DIVAS, PARIAHS, AND THE RADICAL COUNTER-PUBLICS OF AIDS ACTIVISM

DIVAS, PARIAHS, AND THE RADICAL COUNTER-PUBLICS OF AIDS ACTIVISM

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Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first identified in the United States in 1981. Initial uncertainties concerning the virus’ epidemiologic origins as well as its modes of transmission prompted many, including health officials, to scramble for answers. The disease was first noticed among gay men.  It was coined GRID for gay-related immunodeficiency, a decision that would serve to link the devastating impacts of the disease to homosexuality – even though behavior rather than identity puts one at risk of being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. As cases of AIDS began to be found among babies and patients with a history of blood transfusion, it became increasingly clear that AIDS was not merely a disease of homosexuality. But the damage had already been done. AIDS had become the disease of queers and a threat to the ‘general population,’ a distinction that led to the mobilization of the gay community’s (and what soon became the AIDS activist movement’s) response to the crisis. The AIDS crisis became instrumental to the rise of counter-public, or alternative media, structured in both form and function to oppose mainstream media in subject matter and mode of production. From the advent of DIVA TV to the creation of Diseased Pariah News, the voices of the queer community rose to counter the general public's prevailing discourse regarding HIV/AIDS.

 

 

So, if we’re talking about countering the public, then who is the public?

To begin addressing the question of what constitutes counter-public, it is important to first understand what constitutes public. The short answer is that, in this case, the public refers to the general population, i.e., heterosexuals. To put it simply, heterosexual is not a polite word. To identify heterosexuals as just that, heterosexual, is typically considered tactless in primarily heterosexual spaces. The term makes an uncomfortable assumption when used in heterosexual circles, as it suggests that to be heterosexual “is not a given, but something to be accounted for,” it is a system you buy into, not a default setting.[1]

To circumvent this uncomfortable association, the term general population was adopted instead. At face value, the general population seems like an inclusionary term because, after all, who wouldn’t consider themselves a member of the general population? However, the word is problematized when one realizes how the term general population has historically been used to ‘other’ people with AIDS (PWA) in mainstream media. As Gary Bauer, President Ronald Regan’s assistant told Face the Nation, the reason the President had never publicly used the word AIDS before 1985 was simply that “it hadn’t spread to the general population yet.” [2]

Now for the countering part…

By necessity, activism requires coaction and civil disobedience, two traits embodied wholly by counter-publics. Counter-public exits as the oppositional alternative to the public in that they are artifacts that operate in conscientious resistance to dominant public ideologies and ultimately aim to subvert the construction of these ideologies within public discourse. Essentially, counter-public exists as a way of ‘sticking it to the man’ by creating “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”[3] So, in this way, the counter-public can subvert the dominant discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS by filling the gaps left intentionally vacant in traditional representations of AIDS in public media.

DIVA TV: You Can be a DIVA Too!

DIVA TV – Damned Interfering Video Activists – was founded in 1989 as an affinity group associated with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an activist group famous for their irreverent yet informative video-documentary style of activism. As stated on their website, DIVA TV aimed to document “public testimony, the media, and community activism to motivate the fight against AIDS.”[4] Between 1989 and 1990 the original DIVA TV collective created three notable video productions: Target City Hall (March 1989) following the ACT UP demonstration protesting New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s lackluster response to the AIDS crisis; Pride (June 1989) documenting New York City’s 20^th anniversary/celebration of pride, and Like a Prayer (1991), an almost 30-minute video covering the December 1989 “Stop the Church” protest organized by ACT UP/WHAM! (Women’s Health Action Mobilization) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.  

 

 

DIVA TV’s guerilla style of video documentation banked on the idea that anyone could control the means of representation should they have a camcorder and something to fight for. “Becoming a DIVA is as easy as recognizing that the dominant media does not reflect your lives and your world.” The dominant media did not imagine PWA as part of the audience it addressed every night. It did not provide the people most greatly affected by AIDS (lesbians, gay men, people of color, and women) with the information they needed to become empowered and take control of their own lives. There was a solution to this, however, and it was as easy as grabbing a video camera and recording the activism occurring right outside your window.

DIVA TV came to constitute a form of counter-public in the ways it took representative power away from the hands of mainstream news outlets and placed it in the hands of people at the frontlines of the AIDS activist movement. AIDS had become a war of not only public health and politics but one of representation as well. So, as the mass media’s response to the crisis continually failed to give PWA a voice, it became the duty of underground media collectives like DIVA TV to fight back. Counter-publics like DIVA TV fought back against traditional representations of the ‘AIDS victim’ by showing people living with AIDS in the streets, fighting for their lives. DIVA TV overthrew the myth of the unbiased reporter, replacing it with the very real and very angry voices of the real authorities of the crisis.

 

DIVA TV’s Like a Prayer (Spring 1990) features a one-minute P.S.A depicting condoms being put on red apples. The message “MEN: USE CONDOMS WITH A NON-OIL-BASED LUBRICANT” is flashed on the screen.

