Radical Distribution

In the United States, the term civil disobedience perhaps conjures images of sit-ins at lunch counters in the American South or more recent efforts to occupy parks and city squares nationwide and call attention to the fact that “Black Lives Matter.” In fact, over the past two centuries, there have been countless instances in which collective, nonviolent human presence called attention to the social and political facts of structural inequality. Toward its goal of ending the AIDS crisis, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) used images as demonstrations. Updating protest tactics for the televisuality of the late 20th-century American society, ACT UP devised a style of cultural activism that helped imprint the group—and most importantly, its cause—in the consciousness of all those who encountered it. This essay examines the means by which ACT UP and its associated collectives deployed cultural activism—visual ephemera, including posters, placards, stickers, T-shirts, banners, and graffiti—to create a ubiquitous presence in New York City, where AIDS cases were among the highest in the United States. Against histories of ACT UP that acknowledge the importance of cultural activism but neglect to fully account for its status as ephemera, I argue that the ephemeral properties of activist materials are central to the meaning of these cultural artifacts. It was the synergy between sophisticated design and ephemeral distribution that enabled the discursive and spatial representations of collectivity that defined and sustained the most active period of ACT UP, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

The AIDS epidemic, which was first reported in 1981 and rapidly escalated throughout the 1980s, unleashed the prejudice and moral judgment of reactionary conservatives toward the minority demographics who were initially hit hardest by AIDS, including gay men, intravenous drug users, and people of color. As early as 1984, the Denver Principles statement rejected portrayals of people living with AIDS as pathological victims. Similarly, “cultural activism,” as the art critic and activist Douglas Crimp (1988) described it, entailed the transformation of AIDS representations and discourses (p. 7). This included posters distributed on streets and in subways and reprinted as demonstration placards, buttons, and T-shirts, as well as documentary videos and public access television shows made by and for people with AIDS.

This staging of AIDS activism, wherein cultural practices were pursued alongside traditional political goals, is not unique within the history of political movements. Nevertheless, it was a notable phenomenon because of its transformative success. Its foundations lie in the particular exigencies of the AIDS epidemic as well as the resources of ACT UP’s diverse membership. The formation of ACT UP in New York City in 1987 was less a singular moment than the culmination of months of rising anger among gay men and lesbians due to the AIDS crisis as well as the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Bowers vs. Hardwick, which maintained the illegality of sodomy even among consenting adults. ACT UP, a self-described “diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis” (Crimp & Rolston, 1990, p. 13) drew on extant groups, including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an AIDS service organization founded in New York in 1982, and the Lavender Hill Mob, radical gay AIDS activists active in New York in the mid-1980s. ACT UP quickly gained momentum, and chapters were formed in different states and internationally. Its ranks included community organizers and veterans of the New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s (including antiwar, civil rights, gay and women’s liberation). The organization created space, too, for neophytes: people who were too young to remember the sixties as well as professional gay men, including graphic designers and stockbrokers, who had no previous experience with radical street activism. Despite the diversity of these backgrounds, ACT UP’s membership was, initially, relatively homogenous—white, male, gay, and upper middle class—a nearly unprecedented phenomenon in street activism. However, by 1988, ACT UP had a significant contingent of women and people of color (Cohen, 1998, p. 17).

The ACT UP generation of activists (both young and old) courted popular media attention to cultivate a national reputation for sensational, anger-driven politics “imagined on the street” (Berlant & Freeman, 1993, p. 199). Toward this end, the group was strategic in its use of graphic signage at demonstrations and its development of press liaisons and alternative media. In this sense, ACT UP is part of a broad history of ephemeral materials deployed in the service of social and political upheaval, which includes the centrality of print to the Protestant Reformation, the banners used in support of women’s suffrage, and the visual “counterculture” of the 1960s: imagistic posters, sloganeering buttons, informational leaflets, and polemical broadsides. In descriptions of their first encounters with ACT UP, former members note the affective import of these historically charged materials. Arriving at the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) Community Center at 208 West Thirteenth Street in the West Village of Manhattan for his first ACT UP meeting, Tom Kalin (2004) described walking along “narrow, skinny hallways peppered with all those leaflets of every single kind, seeking roommates, substance abuse, you name it, size 12 pumps for drag queens, everything” (p. 25) until arriving at the meeting room, where he walked “through a table of different literature about events and issues you needed to know about” (Carlomusto, 2002, p. 31). Kalin continued his description of his first ACT UP meeting:

