This article was downloaded by: [University of California Santa Cruz] On: 23 January 2012, At: 14:54 Publisher:

Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20

Talkin' 'Bout Meta-Generation: ACT UP History and Queer Futurity

Pascal Emmer Available online: 19 Jan 2012

To cite this article: Pascal Emmer (2012): Talkin' 'Bout Meta-Generation: ACT UP History and Queer Futurity, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 98:1, 89-96 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638664

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 98, No. 1, February 2012, pp. 8996

Talkin Bout Meta-Generation: ACT UP History and Queer Futurity

Pascal Emmer
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012

In 2008, I attended an archive and storytelling exhibition celebrating ACT UP Philadelphias 20th anniversary. At the time, Philadelphias chapter was among the last remaining in the national ACT UP movement. The exhibition, therefore, became more than commemorative; it was vibrant and dialogic. A throng of past and present ACT UP members, older and younger queer activists, allies, and AIDS service providers gathered to discuss their experiences of ACT UP against a backdrop of ephemera, banners, and photographs. Everyone appeared eager to contribute to an archive that had been two decades in the making. One story in particular captivated the entire rooms attention. Asia Russell, an international AIDS activist and veteran ACT UP member, recounted the time when she and fellow member, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, were arrested during a demonstration in Washington, DC, in 1998. Thousands of AIDS activists from around the US converged on the nations capital to demand access to affordable HIV medications for people in the global south. The scale of the crowd drew federal as well as local law enforcement. Russell explained how she and other activists could identify the federal agents by the black, knee-high leather boots they wore. As Kuromiya and Russell lay on their stomachs, hands cuffed behind their backs, Kuromiya began to lick the boots of his arresting officer. Without comment, the agent bent over and slowly tightened the cuffs around Kuromiyas wrists. Russell, witnessing this spectacle unfold, pointedly asked her friend, What are you doing?! to which Kuromiya hissed under his breath, Shh, Im having a scene.1 Russells account evoked what Roland Barthes described as a punctum*an image that pricks ones consciousness, opening one to a whole new affective field. The punctum . . . is a kind of subtle beyond*as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see.2 I had never met Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who, before his death in 2000, had left an indelible mark on AIDS activism. Nevertheless, I felt like I knew him. Through its retelling, his story became a collective memory, in which the
Pascal Emmer is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is currently working on an oral history project of ACT UP Philadelphia. He is also a founding member of Hearts on a Wire, a Philadelphia-based trans justice collective, and co-author of the report This is a Prison, Glitter is Not Allowed: Experiences of Trans and Gender Variant People in Pennsylvanias Prison Systems. Correspondence to: Pascal Emmer, University of California, Santa Cruz, Sociology, Santa Cruz, USA. Email: pemmer@ucsc.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2012 National Communication Association http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638664

