A couple weeks ago, I was wandering around the Art Institute of Chicago in a daze. I’m the kind of person who adds snarky Snapchat captions to pretty much any painting produced between the Renaissance and 1900, but this contemporary art gallery was absolutely transporting me. I was wide-eyed and probably slackjawed as I wound through the exhibit -- until I turned into gallery 295A.
Sitting in the corner of that particular gallery was a huge pile of candies with rainbow-brilliant wrappers that caught the overhead light. At first, I figured it was some Duchamp follower trying to say something about the way Western culture glorifies sugar, perhaps, or just trying to be funny, but then I read the plaque on the wall near it.
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), 1991. By Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Ideal weight: 175 pounds, the weight of Gonzalez-Torres’s partner before he contracted HIV. Visitors are invited to take candy from the pile; the diminishing pile mimics Ross wasting away from AIDS.
At least, those are approximately the words on the plaque. They kind of blurred together in my head.
About then, a small group of high schoolers entered the gallery. They, like me, were a little confused about what the pile of candy was for. I dimly recall stepping aside so they could read the plaque, but I don’t know if they did. One of the boys asked the security guard if they could take some candy, and she said they could each have one piece. They were all so jazzed about the free candy.
I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t look at the pile, either. My brain felt like a scratched CD -- everything skipping, everything garbled. I left that gallery as fast as I could manage. What must it have been like, I wondered, to just take some of that candy? To consume it? Had they sucked on it till it dissolved on their tongues, or had they chewed it -- crushed it?
The thought of taking a piece had barely crossed my mind, and I still felt dirty somehow. Greedy. Complicit.
~~~
Two years ago, during my last semester of undergrad, I participated in an LGBT reading group led by two of my favorite professors. I’d known I was bisexual for about three years at that point, but I’d never been told much about queer history, or really made an effort to learn more. I was content to just be, to revel in the fact that I had finally stopped kidding myself -- that is, until this reading group came along. We tackled Calvin Trillin’s Remembering Denny first and then moved on to Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Every week for a solid two months, I walked out of that classroom feeling as blissfully dazed as I later would at the Art Institute of Chicago. I’d never felt this connected to the past before. I’d never torn into history books as eagerly as I did that semester, while writing a paper on the lesbian experience during and after World War II. These are my people, I kept thinking. This is my history. It wasn’t as if I’d felt lonely before, necessarily, but it still made me giddy to know that I had never been alone.
And then there was the third book on our list. Borrowed Time, by Paul Monette. It’s a beautifully written memoir about his partner Roger dying from AIDS. Monette himself would succumb to the same disease a few years after Roger -- much like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died five years after Ross did. We discussed the first few chapters of Borrowed Time in reading group, and when I walked out of that classroom, I was a completely different kind of dazed. I felt like I’d seen a ghost. I tried to write about it then, about the crushing sense of loss that had settled heavily on my shoulders like an albatross. That blog post has been sitting in my drafts, gathering dust, ever since. I was never brave enough to publish it.
Too many times after last year’s election, people tried to tell me that we’d get through this, whatever horrors this would come to represent. We survived Reagan, we’ll survive this. I wonder if they’ve seen the statistics, seen the number of people who died from AIDS in the 1980s alone. I wonder if they know how criminally underfunded HIV research was. I wonder if they’ve heard the archival audio from White House press briefings in the early 1980s, in which Lester Kinsolving kept asking Reagan’s press secretary what the Reagan Administration was going to do about AIDS, despite the derisive chuckles he got from the other members of the press pool. Do they remember when, to quote filmmaker Scott Calonico, AIDS was funny? Do they remember ACT UP, or the die-ins? Do they remember anything?
Obviously, the nation as an entity survived Reagan. But so, so many of its people didn’t -- and now my peers and I, the first post-AIDS-crisis generation of LGBTQ people, have to contend with this huge, bloody gap in our history. We have our own Lost Generation, haunting us through the AIDS quilt and a memorial Instagram account and in so many other ways. How the hell do we cope with that? How the hell do we do them any sort of justice?
I don’t know. I wish I did.
~~~
It took me probably another half-hour to finish meandering through the contemporary art gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. I pushed open the glass door, and a nearby new media installation caught my eye -- or my ear, rather, because the volume was turned up so high and the sound was often so strident that I had heard it from the other end of the hallway, when I first entered the contemporary exhibit. Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, by Dara Birnbaum. Two TVs mounted on what I think are A/V equipment cases, both showing a video loop. I took a couple steps toward the TVs before my mind caught up with my feet, and then I noticed something shiny on the floor nearby.
It was one of Ross’s candy wrappers.
I only hesitated for a second. I picked up the wrapper, put it in my jacket pocket, and walked away as Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry blared on behind me.
