History and Gay Marriage

"The President has long believed that gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights and legal protections as straight couples. That's why he has called for repeal of the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" and determined that his Administration would no longer defend the constitutionality of DOMA in the courts. The states should determine for themselves how best to uphold the rights of their own citizens. The process in New York worked just as it should."

After hearing that the bill passed, Mary Rodriguez, in white, cheered at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, where the gay-rights movement began more than 40 years ago. Photograph © Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times.

The opening passage I've lifted above is from a statement the White House released in response to the vote last night in Albany (the capitol of New York State) to legalize same-sex marriage. If this is Obama's position - and apparently it is - I wonder if he recalls the phrase "Jim Crow," which was the system by which States in the American South institutionalized the bigotry of the white population toward African-Americans for decades and decades. Among the problems with Obama's unwillingness to look to history for lessons that might guide us moving forward is that he ends up looking like a fool. In the current debate this means that state after state can enshrine religious bigotry in law by withholding equal protection of the laws from gay citizens. After all, New York is one of just six states (plus DC, of course) that have legalized same-sex marriage. And, according to this report in The New York Times: "Dozens more states have laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage." Does Obama think "the process" worked just as it should in all those jurisdictions too? And, as The Times also reports, let's be perfectly clear too - the NY legislation was carefully drafted to insure that private and religious organizations can continue to discriminate against gay and lesbian citizens. This accommodation enshrines bigotry.

Having said all that, I am ambivalent about the entire preoccupation with marriage. Legislation allowing gay men and lesbians to marry is important insofar as it allows them certain legal rights and privileges that might otherwise be withheld from them. On the other hand it also clearly is an example of the normalization of gay liberation - homosexuals now are free to be just like heterosexuals. The aims of gay and lesbian politics turn out to be not so "queer" after all. (I myself would prefer that legal status and political-economic benefits be more clearly disentangled from one's marital status altogether.) And when I saw the photo above, taken at celebrations around the Stonewall Inn last night, I wonder at the irony of that political transformation.*
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P.S.: This conclusion may seem odd or unsubstantiated. And I hardly am an expert on the topic. So, what follows is a passage from this recent interview with my colleague Douglas Crimp who is extremely articulate about such matters and from whom I have learned a tremendous amount.

"I think . . . that something of an enormous shift happened in the wake (sic) of AIDS toward a conservative gay culture where issues like fighting for equal rights to marriage and to fight in the military took precedence over what I think of as a truly queer culture, which is a culture that wants to change how we think about forms of human relations in a much more general sense. I still feel very much what I learned from early second wave feminism, which was the critique of marriage as an institution and how marriage actually served governance as a way of managing the complexity of relations that are possible among people.

One of the greatest gains of the gay liberation movement and the general liberation movements around sexuality and gender was the possibility of rethinking all kinds of questions of affective relationships so that among gay men for example, if you stop thinking about finding Mr. Right, finding a lover or finding a marriage partner, and rather think about possibly sexualizing friendship, maintaining friendly relations with people whom you have had a romantic relationship or having fuck buddies, then a whole proliferation of ways of connecting with others opens up."

Representing Complexity in Graphics

I have posted here numerous times on Ed Tufte and his work on data graphics. I've been working on and off for a while on a paper linking his views with more explicitly political graphics. So, here is an interesting convergence.

Tufte's first book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information concludes like this:

"What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult - that is, the revelation of the complex."

And here is part of a conversation with my colleague Douglas Crimp that you can find at the ACT UP Oral History Project in which he discusses the graphical strategies that activists in ACT UP devised in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

"I think that maybe one of the great things that ACT UP was able to do was to figure out ways of putting a certain complexity into sloganeering. Silence Equals Death is an extremely vague, and at the same time, extremely resonant image text, that, I mean, the way I wrote about it in AIDS Demo Graphics was that it was partly because one doesn’t necessarily immediately know what it means; what that pink triangle is, for example; why it’s upside down, in relation to the way it was historically used; how it was historically used. That’s not all right there. And yet, it became incredibly resonant for that very reason. So I think that there are ways, graphically and textually, to constitute a certain complexity. And I think that that was one of the achievements of the graphic and other representational work that ACT UP did."

The conversation took place in the spring of 2007, and Crimp is reflecting on events two decades earlier. The remarkable similarity between his language and Tufte's struck me. What strikes me too is that the ACT UP graphics really are data graphics. This is true not just because of the central mathematical symbol in Silence = Death, but because of the statistical materials that appeared in many other ACT UP graphics.

Annals of Fair Use: Douglas Crimp

"Q: How does this show relate to the Shepard Fairey controversy?

A: These were among the artists who tested the copyright laws and the whole notion of appropriating images became a kind of discourse, so younger artists could pick up on it very easily.

