It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic

Reviewed By Ivan Bujan

In a recent conversation with my students in my undergraduate course that explores the politics of pleasure, the class reaffirmed my belief that the current US sex education still gives little practical information about sex and sexuality, largely reinforcing the Victorian myths about abstinence, monogamy, and reproduction. One student had not heard about HIV/AIDS or its history before coming to college. Only a few had heard about Gran Fury and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and their importance in the history of contemporary politics of sexuality. This exchange makes Brooklyn-based nonfiction writer Jack Lowery’s It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (2022, Bold Type Books) a promising pedagogical reference for audiences who (still) have no idea about the irrefutable connections between sexual politics, which have been largely informed by the early activism and politics, and epidemiology of AIDS.

Lowery’s work focuses on the importance of the Gran Fury in the history of recent social movements and the group’s entanglements with ACT UP. Gran Fury, a political arts collective, provided visual resistance to the omnipresent institutional homophobia and negligence in the late 1980s, while its posters, billboards, and other paraphernalia played an integral part in numerous protests by a pivotal activist collective of the AIDS movement at the time – ACT UP. Based on the numerous interviews with Gran Fury’s living members, archival ephemera, and drawing on sources, such as Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard’s ACT UP Oral History Project, Lowery tracks the collective’s history as well as the personal history of its members, from the collective’s beginnings to its dissolution in early 1990s. The book’s title draws on the interview with one of the Gran Fury’s members, Donald Moffett, who described the work by ACT UP as “vulgar and beautiful.”

Lowery’s book provides a broad political, historical, epidemiological, and cultural context so the reader can better understand why actions and activism by the two collectives, the majority of them described in detail, were central in creating counter-discourses about AIDS. Lowery argues that many ideas now taken for granted, such as nationalized healthcare as a basic human right, were popularized exactly through the impactful work of Gran Fury and ACT UP that, as Lowery suggests, “undeniably changed the world.” Each chapter is a passionate and nuanced description of Gran Fury’s short but eventful and fruitful lifespan, ultimately arguing that Gran Fury’s art and actions were essential to ACT UP’s success. Lowery skillfully mobilizes numerous affects, whether love, rage, or sadness that lures readers into the 1980s and early 1990s activist New York City and he recreates a sense of urgency of the time. Relatedly, New York City is the stage for this activism: its infrastructure, history, arts, and architecture were quite permissive in making the activism of both ACT UP and Gran Fury possible.

An aspect that makes this book different from others that revisit AIDS activism in New York and the United States more broadly is the author’s care and attention to tell a larger story that takes Gran Fury member’s personal and professional background into account. This aspect of Lowery’s story telling allows readers to better understand the developing aesthetics, politics, and personalities each member brought into the collective. In addition to its main protagonists, collective’s members Avram Finkelstein, Mark Simpson, Michael Nesline, Donald Moffett, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Marlene Marlene McCarty, Loring McAlpin, Robert Vasquez-Pacheco, and Richard Elovich, the chapters also provide a quite passionate engagement with the larger cultural, political, and historical infrastructure, and influential characters of 1980s, such as Larry Kramer, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, David Wojnarovicz, and plethora of others who are not strangers in various literary, artistic, and academic projects about AIDS activism that have been by now well-rehearsed.

It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful is divided into three “acts,” each of which offers a linear narrative about the aesthetic and political choices, circumstances, and ramifications in which the collectives made their work. The first act (chapters one-three) largely focuses on events that preceded the founding of Gran Fury, as well as on the history that sparked the creation of ACT UP. Starting initially as a loosely formed collective titled Silence=Death and thereafter a committee within ACT UP, Gran Fury gradually turned into a closed group with a fixed number of contributors, most of whom were interviewed for the book, except for Mark Simpson who died in 1996. The second act (chapters four-nine) punctiliously and effortlessly engages with the Gran Fury’s oeuvre and lures the reader in with an array of personal, political, and cultural circumstances that influenced the collective’s timely and provocative work, while the final act (chapters ten-thirteen, epilogue) describes the reasons of the group’s disintegration and the collective’s afterlives.

