Art in the AIDies: An Act of Faith

By 1986 the AIDS epidemic had claimed a shocking number of artists. Here New York playwright Max Navarre imparts personal feelings about making art in the face of death, and talks with other prominent artists with AIDS about their issues related to art, survival and political fury. Navarre was vice president of the People with AIDS Coalition, as well as the first publicly identified PWA to serve on the executive board of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, at the time the largest AIDS-related service-provider in the world. —Eds.

Life has changed completely. Things will never be the same again.

We are confronted daily with the media image of the helpless victim, covered with lesions, watched over by the equally helpless, praying parents. We have the other side of that image, the side we see infinitely less of, which is the living with AIDS, the day-to-day showing up of having it that owes nothing to the concepts of victimization or salvation: the going on with life.

When I was diagnosed with AIDS—July 12, 1985—making art was the last thing on my mind. I was too freaked out, too hysterical, too ready to believe that I was at the end of the line to spend much time wondering if there might be a book or a play in it. Not once did I think, "Gee, this might be great for my career," or "Gosh, this might be rough on my health, but I bet it does wonders for my writing."

I thought I was dying. Shit, I thought I was dead. Offstage, I could hear the fat lady tuning up. I was too busy deciding who would get my suede jacket and my bicycle to think about how the artists of the world were interpreting the worst disaster since the Black Plague.

I was not interested. I had become a universe of one.

When the dust settled, when I realized that I still had all my arms and legs, that I was not dead, that I was, in fact going to survive, at least for a few days, I peeked out over the top of the blanket.

It took awhile, but eventually I was ready to crawl out from under the debris and check out the landscape. When I did, the first thing I reached for was a pencil.

In the 16 months since my diagnosis, work has been my primary resource in evaluating and (you'll excuse the expression) sharing my experience. Learning how to listen to my body and to trust my instincts over and above the unrelenting media image of the "AIDS victim" has been a real exercise in faith, an exercise that parallels my life as a writer.

I am not an AIDS victim because I say I'm not. I turn to my work because I always do. Any opinions I have about the effect of AIDS on art are colored by the effect of my AIDS on my art.

In the popular view, there's this prevailing idea that, in the health crisis, there are issues, side issues and nonissues. For example: providing health services, legal, financial and counseling services for people with AIDS and those around them are issues. Getting federal funding to provide those services is an issue. Quarantine is an issue. HIV testing of "risk groups" is an issue. Confidentiality is, however, a side issue. Self-empowerment, self-help and the active role of the person with AIDS are all side issues. Art, evidently, is a nonissue.

Of course, as with most priorities, it all depends on whom you talk to.

And who talks. Some wouldn't. Not necessarily because they thought the question was beside the point, but because they were just too flipped out to think about the issue long enough to answer me. Some folks wanted to talk, but absolutely could not articulate their thoughts. People are reeling. Why should artists be any different?

There was the performance artist, a friend of mine, who had a wonderful conversation with me. She talked about learning to be responsible about her sexuality and how she saw that responsibility reflected in her work. Then, when I saw her a few days later, she was bent out of shape because of what she'd said, and she was anxious about being quoted, and she couldn't believe how confronted she'd felt and how much agitation she'd experienced just talking about AIDS. Then, still later, she called me up to give me a quote.

She said, "It's the maturity effect. If you're forced to face an issue that affects every angle, and if people are forced to confront, it affects your work. That's the way you make pieces. You're forced to take risks." But I'm not using her name.

I have another friend, a well-known performance artist who has AIDS. His health is iffy, and he's so well-protected by the people around him that I couldn't get close enough to him to talk. I'm not pointing fingers, if I were sick I'd want my friends to protect me too. But it's the ferocity with which people defend themselves that puzzles me. I've had a hundred conversations with this man. I may have a hundred more. But not for publication. Is it about the stigma of AIDS, or the social taboo of being unwell? Is it about denial?

Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet, gifted screenwriter and a spokesperson for the gay community for many years, said to me: "I am emotionally and psychically devastated by this disaster. I am too busy living through it. I do not want to write about AIDS. I refuse to. I will not write about this. When it's over? Maybe."

He went on to say, "Everyone is threatened. Not a lot of people are in touch with their feelings, and the people who have created works are not sick."

Someone who is "sick" who's creating work is Michael Callen. Diagnosed in 1982, Callen is an activist and a founder of the People With AIDS Coalition, which is the leading proponent of self-empowerment for PWAs. He is also a singer and songwriter, author of "The Healing Power of Love" and coauthor, with Marsha Malamet and Peter Allen, of "Love Don't Need a Reason." With his band Lowlife and his status as one of a handful of high-profile, publicly identified people with AIDS, Mike is the very epitome of someone whose art provides a beachhead for his life.

His song "Living in Wartime" was used in Larry Kramer's controversial play The Normal Heart during its run at the Public Theater.

"AIDS made me get serious about life and about singing," Mike says. "It wasn't until AIDS gave me that cosmic kick in the ass that I said to myself—OK, with whatever time you have left, what do you want to do? The answer was to make music, queer music."

For Callen, being publicly identified as a PWA is essential, but it also poses a dilemma on the career front. "What record company would invest money into a band when they think the singer is going to die?" [Callen passed away in 1993.]

