It’s Saturday: let’s have fun!
Possibly not peaceful, though I think it’s fine, and definitely fun!
To me, they are such a sweet couple!
(I watched the Tonys Sunday; I just have to, I’m a stage/dramaforensics nerd. Enjoy!)
Gotta do the Conga; and make it a great weekend for yourself!
Mo Turner — queer, Muslim and Black — faced discrimination and censure in the Oklahoma legislature. They have found healing through activism.
This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Orion and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Mo Turner doesn’t often think about their time in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
In that building, they were Mauree — the first out nonbinary state legislator in United States history; the first Muslim elected in Oklahoma; a Black, queer, gender non-conforming lawmaker in one of the most conservative states in the country. Elected at 27 to represent House District 88, which includes much of Oklahoma City, they stepped into a political institution that had never belonged to someone like them before.
The job almost broke them. Turner left office in November 2024, four years into their tenure, after the work took a toll on their health. They are still recovering.
“I spent January 2026 walking. And weeping. And reading,” Turner said. After the legislature took over their life, they had to find a way back to who they were before a national spotlight brought constant harassment, abuse and stress. They’ve found solace in a particular song near the end of the Hamilton musical, when the eponymous founding father takes long, quiet walks after losing his son and stepping away from politics.
Turner’s own walks can go on for three hours.
If there’s one lesson Turner took from their time at the statehouse, it’s that politics won’t help communities. People will.
“I want people to understand that policy is not coming to save you,” they said. “We get justice, we get faith, we get warm meals, we get community right here when we start talking to folks.”
Although the United States is a representative democracy, our political system still rejects anyone who strays too far from the norm. Turner’s story shows how far from equal the nation’s politics still are — and how being an out LGBTQ+ elected official today is just as revolutionary as it was five decades ago.
Elaine Noble was the first openly LGBTQ+ person ever elected to a state legislature, serving two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the 1970s. She described the campaign as ugly: her car was destroyed, her windows were shot through, her headquarters were vandalized. The harassment she received from colleagues in the statehouse was ugly, too. She routinely heard obscene profanities. Once, someone left human feces on her desk. Another time, a man stopped her as she walked to work and spat on her.
These are not just scenes from a distant past. Political violence against LGBTQ+ candidates is rising, according to a new report from the Victory Institute. Many LGBTQ+ candidates who ran for office between 2023 and 2025 experienced death threats on the trail. One candidate said their house was shot up by a neighbor. Another said that someone posted in a local newspaper’s online thread that a bullet should be put through their brain. Another candidate was shoved off a porch while door-knocking.
Some LGBTQ+ candidates receive death threats on social media at least once a week, according to the Victory Institute. A number of them respond to those threats by limiting voter engagement. Some avoid door-knocking and social media. Others decline public events entirely.
Rising violence against LGBTQ+ candidates doesn’t just scar candidates; it scars democracy, according to the authors of the report.
“This is changing who feels able to run for office, how candidates are showing up in their campaigns, whether they can even remain in public life at all,” said Pooja Prabhakaran, director of elected and appointed officials engagement at the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute. “The broader piece of it is, who is able to serve and participate in democracy?”
Death threats against Turner began as soon as they entered office. They received voicemails filled with racial slurs and obscene emails targeting their religion and LGBTQ+ identity. As a freshman lawmaker, they were surprised to learn that not everyone was treated that way. They thought death threats were commonplace.
Turner has dealt with harassment on a larger scale than many other LGBTQ+ candidates do, Prabhakaran said. For other trans people or LGBTQ+ people of color who consider running for office, there is a chilling effect: Do they want to be subjected to the same treatment?
Threats against Turner escalated after they were censured by the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 2023, during their second term. They were accused by the Republican leadership of “harboring a fugitive” — a trans person who went to the statehouse with their partner to protest a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors.
At the protest, the couple got into a scuffle with a state trooper after one of them threw water at a state representative. One was arrested. The other sought out Turner’s office.
“This person’s spouse was just arrested. They came to my office to process. That’s what happened,” Turner told The 19th at the time, in 2023. “I let folks get their affairs in order, because everyone was in agreeance that they were going to go ahead and turn themselves over.”