90 P. Emmer

collective expanded to include multiple generations of ACT UP Philadelphia. The distance in both history and familiarity between myself and Kuromiya, as well as elders present at the exhibition, seemed to dissolve. Other younger activists like myself have articulated similar feelings of affinity with older activists who populate the stories and media about ACT UPs history.3 Deborah Gould discusses the power of emotions to nourish resistance within the ACT UP movement by expanding its political imagination and mobilizing people.4 I believe generation constitutes an important site for exploring this kind of political potential of affect when relating ACT UPs history to contemporary AIDS activism. Generation is an affective realm in which to acknowledge the somewhat ineffable weight of collective loss. In this sense, Kuromiyas story attends to Barthes second interpretation of punctum*a wound. Mixed with feelings of affinity and inspiration at the exhibition was a profound sense of loss*of past and potential lovers, friends, comrades, and mentors. When discussing the possibilities for intergenerational dialogue in relation to ACT UP, this loss is unavoidable. And yet, Kuromiyas scene compels precisely because it addresses desire in the face of an impasse. With neoliberalism eroding the social gains made by prior leftist movements, including ACT UP, Kuromiya, by way of example, exhorts us to channel our imaginations into new possibilities and avenues for action. His scene is motivating as political allegory, but I believe it also speaks to a greater yearning for mutual recognition, across a chasm of collective loss, between activists of different generations. Otherwise, how is it that I left the exhibition not only with new memes of community history in my consciousness, but also an aftertaste of leather on my lips and a phantom throbbing in my wrists? The transmission of ACT UPs movement histories is indispensable to the potential for what Jose Esteban Munoz calls queer futurity, or a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity.5 Roger Hallas argues that ACT UPs material and visual archive alone cannot guarantee such transmission; ACT UPs histories must be discussed if they are to be preserved and put in the service of AIDS activism today, and this requires intergenerational dialogue.6 Establishing the grounds for such dialogue necessitates a look at the framing of generational relations. A lingering effect of queer collective loss is seen in the difficulty of prefiguring a radical cross-generational relationality, the language for which is further challenged by dominant generational paradigms. As scholars of feminist movement history point out, intergenerationality amongst activists can be troubled by a hegemonic rhetoric of generation, which reifies oppositions . . . of strict chronological categories, courts ageism, inscribes heteronormative familial structures, and posits generation as a screen for other political differences.7 In thinking about the transmission of ACT UPs histories, how do we address relationality without falling prey to these rhetorical pitfalls, nor conceding a liberal optimism that disavows difference, generational or otherwise? I propose the term meta-generation to describe a radically alternative arrangement of generational relations present in ACT UP Philadelphia. As an organization,

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012

ACT UP History and Queer Futurity 91

it is both intergenerational, comprised of people of different ages, and multigenerational, collaboratively run by people from different eras of ACT UP. These intergenerational and multigenerational phenomena are not necessarily correlated, however. For example, Russell, who is in her mid-thirties, joined ACT UP in her late teens. Now considered an old head in the group, she has mentored several new members who are nearly twice her age. In other words, generational dynamics and mentoring move around multiple axes without predetermined hierarchies.8 I use the term meta-generation to define the particular crosshatching of intergenerational and multigenerational dynamics at work in ACT UP Philadelphias organizing culture, historically and presently.9 Meta-generation creates a vibrant framework for viewing the transmission of history. It asks: On what terms is this transmission conducted? Rather than bifurcating ACT UPs history and current queer/AIDS politics into discrete objects of study, to which an older generation and a younger generation respectively belong, ACT UP Philadelphias meta-generational culture grapples with the continuities and discontinuities of its various phases through the working relationships of its members. Another index of meta-generationality resides in the fact that many longstanding and new members alike bring to ACT UP their experience with and historical knowledge of other social justice movements.10 These members conversations cross-pollinate ideas, foster mutual learning, and situate ACT UP Philadelphias particular history in a larger context of movement history, including and beyond AIDS activism.11 In the meta-generational structure of ACT UP Philadelphia, the organizations history is not simply transmitted*it is discussed, contested, and retold from different perspectives. This sustained engagement with history engenders the possibility for stimulating and productive exchange amongst queer leftists of different generations in (and of) ACT UP. In many scholarly accounts of ACT UP, the histories of specific chapters have often come to stand in for an entire movements history.12 The venerable chapters that existed in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, for example, doubtless offer invaluable movement histories from which to glean insights for current AIDS activism. The issue is that ACT UP typically gets periodized between 1987 and 1995, when these chapters were (most) active. Consequently, the dominant portrayal of ACT UP eclipses the nearly twenty years since that time, during which surviving chapters, including ACT UP Philadelphia, have continued and innovated their strategies to fight AIDS at the local, national, and international level.13 The conflation of movement history with the fate of select ACT UP chapters casts ACT UP as a political phenomenon of the past, distinctly and necessarily separate from any grassroots AIDS organizing today. Perhaps an inevitable tension that arises when representing any social movement made up of autonomous branches is in accounting for the constellation of multiple histories and presents that emerge.14 Nonetheless, a sole emphasis on retrospection in considering ACT UPs history, in contrast to contemporary AIDS activism, naturalizes a certain generational gap between queer leftists. It assumes that ACT UP participants are of a bygone era of the AIDS movement and that younger activists could not be part of ACT UP.