This seems like the moment to ask, "Max, what do you want from people?"

Answers, I guess. I'd like someone brilliant to appear on the scene who would create something—a performance piece, a play, a painting, an opera—that would put the whole health crisis into perspective for me. That's what I want. Tidiness. I want order in a situation that seems more and more devoid of order.

I remember sitting in a parked car in Los Angeles having an argument with Philip Minges about Tim Miller's piece Buddy Systems. I'd seen the piece in New York in the fall of '85, and we had just come from seeing it again. "Why isn't Tim making a piece about AIDS?" I crabbed. "I love Tim and I love his boyfriend and I love the piece and I'm glad they're having a relationship, but who cares? People are dying."

If you ever want to make a point about AIDS, just say "people are dying."

Philip, none too patiently, pointed out to me that Tim Miller and his lover Douglas Sadownick were both very aware that people are dying and that, if I would just shut up, I would realize that. "When a gay man makes a piece these days that is about trying to maintain a monogamous relationship with another gay man, then that piece is certainly reflective of the health crisis." So there.

He was right, of course. Even if the health crisis is not the topic of an artwork, that does not mean that the creator of that work is not up to his or her ears in AIDS and its meaning.

David Schweizer directed Plato's Symposium. It's a contemporized (sort of) retelling of the Platonic dialogs. I got a lot of hope from the piece and I called David to see if other people had responded in the same way.

"We got started because we know people are dying," he said. "Everyone has their own personal way of trying to be of help, to mobilize, to contribute instead of shutting down. The atmosphere of the project was about turning a creative instinct and a concern into an affirmation of life and a potential for some kind of transcendence."

About himself, David said, "I might be able to do something that presents a view of life that is of some comfort during this time when life is so precarious. The material in Plato's Symposium is perfect because it says, 'Here is something beyond this moment.'"

For Schweizer, his proximity to AIDS has made living and making art a self-conscious, special privilege. He said, "I don't take life for granted." A common theme.

Someone else who doesn't take life for granted is Michael Kearns, director of AIDS/US and founder of Artists Confronting AIDS.

AIDS/US was an L.A. production that took 13 people, some with AIDS, some with AIDS-related complex (ARC), some who are bereaved, and put them on a stage to tell their own stories. To say that it was a sensation is to understate badly. "This is the genuine article," said the L.A. Times. The L.A. Herald Examiner said, "In their refusal to be victims, we witness the collapse of theatrical artifice before emotional truth." The piece sold out for months.

Concurrent with the success of AIDS/US grew Artists Confronting AIDS, a collective of artists whose goal is to address AIDS-related issues head on.

"We can't afford to be protective of our feelings," says Kearns. "Artists have been gifted with a way of seeing the world. The question is how best to face the challenge."

For Kearns, the best way is to generate awareness among the artist's community, and, through that community, to the public: an awareness of feelings, an awareness of fears, an awareness of coping. This extends particularly to the realm of works created by PWAs. We have the same problems other artists have, but there is also the question, in some cases, of physical impairment. Some people simply don't have the stamina to work, regardless of their need to create.

There is a need to move away from our cultural obsession with physical perfection. It is time for an across-the-board reassessment of what we, as a society, are willing to look at on a stage. And art by PWAs, particularly performance art, must be presented with love, sensitivity and respect: The last thing we need is a P.T. Barnum sideshow.

Kearns says, "We need to allow PWAs to be seen as something other than just their bodies. If there is something we're going to learn from this hideous disease, I would hope that it is that we're not our physical beings."

Artists Confronting AIDS is committed to the idea that people who are affected by the health crisis find a public source of expression. The fact that this notion may confront ingrained ideas about professionalism and threaten the public's firmly held aesthetic beliefs leaves Kearns undaunted. "The idea that someone would have something to offer and would be cut off from that by fear, or by a need to comfort an audience, is in opposition to the work of Artists Confronting AIDS."

AIDS is not always pretty, but it is always a challenge. I see more and more people reaching beyond themselves for expression. For those people who are writers, the mechanism is already in place, and dealing with AIDS becomes a question of being willing to explore the feelings behind the impulse to create. For those people with AIDS who are not artists, learning to create art can help them to rediscover themselves and can provide a vehicle as they wend their way through an increasingly complicated and confusing emotional landscape.

Art is a lot of things: it's an educational tool, a grieving tool and a healing tool.

When you talk about healing in relation to AIDS, there's an automatic cringe response. All kinds of people are promising all kinds of results based on all kinds of ideas. When I write of healing I do not necessarily refer to physical healing. There is more to the concept of wellness than physical recovery.

Healing is more fleeting and satisfactory. It comes from experiential and emotional truth that soothes and eases pain, as it stimulates and clears the way for what is to follow. Grief is healing, as are joy, sorrow and celebration. Sometimes death is a healing.

I don't know the future of art in the face of the health crisis. I believe that we can all only profit by continuing to risk beyond our limits of safety. If AIDS challenges us to go beyond those limits, then we can begin to see past the devastation and accept the gifts that are available to us all through this experience.

I want to survive. I want my friends to survive, my culture and my planet to survive. The best way I know how to do that is by loving myself as I am and expressing my joy, my pain and my vision.

This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Winter 1986.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002