We are writing this introduction just days after World AIDS Day, founded in 1988. World AIDS Day is honored every December 1st as an opportunity for people to unite in the struggle against HIV and AIDS, to show support for people living with AIDS, and remember those who have died. This World AIDS Day marks the third in which we have also been living through another pandemic, one that in the United States has killed more in two years than AIDS has in the 40 years that scientists and physicians have recognized its existence, though of course we know from the work of scholar-activists like Ted Kerr, that it has been with us much longer. Although the course of AIDS in the United States changed drastically in the mid-1990s with the introduction of drug cocktails, which meant that those with access to health care could manage HIV and AIDS as a chronic illness, the situation globally is much more dire. Scholar and journalist Steven Thrasher, in an opinion piece published in Scientific American, notes that globally more than 36 million people have died of AIDS and only 5 million from COVID. As Thrasher writes, “let us remember there is no contest between these two pandemics. It’s not a competition. Despite the particulars of the two viruses, they affect a similar viral underclass. The making of a world free of AIDS would make a world free of COVID (and vice versa), because the same underlying causes are driving both pandemics.”
While we have made many more opportunities to collectively mourn the tragedies of the AIDS pandemic, we have far fewer opportunities to grapple with the devastation that COVID continues to wreak on our daily lives, let alone considering the immensity of living through two pandemics in tandem. This issue of QT Voices is our attempt to create space for queer and trans folks to sound off on pandemic politics.
On this episode of “Audio QT,” Karma Chávez interviews legendary AIDS activist and author Sarah Schulman about her new book, Let the Record Show, which discusses the early years of ACT UP New York and provides a playbook for contemporary activists. In “Ask a QT,” educator and activist Riley Valentine offers insights into how Cajun culture deals with death, making connections between how queer elders have dealt with AIDS and how this maps on to current practices with COVID deaths. This issue’s “QT Deep Dive” comes to us from Dr. Neville Hoad, a scholar who has written extensively about AIDS in South Africa and offers insights from his thinking about AIDS and COVID together. Our spotlights in this issue come from diverse community members, scholars and students including a dance piece called “Zoom” from the Lamar Dance Company, reflecting the daily life of students surviving in 2020. We also include an audio short from joto scholar Dr. Ángel de Jesus González, who reflects on his first date with his partner and learning about his partner’s HIV positive status. UT graduate student Amarainie Marquez wrote five poems reflecting on living during the COVID pandemic, and UT graduate student Rob Colgate’s poems reflect on the problems with expectations for productivity during pandemic times. In our “Arts QT” feature, we are lucky to include three works by east Austin photographer, Cindy Elizabeth, whose “Signs of the Times” series reflects on the ways that people long for community and connection when normal means of obtaining them were not possible.
As we await news about the severity of the latest variant of COVID and watch news about the Biden Administration’s racist decision to close our borders to travel from several countries in Southern Africa, despite the presence of the new strain throughout Europe, we can’t help but think of some of the powerful art from Gran Fury, an artist collective that created the visual rhetoric for ACT UP during the early years of the AIDS pandemic in the United States. We are reminded of one image, which features a bloody handprint on a white background, surrounded by words in a stark black font that read, “The Government Has Blood On its Hands, One AIDS Death Every Half Hour.” Although many of the pieces included here are personal reflections, as Schulman and Hoad emphatically remind us, pandemics are not just about disease and our personal and community experiences of them. They are deeply political, and the failures of powerful governments to adequately and reasonably and responsibly respond to pandemics in ways that center the experiences of those most impacted will always lead to death and devastation. Therefore, it is on us to express our outrage and our sorrow and to demand more. As our friend, the artist and activist Jesús Valles always poignantly reminds us, all we have is us.
Karma R. Chávez (she/her) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and a member of the LGBTQ Studies Advisory Council at The University of Texas at Austin.
Lisa L. Moore (she/her) is Archibald A. Hill Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of the LGBTQ Studies Program at The University of Texas at Austin.