Act One. Chapters one-two ruminate about a variety of personal relationship during the early years of AIDS to demonstrate how they engendered a political resistance and rage and, as such, preceded the life of the Silence=Death collective that was behind the ubiquitous Silence= Death poster, initially inspired by the anti-war movement in the late 1960s. Chapter three centers on the process of making an impactful installation Let the Record Show (1987) exhibited in the New Museum’s street facing window display. Influenced by anti-Nazi propaganda and feminist art, the installation was welcomed by activists and critics as an exemplar of political art, while its success and positive responses inspired the then called “The New Museum Committee” to produce posters in conjunction with ACT UP’s demonstrations.

Act Two. Chapter four tackles the problem of the overwhelmingly male and white structure of both ACT UP and Gran Fury, and centers on the role of one of the rare female members of ACT UP, Maxine Wolf, who organized the Dyke Dinners with the other few women in the collective. The chapter also emphasizes Gran Fury’s poster AIDS: 1 in 61 (1988) that spoke to the high number of babies born with HIV antibodies; project Read My Lips (1988) that raised a problem of lesbian representation in Gran Fury’s work; as well as All People with AIDS are Innocent (1988), and Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head (1988). Chapter five is about protests that targeted Stephen C. Joseph, NYC’s commissioner of health and his misinformation about high rates of HIV/AIDS among gay New Yorkers that gradually engendered a project The Government Got Blood on Your Hands (1988), a set of posters and tees that accompanied ACT UP’s Seize Control of the FDA protest. Gran Fury’s mission was to use art and pop culture to create counter-discourses to governmental inaction and misinformation that would be highly provocative but also easily communicable to the masses.

The lack of ACT UP’s coverage in The New York Times is discussed in chapter six. The chapter describes a production of fake newspaper New York Crimes (1989) in response that was timed to coincide with ACT UP’s demonstration targeting City Hall where the members demanded the city spend more money on AIDS services. The chapter also speaks about the lack of people of color in Gran Fury that made Robert Vasquez-Pacheco join as its only member of color. Chapter seven gives space to collective member Marlene McCarty, whose background as a graphic designer allowed Gran Fury to blur the lines between graphic design and art by using spaces reserved for traditional advertising. This was practiced in the public billboard Welcome to America (1989), and bus poster and short video Kissing doesn’t Kill (1989) that featured racially and gender diverse ACT UP activists kissing to destigmatize affection, a project that may have signaled that the collective was more diverse than, as cautioned by its members Julie Tolentino, Lola Flash, and Vazquez-Pacheco, this was the case.

Chapter eight depicts ACT UP’s 1989 demonstration at the St. Patrick’s Cathedral in response to cardinal John O’Connor’s neglect of condoms as a successful prevention strategy, and Gran Fury’s participation at the 1990 Venice biennale where they enacted scandal when activists placed a large billboard featuring an image of the pope next to billboard from the collective’s archives that depicted an erect penis. In Chapter nine, Lowery writes about Katrina Haslip, an ACT UP activist who spent six years in a maximum-security women’s prison for pickpocketing and how her work sparked the collective’s lengthy lobbying to change the CDC’s definition of AIDS, which did not include women as an at-risk group. Because the CDC did not list women-specific symptoms that would indicate one is living with HIV/AIDS, women were more often misdiagnosed, and thus left untreated and unqualified for subsidized AIDS care. Such circumstances engendered Gran Fury’s project Women Don’t Get Aids, They Just Die from It (1991), urged by Marlene McCarty, the only woman in Gran fury.