 

Diseased Pariah News:

“The Freshness of Irreverence”

Diseased Pariah News (DPN) was just one of the many queer-oriented zines (pronounced “zeens”) that emerged during the 1990s as part of an expanding counter-public universe that focused on giving a voice to people living with AIDS. By necessity and definition, zines are printed embodiments of counter-publics that resist the authority of print. They exist not alongside, but despite, consumer culture. Creators of zines – zinesters, if you will – propagate a democratized and participatory culture that rebels against the homogenizing effects of capitalism and consumerism. Zinesters subvert the authority of the printed form by occupying and mobilizing the authority of the printed form.

 

 A reprint of the cover of Diseased Pariah News (DPN) first issue.

 

Much like DIVA TV, Diseased Pariah News embraced the freshness of irreverence. DPN was created by Tom Shearer and Beowulf Thorne and was active from 1990 to 1999, publishing a total of eleven issues during this period. In the opening remarks of its first issue, DPN established itself as a “quarterly publication of, by, and for people with HIV disease,” that provided “a forum for infected people to share their thoughts, feelings, art, writing (…) in an atmosphere free of teddy bears, magic rocks, and seronegative guilt.”[5] DPN was a counter-public that sought to “bring some much-needed levity to the experience of HIV infection,”[6] while also reclaiming the image of the AIDS body (an image that had been victimized and perverted by mass media).

Clay transforms into Captin Condom in DPN #2, 1991

Within DPN’s pages lived all types of media targeted at informing a new perspective on the AIDS body. DPN ran a column reviewing gay male pornographic and included centerfolds featuring racy images of HIV-positive men, the editor’s T-cell count updates, and “The DPN Meat Market,” which was something of a mail-in ‘In Search of Love’ column.

‘‘We’re all still sexual creatures, no matter how much our ever-so concerned seronegative caregivers would like us to live in saintly abstinence, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t find ourselves and others like us attractive,’’[7] wrote the editors in issue four’s centerfold, justifying DPNs frequently sexy portrayals of the HIV-positive person.

DPN also featured the ongoing comic Captain Condom which follows the adventures of the character Clay Carpenter, an HIV-positive man who is transformed into a contraceptive crusader. The comic draws on traditional superhero troupes to expose relevant issues like internalized homophobia, the reality of AIDS treatment, and violence towards PWAs. Within its single decade of activity, DPN managed to create a world within itself – one that embodied counter-public by providing a refreshingly un-sanctimonious image of the HIV-positive body.

Diseased Pariah News constituted counter-public in both its form and function: Physically it took the form of a wonderfully unconventional piece of ephemera that by just existing subverted the authority of consumerism and mass print. In function, DPN pushed an image of the AIDS body that counters the one that could be seen in the public’s media, and it embraced all the dark humor that can come with a prognosis like AIDS: “What’s so damn funny about a pandemic devastating the world?” mused late cofounder Tom Shearer, “Well, we have it and sometimes we find it amusing. Besides, who wants to be serious all the time, even about fatal illness?”[8]

 

Centerfold Boy Kevin Bryson. The bottom-left caption reads:

"Age: 30; Height: 5’10”; Weight: 150 lbs.; CD4 Count: 40; Medications: ddC, Dapsone, Zovirax, Ketoconazole."

 

Some final remarks:

In true counter-public fashion, DIVA TV and Diseased Pariah News understood and celebrated the power that media held in influencing the meanings, policies, and representations coming out of the AIDS crisis. These works of counter-public were able to subvert the representations of HIV/AIDS that existed in the general population’s media. While the mass media wanted to show ‘the face of AIDS,’ queer counter-publics made for PWA by PWA created a safe space in which queer PWA could escape the disciplinary and condescendingly pitying gaze of mass media.

            DIVA TV empowered everyone to be an activist by encouraging anyone with a camera to reclaim their authority over the representations of HIV/AIDS that could be found in mass media. The ACT UP affinity group went against all rules of conventional journalism, throwing out objectivity and seriousness in favor of the real, the bizarre, and the emotional. Meanwhile, Diseased Pariah News resisted traditional modes of production by existing as a snarky, queer-oriented, self-published piece of ephemera. Harnessing the powers of a dark sense of humor and some wit, DPN was able to subvert the mass media’s perception of AIDS by reclaiming images and narratives surrounding the HIV-positive body.

            Using radically discursive representational modes like humor, the erotic, the emotional, and the sometimes downright sacrilegious, HIV/AIDS counter-publics reclaimed, redefined, and rebalanced the media’s records of the AIDS crisis.

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Citations:

DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) - ACT UP. “DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists),” n.d. https://actupny.org/divatv.1.html.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Habermas and the Public Sphere, n.d.

Grover, Jan Zita. “AIDS: Keywords.” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism Vol. 43 (Winter 1987): 17–30.

Thorne, Beowulf, and Tom Shearer. “DPN: Diseased Pariah News #1,” 1990. https://archive.org/details/diseasedpariahnews/DPN%20001/mode/1up?view=theater.

———. “DPN: Diseased Pariah News #1,” 1990. https://archive.org/details/diseasedpariahnews/DPN%20001/mode/1up?view=theater.