[It] was like every fantasy I ever had of 1930s New York, socialist, communist meetings . . . it reeked of it. It was like the ‘60s again. I was in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. Oh my God. It had that romantic whiff to it, because it seemed utterly urgent, completely improvised, totally responsible and nimble in that early stage. (Kalin, 2004, p. 25)

Although still active today, during its first 5 years, ACT UP New York achieved its largest membership and greatest social impact. ACT UP changed the public discourse on AIDS, streamlined the way the federal government tests and distributes experimental drugs, and broadened the definition of HIV/AIDS to include a range of symptoms. These remarkable accomplishments are especially significant because the stakes were so high in the 1980s and the early 1990s. As characterized by Maxine Wolfe (1997),

People were dying left and right, horrible deaths, and nobody knew why. The shock was incredible. People were trying to figure out so hard how to take care of the people they cared about, how to take care of themselves, how not to get sick, how to prevent people from dying, how to get services to people in every way, shape, form. The idea of doing anything else was overwhelming. ACT UP took that leadership role. (p. 410)

ACT UP’s leadership role in galvanizing a generation toward direct action has been explored in recent exhibitions—ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993 (Grace & Molesworth, 2009), Gran Fury: Read My Lips (Cohen & Gran Fury, 2012), and Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism at the New York Public Library in 2013) as well as in the documentary films United in Anger (Hubbard, 2012) and How to Survive a Plague (Gertler & France, 2012). In each work, archival materials characterize the activist style of ACT UP and the ubiquity of agitprop emblems such as SILENCE = DEATH. Encountering these archival representations, which capture the sheer volume of visual ephemera worn and held by protestors, one is struck by the collectivity and relationality of these materials. In other words, they were collaboratively designed, printed in multiple copies, and affixed to bodies or used as their stand-ins. Ephemerality is additionally underscored by the plaintive fact that many of the people depicted have been lost to AIDS. While the films achieve “intimate and visceral” (Bruni, 2012) effects by relying on footage taken by protesters (How to Survive a Plague credits no less than 30 videographers), the exhibitions, despite inventive attempts at contextualization such as the streaming of protest footage and photographs of the works in situ, tend to deflate the temporality and contingency that animate activist graphics.

The term ephemeral intervention offers a way to understand the contingency that results from urban contexts of reception that are sometimes spectacular (as in a banner drop from a building) but often unremarkable (as in posters that are covered up or torn down, if not ignored completely). As is often the case with activist uses of visual ephemera, graphics are produced in multiple and become animated as constituent parts of demonstrations, as do aural (many voices chanting) and tactile (bodies crammed together) elements. “Ephemeral intervention” locates meaning in the production and distribution of such materials along with, rather than exclusively in, aesthetic reception. New York-based activists of the 1980s and early 1990s have described the creation and dissemination (often illegally, at night by wheat-pasting to city walls) of visual ephemera as central to their affective experience of collective political activism, since it is nearly impossible to gauge the impressions of multiple and anonymous public audiences of posters and stickers (Hess, 1995, p. 324).

Activist graphics are not stable cultural objects; they are transient, functional instruments often conceived for a specific event or, at least, in terms of topicality. As Eileen Myles (2010) noted in her review of ACT UP New York,

Surprisingly—and maybe, when you think about it, a little ecstatically—very little material is still extant out of the enormous output of ACT UP’s many individual artists and groups. So much work by these artists virtually disappeared into the very environment that spawned it. Their production was absorbed by the world of their time. In terms of radical distribution, that’s an utter coup. (p. 440)

