"I'll Hold Your Story, I'll Be Your Mirror" by Richard Elovich If in the nineteen eighties and nineties, many of us as artists and activists tried to respond to AIDS as a crisis in our lives, today the response is radically different. AIDS is no longer a crisis if only because by definition a crisis can't be life long. More importantly, we know there is not one epidemic but multiple pandemics with multiple epicenters. We don't even have to go to the African continent to know that. In New York, multiple epidemics co-exist in the five boroughs. In Mott Haven, when one in four residents were infected, neighborhoods were transformed by AIDS. Someone described it as a slow motion nuclear bomb going off. The epidemic among poor Latinos spanned neighborhoods in New York and San Juan. The concept of the airbridge between New York and Puerto Rico helps us understand what geographer David Harvey meant when he talked about the world getting smaller, the globe shrinking, time compressing: distances. At the same time, the epidemic among gay men is fractured and fragmented. While infection rates among young white men hover between 3-6 percent, among homosexually active young Black men, it's nearly twenty percent. Picture nearly one out of five young Black men under 22 years of age already infected. Not one epidemic, but multiple pandemics with multiple epicenters. Looking at the role art might play in relation to the AIDS epidemics, we ignore at our own peril the structures of society that make the epidemics move the way they do. Sociologist Manuel Castells describes how capitalism is in transition from an industrial to informational mode of development. Most of us know this because of our email or palm pilots, but the well-connected hook up through clearly defined interests that bind them, producing new forms of social exclusion and inequality. Disconnected and polarized populations are left in what Castells describes as "black holes" of informational capitalism--inhabitants of Mott Haven and Africa are superfluous. Instead of informational capitalism, many rely on survival economies--Castells calls them "perverse economies"-- including drug trafficking and sex industries. And as trafficking economies penetrate communities and the globe, so does AIDS. In response to the AIDS epidemic, I myself changed from writing and performing plays- I received a NY Performance award, a "Bessie", for a solo play in 1992--to working in and attempting to open new thinking in the fight against AIDS. My AIDS work has spanned the gamut from organizing illegal needle exchange and harm reduction services around the city, being a member of both ACT UP and the art collective Gran Fury, to creating GMHC's first substance use counseling program and directing the organization's efforts to rethink HIV prevention strategies for a younger generation. My engagement began when as a representative of ACT UP's Treatment and Data Committee in 1989, I heard a researcher dismiss addicts as a "non-compliant population" while explaining why they were not represented in clinical drug trials. I remember standing up in an auditorium at the New York Academy of Medicine, not three blocks from the methadone clinic where I had been a client seven years before, identifying myself with other addicts and challenging this notion. I'd stood often in front of audiences as a performer, but never before as a heroin addict in recovery. But I was moved, because underneath the jargon of "non-compliance" was a belief that drug users couldn't be helped until they stopped using drugs. I knew from my own experience, bouncing between methadone maintenance programs and detoxes, that stopping drug use was a long process. In the midst of the AIDS epidemic, focusing only on the end of that process meant that tens of thousands of drug users, their partners and their children would lose their lives. When the city's pilot needle exchange program became so politicized that it was shut down in 1990, ACT UP founded an illegal program, jokingly referred to as its longest running civil disobedience. Operated entirely by volunteers, we performed weekly going out to distribute clean needles, condoms, and bilingual information about health services to thousands of injection drug users at risk for AIDS in the Bronx, East Harlem, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Our services were informed by the theory of "harm reduction," the belief that change is not all or nothing, and that even incremental changes could be valuable in helping people save their own lives. The next phase of the performance was in front of a judge. I along with eight other AIDS activists, including Gregg Bordowitz, here today, were arrested when we openly challenged the law that criminalized needle possession. We based our defense on the legal principle which held that the minor legal harm of needle distribution was justified by preventing the much greater harm of drug users and their families dying of AIDS. We couldn't take the judge out to see needle exchange, so we needed to bring experiences of the drug users, the reality of the sharing of needles and drug users' lack of access to effective treatment, and the concreteness of our intervention into her courtroom. Listening to our array of expert witnesses and our collective testimony, the judge agreed, finding needle exchange to be a justifiable medical necessity. Our legal victory didn't change the world. In fact, ten years later, the Federal government still refuses to lift its prohibition on needle exchange. Today, the artist needs to grapple not just with her or his own individuality and identity, but with the forces shaping the world in which we live. As patriarchal family structures break down without new collective structures moving in to replace them, there is a preoccupation with individualism and identity to anchor people and give meaning to their experience. Identity, particularly among feminists, lesbians and gays, has been a powerful force for organizing and structuring responses. Artists, too, have clung to our individual or natural account of who "we" are. But a problem with identity is that it provides us with a segmented way of viewing the world. We see problems in terms of problems that are mine versus problems that are not mine. We cannot create an effective response to the epidemic based solely on our preoccupation with our own group. We need a different way of understanding our existence in the world and the world that is going on around us. Medical anthropologist Richard Parker, who works in Brazil, has talked about notions of solidarity, in which he is describing the capacity to relate to the problems and suffering of others as if it were your own, as if it were directly relevant to you even though you are not them. Solidarity is an understanding of yourself that includes them. Solidarity would allow us to join them and see their problem as our problem. How does this relate to questions of art and activism? An example might help. Gran Fury was an art collective of AIDS activists. Most of us were members of ACT UP and a few were members of the group that created the logo Silence Equals Death. Recognizing both the