Democrats said Turner cooperated with law enforcement during the search for the protester. Still, they were punished. Republicans asked Turner for a formal apology in exchange for keeping their committee assignments. They declined.
“I think an apology for loving the people of Oklahoma is something that I cannot do,” they said at a press conference following the censure.
Many constituents already saw Turner as a trusted confidant. People would call to ask where they should move to escape anti-LGBTQ+ laws and how to crowdfund to help someone travel for an abortion. As politics restricted daily life, more and more people came to Turner for help.
Now, after earning that trust, they were silenced. They couldn’t shape legislation through committees or join caucus discussions to speak on behalf of voters in their district.
The threatening calls and emails got worse.
Some political violence is based on a candidate’s beliefs. Some of it is driven by a desire to intimidate them out of politics altogether because of their identity. Those who challenge the status quo often face the most backlash, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. And those conditions don’t just stop once someone gets into office, she said.
“I can have an elected position, but my power in that position is very much influenced by all of these other dynamics that are not formalized,” Dittmar said. There’s a difference between politics as usual within a two-party system, where everyone jockeys for influence, and being seen as a threat for being different or a minority, she said.
In 2023, Oklahoma lawmakers introduced 35 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — a lot more than most other states at the time. They passed laws enabling broad discrimination against trans people and restricting young students from learning about LGBTQ+ people. Inside the statehouse, Turner felt demoralized.
The next year, their Republican colleagues introduced 55 anti-LGBTQ+ bills. Oklahoma already had few legal protections for LGBTQ+ people, and things only got worse.
“I’m going into a job that doesn’t care about me in a state that it feels like doesn’t care about me,” they said, reflecting on how they felt at the time.
Still, Turner was making an impact. As the first out transgender lawmaker in Oklahoma’s statehouse, they inspired young people. Students told Turner that they had never cared about politics until seeing them in office. High school and middle school students would approach them in the capitol to ask questions about their tenure for class reports.
They represented more than just House District 88. They represented younger generations of queer people in Oklahoma and beyond. Turner felt the weight of the responsibility. That’s what made it so hard for them to leave.
Turner found an ally in then-Rep. Monroe Nichols, a Democrat who now serves as the first Black mayor of Tulsa. Nichols was the only one who seemed to genuinely care that Turner was receiving death threats. He was the only one who made them feel human.
“I do think that there was solidarity in him being a Black man from Tulsa of all places, understanding what it looked like to feel discrimination or oppression,” Turner said.
Once Turner took office, there were eight Black legislators in the Oklahoma statehouse — a record. Currently, there are six. Most politicians in the building are White. The status quo of power in Oklahoma is very much White, cisgender, heterosexual and male, said Dittmar of Rutgers University. And those who break that mold are seen by others as a threat, she said.
Then there’s this: In a state like Oklahoma, Democrats have very little leverage. On top of the low pay and high stress, there’s a small chance of achieving any concrete policy wins. Republicans sponsor most state laws because 80 percent of the lawmakers are Republicans. Barely any bill passes without Republican support. Being in the minority party means taking on the steep personal costs of being in office in exchange for little payoff.
Toward the end of those four long years, Turner didn’t feel like a good legislator anymore. In their words, they were phoning it in. Although they did spark a committee hearing on repealing the state’s HIV criminalization law, none of their bills advanced.
Turner would frequently sit in their car in the parking lot before work, trying to breathe through the rising panic and find the will to go inside. Walking into the statehouse each day was taking a deep toll on them.
The stress grew until they landed in the emergency room. At the beginning of their last legislative session, they were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and underwent a procedure to have cancerous cells removed from their body. That health scare followed bouts of migraines, panic attacks and depression.
As their health cratered, they felt alone. After their visit to the emergency room, none of their colleagues checked to see how they were doing.
Turner knew something had to change. They were worried for their nephew, Anthony, whom they are raising on their own. While juggling their job and all the harassment that came with it, they were setting up daycare and school drop-offs — everything that comes with being a single parent. Sometimes, Anthony would join them on the House floor if work ran late. But they had to leave by 7 p.m. to make it home at a reasonable time for dinner, bath and bedtime.
