that’s part of our world tonight
by
Douglas Messerli
James
Wentzy (director and editor) Days of Desperation / 1994
My
husband and I, Howard Fox, will next week celebrate our 50th
anniversary as a couple, married now about 4 years, which matters little since
in 1970 we met and cemented a relationship that would—despite what any gay
relationship proffered as near impossible odds in those days—a commitment that
settled us into a kind of outside marriage that could not tear us apart, while
everything in our world in those days and much still now desires to. We fight
daily; perhaps most couples do. But we have such a long history now that
neither of us might imagine a separation, and I believe now that had we not met
that year I most certainly and perhaps Howard also, as I’ve expressed
elsewhere, might have died of AIDS. The year before, living in Manhattan and
Queens, I had gay sex nearly every evening. And Howard, that first night we met,
had suddenly become determined to pick-up guys; I was his first choice! We
were, after all, from that first generation of the dreadful plague, when little
was known about the disease or its transmission, and absolutely nothing was
known about possible cures or extensions of life.
The other day, a Facebook friend, John
Wier, sent me James Wentzy’s tape about the ACT UP protests of 1991, however,
that made me realize even further just how fortunate we were. That year, the apex
of AIDS illnesses, when young and older gay people were suffering more deaths
daily than the constantly news-reported deaths in the absurd wars of George H.
W. Bush in Iraq and elsewhere in the Gulf States and more gays and others had
died of AIDS than all those during the Viet Nam War, the gay-led movement ACT
UP suddenly took over network reports, most notably CBS’s Dan Rather’s nightly
news report, with Wier’s head popping up on screen, along with his friends Dale
Peck and Darrell Bowman together shouting “Fight AIDS, not Arabs.”
Seconds after the screen went black and,
with the intruders being carried off, Rather was returned into view apologizing
for the interruption and arguing that they had been attacked by some very “lewd
people.” I’ve always felt that Rather has been too exulted as a newscaster and
writer, but this truly confirms it to me. He had not perceived that his constant
reporting on the Gulf War, was totally ignoring the war at home that was
killing so many people of the LGBTQ community (in those days simply described
as “gays” and “lesbians”).
Wier, whom Wentzy allows to talk about
the event at some length, plays out the significance of those actions, quite
humorously and yet clearly painfully, including his personal family crises that
resulted—his father and brothers were all in the broadcasting industry—after
which his father finally seemingly came to comprehend just how important his
son’s action was. As Wier says, if I could influence just one person to perceive
the problem, particularly my father, then I had succeeded.
Meanwhile, at the same hour, Jon Greenberg,
Mark Lowe Fisher and Anna Blume, demonstrated at the studios of the PBS
MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, but were unable to reach the studio itself. Unlike
Rather, Jim Lehrer, who died this past week, later admitted that those protests
and the events that followed the next day, January 23rd, 1991—which
the ACT UP group described as the Day of Desperation Actions—in downtown New
York, Harlem and governmental offices throughout the city.
At 5:00 they joined up at Grand Central
Terminal, making it impossible for thousands of workers and tourists to make
their way to their trains. The protestors held large signs reading “Money for
AIDS, Not for War” and “One AIDS Death Every 8 Minutes,” holding hands and, as documentary
filmmaker Wentzy shows, sometimes laying down to block the commuters.
Their demonstration flier read:
Within
a matter of months the U.S. Government is able to house, feed and provide
health care for half a million people in the middle of the desert. But here at
home, the Federal Government continues to routinely deny these same basic
necessities to people living with AIDS. We wonder--as we fight a war for oil in
the Persian Gulf--whether President Bush and Congress are conscious of the desperate
state of the AIDS crisis in this country. We are. Through 10 years of this
plague and 10 years of Republican administrations, there remains no leadership.
After over-whelmingly (and with much fanfare) passing the C.A.R.E. Act (aka the
Ryan White Act), Congress and President Bush failed to appropriate the funds
necessary to implement this disaster relief. Why is it that when a hurricane or
earthquake hits--and causes mostly property damage and relatively few
deaths---federal dollars pour in? When a disease devastates whole communities
and kills more than 110,000 men, women and children--more than twice the number
of Americans killed in the Vietnam War--our leaders remain silent. And you
remain silent. Silence = Death.
Soon after these events, Mark Fischer
died of AIDS, and, a few years later, upon the death of another AIDS sufferer, Jon
Greenburg, a friend reads poignantly from the speech Greenburg had prepared for
Fischer’s funeral, but could not deliver because of his own illness at the
time. If there was ever a statement about how brave these desperate men and women
were this is it. I wish I might print out that entire previously undelivered
speech, but if you care at all you need to hear it as delivered in Wentzy’s
movie.
At the heart of these statements is just
how these young men and women where nervous, frightened, and doubtful about the
actions they were about to undertake, while yet realizing that if they didn’t
do so, their deaths would be suffered without consequence. They were not afraid
of dying as much as they were horrified for the suffering of so many others
before and after them. And they were justifiably angry. There was, as the speech
declares, “an otherness about their fears.”
By the time of Wentzy’s film, covering
the events of 1991, Howard and I were ensconced in rather lovely jobs, he as a
curator at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and then the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, and I, having, been an assistant professor at Temple
University in Philadelphia, going on to be a significant publisher, a poet,
fiction writer, and memoirist.
In short, we were sheltered somewhat from
the world this 1994 film recounts. But I feel slightly guilty for those facts.
I am glad that we narrowly escaped the AIDS crisis, but I do feel that, given
my stubborn beliefs in fairness and my love of the LGBTQ community, I might
have wanted to have been there to fight for those rights.
Wier, as an AIDS activist, seems at
moments to be slightly apologetic or at lease a bit sanguine for his actions;
but when he posted Wentzy’s film I immediately realized how proud he should be
and perhaps is.
Any growth in consciousness, in the US
awareness of what is truly happening, is a near miracle, given our recalcitrant
belief in our values, and those young men and women from 1991 helped to
accomplish that with acts small and large.
Goodnight Dan Rather; "That's part
of our world tonight." These men where not “lewd,” but true believers.
Los
Angeles, January 26, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (January 2020).
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