To consider the “radical distribution” of ACT UP graphics, and the ways in which they did (or did not) function in terms of resistance in the public contexts of their display, it is helpful to situate this visual archive in terms of “dark matter,” defined by Gregory Sholette (2005) as “the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society,” a form of “shadow creativity” that is “essential to the functioning of the institutional and elite art world” and yet remains largely “invisible” (p. 5). Although the ACT UP-affiliated art collective Gran Fury has received a measure of critical recognition and material support from art institutions, while consistently negotiating the risks and benefits of increased visibility and funding, the bulk of AIDS cultural activism remains more firmly within the realm of cultural dark matter. This art/history of resistance is part of a groundswell of collaborative art and activist practices in New York City that seized public display opportunities opened by the city’s derelict buildings from the early 1970s through the early 1990s. It includes the multiple and overlapping affinity groups, committees and collectives of ACT UP New York, such as Little Elvis, Metropolitan Health Association, Gang, and the Silence = Death Project, as well as those who produced agitprop individually—Donald Moffett, Richard Deagle, and Vincent Gagliostro, among others. Although it lies beyond the scope of this essay, video was a crucial medium for AIDS cultural activism, produced by collectives such as Testing the Limits, DIVA TV, and House of Color.

ACT UP prioritized information and agitation, and so ephemeral materials were routinely blitzed into the public sphere: posters wheat-pasted weeks in advance of demonstrations to publicize and recruit participation (12 different Reasons to ACT UP pasted before the “Target City Hall” action [1989]), specific projects created for particular demonstrations (New York Crimes, a four-page newspaper designed to look like The New York Times but with accurate AIDS reporting, wrapped around the Times in newspaper machines throughout the city the morning of Target City Hall), sex education (crack-and-peel stickers that read Men Use Condoms or Beat It put in cabs, bathroom stalls, and on city walls, Figure 1), as well as the movement’s enduring visual ephemera (SILENCE = DEATH posters and The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over stickers [Little Elvis, 1988]). These materials joined other AIDS-related visual campaigns already in the urban environment, such as the AIDS posters displayed throughout Manhattan in late 1987, created by the Canadian art collective General Idea as an ambivalent appropriation of the famous Pop Art image LOVE by Robert Indiana. While AIDS activist ephemera were distributed throughout the five boroughs of New York City, much was posted in downtown Manhattan, south of 14th Street. This area included the city’s established gay neighborhood—the West Village—and the new queer scene—the East Village—as well as the contemporary art realm, and a vibrant print culture of locally produced newspapers and magazines.

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Figure 1.

Gran Fury, Men Use Condoms or Beat It (sticker on brick wall with 250,000 Gay AIDS Cases Last Week, 50,000 This Week? Fact or Fiction? and bloody handprints) in situ, New York City, n.d.

Before the ubiquity of the Internet, building exteriors were vital public forums for the exchange of information, particularly in cities like New York where pedestrian culture enabled unique public exhibition opportunities. This was especially the case in the period between the Stock Market crash of 1987 and the gentrification/development of the mid- to late-1990s, when graffiti and other posted ephemera on abandoned buildings were relatively unmonitored by the police. Gregg Bordowitz (1998/2006) explains,

At that time, I looked to the city’s walls for direction. I recall exiting the Christopher Street subway station when a small eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch Xeroxed flyer, wheat-pasted to the wall, caught my attention. It advertised an upcoming protest. I knew then and there that I would go. That’s how I attended ACT UP’s first demonstration, on Wall Street on March 24, 1987. (p. 109)

Any consideration of the ephemeral production of movement politics is a project to reconstruct the circulation of discourse that constitutes the epistemological experience of urban space. Myles’s observation about ephemera’s multiplicity and obsolescence is crucial, since when we encounter surviving activist materials today, they often exist as singular objects, yet posters and other ephemera were always produced in multiple copies, intended for far-ranging distribution. In fact, one could substitute “ephemera” for “dark matter” as the answer to Sholette’s (2005) riddle: “What is invisible, has great mass, with an impact on the world that is everywhere in plain sight?” (p. 3).