“I remember one day thinking, I would like to see him grow up,” they said.
So they left. They walked away from politics.
“It was a tough decision to make because I know that representation matters. And some days, me just showing up to work is the representation that people need,” they said.
This is the passion that still fuels Turner: showing up for Oklahomans and showing up for young LGBTQ+ people who don’t feel heard by their elected representatives.
In March, Turner went back to the statehouse to help a friend, the executive director at Freedom Oklahoma,a state LGBTQ+ advocacy group, monitor anti-trans bills. But the building is still full of red tape: Initially, they were barred from entering the gallery by statehouse security. The experience became a reminder of why they left.
To actually make change in their community, Turner knew they would have to work outside of politics.
Here’s how: They’re working with the immigrant advocacy group Dream Action Oklahoma, making and distributing zines on how bystanders can intervene when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are out making arrests. They help serve community breakfast with the Foundation for Liberating Minds, a Black-led abolitionist group based in Oklahoma. And in their new job, they get to work with LGBTQ+ students from across the country.
Turner is the director of public policy and advocacy at GLISTEN, a national nonprofit that lobbies for LGBTQ+ students. They’re working to expand GLISTEN’s National Student Council, a leadership program for high schoolers. They’re working on the curriculum for that program and thinking about how these students want to grow. Many of them want to become activists, or already are. These students represent a future that is rapidly changing, regardless of how many anti-LGBTQ+ laws are passed; more and more young people are identifying as queer and trans.
Working with students is a bright spot for Turner. Their organization is asking LGBTQ+ students about their experiences, their school policies and what they think needs to be different. And amid so much anti-LGBTQ+ hostility in politics, kids are making it clear that they’re ready to make change on their own terms.
“Youth aren’t just saying, ‘Oh, god, policy is so bad, whatever.’ They’re saying, ‘No, maybe I will run for office. Or ‘I’ll work on my friend’s campaign.’ They’re being outspoken,” Turner said. “Our power lies in the streets, outside of any state legislature, and it always will.”
Turner doesn’t think they will ever go back to politics. But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped paying attention. They still keep tabs on bills moving through Oklahoma’s legislature. Lately, they said, things have been going from bad to worse.
The legislature just passed a law to create criminal penalties for providing gender-affirming care to minors and adults. No public funds or property may be used to provide the care, which threatens state university hospitals. The state Medicaid program will also no longer cover gender-affirming care for any patients.
This bill is just another step in stripping health care from all Oklahomans, Turner said. They want people to respond to laws like this by doing more than signing a petition or calling their local reps. They can reach out directly to state agencies, donate to local healthcare fundraisers or just talk to their neighbors.
“When the government fails us, what do we have?” they said. For Turner, the answer is clear: community.
In a way, Turner has returned to their home turf as an activist. Before elected office, Turner worked with local branches of the ACLU, the NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. They learned the ways of the statehouse and now they know how to push for change outside.
And they don’t plan on leaving the state or their community in House District 88. Their brother went to college in this district. They worked an internship here. They met friends at Picasso Cafe and The Red Cup and had first kisses at local bars. Oklahoma City feels like such a queer place to them, and they have fallen in love with it.
“This is my home. I love it,” they said. “I’m going to stay and fight.”
I first read about Bayard Rustin in “The Nation” in the late 1990s. His story was both sad and inspirational. Here is some background on an unrecognized star (not that article I read years ago, I’m sorry. I have no access.)
(1912–1987)
Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) was a human rights activist known for his work during the Civil Rights Movement
Rustin was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest advisors, especially on techniques of nonviolent resistance. Rustin was extremely active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and helped to create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Early in his career, he was arrested for “moral cause” which led to his outing to the public. However, once outed, Rustin was completely open about his sexuality and was never ashamed. Criticism and discrimination over his sexuality led Rustin to have a more background role in the Civil Rights Movement. He never wanted his sexuality to have a negative effect on the Movement, which is often the reason that Rustin’s efforts are not widely known. (snip-MORE)
Bayard Rustin was an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, pacifism and non-violence, and gay rights.