art world's powerful connections and its appetite for consuming controversy, Gran Fury used sophisticated advertising strategies and art world connections to detonate political consciousness in spaces where demonstrations were not invited. When a public bus company refused to allow Gran Fury's panels of "Kissing Doesn't Kill, Corporate Greed and Indifference Do" on the sides of buses, the ensuing controversy provided sustained media coverage and public debate about discrimination. Gran Fury's infractions--picturing gay and interracial kisses, as well as corporate criticism--may seem dated and even quaint after media coverage of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ trial, and decision by "The New York Times" to reprint the term "blow job" from Kenneth Starr's exhaustive report on Bill Clinton's sex life. But if the question for those of us going to art school in the early seventies was thinking through what art was, in the AIDS era it has meant challenging the notion of what the artist is and art practice is, where she works, who she works with, and how cultural production happens in multiple use spaces rather than just in art spaces. When rhetoric about inequality and inclusion has become so acceptable within established systems of power that grantmakers fund artists to retell stories of oppression, maybe we ought to consider camouflage architecture to reveal stories of agency or resiliency-stories where insurgent movements manage to resist or get out from underneath oppressive realities. Sometimes artists look like artists and sometimes they don't. Sometimes art needs to look and happen somewhere else. Sometimes artists look like producers, facilitators, investigative reporters, teachers and ethnographers introducing audiences to new voices, new accounts, or new interpretations in an effort to produce what anthropologist Margery Wolf called not new truths just "less false" stories: ones that preserve tensions, present us with contradictory voices, a range of interpreters, and that put off premature closure. Artists can be facilitators. Despite silences around sex or being inculcated into normalcy, most of us, when we were young adults found or created opportunities to have sex, to explore pleasure and to try on different roles with each other. Depending on the era and the culture, we may also have experimented with everything from cigarettes to various mind altering drugs. What we didn't have, and what young people today don't have, are the opportunities to talk about it, frankly and realistically. Providing people with opportunities to create their own language for their experiences and desire, to be conscious of what they are doing, what they desire-the meanings, the relationships, the choreography: that's culture. A few years ago I met Angie, who considers herself a gay man. She had taken on the role of videotaping the history of a Projecto PAPI, a group of gay and bisexual Latino immigrants in Jackson Heights, Queens. She taped all their gatherings and activities. Every once in a while, she invited everyone over to her apartment, where she cooked for them and they sat around watching themselves on TV. To paraphrase photographer Nan Goldin, she was their mirror; she held their stories. Her watching them, made it real, made their lives feel watchable, valuable and important. I have seen other men do the same with an oral history project, sitting for each other as they related their experiences of sex and desire. "A lot of the guys say they feel like they've just shared in something sacred," observed one participant. "Within minutes of listening to my guy, my back straightened up. I thought, 'Okay, this is real, something's happening here.'" That's culture production. That's art. In many communities, particularly those hardest hit by AIDS, there are enormous silences that need to be questioned. Soul Food, a group of Black gay and bisexual men, encouraged by the success of their "house calls," where one member opened his apartment to other members to talk about being in the life, they wanted to put together a subway campaign to do three things: act on the epidemiology to promote the value of not waiting until you are in the emergency room to know your HIV status, to let people know where they could get tested free and anonymous, and to make their group more visible. When they discussed the project among themselves, they identified as a major obstacle the fact that a positive test result for a Black gay man meant there was another secret he had to keep from his mother, like his being gay. Something else that might keep him feeling isolated and alone even from his family and community. They brainstormed the idea of having the campaign feature a Black woman, a mother as the mediator, acknowledging her special closeness to her son, her ambivalence about his sexuality, but her determination that he both stay healthy and get the support he needs from other gay men. Like many things for Black gay men it is both too late and too early. Too late because campaigns like this picturing Black gay men within the context of their families and communities should have been done over a decade ago, and too early, because it is still bringing issues up that people would prefer to hush up. I think back to a subway campaign I did with Gran Fury, which was also featured in museums. Why was one poster considered art, and the other wasn't? At GMHC, I worked with two other former members of Gran Fury to create a magazine "b.2K, Beyond 2000," which was part of a grassroots effort to mobilize more than 2000 young gay and bisexual men to get involved in HIV prevention in their communities. b.2K had different groups like PAPI, Soul Food, and the vogueing scene's House of Latex. We were challenging the notion that any community was "hard to reach." As one young man in the ball scene said, "we are not on the margins anymore, we are creating new centers." From the various scenes, we produced photographs, high art and low art, photo shoots and snapshots, oral histories, advertisements, HIV prevention, and transcripts of conversations for the magazine. Just as Gran Fury applied sophisticated advertising strategies to getting AIDS propaganda into art spaces and onto bus sides and shelters, savvy art production pumped up dissonant beats into a slickly produced package that got into the hands of men who were unlikely to pick up a health brochure. When we looked at the finished product, we said we should have called the magazine "Utopia," because it pictured a community that doesn't really exist. If you as an individual don't pause for a breath the video-editor can't splice your quote in the tape. But collective means you can do things together that you couldn't do alone. Several hundred chanting in solidarity with good visuals, when magnified by TV cameras or radio mikes, can look like thousands until the thousands watching their TVs finally arrive for the next demo. That's how you built a movement. Picture utopias. Now that is art. Richard Elovich is a doctoral student in sociology and public health at Columbia University. The symposium "panelists'" - Richard Elovich, Gregg Bordowitz and Sarah Schulman.