This argument is made formally in AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS, a book that juxtaposes ACT UP graphics with photographs of them in use at demonstrations, and descriptions of the events including transcriptions of particular chants used and polemical and informational fliers distributed. Published in 1990 by ACT UP members Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS is essentially a manifesto that foregrounds ACT UP’s innovative and successful ephemeral interventions. Both authors (Crimp, an influential art historian and critic, and Rolston, a graphic designer) had a strong investment in the activist use of visual materials. The book project itself makes an argument for the importance of documentation and distribution, as the authors make clear:

This book is intended as a demonstration, in both senses of the word. It is meant as direct action, putting the power of representation in the hands of as many people as possible. And it is presented as a do-it-yourself manual, showing how to make propaganda work in the fight against AIDS. (Crimp & Rolston, 1990, p. 13)

AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS opens with an introduction that sketches the chronology of ACT UP graphics, beginning with SILENCE = DEATH, described as a “simple graphic emblem . . . printed in white Gill sanserif type underneath a pink triangle on a black ground [that] has come to signify AIDS activism to an entire community of people confronting the epidemic” (Crimp & Rolston, 1990, p. 14). In 1986, an AIDS consciousness–raising group of six gay men (including several graphic designers) decided to create a poster to galvanize action. They collaboratively designed SILENCE = DEATH over the course of 1986 and had several thousand copies printed and professionally “sniped” (wheat-pasted in strategic locations) throughout Manhattan in early 1987. The poster contains a call to action, written in small text at the bottom.

Why is Reagan silent about AIDS? What is really going on at the Center for Disease Control, the Federal Drug Administration, and the Vatican? Gays and lesbians are not expendable . . . Use your power . . . Vote . . . Boycott . . . Defend yourselves . . . Turn anger, fear, grief into action. (Crimp & Rolston, 1990, p. 30)

SILENCE = DEATH appropriates and inverts the pink triangle used by Nazis to designate homosexual men in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The symbol had been used in the 1970s as a collective rallying cry for gay liberation, and in the context of the AIDS crisis, the historical parallel between the Holocaust and the federal government’s mismanagement of the AIDS crisis was devastatingly acute. The canniness of the graphic design as a work of political art is that it combines this historical charge with the sleek visual language of advertising, soliciting the attention of those who encounter it before relaying its message. Described by Avram Finkelstein, a member of the Silence = Death Project (as the consciousness-raising group became known),

[SILENCE = DEATH] puts political information into environments where people are unaccustomed to finding it . . . it’s very different from being handed a leaflet where you automatically know someone’s trying to tell you something and you may not be receptive to hearing it. But when you’re walking down the street and you’re gazing at advertising . . . who knows what’s going through your mind? (Meyer, 1995, p. 53)

Less prescriptive than provocative, SILENCE = DEATH had an immense impact. It was akin to other public art projects entrenched in the dense visual culture of advertising in New York City, such as culture jamming (the anticapitalist refiguring of corporate logos in extant public advertisements), the text-photo and statistics-based posters by the Guerrilla Girls feminist art activist collective, and language-based feminist public art practices by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer that appropriated media imagery and display formats (billboards, LED tickers, serialized posters). The bold legibility (caps lock, sanserif type) of SILENCE = DEATH was highly influential on subsequent AIDS activist graphic design, as was its inclusion of information in small print at the bottom of the poster. Many posters successfully adopted this formula, combining the visual pleasure of advertising with instructions for direct action. This formula was created for an urban street display—the poster is legible on several levels, from a distance (e.g., in a car) or up close.

SILENCE = DEATH posters debuted the same week as the formation of ACT UP in March 1987 by members of the Silence = Death Project, among others. SILENCE = DEATH was soon adapted for use by ACT UP—in posters mounted on foam-core for placards held at the second ACT UP demonstration, at New York City’s main post office on April 15, 1987, and in buttons that quickly sold out at an AIDS march that May. In 1989, ACT UP infiltrated the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal, a success measurable by the fact that “by the end of the conference perhaps one-third of the more than 12,000 people attending were wearing SILENCE = DEATH buttons” (Crimp & Rolston, 1990, p. 14). Indeed, ACT UP quickly realized the potency of the graphic’s instant legibility, easily translated on camera by the news organizations that covered the group’s demonstrations. As Michael Nesline (2003) describes,

We got amazing coverage . . . in the New York Times and on the local press. Of course . . . what the media was impressed by was the uniformity of our presentation . . . all of the posters are black posters with pink triangles. It looked really organized. That was not a completely conscious strategy at that point. It quickly became a conscious strategy, because we realized that it worked, for the media. (p. 15)

