A.I.D.S. art booms in San Francisco

Press, 17 May 1989, Page 16

A.I.D.S. art booms in San Francisco

Over the last four or five years, A.I.D.S. has become a heavy presence in American cultural life. But how can it be dealt with?

Hollywood and the television networks can dramatise Helen Keller’s blindness or the ravages of cancer, but what of A.1.D.5., linked as it is to homosexuality and drug abuse? Scriptwriters are torn between the raw topicality of the disease and its inflammatory associations; and this may explain why television’s few attempts to address the issue have been so unsuccessful. If A.I.D.S. victims are sordid (as in N.B.C.’s “Midnight Caller,” where a bisexual A.I.D.S. victim had to be arrested before he could realise his plan to infect every woman possible), general viewers are revolted and homosexuals are outraged.

If the victims are uncontroversial (as in A.B.C.’s “The Ryan Wright Story,” in which a haemophiliac child contracted A.I.D.S. in the course of a blood transfusion), the producer knows in his heart that he has not boldly confronted the issue.

Beyond television, A.I.D.S. is being addressed in a more levelheaded fashion, no doubt because so many of those writing or painting about it do so from first-hand experience, or something close to it.

As with much of the art of A.1.D.5., perhaps the best attempt at visualising the devastation has come from San Francisco, the First City of the epidemic. Two years ago a photographer, Jim Wigler, began a project called “Faces of A.1.D.5.”: stark head shots of dying men and women, which have been seen across the

country and will tour Europe this year.

One of the faces was of Sylvester, a black disco queen. Sylvester, who died last December, told Mr Wigler as he posed for him: “I’m dying and it’s not pretty.”

Bitterness of this kind has been characteristic of the art and writing of A.I.D.S. Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On,” written in 1987, alerted the nation to the scientific, bureaucratic and politically motivated delays attending the treatment of A.1.D.5., and stirred up a good deal of anger.

Signs abound, however, that the angry phase is giving way to two more constructive avenues of expression: the wish to educate, and the wish to comfort. Susan Sontag’s “A.I.D.S. and its Metaphors” addresses the language used to discuss A.I.D.S. A word such as “plague,” she argues, with its associations of the Black Death, vermin and biblical retribution, conveys a false picture of the disease. A.1.D.5., Miss Sontag implies, should be forcing the West into new ideas, not old phobias. It may be a turning point in thinking about sex and natural catastrophes. On every side, the urge to force the public to think is becoming stronger. In San Francisco, plays about A.I.D.S have been written especially for schoolchildren, teenagers and blacks; and the American Conservatory Theatre, which makes a point of educating its actors to cope with A.1.D.5., is looking for a didactic play for a general audience.

But according to one San Francisco playwright, Philip Real, people cannot keep their rage

burning indefinitely, as Larry Kramer did in his play “The Lonely Heart.” He himself has decided to write a romantic musical comedy with A.I.D.S. in it; and Theatre Rhinoceros, perhaps the most dynamic homosexual repertory company and, at first, one of the angriest, is now beginning to treat the disease comically and satirically. Writers of fiction, in general, have an ambiguous attitude to A.I.D.S. It inspires them, but not in a way they like. David Feinberg’s “Eighty-Sixed,” perhaps the best A.I.D.S. novel so far, is the memoir of one man’s journey from a promiscuous homosexual life at the beginning of the 1980 s to terror and grief at the end. In addressing A.1.D.5., writers admit they have been brought up against questions they had never expected to confront in their 20s. Michael Rubin, a novelist, adds a guilty postscript: “I would hate to say it’s the subject I’ve been looking for.” Perhaps out of guilt, but mostly because the numbers of those with the disease are inexorably growing, artists are increasingly trying to use their work as therapy. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, which has lost 39 members to A.I.D.S. since 1978, makes a point of using music to help. “I’m very careful about the music,” their conductor said last year. “I don’t do anything that’s sad or disquieting.” One recent book of essays on A.I.D.S. quotes an art historian’s observation that art cannot save lives; only science can. Art is doing much to make A.I.D.S. bearable, but in default of the doctors.

(Copyright — The Economist.)