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012

92 P. Emmer

This requires an elision of currently active chapters that foster multi- and/or intergenerational organizing. By introducing the term meta-generational, I offer a different reading of generational organizing in regard to ACT UPs history. Meta-generational work is politically significant on multiple counts. According to several current and former members I interviewed, this work largely contributed to ACT UP Philadelphias sustainability during and after the movements decline in the mid-1990s. Because it survived, the organization possesses a strong institutional memory, which one interviewee described as its radical capital.15 ACT UP Philadelphia uses this radical mnemonic capital to inform the planning of its current campaigns and organizing strategies.16 Through meta-generational work, this resource of memory is organically shared in collective meetings and individual relationships.17 ACT UP Philadelphias past and present are in regular conversation when group members debate what tactics have hitherto been politically efficacious, what current conditions demand, and what alchemy of retro- and pro-spective imagination indicates the greatest hope for transformative action. Generations valence in the politics of memory became clear to me during a panel in New York in 2009, titled ACT UP Oral History Projects and Intergenerational Dialogue. An audience member asked how ACT UP was currently engaging young queer AIDS activists of color about its history. In response, I discussed the complexity ` of historical representation vis-a-vis ACT UP Philadelphias largest historic action, a protest against George H. W. Bush at the Bellevue Hotel in 1991. For this action, ACT UP worked in coalition with many disparate factions, including unions, feminist organizations, and We the People, a primarily black and Latina/o direct action group of people living with HIV/AIDS. ACT UP members hoisted a coffin filled with kitty litter in symbolic cremation of all those who died as a result of the Bush administrations genocidal negligence. At some point, the coffin fell across the police barricade, striking a cop. The police used this as a pretext to attack the activists with clubs. Members of ACT UP later filed suit against the Philadelphia Police Department for the brutal beatings that occurred. Mayor Ed Rendell signed an order prohibiting police from using violent force against ACT UP, which, over the next decade, enabled ACT UP to pull off a number of successful street demonstrations. I explained how some interviewees offered an alternate interpretation of the Bellevue Hotel protest and its significance for understanding the political context in which ACT UP operated in Philadelphia. They believed that part of the reason this instance of police brutality against ACT UP members garnered sympathetic media attention was due to the racial privilege of these members.18 Images on the nightly news of white men, their queerness notwithstanding, having their skulls cracked open by police batons had a political impact in a city with a deep history of racial injustice. Whereas local media had historically ignored or vilified people of color-led leftist formations who had suffered state violence, they portrayed AIDS activists as victims of excessive police misconduct. To a certain degree, this buffered ACT UP from severe state backlash, which allowed the organization to continue using civil disobedience as a tactic for years thereafter.19

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012

ACT UP History and Queer Futurity 93

In relaying this story, I argue that our movement histories are contradictory, and that sustaining a critical engagement with them is important if we are to draw lessons that ultimately propel us toward a queer futurity as Munoz advocates. Doing so moves us away from what Scott Tucker called the fatal attraction of telling simple stories.20 However, raising the question of social privilege, as an angle from which to view part of ACT UPs success, caused contention at the panel. A former ACT UP/ New York member refuted that any (white) gay activist confronting the state had such privilege, and another said such inquiries bordered on disrespect to the memory of deceased gay men who originally participated in ACT UP. What becomes the goal of transmitting movement histories if they are enshrined as relics*to be contemplated but not examined.21 How do we honor our movement histories while resisting the temptation to mythologize them? How can critical inquiry lead to a textured understanding of these histories, wherein discussion of their inherent contradictions may offer insight to current AIDS activists grappling with similar issues? Finally, how might we incorporate into a meta-generational framework those members who have passed? Examining how ACT UP Philadelphia has survived for nearly a quarter-century recognizes the extraordinary political work of an earlier era while marking the necessary shifts that secured the organizations viability. When many chapters folded due to untenable internal conflicts, ACT UP Philadelphia revitalized itself by forming Project TEACH (Treatment Education Activists Combating HIV) in 1996 to build activist leadership among Philadelphians most affected by AIDS, especially in communities of color.22 Original and contemporary ACT UP members collaborated to form TEACH, whose curriculum encompassed HIV treatment science, selfdetermination, and political organizing. Though TEACH was never formally part of ACT UP, dozens of its participants joined ACT UP and several of them became key leaders from the late 1990s onward.23 TEACH Outside then formed, expanding ACT UPs relationships with formerly incarcerated people living with HIV. In the mid1990s, ACT UP Philadelphia largely comprised of young white, HIV-negative anarchists. After TEACH, it was increasingly multi-racial and intergenerational. TEACH changed ACT UPs composition to reflect the trajectory of the epidemic. Many TEACH participants-cum-ACT UP members now serve as ineluctable community historians and organizers, bridging the old guard and the novice. In so doing, they are both successors to and producers of a meta-generational culture that continues in ACT UP Philadelphia today. In reflecting on ACT UPs 25th anniversary, we need a critical nostalgia24 regarding not just what histories we tell but how this very telling structures the rules of engagement between queer leftist generations. Such considerations complement Munozs critically utopian desire for a relationality that animates queer futurity.25 Confronted with an intensifying neoliberal regime, which presently acts as a reducing valve on our radical histories, and a certain Leftist melancholy,26 which largely ignores contemporary forms of activism, the question of generationality is particularly salient. I argue for a meta-generational approach to connecting ACT UPs past with the current AIDS movement, and the potential of a queer future, by