Early on, ACT UP and independent affiliated collectives (Silence = Death Project and Gran Fury) poured resources into printing posters, flyers, T-shirts, and buttons for use at demonstrations and for fundraising. In AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS, Crimp and Rolston (1990) explain the centrality of graphics to ACT UP’s self-promotion,

Having such well-prepared visuals at such quickly arranged demonstrations is especially disarming to our opponents, who begin to fear our ubiquity. Protest movements have always had all-night poster-painting parties, to prepare for such eventualities; ACT UP’s innovation is to get the wheels of mechanical reproduction turning on equally short notice. (Crimp & Rolston, 1990, p. 22)

SILENCE = DEATH and the subsequent aesthetics of AIDS activism largely drew on the visual tropes of advertising such as stark photo-and-text combinations rather than the typically grassroots aesthetic of the 1960s New Left movements, which often featured hand-drawn lettering and stenciling. While these design decisions were surely influenced by contemporary public art practices, they were also enabled by the organization’s financial stability. This differentiated AIDS activism from other social movements, which tend to have limited access to capital. The unique resources of ACT UP—its ranks included graphic designers, people with corporate jobs and hence access to reproduction technology, and the cultural and social capital of the group’s membership and connections—proved immensely beneficial to the development of AIDS cultural activism. In 1987, the Silence = Death Project created a poster that garishly rendered Ronald Reagan in Warholian distortion with an “AIDSGATE” stamp, to indict his silence on AIDS. As a demonstration placard, the emblem provided an instantly legible protest message. Maxine Wolfe describes the deliberate orchestration of these graphics at the March on Washington in 1987:

ACT UP member Michael Miles was a stage designer, and he designed an incredible contraption with these posters [SILENCE = DEATH and AIDSGATE]—a snake formation. Each poster was held by an individual person but was connected and we used those in Washington and they went way up above your head and we all wore SILENCE = DEATH T-shirts. We also had these huge banners that were of the late eighties order of things—black with huge white letters—very stark, very black. ACT UP had become very well known for these banners. Everyone else had purple banners with flourishing letters but our posters were very striking, very stark, with very clean lines. This was very graphic-design-oriented kind of stuff and had a tremendous impact. Many ACT UP groups started after that march. (p. 441)

Although the sleek graphics of ACT UP garnered attention, as Wolfe points out, there were often handmade signs alongside printed ones at demonstrations. ACT UP poster-painting parties at the LGBT Center supplied placards on short notice for spontaneous demonstrations (called zaps by gay and women’s liberationists). Whatever their aesthetic form, the goal of these protest graphics was clear: “to assist other activists in clarifying their positions and goals and to represent those positions and goals to the world” (Bordowitz, 1987/2003, p. 190). As discussed earlier, sloganeering was a key endeavor of early AIDS cultural activism.

Within the laboratory of ACT UP New York, various graphic strategies, production techniques, and scales of display were tested and modified with uneven results. For example, Gran Fury’s first billboard project was the slogan, “When a government turns its back on people is it civil war?” In the fall of 1988, the collective attempted to legitimately purchase Sale Point billboard spaces but was thwarted when the company balked at displaying Gran Fury’s politicized message next to other advertisements. Gran Fury eventually wheat-pasted poster versions of the slogan in strategic locations, such as a building on the busy corner of Church Street and White Street in lower Manhattan that was near city government offices (Deitcher, 1990, p. 227).

While direct actions and demonstrations focused on specific issues—access to experimental drugs, participation in drug trials, and housing and hospital beds for people with AIDS—cultural activism aimed to create awareness, galvanize support, and change dominant representations of people with AIDS. ACT UP demonstrations were sensational and created a national consciousness of the AIDS activist movement for those who would never witness or attend a demonstration. In a sense, the activist sartorial style that emerged within the context of ACT UP, for example, black leather jackets, blue jeans, and SILENCE = DEATH buttons, helped to shape and define a new defiant generation of queer activists. The self-conscious stylization of ACT UP was not lost on journalists who often relied on photographs of demonstrations and descriptions of protest graphics to characterize the group. Even if it could not prevent biased reporting, ACT UP could represent itself through the reproduction of its graphics, as ACT UP-ers Ray Navarro and Catherine Saalfield noted in a 1991 essay: “T-shirt graphics, hilarious signage, and visual puns on posters often puncture the cruelest oversimplification in the layout of a mainstream newspaper. ACT UP is a media organization and these images can themselves feed the protest” (Navarro & Saalfield, 1991, p. 346).

