I’m keeping track of older gay men who kill themselves because nobody else is.

As usual I schlepped 50 minutes to borrow the library’s copy of Eye, only to discover it was a “Food Special Issue,” hence bereft of any novelty or interest whatsoever.

No review. Eye is a fraud.

I did, however, note that Louise Fili gets star treatment in this issue, in an echt-Eye hagiographic profile that only once mentions she is Steven Heller’s wife.

If obscure, criminally unsung designers are to accrue the recognition they deserve, I see no alternative. If not Eye – who?

Update

(2014.11.03) I got halfway through issue 88 and realized: this whole project has been a chore for years; the stress of doing it makes me sick; and this is merely the latest example of a self-assigned online project that I only belatedly realize does not have to become a lifetime commitment. Project concluded.

And I agree with it!

Peter Staley:

Obama ended his speech with a challenge to our community to expand its agenda into a broadly progressive one, looking beyond our own fight for equality to the issues that continue to hold back far too many Americans – social-justice issues like poverty, racial and gender discrimination, immigration, and health care. It’s as if he’d just read Urvashi Vaid’s Irresistible Revolution

It’s as if Staley just failed to read the truth about Irresistible Revolution.

with its frustration at our narrow focus on marriage equality. Vaid has often seemed like a lonely voice among our LGBT leaders as she’s yearned for a more substantive agenda with race, class, and gender at its foundation, knowing that it would produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.

Especially champagne socialists. I know Staley once worked on Wall Street, but has he ever earned a half-million for half a year’s work? Vaid has.

Pre-order. (About.)

I have written elsewhere about DV8 Physical Theatre, a foundational experience of mine. I call it an experience even though for years all I ever did was watch DV8 on TV. Later I saw a production of theirs, MSM, in Montreal in 1993, and Enter Achilles here in 1997 (as I saw after I wrote this).

I feel almost embarrassed about my strong memories of 1990s cultural touchstones. I imagine a withering glance from my old friend de l’époque, the one who bugged out to Vancouver and whom I obviously still miss and take seriously, and, I realize now, require the approval of. I imagine being told to stop living in the past. But he’d only tell me that because he’s more embittered or discouraged or disaffected than I am. Living in the past is what you do when you’re our age. And of course I feel sad there’s someone who’s worse off than me on those axes.

I had a terrible Sunday and for some reason I looked up DV8. I saw that Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men is available – and not in seriously worse quality than the original, either. (The library has it. The bravest teenagers ever to enroll in art school condensed Dead Dreams and performed it themselves.) But there was also a samizdat posting of The Cost of Living, whole and in parts. And, just as I first saw Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men by chance and it was a foundational experience, I saw this snippet by chance and the same thing happened.

I remember dancing in gay bars

In fact I dearly remember dancing in gay bars. I especially remember another old friend and I complimenting each other on our dancing. This would have been when we were very young and before his boyfriend was murdered. And I guess before the life went out of us and queer began its genocide program against gay. Dance at your revolution, about architecture, etc. – no, thanks. That part of me has been killed. I can’t even tell you that without writerly references.

As a writer since childhood it has taken me a lifetime to understand people with natural grace and physical gifts and the ability to move and what I am missing. The difference is you can teach an athlete to read. One of my ginger athlete friends (naturally I have amassed a stable) tells me a lot of athletes really aren’t that smart. Smart eldergays whose smarts are all in the mind secretly would love to swap lives with these guys.

Do gay intellectuals make up for it by engaging in sex? Nope. As 26-YEARS OLD [sic] COCKSUCKER LERNERT FROM AMSTERDAM put it in Butt, nothing’s worse than a gay intellectual with a big dick.

I learned a lot about this distinction from Camille Paglia, a professor of English who teaches artists and accepts paintings and dance pieces as responses to literature. What a great idea. (And that’s another ’90s reference, one I can’t actually back up.) Paglia also said Madonna thinks with her body.

Here we have the transition from stony-cold life of the mind to actual life in three short minutes (at 15:00 in the original). Watch for the voguing, then the smile.

This thing still brings tears to my eyes. Who says a dance film can’t have its own set piece set to a set of Cher’s “Believe”? Only Lloyd Newson would do that.

I just gave you 550 words explaining how words are inadequate and are not really “life.” And it took me a month to put them together. I’m having a lot of terrible Sundays.