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012

94 P. Emmer

recognizing the multiple histories and presents available as political resources. Metagenerational work is urgently important because it constitutes an active and archival process; it interfaces past and present activist knowledges. In considering potential uses of memory work or lessons to be drawn from ACT UPs history, we must ask: What is at stake for the future of queer leftist politics and what does generational affinity have to do with it? Notes
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012
[1] Though many readers may already be familiar with this term, a scene in BDSM culture refers to a negotiated space of power play. Many ACT UP members, including Kuromiya, participated in the radical sexual culture of BDSM and brought its ethic of queer sex positivity to ACT UPs politics. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 59. See Lucas Hilderbrand, Retroactivism, GLQ 12 (2006): 30317. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UPs Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4647. Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 16. See Roger Hallas, The Witness in the Archives, The Scholar and the Feminist Online 2 (2003), http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline. See Jennifer Purvis, Girls and Women Together in the Third Wave: Embracing the Challenges of Intergenerational Feminism(s), Feminist Formations 16 (2004): 95; Lisa Hogeland, Against Generational Thinking, or Some Things That Third Wave Feminism Isnt, Women Studies in Communication 24 (2001): 10721; Judith Roof, Generational Difculties; or, The Fear of a Barren History, in Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue, ed. Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6987. I also thank Gina Velasco for her insights on the matter of generational discourse in feminist and queer social movement history. There remain hierarchies related to age and generation in the group, though they are polymorphous and therefore complicate a normative conceptualization of generational conict and difference. The meta-generational structure generally allows for a high degree of trust amongst group members in working productively to address these hierarchies. I make a case for the meta-generational character of ACT UP Philadelphia based on interviews I conducted with ACT UP members as well as observations I made during my involvement in the group. In my interviews with ACT UP members David Acosta, Sam Sitrin, and Val Sowell, they pointed out this fact. Che Gossett has done extensive research linking Kiyoshi Kuromiyas history in the Black Panther Party, Gay Liberation Front, and the anti-war movement to his activism in ACT UP. David Acosta, interview by Pascal Emmer (Philadelphia: ACT UP Philadelphia Oral History Project, August 22, 2008); Sam Sitrin, interview by Pascal Emmer (Philadelphia: ACT UP Philadelphia Oral History Project, September 2, 2011); Val Sowell, interview by Pascal Emmer (Philadelphia: ACT UP Philadelphia Oral History Project, August 31, 2011), AIDS and Social Justice. Che Gossett on AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiyas legacy and the intersections between all movements for liberation (June 13, 2006), http://aidsandsocialjustice.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/che-gossett-on-aids-activist-kiyoshikuromiyas-legacy-and-the-intersections-between-all-movements-for-liberation/. In this sense, ACT UP Philadelphias meta-generational culture speaks to the mutuality Sarah Shulman describes of an earlier ACT UP era and to Roger Hallas observation that