Posters to publicize upcoming demonstrations often remained affixed to buildings for days or weeks after the advertised event. Besides informational messages, potent emblems akin to SILENCE = DEATH were also developed for street campaigns. In the most successful ephemeral interventions, both modes—informational and emblematic—worked together to create a discursive representation of oppositional collectivity. For the ACT UP New York campaign against Steven C. Joseph, the Health Commissioner of New York City, who distorted the number of AIDS cases in NYC to justify cuts in services, Richard Deagle created a series of subway posters (oriented horizontally, to slip in front of extant advertisements), one with a portrait of Joseph and the caption “DEADLIER THAN THE VIRUS” and another with Joseph’s boss, Mayor Ed Koch and “10,000 AIDS Deaths—How’m I Doin’?” The phrase that won Koch popular support earlier in his tenure now indicted his abysmal record on AIDS. For straphangers standing in front of posters, the message was clear thanks to terse captions, clear statistics, and a constrained palette of red, black, white, and gray (traditional protest colors). These works supplemented Gran Fury posters already in circulation with a bloody red handprint and the text “YOU’VE GOT BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS, STEPHEN JOSEPH. THE CUT IN AIDS NUMBERS IS A LETHAL LIE” (another version addressed Mayor Koch, Figure 2). These were distributed all over the city (as were sticker versions) and supplemented with “bloody” handprints stamped by ACT UP members with red paint on their palms onto the buildings, newspaper stands, and street signs near the posters.

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Figure 2.

Gran Fury, You’ve Got Blood On Your Hands, Ed Koch, poster, circa 1988.

Richard Meyer (1995) has argued that the force of the bloody handprints graphic lies in its status as a handprint, “a trace of a body that is no longer present, presumably because it has died from government neglect” (p. 70). This observation is extended by the recent suggestion that “the movement’s reliance on cheap, ephemeral media was not solely tactical, but bore a certain pathos . . . literalizing . . . the prevalent view that HIV-infected populations were expendable” (Weiner, 2012, p. 108). However, the bloody handprints symbolized more than the disappeared victims of the AIDS crisis, because they were emphatically linked to the presence of activists. For direct actions such as disrupting mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and shutting down City Health Department offices by occupying the nearby Brooklyn Bridge, ACT UP New York had gained, by the late 1980s, a reputation in local and national media as the “No. 1 loose cannon of local [NYC] politics” (Leo, 1990, p. 5). Whereas SILENCE = DEATH galvanized the gay community and the broader public into action and acknowledgment of the AIDS crisis, the bloody handprints came to signify the directed rage of collective action since they were buttressed by a series of controversial and well-publicized ACT UP demonstrations.

In such a polarized environment, there were inevitably virulent responses to posters from the diverse audiences who encountered them. Gran Fury engineered posters with this in mind and often documented the works in situ on New York City streets to record such interactions. For example, on a bilingual (English and Spanish) Gran Fury poster that addresses incidences of AIDS in women and children (the poster’s title, AIDS: 1 in 61, refers to the number babies born in 1988 in New York City HIV positive or with AIDS), a passerby wrote “SCARED FAGS’ CRAP.” This inscription actually underscores the poster’s urgent task, which was to break the widespread stigma of AIDS as a “gay plague” and to publicize life-saving information about HIV transmission in women and heterosexuals. Another Gran Fury poster, made for a nationwide series of AIDS actions in the spring of 1988, wittily illustrates the text “Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head” with an image of an erect, engorged penis. It was routinely torn down when posted in New York City.