Q: Do you think the Fairey controversy is making a mountain out of a molehill, because we've already established the appropriateness of this type of use by artists?

A: No, because copyright is still a huge legal issue. I myself have huge issues with the notion of "fair use"---whether or not a critic should be able to publish an image without having to pay huge rights fees or, for that matter, to clear the text with the estate of the artist to make sure that they control what can be said. I think that copyright comes into conflict with critical discourse."

This exchange comes from an interview Douglas gave at the opening of a current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition The "Pictures Generation, 1974-1984" focusing on artists who "worked in all mediums—photography chief among them—to explore how images shape our perceptions of ourselves and the world." Douglas was the curator of the early (1977) exhibition of this work mentioned in the Met press release. I think he is right on point in his qualms regarding "fair use."

Alvin Baltrop . Douglas Crimp

The cover story at ArtForum this month (February 08) is a very brief essay by my colleague Douglas Crimp on the photography of Alvin Baltrop. The essay itself is sandwiched between 10 of Baltrop's "Pier Photographs." This is an immense series of photos which he he took from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s chronicling the lives and travails of gay men (and sometimes women) who sought sanctuary and sex amid the dangerous decrepitude of the "abandoned" piers along the lower West Side of Manhattan. Until reading the essay today I'd not heard of Baltrop, who died in 2004. The striking thing that both Baltrop's photos and Douglas's essay reveal is how the need to define and redefine oneself can lead members of marginalized populations to appropriate putatively abandoned spaces in which to do so. The piers might be viewed as landscapes of desperation or as sites of innovation and experimentation.

World AIDS Day, 2006

I want to mark World AIDS Day in several ways. The first is to recall the early politics of AIDS in the US. Here I recommend this book AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS by my colleague here at Rochester Douglas Crimp (along with Adam Rolston). First published in 1990, it is now, unfortunately, out of print. If you are interested in visual politics and the uses of photography I urge you to track it down. I assign it in my freshman seminar and find that the history it chronicles - the way ACT UP New York created strategies to render the ongoing epidemic visible - can help inspire students to think about how they might use their (often considerable) talents for critical political purposes.

This now familiar graphic is among those crafted early on by members of ACTUP New York (actually by a precursor group that worked cooperatively with them). The message it conveys remains powerful. In that respect, I want, second, I want to call attention to the UNAIDS web page where you can locate information on the toll the global AIDS/HIV edpidemic continues to take.

Finally, a bit of promotion for a journal I edit for the American Political Sccience Association called Perspectives on Politics. The December issue (Volume 4, #4) should be out soon - not exactly "on the newwsstands" but surely in a local college library. It contains a short symposium co-edited by Meredith Weiss and Michael Bosia to mark the 25th Anniversary of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In my editorial introduction I write:

"The issue opens, by design, with ... a symposium entitled "25 Years at the Margins: The Global Politics of HIV/AIDS." I say ‘by design’ because the symposium is intended to commemorate the initial scientific documentation of the HIV virus in 1981. However, our aim in publishing, and indeed in leading off with, the symposium is not simply to commemorate. Whether explicitly or implicitly all of the contributions to the symposium also remonstrate with the discipline and its intellectual priorities. As Andrea Densham points out in her introduction, with a handful of prominent exceptions, political scientists largely have neglected the comparative, domestic, and international politics of HIV/AIDS. The remaining four contributions make no claim to be comprehensive but aim instead to indicate the scope and scale of the ongoing AIDS epidemic and some of its political causes and consequences across a diverse array of cases - France, South Africa, Brazil, Barbados, Malaysia and Singapore. By implication the contributors highlight too the scope and scale of our neglect.

Upon reading the penultimate version of the symposium I considered the possibility that this charge might perhaps be overstated. As far as I have been able to ascertain, it is not. A quick search on JSTOR and the Social Science Citation Index suggests that with only extremely rare exceptions, over the past quarter century none of the top dozen or so general or specialized journals in the discipline or its primary sub-fields have published so much as a single research article directly addressing the politics of HIV/AIDS. I am sure that that claim will be challenged but I also am confident that any correction I might be compelled to make will be marginal. The exceptions, if any might be found, will prove the rule. It is crucial to add that we political scientists cannot simply plead ignorance or irrelevance here, since as long ago as 1992 Kenneth Sherrill, Carolyn Somerville and Robert Bailey had indicated quite forcefully "What Political Science is Missing By Not Studying AIDS" (PS: Political Science & Politics 25(4):688-93). Having said all that, I implore you not to read this symposium simply as an indictment. That would be a mistake. The contributors to the symposium are extending an invitation, one imploring that we focus our intellectual energies and research skills on what indisputably remains a very urgent set of political problems. I urge political scientists to accept the invitation. Indeed, the pages of Perspectives on Politics would provide a perfect forum for the results that such inquiry might generate."