2HKJNR6 Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), American civil rights activist, attending Walter Reuther Press Conference, Warren K. Leffler, US News & World Report Magazine Collection, March 17, 1965
Born on March 17, 1912, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Rustin was nurtured in a household steeped in activism and moral conviction. Raised by his Quaker grandparents, particularly his grandmother, Julia Rustin, a dedicated member of the NAACP, he absorbed the values of equality and social justice from an early age. This upbringing ignited a spark within him that would blaze throughout his lifetime.
Rustin’s early education at Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College further fueled his activist spirit. Though he did not complete his degree, these institutions were fertile ground for his burgeoning political consciousness. His move to Harlem in 1936 immersed him in the heart of African-American culture and political activism, setting the stage for his life’s work.
Rustin’s commitment to nonviolence was both a strategic choice and a deeply held belief. His association with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organisation, was pivotal. Under the mentorship of A. J. Muste, Rustin honed his skills in civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance, becoming a leading voice in the fight against racial injustice.
In 1947, Rustin co-organised the Journey of Reconciliation, a courageous precursor to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. This daring initiative aimed to dismantle segregation on interstate buses through direct action. Facing arrests and brutality, Rustin’s unwavering resolve demonstrated the transformative power of nonviolent protest and set a powerful precedent for future civil rights campaigns.
Rustin’s encounter with Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery Bus Boycott marked a turning point in the civil rights movement. Recognising King’s potential, Rustin became a crucial advisor, infusing the movement with his vast experience and strategic acumen. His efforts were instrumental in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, strengthening the infrastructure of the civil rights struggle.
Rustin’s strategic brilliance shone through his emphasis on Gandhian principles of nonviolence. He played a key role in guiding King towards these philosophies, ensuring that nonviolent resistance remained at the heart of the movement. Rustin’s behind-the-scenes influence was a driving force that propelled the civil rights movement forward, even amidst escalating tensions and opposition.
And from Quakers In Action,
1912-1987
Bayard Rustin was a black Civil Rights activist, a close associate of Martin Luther King, and an advocate of gay and lesbian rights, and a Quaker.
Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and was brought up by his grandmother, who had been raised as a Quaker. He himself became a Quaker in 1936, shortly before moving to New York where he lived most of his adult life. He was a pacifist and a primary influence in bringing non-violent resistance into the American Civil Rights Movement, much inspired by Gandhi’s approach in India.
In 1941, he joined the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He protested against segregation within the armed forces, and worked with the American Friends Service Committee to protect the property of interned Japanese Americans.
Despite his membership of the Society of Friends (one of the so-called ‘Historic Peace Churches’), Rustin was jailed in 1944 for his conscientious objection to cooperating with the draft. While in jail, he organised protests against segregated seating in the dining hall. In a letter to the prison warden, he wrote:
Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) On can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it.
After the War, he took part in the Journey of Reconciliation across four southern States, to protest against illegal segregation in inter-state travel. He was arrested, along with his fellow protestors, several times in the course of the journey and in North Carolina was sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang. The protest became a model for future ‘Freedom Rides’.
In 1956, he was asked to advise Martin Luther King on the application of non-violent resistance to the boycott of public transport in Montgomery, Alabama. In August 1963, Rustin had the mammoth task of organising the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – a rally attended by twenty thousand people that culminated in King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. In 1968, shortly before King’s assassination, he drafted the ‘Economic Bill of Rights’ which called for – among other things – a meaningful job and a living wage for people of all colours.
Rustin’s concern for Human Rights was never confined to black Americans. In the 1940s and 50s, He supported independence movements in India, Ghana and Nigeria. In the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin became an election and human rights observer in countries like Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland, and Zimbabwe. As Vice Chairman of the International Rescue Committee he participated in the international March for Survival on the Thai-Cambodian border and helped raise awareness of the plight of the Vietnamese boat people. He was Co-Chairman of the Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees and helped found the National Emergency Coalition for Haitian Refugees.
Rustin was an openly gay man who had once been arrested for public indecency at a time when homosexuality was illegal in all US states. This fact was used against him more than once and contributed to his relatively low profile in the Civil Rights movement. However, in the 1970s and 80s he wrote a number of essays which drew parallels between the black civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. In 1986, Rustin wrote:
Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination… It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change… The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.
