Layers of Disaster

In the Spring of 2011, Ayesah Adamo, a Columbia University undergraduate, asked if she could interview me about the political funerals that we performed in the later years of ACT UP New York. This interview was for a special edition of the journal Trigger93 that she edited entitled “Flesh.” I had not often spoken about these funerals, not that I had forgotten them, it’s just I was only accustomed to talking about them with friends who had been there. It is difficult to speak about death, even today, beyond the established norms of discourse, and so I welcomed the chance to talk with Ayesah, to see through her eyes, and out to others, something of that time. As members of ACT UP New York in the early 1990s we took to the streets with the newly dead bodies of our friends to honor them. We were filled with rage at a political, social, and intertwined healthcare system that had ignored, abandoned, or punished those who suffered with or died of HIV infection. HIV disease stripped the body of its own ability to care for itself and decimated and stole lives from us. The politicians and pharmaceutical companies wallowing in their willingness to let us die provoked the rage. These bodies of our friends were all we had left in the material world of their literal lives, so we hoisted them on our shoulders in caskets and walked through the streets not willing to be silent with our anger and loss. These were acts beyond words and images as we stood there with their actual bodies, their weight beyond comprehension.

It is now nine years since I gave this interview (published in full below) and twenty years since the height of the HIV epidemic in New York. I am writing from home here in Brooklyn, having been in some form of “Lockdown” for over nine months when the city shut down and my college went remote on March 13th, 2020. First there were the empty streets and sound of sirens at all times of the day and night as the number of people who died from COVID-19 in New York State rose to 12,312 on April 4th and then another 1,055 deaths on April 7th. As I write today, December 5th, 2020, 280,079 in the US and 1.5 million worldwide are known to have died of COVID-19. Known, of course, since people in the shadows who never make it to the hospital or the ones too frightened of the machinations of vicious surveillance outfitted with debt collectors or ICE Officers, are never counted, named, numbered or known.

Since March, I slip in and out of memory of the loss of our friends to AIDS in the 1990s. Of course, death is inevitable for living beings, for all biologics. But discriminatory, outrageously neglectful death calls out for a reckoning. What we are living in real-time with an airborne global pandemic stealing, upending, and laying bare lives jolts us into the present. The current massive loss of life, even unclaimed, unknown lives is photographed and placed on multiple platforms. The seeing can only begin to scratch the surface of consciousness if we, collective we, begin to see the deeper roots and causes of pandemic that haunt our contemporary self-made world. I am thinking about the two-sided causes. The aggressive encroachment or destruction of other animal habitats that cause zoonotic disease, the jumping of a contagion that quietly lived in one animal but devastates its new host like bubonic plague from rats to fleas to humans, or 1918 Flu from birds, or HIV from chimpanzees, or SARS and MARS and COVID-19 from horseshoe bats. But it spreads and devastates for other reasons well beyond the biology or epidemiology of contagion. And it is this second causality that confounds the mind and wakens us to layers of disaster, the brazen festering cruelty, especially in the US, of systemic disregard for what is and can be known about how to care for one another. [End Page 29...