than simply disclose illicit spaces, he re-performs the very nature of how they functioned by always shading the interlocutor from view. In so doing, he appears to protect the names, faces, and even the precise locations of those who ever occupied them. Many of the images of Landscapes look protectively onto depopulated spaces where his Papi may have stood, but several of the images suggest that Rodriguez stands explicitly within them, as if by doing so he inserts himself in his Papi’s shoes. In #12, Los Angeles, California, Rodriguez looks up to two rows of Los Angeles Palm trees and we can question whether he is standing, sitting, or lying down between them, perhaps on a winding canyon path, in a park, or on a boulevard. In #1, Key West, Florida, a rattan, hotel bedroom set explicitly reminds us that Rodriguez is not solely documenting cruising grounds as historical sites, but is potentially reenacting their function. A crushed orange pillow sitting atop slightly disheveled sheets is visually anchored by the hotel phone on the bed stand next to it, angled toward the bed as if Rodriguez has just gone to the door after receiving a phone call announcing a visitor. These select few images are the starkest reminder that The Papi Project is Rodriguez’s attempt to remember his father through the grammar of sex and intimacy that wholly circumscribed his death. The collection documents expeditions meant to follow his Papi’s footsteps, to stand in his shoes, and, at times, to grope for other men along with him. The Papi Project is undoubtedly disturbing in the way that it documents a queer child’s odyssey into his father’s romantic life, seeking to recreate the very acts of transmission that were at the center of the HIV/AIDS crisis that enveloped Rodriguez and his family in decades of struggle. Instead, the collection charts a path for thinking more critically about queer childhood as both a structure of feeling and a learned way of being that is transformed generationally. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, the cruising landscapes Rodriguez documents were systematically dismantled by city initiatives cracking down on same-sex sex using the veiled language of “urban renewal” that was undergirded by the moral, sex panic spurred by the fear of HIV/AIDS. Cruising grounds simultaneously transformed as they began to take shape in the digital domains of the

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internet: chat rooms, Craigslist forums, and smartphone apps coalesced around samesex desire so that, by the time Rodriguez came of age, a generation of queers hadn’t necessarily needed to sit on a secluded park bench or pier, or knock on a hotel door waiting for the right kind of passerby. In his series Emails: Seeking Men, Rodriguez specifically utilizes these electronic outlets to search out and intimately connect with his Papi’s former lovers — a difficult and moving piece that questions the definition, physicality, and temporality of queer lineage. Ultimately, while Rodriguez follows his Papi’s footsteps through the spaces of Landscapes, he reveals a rumination on queer childhood that queries whether queer ways of being can be learned, practiced, and expanded upon between fathers and sons and across space and time. In this, The Papi Project does important work to visualize and theorize the queer family in the United States as a multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, multi-generational unit that persists even as its members are whittled away with each passing year. Rodriguez’s queer life took shape in the very queer arrangements of his upbringing that are documented, in part, in the Archival Images series in this volume. In these domestic scenes we are unsure who Rodriguez’s Papi is or who he is with, just as we are unsure where Rodriguez, née Vanessa, stands in masses of other giddy kids. Yet the two are woven together in larger scenes of queer domesticity — of kikis, birthday parties, and pets — and in the shared gestures of love and intimacy that emerge in each queer glance, smirk, hand flip, and embrace that appear in the images. More than this, the desire to identify Rodriguez’s Papi is balanced by the enduring presence of Janice, who stands as a central figure alongside Rodriguez as two of the few survivors who remain. Throughout The Papi Project, Rodriguez reveals how queer kinship takes shape beyond the rigors of government-regulated union and beyond domains of intimacy that are expected to remain behind closed doors. The reflections and documentary inquiries in this volume are as much memories of his Papi as they are memories of his former self. Both subjects are indelibly shaped by the ravages of secrecy, silence, and disease, but are in full view of the life and potential that was and is only made possible by the figures in Rodriguez’s life coming together in alternative formations of simply being and being together. His work subsequently allows us to reimagine how methods of loving are constructed in shared landscapes, vocabularies of intimacy and, to be sure, fucking. They are crafted on the grounds upon which we experience absence, waiting, and anticipation; they passed down in ideas, exchanges, and body heat; and they are fomented by the intermingling pain and pleasure that remain the legacy of our longings.