Rustin fell ill during a human rights expedition to Haiti in 1987 and died shortly after from a perforated appendix.
His life was documented in the film Brother Outsider.
His collected writings were published in A Time On Two Crosses.
And we aren’t backing down.
The Human Rights Campaign has reached a historic high of 4 million members and supporters thanks to people like you. With our rights and freedoms under attack, our job at this moment is not simply to defend ourselves. We must rewrite what it means to be free in America. Because freedom must belong to all of us.
So this Pride Month, as we head into marking this country’s 250th birthday, the LGBTQ+ community and allies are showing up loud and proud — we’re reclaiming this country and its freedoms as our own. We say with our full chest: Pride is Patriotism.
Real change doesn’t come from the top down — it rises from the streets, from our communities, and from people like you. With 4 million voices already united under the Human Rights Campaign, this movement is fierce, fearless, and growing. Together, we can ensure that our voices are heard and our rights are protected.
Winter 2026 • Jonathan Lovitz He/Him
At a military retirement ceremony unlike any other in modern American history, five transgender service members stood before their families, colleagues and country to mark the end of careers defined by excellence, leadership and sacrifice. They were not retiring because they failed to meet the standard. They were retiring because the standard was changed to exclude them.
“Trans servicemembers … are the frontline canaries in the coal mine of our democracy as to who can be seen as not just American, but among the best that America has to offer,” said Shawn Skelly, former assistant secretary of Defense for Readiness and member of HRC’s Board of Directors.
In addition to providing the official welcome on behalf of the HRC Foundation, Cmdr. Skelly provided a powerful keynote during the morning session and panel focused on military benefits and the future of service for our communities.
HRC’s Equality Center proudly hosted this event on Jan. 8, 2026, to officially retire Col. Bree Fram, Cmdr. Blake Dremann, Lt. Col. Erin Krizek, Chief Petty Officer Jaida McGuire and Sgt. 1st Class Cathrine Schmid. Together, they represent more than a century of service across the Armed Forces. These heroes were also a proxy for the countless more whose stories we have not yet heard but whose service has helped shape a safer, stronger more honorable military and nation.
Photo Credit: Laura Hatcher Photography
“This ceremony is unprecedented,” said retired Maj. Gen. Tammy Smith, who served as master of ceremonies. “Not because their careers fell short in any way, but because they shined so brightly in a military that cast them aside as unworthy.”
As former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall observed, what stood out to him was “how similar these read to those of all other retirees, and to others still serving.”
The difference, he noted, is that this group was not allowed to continue wearing the uniform. “It is a huge injustice, and an enormous loss to our nation.”
The ceremony was presided over by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose remarks were as direct as his reputation for leadership.
“This isn’t complicated,” McChrystal said. “We’ve got to leverage every bit of talent that this nation has.” Excluding people who meet every standard weakens readiness and undermines the values the military is meant to defend, he said. (snip-MORE; each retiree gets to share, too)
The voices of artists and activists illuminate the human experience behind the AIDS epidemic.
From a photograph of David Wojnarowicz’s audio cassette tapes, 1987-89 and undated in Voice=Survival, 2017 via JSTOR
By: Liz Tracey
When approaching recent historical events, where the scope of destruction and loss can be unfathomable in scale, oral history can bring both connection and immediacy through individual stories of loss, grief, rescue, or triumph that would otherwise disappear in the grand sweep of “Great Men and their Deeds.”
Scholar Indira Chowdhury describes the approach:
[T]he method enables the documentation of certain aspects of historical experience that are often missing from other kinds of historical sources. Oral historians not only interview and engage in conversation with living sources, they also find themselves challenged in a unique way—the historian is transformed into a protagonist in the dialogue. Oral history is perhaps the only field where the sources talk back to the historian, confronting, disputing, disrupting, and sometimes resisting the historian’s understanding of the past (Frisch 1990; Shopes 2012). Oral history works with the interviewee as a partner in dialogue and the verbal form historical truth can take is always co-constructed (Cook and Goodall 2013; Goodall and Cadzow 2009; Portelli 1991).