Fortunately for us, for you, for the gay and lesbian community, and for posterity, ACT UP is becoming well documented.

1. Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP (little known; James Wentzy, November 2002). DVD; online at Vimeo

2. Sex in an Epidemic (Jean Carlomusto, 2010). DVD; at the library

3. How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012; q.v.). DVD; at the library

4. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Jim Hubbard, 2012; q.v.). (Coming to the library)

The latter three can be watched at various online services, sometimes even Netflix. There is of course also the ACT UP Oral History Project, whose choice of formats ensures it will not last. You’d best mirror that site every month until it disappears (which it will).

Also of interest

• Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too (1993)

• Interview with Avram Finkelstein about the origin of the SILENCE = DEATH poster (q.v.)

We need this documentation

We need documentation of ACT UP because the following is happening and will continue: Genderqueers and trannies literally rewrite our history so we never existed, further lying that we were RAYSISS and cissexist. (We didn’t exist and we were deficient.) They lie that everything we accomplished matters nil because not enough of us were men with vaginas or nonwhites. ACT UP is the important gay and lesbian achievement following Stonewall – an event that was not led by transgenders, people of colour, women of colour, or transgenders of colour – and the truth must be preserved even in the face of queers’ and transgenders’ supremacist movement to wipe us out.

Peter Staley posted a scan of a foundational document from ACT UP, A National AIDS Treatment Research Agenda. I improved his version to something resembling archival quality.

• Read this first: Copy-edited version in valid HTML

• Staley’s blog post

  • Original PDF at original location (ridiculously linked via the word “here”)

  • Archived original PDF (my copy of it)

• My improved PDF

Changes

• Crappy scanned PDF with skewed pages deskewed. Poor-quality recognized text included. Tags added. Almost complies with PDF/A standard, but not quite

• Thoroughly copy-edited HTML version:

  • merged pages one and two of original, because HTML is pageless

  • regularized some spellings (payers, Treatment IND)

  • altered copy inasmuch as hyphenation and nonbreaking spaces were added

  • could not reasonably regularize all capitalization and punctuation in original (the latter especially in headings); title case troublesome here, as it is with all amateur writers (Who Think All Headings Have To Be Capitalized Like This – They Don’t)

  • did not number everything the original does, because, while valid in HTML, the result is unexpected; specifically, numbered headings were reduced to the minimum possible

  • corrected inconsequential errors and marked up consequential errors found in original

If you’re concerned that the HTML version does not look, feel, and act like the PDF, understand that it cannot and should not.

Why?

I was explaining previously that the ACT UP Oral History Project is making a serious mistake – attributable to poor computer knowledge and Windows use – by publishing transcripts of interviews with ACT UP members as PDFs. I explained the need for correct archiving of these important documents and the need for an upgraded codebase for its site.

Nothing changed. Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman are not about to take my advice on anything even if it means that, someday soon, nearly 200 priceless interviews and transcripts will disappear or become unreadable. They would prefer to keep on doing what they’re doing if the alternative is taking advice from me. I get this a lot.

But for demonstration purposes, I decided to correct the archival errors in A National AIDS Treatment Research Agenda. My improved PDF is somewhat more likely to be readable in the future than Staley’s, and is already much more usable. For the rest of our lives and probably our children’s lives, as long as computerization still exists, my valid-HTML version will be readable. I guarantee what I just said. Valid HTML will not become less comprehensible.

Repairing this 16-page document took half a week of part-time effort. It was possible only because I am good at PDF manipulation (though with middling skills compared to people I know) and am an expert in HTML. I suspect I am the last person publishing nothing but valid HTML.

This was just one document. How do we solve the entire archive problem? I imagined a scenario in which we applied to Tim Gill for, say, a million dollars to correctly archive all AIDS-activist materials in the United States and Canada – yes, even of my enemies in the former AIDS Action Now. I then wondered which exact institution would apply for that money and how we’d get our hands on the original materials. Despite its being my idea, I knew I would be excluded from the outset or fired the day the cheque cleared. People who don’t know the difference would hire other people who don’t know the difference to do the work (as in captioning, a cadre of identical 25-year-old females with humanities degrees).

You can see, then, why it is obvious to me this will never be repeated. No archival ACT UP documents will ever be given this treatment again. This one was.