[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

ACT UP History and Queer Futurity 95

nostalgia for said mutuality is not restricted to the generations who participated in it. Hallas, The Witness in the Archives, 4. Scholars such as Jennifer Brier, Ann Cvetkovich, Deborah Gould, Roger Hallas, Lucas Hilderbrand, and Sarah Shulman, among others, have advanced signicant analyses and chronicled excellent histories of the ACT UP movement. I hope to add to their theoretical and historiographic contributions by posing the question of how a consideration of the ACT UP movement beyond the heyday of its most visible chapters might expand our understanding of the movements signicance to current AIDS activism. Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: US Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Gould, Moving Politics; Hallas, The Witness in the Archive; Hilderbrand, Retroactivism; Sarah Schulman, Symposium: Gentrication of the Mind, (2001), http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/symposium/ symposium_schulman.html. For information on ACT UP Philadelphias current activities, see http://www.actupphilly. org/. This is not an argument for a localist versus a movement account of history, nor for the privileging of one chapters history over anothers. The differences and fracturing between and within various chapters is not the focus of this piece. Rather, I am interested in how a focus on surviving chapters, in this case ACT UP Philadelphia, may broaden the movement discourse and open new possibilities for historiography. See Jeff Edwards, AIDS, Race, and the Rise and Decline of a Militant Oppositional Lesbian and Gay Politics, New Political Science 22 (2000): 495. Scott Tucker (original ACT UP Philadelphia member), interview by Pascal Emmer (Philadelphia: ACT UP Philadelphia Oral History Project, March 5, 2009). A recent example of this is the Condoms in Schools campaign, which ACT UP Philadelphia initiated in 1991 to change a policy to make condoms available in city public high schools. It won this change. However, by the mid-2000s this policy clearly wasnt enforced, so ACT UP revamped its campaign. It compared its original tactics against the structural changes in school administration, and mixed old strategies with new ones in its approach. When I joined ACT UP Philadelphia in 2006 I received an orientation kit for new members, which contained historical information and the original mission statement. I also learned a lot about ACT UPs history through meeting discussions and friendships I developed with longstanding members. The politics of civil disobedience (CD) are contentious. Clearly, not only white gay men in ACT UP partook in CD. Several queer activists of color, David Acosta, John Paul Hammond, and Kioshi Kuromiya among others, were involved in organizing the Bellevue Hotel protest. They brought to ACT UP the CD tactics they learned from previous civil rights and antiimperialist movements. When interviewed, Jose DeMarco pointed out that through the 1990s ACT UP Philadelphia successfully carried out street demonstrations in its own city without severe police interference. In other cities, such as New York and Washington, DC, police repression against AIDS activists was more pronounced. Jose DeMarco, interview by Pascal Emmer (Philadelphia: ACT UP Philadelphia Oral History Project, July 7, 2008). Scott Tucker (original ACT UP Philadelphia member), interviewby Pascal Emmer (Philadelphia: ACT UP Philadelphia Oral History Project, March 5, 2009). I thank Munira Lokhandwala for thoughtful discussions of this question. Jeff Edwards and Deborah Gould discuss racialized power asymmetries as one of many factors contributing to the destabilization of group solidarity within many ACT UP chapters

[12]

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012

[13] [14]

[15] [16]

[17]

[18]

[19]

[20] [21] [22]

96 P. Emmer

[23] [24]

[25] [26]

in the mid-1990s. Gould, Moving Politics, 330; Edwards, AIDS, Race, and the Rise and Decline. Suzy Subways and Pascal Emmer, AIDS Activism, Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action 9 (2009): 49, http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/09-aids-activism. James Clifford interprets Raymond Williams concept of critical nostalgia as a way to break with the hegemonic present by asserting the reality of a radical alternative. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, ed., Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 114. Munoz, Cruising Utopias, 10. For more on Leftist melancholy, see Wendy Brown cited in Melissa Gregg, Cultural Studies Affective Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 22.

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:54 23 January 2012