Some of the most effective (and affecting) projects using this approach concern communities that may be far outside of the audience’s experience, whether due to time, geography, or identity. Works like Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, Hard Times by Studs Terkel, and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy document their subjects through the voices of those who lived through specific moments and events that can be overwhelming or remain unknown without a more interpersonal method.
“Many of the best works about this disease have been produced by people at various stages of HIV infection.”
The history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has recently become the subject of numerous oral history projects, where the stories of survivors, caregivers, activists, and health care professionals have been collected and made available online, traditionally published, and edited into documentaries.
One such collection, Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic, was begun in 2015 by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art after receiving a grant from The Keith Haring Foundation. Haring founded the foundation in 1989, a year before his death from HIV-related illness, to maintain his artistic and philanthropic legacy. The project interviewed forty artists about their lives, their work, and how the AIDS crisis intersected and permeated both.
The interviews in the Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic collection cover wide ranges of personal and creative history, ranging from insider gossip and “name-dropping” to theoretical discussions of method and art history. They benefit from interviewers who bring their own experience as artists, art scholars, and historians to the conversation, with questions and insights that make this collection a rich multifaceted history of AIDS, the arts, and activism.
In his 1990 article, journalist Richard Goldstein wrote about the deep relationship between art about AIDS and its creators. “One senses in much art about AIDS a sense of familiarity with its subject,” Goldstein writes,
as if the artist were immersed in dealing with the epidemic—as so many are. Many of the best works about this disease have been produced by people at various stages of HIV infection. Perhaps they have lost a lover, nursed a dear friend, or attended a dozen funerals at a young age, and feel themselves to be, in every sense, set apart by the experience. They are implicated. Their art signifies a collective trauma—mass death in the midst of life.
Reveal Digital, an initiative “to amplify important, long-overlooked voices of the twentieth century,” has made these histories, and more, available in their developing open access collection HIV, AIDS and the Arts.
“I still can’t believe—I still don’t believe that AIDS even existed and wiped out our community in the ’80s, just wiped off our community from the history. It’s unbelievable to me. Everybody who held my—who carried my history is dead.” —Nan Goldin
The initial public responses by the US government to the first years of the epidemic were jokes at the expense of the ill at press conferences. President Reagan didn’t publicly say the word “AIDS” until 1985, four years after the first reported cases and two months after family friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS-related complications. That same year, Ryan White, a hemophiliac teenager with AIDS in Indiana, was prevented from returning to school after his diagnosis, and his family had to move after someone shot into their home.
One year later, William F. Buckley published a New York Times op-ed calling for HIV-positive people to be tattooed on the upper arm and buttocks to protect others (assuming that would protect both future sexual partners and intravenous drug users who might share needles). News reports about the disease largely focused on fear of contagion, the promiscuity and danger of gay men, and the threat of HIV to “normal” Americans.
Information about treatments for the many opportunistic infections that HIV made people vulnerable to was gathered in the early years by those under threat. Newsletters like “AIDS Treatment News” were photocopied and sold at LGBTQ bookstores, and buyers clubs imported potential treatments not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration or available in the US. These groups and others, working with health care providers, had to become experts and educators at a time when US Congress was successfully prohibiting the use of funding from the Centers for Disease Control for education and prevention materials that would “promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.”
In the interviews gathered in the Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic collection, artists describe how they first became aware of AIDS: from a loved one diagnosed after an illness; from hearing of a friend’s passing after not seeing them for a while; from a doctor telling them to stay with a partner because “there’s something going around”; or by learning of their own diagnosis. Friends were lost to the disease, and surviving family members denied the illness or sometimes actively excluded partners from funerals.
Sur Rodney (Sur), a New York City-based writer, gallery co-director, and archivist, relates that the late artist David Wojnarowicz would go to his local bodega in New York City where the clerks returned his change in a paper bag, out of fear. He describes his own anxieties when stepping in after a friend’s death to help save and archive their artworks and collections so they wouldn’t be destroyed (before there were nonprofit organizations to do so).