Act Three. Chapters ten-thirteen follow the collective’s work and individual projects that some of its members embarked on during “the bleakest” years of AIDS activism in the early 1990s, the time when personal differences in their politics produced problems that led to Gran Fury’s dissolution. Chapter twelve depicts changes brought on by the FDA’s approval of successful medications to treat HIV/AIDS in the mid-1990s and how these changes influenced activism and politics. Anti-HIV medications turned the number of AIDS-related deaths downward and as, as a result, ACT UP’s and Gran Fury’s activism quieted down as they questioned the urgency of their work. In addition, the chapter, quite compassionately, describes the circumstances that led towards Simpson’s assisted suicide.

Chapter thirteen narrates the media’s false promotion of the end of AIDS mediated by successful medication, and its ignorance and disinterest about inaccessibility. Also, the chapter foregrounds cultural institutions’ interest in Gran Fury’s work in the “after” years, such as placing their work in permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Whitney, as well as numerous retrospectives of their work. The chapter asserts that ACT UP and Gran Fury (directly or indirectly) influenced form, aesthetics, and activism of several contemporary movements, including the Occupy movement, Women’s march, and the Movement for Black Lives, while also outlining similarities and differences in relation to ACT UP’s and Gran Fury’s work.

In a way, the chapter is a full circle to the beginning of the book that suggested that the two collectives are pivotal points for inspiration for these contemporary movements. While the cross-generational references are inevitable, I am left wondering how this important historical moment influences or lingers into current AIDS activism and cultural production that largely aims to eradicate mass incarceration and unjust policies that criminalize HIV. A short critique of biomedical profiteering that Lowery tackles in the final chapter also extends into the epilogue that glances over the AIDS crisis in the present. In the second-to-last page of the book, Lowery recognizes that “one in two gay Black men will test HIV-positive in their lifetime, and [that] the situation is even more dire for Black trans women” and that a third of Americans living with HIV lack proper medical care. Ending the book with this alarming information begs some questions: How would this book read if Lowery employed an intersectional analysis as a point of departure rather than a point of arrival? Does the history of ACT UP and Gran Fury also inspire the current AIDS activism as it has other contemporary movements Lowery brings in the conversation?

Lowery acknowledges that the AIDS crisis persists, but as many historiographers of the first decades of AIDS and its activism do, neither does he offer nuance of this persistence, nor does he engage any current activist work that is geared towards lessening the high rates of the virus among Black and Brown trans and cis populations. However, this is not what this book is about. This book is about a specific snippet of a history that narrates about the peak of the crisis and its impactful and transformative activism, ending the narrative with the mid-1990s and successful anti-HIV medications. Since Lowery’s work convincingly sets up a scene to flirt with the past and in a way looks backwards, as such it could be placed in the genre of what writer Ted Kerr terms “AIDS revisitation,” an array of projects that revisit the history of AIDS activism. Some such projects are mentioned in the book, including Gran Fury’s retrospective at New York University’s 80WSE gallery in 2010, while other examples are a documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) or exhibit Art, AIDS America (2016). According to Kerr, although projects that revisit the past may have powerful impact and purpose, at the same time historicizing the crisis as a matter of the past forecloses the importance of AIDS work and its urgency in the present.

This is not to say that one should not revive the importance of the past that has offered us the modes of activism and cultural production to look up to, but rather opens the question of the audience and its impact and points in the direction of what future work on AIDS activism should look like. Regardless of who takes this book in their hands, they will either revisit something well-known, learn something new, or perhaps get inspired to expand on Lowery’s work. For instance, an AIDS activist who relived the 1980s may read it with a dose of nostalgia; My college students who are not familiar with the impacts that AIDS has had in US history will read it as a very fruitful study about the role of political art; An activist invested in undoing racist policies and unfair HIV legislations in the present may read it as a project that needs to be expanded with yet-to-be written narratives, invisible protagonists, and unresearched archives and collections.

Ivan Bujan is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Bujan teaches, researches, and writes about art, activism, health, and social justice.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Media, Medicine & Public Health, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 1, 2022Comment