Lil Miss Hot Mess

I’m still feeling a bit in the middle of the conversation around Charlie Horse, the Polk, gentrification, queers, and all that other good stuff, but I also want to change gears a bit.

YBCA is having their next Big Idea Night party this Saturday.  Sadly, I’ll be out of town for it, but I caught the very tail end of the last one and it was fun.  I wholeheartedly encourage attendance and I totally applaud a more mainstream art institution for really successfully engaging the community with an explicitly queer night, and one that seems to really aim towards a more politicized and un-essentialized idea of queerness at that.  (Oh, and of course, I love just about anything that Danyol does.)

That said, I’m a bit taken aback by their interactive ad campaign that lets users reconfigure ACT UP’s classic Silence = Death logo with their own images and sayings.  Here’s what the site says:

Gran Fury Collective’s “SILENCE=DEATH” image became the icon of AIDS and radical queer activism in the late-1980s. YBCA invites you to personalize and update this groundbreaking campaign by putting your own spin on it: How would you tailor the design to reflect your activism? Come to YBCA’s Big Idea Night pARTy on Sat, Nov 14 to make your own design into a button. And enter to win the Go Pink Yourself design contest for fabulous prizes!  [Click the links -- they're YBCA's, not mine.]

Maybe I’m too much of a political purist, but this rubs me the wrong way a bit.  ACT UP was one of the gay community’s most successful moments of radicalism (“successful” in at least a few different ways), and played a critical role in expanding access to AIDS-related medications through direct action targeting pharmaceutical corporations, politicians, and the media.  It also supported people living with AIDS through direct action, sometimes through Robin Hood-esque tactics of taking from the rich to give to the poor.  Seriously, it’s the shit that Rent tried to emulate but couldn’t come close to.  (But that’s another story, which I highly suggest you read.)  While I am too young to have really experienced the AIDS crisis in full force, I deeply admire the legacy of ACT UP (though, I’m sure it had its issues too).

In my mind, Gran Fury is also one of the most successful leftist propaganda operations, and added immensely to the movement by providing an array of graphics that are simultaneously devastating, playful, sexy, avant garde, highly referential, and politically savvy.  It’s a queer aesthetic that predates the ascendence of the accolade “FIERCE!,” but honey, it defined it.  Together, Gran Fury and ACT UP proved the importance of visual work in political movements, and understood the necessity of both creatively capturing the attention of traditional media and creating one’s own.  It’s an aesthetic and process I strive for in my own work.

“Silence = Death” is perhaps their greatest known work, but I encourage folks to check out the small gallery posted at the Queer Cultural Center’s website to see more. The phrase reflected many aspects of the crisis, but it was also desperately literal: people were dying due to the silence of Reagan and other politicians, due to a culture that stigmatized gays and disease, and due to a healthcare system that supported profits over saving lives.  It was both a call to the community to come out and fight, and also a calling-out of the Powers That Be for allowing marginalized people to die.  Another common slogan used by members of ACT UP was “This is about people dying!”  Both remind me of something that Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian leader of the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel said at a talk last week: “BDS is a strategy to win.  We’re not in it to make a point.”  In both cases, we’re talking about disasters with real consequences today, tomorrow, and until it stops.  We’re talking about emergencies and halting business as usual.

Which is why I just feel irked by YBCA’s campaign.  I’m happy to see the image continue to circulate, but it saddens me to see it pulled from a truly political context and replaced with ironic sayings and people’s Facebook photos.  And as much as I’m happy to see a celebration of diverse queer culture and activism, that celebration itself is indicative of the fact that we’re in a much different political moment.  Today’s silences, at least when it comes to the gays (and especially those in San Francisco), are not nearly as life-threatening.  I’m not sure I’d blame YBCA — they do, indeed, suggest using it to speak to current political activism — but the strength of the graphic, to me, lies in its specificity and even seeing some that reference things like healthcare still make me wince.  I think it’s too much, too soon, or maybe just in bad taste.

Plus, let’s be real: we’re still in the middle of the AIDS crisis — it’s just (somewhat) shifted demographics.

Anyway, enough about me: What do you think?  I’m posting some more examples of the reinterpreted graphics after the jump.

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