These personal experiences unfolded within the larger context of governmental indifference, active discrimination against people with the disease (or belonging to groups that were deemed “at risk”), and a growing consciousness of the political landscape of the epidemic. Robert Vasquez-Pacheco, a member of ACT UP and Gran Fury, recounts,
as I was becoming more and more politically aware, I became more and more pissed off, you know, because I was seeing. I was beginning to understand how women were being treated. I had an understanding, a firsthand understanding, of how people of color are treated, you know, because I knew that. But then I started to understand the institutional stuff and all of that, and consequently, as a gay man. So I started to put all of this stuff together and I was just super pissed off.
Some version of this process, repeated for many of the subjects, led people to activism, whether through art, volunteer work, protest, or sometimes all three. Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023), a visual artist and member of the fierce pussy collective, describes the progression in her interview.“Because when people were dying,” she explains,
we just kept going. […] You went to a funeral, and then you were out on the streets. Or you were at a meeting, and then you went to a hospital to take care of someone and feed them. Feed someone’s cats, walk their dog, help someone move. You know? These things just—we didn’t have any—I didn’t have any room or perspective on it. It was just what was happening.
The meetings she, and others, refer to were those of ACT UP New York (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which began in 1987 at a community meeting where Larry Kramer asked, “How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?” Kramer, a playwright and essayist who had been covering AIDS since the beginning through journalism, had co-founded the non-profit Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982. His play The Normal Heart, an impassioned call to action, spurred members of the audience to meet and subsequently take part in one of the most significant and effective activist movements of the twentieth century.
The artistic works of those interviewed are diverse, both in media and approach: photographing people living with AIDS, using détournement to turn existing works into calls to action via graphic design, or using their body to confront audiences with the existence of the disease through performance. In some cases, their illness became an essential component of their art: John Dugdale, a former commercial photographer, began using nineteenth-century methods to capture and produce his work after HIV-related retinitis and a stroke left his sight significantly impaired. Ron Athey, one of the NEA Four, used his own HIV-positive body to create work exploring sex, trauma, and desire. The place of the artist within (or outside) a community could become a contentious issue, especially at a time when representation of people with AIDS was so fraught.
Rosalind Fox Solomon, whose 1988 show Portraits in the Time of AIDS featured photographs of the subject alone or with loved ones, some with visible lesions or in the hospital, relates that her project was critically panned and called “exploitative” at the time.
As another “outsider” to the communities she photographed, Nan Goldin reports that she encountered similar criticism for her exhibition The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, despite her immersion in the cultures she documented. In the book of the collected photographs, she writes, “I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.”
Some of the most vibrant, and now iconic, images of AIDS were created as (and for) protest: Silence = Death, the work of the Silence = Death Collective (and not ACT UP, as Avram Finkelstein relates in his interview) became the primary pictorial representation of ACT UP and a rallying slogan for the fight against the disease. Keith Haring did his own take on it for a poster, adding “Ignorance = Fear” to a “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” scene.
Collectives like Gran Fury and fierce pussy, which organized inside the ACT UP activist group, created posters for wheat-pasting that served as art, education, and calls to action around AIDS, homophobia, health care, and visibility. Whether newsprint works of text, guerrilla-installed bus station “ads,” or rolls of stickers of bloody hands announcing “One AIDS Death Every 10 Minutes,” the art of AIDS activism used any means available to communicate the urgency of the crisis.
The Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic collection demonstrates the power of oral history to preserve not just historical events, but what it felt like to live in the moment and survive it when so many people did not. Together with Reveal Digital’s HIV, AIDS, and the Arts archive, the collection ensures that these voices, experiences, and creative histories continue to be available to inform and educate future generations.
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Birds (Sources: Birdsandblooms, Blair Benson, Bill Duncan, Blair Benson, JM Arment, Hummingbird centarl)
It’s June 1, which means Pride Month begins again today. It’s my seventh Pride. I remember my first one, seven years ago—terrified and excited, going out dressed in the clothes I felt best in, using the name I wanted to use for the first time in public. I had people with me that day, people I found safety with, people who helped me grow into the person I am now. Seven years later, so sure of myself and so comfortable in my skin, I look back on those moments as some of the best of my life. And now, this year, as I have every year, I watch the new flock—countless in number—who are wearing rainbow colors and joining a family that will show them more love than they have ever known. They are arriving even after a political winter that was, by any measure, cold and brutal to all of us. It is watching them that has me thinking about the beauty of what we witness starting today.
