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150 10 Where There’s Querer Knowledge Production and the Praxis of HIV Prevention GEORGE AYALA, JAIME CORTEZ, AND PATR ICK “PATO” HEBERT “Sorry I can’t be what you want me to be. Hate won’t change me, Hate won’t change me.” —Byron Stingily, “Hate Won’t Change Me” “For a long time, I’ve thought that the purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning , not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of the creation of the world. Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world.” —Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark “And remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too And every breath we drew was hallelujah?” —Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah” In this chapter, we share the ways we synthesize community mobilization, creative production, and cultural studies in service of HIV prevention. Our work is grounded in a reverence for querer, the supple Spanish verb that simultaneously evokes multiple concepts. Querer is to love, to want, and even to wish. Our loved ones are our queridos, and these concepts form the most tender of greetings WHERE THERE’S QUERER 151 in e-mails and old-fashioned letters, which open with the flourish “Querido/a . . .” Querer can be used to express casual affection, deep love, intense passion and magically raunchy desire—sometimes all at once. It is this multiplicity and simultaneity that mark our work—our querer for one other, our communities, and our shared commitment to wellness in a time of expanding plague. All three of us are long-term cultural workers. We draw on decades of AIDS work combined with disciplines as varied as education, psychology, visual art, creative writing, performance, graphic design, research, grassroots organizing, and community-based arts programming. Together, we have spent the last four years seeking a kind of flexible synergy, honing our work in concert with hundreds of community members, artists, writers, designers, clients, students, social scientists, academics, public health officials, and AIDS service providers. We believe relationships and social contexts are central to the production of vibrant knowledge. Too often, we—academics, community workers, activists— work in isolation. The danger of working alone is that the work can become dehydrated because too little time is spent growing ideas within and through relationships. We recognize these risks and therefore remember that community cannot exist without meaningful connection and exchange. Knowledge grown in playful, purposeful partnership with others is stronger, more lithe, and better able to resonate across competing social terrains. Here we present a number of examples of this cultural production of knowledge from the contested currents of HIV prevention. We begin with a basic overview of our methodology and then devote the bulk of the chapter to presenting case studies showing how knowledge is produced by queer communities of color that are deeply affected by the AIDS pandemic. Throughout this process, we conceptualize knowledge not as a passive, static object but rather as energy, a force, an elixir. We treat knowledge as our connective tissue, from past to present to future, from self to Other, from fear to courage. The conduit for this now four-year effort is AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA). APLA has served the HIV/AIDS community in Los Angeles County for nearly twenty-five years and has become the largest AIDS service organization in California, with 125 employees and 1,500 volunteers. The projects described here emanate from APLA’s education department. Many of them were produced in collaboration with the prevention department of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), which is located in New York City. APLA began in 1982 with four friends providing HIV services out of a home closet. Queer citizens and their supporters were the first responders to the pandemic. Social fear, homophobia, and severe government neglect ensured that this front line of community members felt little distinction between being activists and AIDS service providers. Over time, the disease changed and spread, as did a growing network of AIDS service organizations. Now more than twenty-five years into the pandemic, APLA operates at a scale that some have referred to as “AIDS, Inc.” With this increased scale and attendant professionalization...

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