The Unfashionability of AIDS with Thomas Sokolowski MONDAY: Last night I dreamed that I return to New York City. It was 1989. I was 39, that never-changing-Jack-Benny-Birthday-age. AIDS was all around me again. People were sick, people were dying, people were depressed, galleries were closing, art was stagnant, and yet--yet--style was everywhere. We had given up parties for meetings both grassroots and grandiose. There was always something to do- and to do with rapacious passion and consummate stylishness. As I walked down the streets of the Village and Tribeca, and the streets of SoHo, stylishness was everywhere. AIDS graphics were stylish, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs were stylish, ACT-Up meetings were echt stylish and the attendees young and hot! The younger you were, the tighter your jeans, the closer cropped your hair, the louder your bray, all of this was stylish and intense, passionate and sexy. Get relevant, get laid. It was hot and in supremely good taste. Yum. Hell, even the latterday works created by David Seidner, John Dugdale, and Frank Moore literally find niches now in the pages of "Martha Stewart Living" or on the wall of homo homemaker/rock stars. All so tasteful. Lush dying. If a bunch of fags was to hang some crepe, then dammit it was going to be real peu de soi, Mary! And hang the crepe we did. ACT-Up, Day Without Art, Night Without Light, Red Ribbon Project, "Electric Blanket," "Longtime Companion," "As Is," "An Early Frost," Rosalind Solomon, Nicholas Nixon, "Witnesses Against Our Vanishing," Gran Fury, Silence=Death, "The NAMES Project Quilt," "The Baltimore Waltz" (I hated that stinking play!), "Jeffrey," Kenneth Cole Ads, that Bennetton ad, Visual AIDS, Broadway Cares/Equity Fight AIDS, Classical Action, Tony Kushner, Douglas Crimp, Andrew Sullivan. (Have I just created my own concrete word play a la Felix Gonzales-Torres?) Oh my god, I forgot Larry Kramer! TUESDAY: Today, I reread the paragraph above and thought, "How dare you?" Fear and loathing grabbed me by the low hangers. Will the AIDS angels get me? Not those who are dead. Most of them had a sense of humor and place. No, those who are still around and aground. I take a breath and think, but was it a lie, my dream of eleven years ago? As I pause at this age of fifty, it all comes flooding back, the noontime and cocktail hour visits to hospitals, the marches, the meetings, the rhetoric produced by the white collar workers of the AIDS machine and carried out by the blue collar workers: the buddies, the caregivers, those real heroes of the moment swathed in white cotton rather than black crepe. I cannot think of those intense moments without feeling that within this monolithic wall of sickness, death, and grief was a bigger, 800-pound gorilla charged with the unquenchable passion of being alive and not knowing, quite, for how long. I wonder about all that tactical strategizing and cultural tweaking? Was it for me or for my dying friends? I also remember being embarrassed at more than one moment of talking about my activism when seated on a hospital bed. Rhetoric colliding with reality. Passion and stylishness. Unbeatable combo. "Piacere da morire" as the Italians might say. Queer culture, Death, and Grand Giugnol coming together to produce that very long play, "Angels in America." In two parts, don't you know. AIDS was big enough for all of us. And, unfortunately, big enough to include Pat Buckley bereft at the loss of her cadre of hairdresser, stylist, and interior decorator, that is, until; protestors spit on her tautly stretched Oscar de la Renta schmatah, and, then, enough was enough, Stylishness won out over passion. But she did care as did many of her sisters, those second wives, yearning for passion. WEDNESDAY: It's so easy now. Here in Pittsburgh, there in New York City. Forget SoHo. Hello, Chelsea. Does anyone even know that an AIDS hospice sits next to D'Amelio Terras Gallery and just a hop skip and jump down the street from Dia? Dia means "conduit"-that is, a pipeline for the arts. Hell, I thought that AIDS was the conduit, the artery, the pathway, the release valve, the reason for doing everything that we did. For awhile, it was. Now it isn't. Life is not the same. Gay culture, gay people, those left behind, those remembered, those tastemakers of tortured grief are no more. History has taken over, and has left us with only the quantifiable. None of the anecdotes matter to those who weren't there. Do I sound like one of The Weavers? Forget everything, you had to be there. Thomas Sokolowski is director of the Andy Warhol Museum former director of New York University's Grey Art Gallery. He is a co-founder of Visual AIDS, a co-curator of "From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS," the first travelling museum exhibition of AIDS-art, and a current board member of Pittsburgh's AIDS Task Force. The symposium "panelists'" - David Román, Steed Taylor, Barbara Hunt and Thomas Sokolowski.