This year, I took up birding. I always thought it was a silly hobby, but my wife Zooey encouraged me to point my camera at a new subject. I first did so on the Pattee Canyon trail up in Missoula—and caught, soaring in place, a single red-tailed hawk, just hovering, watching the ground below. I stared at it for a while in awe. That was all it took. And the timing was perfect, because in the weeks that followed I stumbled into the best time to be a birder: spring migration. Wave after wave of orioles, tanagers, flycatchers, and warblers of every different color and size came pouring through. I didn’t even know there were so many birds. It made me realize that for most of my life I had been walking through the world completely unaware of the beauty around me—that there was this entire world that had always been there, just waiting for me to lay eyes on it.
What I also didn’t know was the incredible journeys so many of these birds had taken just to be here—how far they had traveled to find the flocks they’d spend the season with, to build nests, to raise families, to simply exist in a place that could sustain them. The Prothonotary Warbler I spotted in the marsh? It spent the winter in the mangrove swamps of Central America, then crossed the entire Gulf of Mexico in a single flight—more than 600 miles of open water, eighteen hours in the air with nowhere to land. It had to travel that far just to find its family. And the most stunning thing about a bird like that—one that has gone through so much, that has flapped its wings until it has exhausted itself and left everything behind? It arrived here in the most brilliant gold you’ve ever seen, and began to sing. The Prothonotary Warbler isn’t nearly the only species that does this. Ruby throated hummingbirds, blackpoll warblers, bobolinks… all take incredible journeys.
I was unaware of all of this before I took up birding. It makes me wonder how much else I walk right past without seeing. I remember before I came out, I didn’t know how rich this chosen family was, how many different people were also queer like me. I had no idea that once I came out, I’d find so many of them had been here all along. They were just waiting for me, and all I had to do was stop and look and embrace something new. And I did, and an entire world opened up. I love moments like this, where life teaches you something about itself, and you realize that diversity and surprise might just be the best things it has to offer.
Today, as Pride begins, I am reminded that every single person who has made it here, put on their colors, and found their family has survived something difficult. Every one of them has just lasted through a winter where our rights were systematically stripped away. Politicians who hate us have spent the year dismantling everything we built—healthcare ripped from hospitals, identities stripped from documents. Corporations that once draped themselves in rainbows every June are nowhere to be found. Some of us have quite literally migrated to entirely new states looking for safety. And our gulf crossing this year was met with heavy headwinds.
And yet, so many of us still made it. This year, you will see your city streets filled with rainbows. This year, countless new people will celebrate their first Prides. People will put on the clothes that fit them best. People will love in ways they didn’t know how to before. People will dance and sing, and others will have no choice but to acknowledge our existence, because when we arrive, we do not do so quietly. Every single person you see in the streets this month is a testament to our resilience, and a reminder to the fact that this is a journey we have been making since the beginning of human existence. We call it something different now. We carve out a specific month for it. But we have always been here, and we have always had to search for ways to express ourselves, be ourselves, and find our kin.
Maybe birding is a silly hobby. Maybe dragging myself out of bed before dawn—and I am not a morning person, I might add—is more trouble than it’s worth. Birders look ridiculous. We stuff our pants into our socks so the ticks don’t climb up our legs. We carry binoculars and absurdly large cameras into places where everyone else is just taking a walk. But I think there is something more to it than that, something that opened my eyes to the way the world moves around me—something I wasn’t expecting to find when I first pointed a camera at a hawk and couldn’t look away. I think I understand something about this month that I didn’t understand before because of it. Pride isn’t just a celebration, it’s a testament to survival and a refusal to be quiet even after the journey. It’s putting on your most brilliant colors after the longest winter of your life. And I’m so glad we made it one more year.
Happy Pride.
Scottie's Playtime 