Oliverio Rodriguez’s Landscapes of a Queer Life Lived Kemi Adeyemi

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1. The Absence of a Sexualized Any-man The various iterations of Oliverio Rodriguez’s The Papi Project are bound together by the experience of longing and desire expressed across distances of time, space, and memory. Each project makes an attempt to commune with the dead, lives culled from the artist’s community by HIV and AIDS. The gulf of death surrounds the empty landscapes of “Cruising Spaces,” the wet bodies on the shores of Lake Michigan long dry and put away. We squint into these photographs and their hazy horizons, peering for apparitions, for traces of dead lovers. The family photos of “Archival Images,” the bits and pieces of a queer family, only ever tell a fractured narrative, like fragmented bones dug up by an archeologist. We try and piece together these lives, loved ones long gone, flashes of parties and dances all quiet now. Even the project “Interview” strains the capacity for words to express memory, and the written record of a conversation becomes a thread of language we follow backwards into the mouth of the speakers, back into the body of someone who was a witness to a discrete moment in time. Absence is the central figure in these works. Like a hole in the heart of each component of the project, the voidance of a “Papi”— whether literally the artist’s own father, whose death at the height of the AIDS crisis in the ‘90s provides a personal narrative in this expansive politic, or a more generalized “Papi,” a Papi as an endeared, sexualized any-man — is the vacuum that is to be filled. But from the outset, this is known to be an impossible task. Every Papi is irreplaceable — these vacuums cannot be filled. So it is the act of finding connection to the absent figure, connection to their traces and ghosts, that becomes the primary, recurring theme in Rodriguez’s work. The “Cruising Spaces” are not just documentation of ruins, but through the lens of the camera, a way to travel in time to connect and inhabit the body of one who had gazed upon those shores and upon the bodies that once populated them. The “Archival Images” are not a stroll down memory lane, but about piecing together lived experience: making the past, which is always alien to us when we see it in documentation, somehow familiar, bodily, and present again. Memory itself, neuroscientists tell us, is not at all about recollection or reconnection with distinct past events, but rather, memory is a process of reinvention, of willfully assembling a collection of random moments into a coherent narrative. So long as we remember something, we recreate it, every time anew. The photographic image and the word, whether spoken or written, are aids in this recreation. They are symbolic in their connectedness with bodies and places of the past; we experience them as signs of the past, as reminders. And yet a photographic or textual document betrays itself, these forms act as evidence of our apartness from the past in the very moment they aid us in our memory. The snapshot or the journal entry, their very presence before us reminds us that the moment is gone, the bodies elsewhere, the landscape already altered. This duality, the fact that pictures and words are trapped at the gate between past and present gives our relationship to them a peculiar kind of melancholy. They

are always reminders of mortality in the passage of time they articulate. We can imagine our own lives in pictures and in stories, our faces and the many words that leave our lips or fingertips one day to be reminders to future eyes of our own absence. But in all, these particular iterations of The Papi Project deal with memory and loss in ways that are primarily cognitive. They depend on the capacity of the viewer to read into the narrative of the artist, who is himself reading into the narrative of his familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past. They do not address the memory of the body, the haptic traces of touch, the membranes in flesh that hold experience. These forms of corporeal memory evade words, their storytelling is transmitted not by sign but by sensuality, tenderness, trauma, or rupture. In a community joined by AIDS, memory of a lover may not be only in a cherished photograph or urgent love letter. Memory and trace are also in blood and marrow, in semen and all the oozing messiness of bodies touched by other bodies. Ever wordless and without the need of our persnickety consciousness, this kind of memory recreates itself, the virus is a trace of a lover and its own engine of regeneration. It floods the body to the point of breaking, it makes an entire person a reliquary of lovers.

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2. A Reliquary of Lovers. Different from much of The Papi Project, “Emails and the Man I Met” confronts the notion of memory held in the body in particularly unflinching clarity and precision. The parameters of this work are straightforward, the artist is seeking his father’s former lovers. Rodriguez writes, “I am looking for men who had sex with my dad. He was known as Troy, Peter, Pedro and other aliases in the late 70’s/80’s/early 90’s, before his death from complications of AIDS in 93’. I am his son and I want to hook up with you.” The work is a display of emails, the private solicitation on Craigslist made public. The platform is not only one of voyeurism, but extends the virtuality of the the artist’s search into the physical space of the gallery. What reads as documentation of a private engagement doubles as a continuation of the search for the men who were the artist’s father’s lovers — as long as the work exists the call is open, unto the death of the artist. The formalized emails makes the search physical, memorial, permanent. The seeking of the lovers is endless. “I am his son and I want to hook up with you.” The statement is like a Fluxus instruction, directed inwards towards the artist and outwards towards the world. Taken on its own, the directive is palpably unnerving in the simultaneity of its tenderness, intimacy, anonymity, and sense of danger. “I am his son and I want to hook up with you.” We read in such language a dare, a line drawn into the sand; this language stirs cultural anxieties around the taboo notion of a sexualized unit. And yet taken in the larger scope of The Papi Project, a profound sensitivity emerges in this endeavor. Because if the memory of the deceased is embedded in the bodies of the lovers who have survived them, then to love those bodies is an act of communion with the dead. In this light, we are each reliquaries of our former lovers.

The Far Away Inside Jovencio de la Paz

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D E D I C AT I O N

D E D IC AT ION

Book Designer: May-Zu Chien Production: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Printed: Service Bureau Editor: Nicholas Szczepanik Copy Editor: Kemi Adeyemi Photo Editor: Alyssa Chappe Essay Contributors: Kemi Adeyemi, Jovencio de la Paz, Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Typeface is set in Frutiger LT

Special thanks to Janice Rodriguez, Nic Ciesla, Jovencio de la Paz, Dan Paz, H. Melt, Joe Varisco, Gregg Bordowitz, Sarah Schulman.

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