In fact, as the culture wars escalated in the late 1980s, public censorship debates played out on city walls via posters, stickers, and graffiti. With the formation of Queer Nation in April 1990, the strategies of rhetorical address became even more confrontational. Queer Nation was founded to combat homophobia with brash visibility strategies, in order to address a nationwide spike in hate crimes against gays and lesbians. After the group’s second meeting (like ACT UP, Queer Nation meetings were held at the LGBT Center in the West Village), attended by over a hundred people, a large group convened late that night to wheat-paste small posters with the phrase “My Beloved Was Queer-Bashed Here” around the city at hate crime locations. Queer Nation was composed of ACT UP members and other activists, as well as people with no political experience. The group prioritized immediate action, partially to circumvent the increasingly bureaucratic nature of ACT UP meetings and creeping movement fatigue. Laura Morrison explained,

The thing that’s important to me about Queer Nation is that we’re ready to act. People are frustrated with endless talking about issues around lesbian and gay concerns, we don’t want to sit around and strategize anymore . . . I want to do something proactive. Sometimes you need to take it to the streets. (Morrison quoted in Trebay, 1990, p. 34)

Queer Nation’s direct actions included wheat-pasting downtown Manhattan phone booths with posters featuring a pink triangle and the legend “DON’T TREAD ON ME.” This reworking of SILENCE = DEATH via a famous American Revolutionary War slogan suited the group’s nationalist rhetoric as did its address, which was aimed more at the general public than at the community of people living with AIDS. Queer Nation drew on the visibility tactics of ACT UP, which included demonstrations at symbolic locations like Wall Street and City Hall but refocused its aim in order to “redefine the community, its rights, its visibility—and take it into what’s been claimed as straight political and social space” (Kaplan, 1990, p. 34). This included the defiant reclamation of hate speech—“queer”—and the occupation of iconic straight bars throughout the city (including Dorrian’s Red Hand on the Upper East Side and the White Horse Tavern in the West Village) in “Nights Out” actions, in which groups of 50 or more queers met to order drinks, socialize, and make out with each other to the discomfort of regular patrons. These public displays of queer sexuality created mise-en-scènes of Gran Fury’s iconic Kissing Doesn’t Kill campaign that subverted United Colors of Benetton ads with three kissing interracial couples—one gay, one lesbian, and one straight—displayed in 1989 as bus billboards (also distributed in postcard and video versions). “Nights Out” raised the stakes of Kiss-Ins, the ACT UP-sponsored, public mass-kissing actions advertised in advance by Gran Fury with posters containing black-and-white vintage photographs of same-sex couples kissing and the phrase “READ MY LIPS.”

While it resuscitated the separatist tone of the Black Panthers and radical lesbians (the group’s manifesto read “Queers Read This!” on one side and “I Hate Straights” on the other), Queer Nation also embraced the media-savvy strategies of ACT UP, which had “groomed a generation of demonstrators to look for the sound-bite, to keep the message within a limited, tele-visible range, to treat reporters as people almost constitutionally incapable of seeing past the clenched fist to the underlying agenda” (Trebay, 1990, p. 35). Like ACT UP, Queer Nation expressed activism through style, with provocative buttons and T-shirts such as “Queers Bash Back” and “We’re Queer, Get Used to It.” Recalling the tactics of the Civil Rights era, these accessories put activists’ bodies on the frontlines of conflict. This was an especially bold move in New York City’s homophobic public sphere, where hate crimes against gays and lesbians increased exponentially during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a lengthy piece on Queer Nation for The Village Voice, written 4 months after the group’s founding, noted fashion writer Guy Trebay (1990) observed that these ubiquitous Queer Nation T-shirts “don’t yet outstrip the street-side potency of ACT UP’s graphics, which have defined a generation of activists through fashion presence, but they’re pretty close” (p. 36).

As street activism by ACT UP began to wane in the early and mid-1990s, participants from ACT UP, Queer Nation, WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization, founded in New York City in 1989), and the Guerrilla Girls formed a new crop of visually oriented collectives in New York to perform direct actions on issues such as lesbian visibility and reproductive rights, including the Pink Panthers (f. 1990), fierce pussy (f. 1991), Dyke Action Machine (DAM!; f. 1991), Oral Majority (f. 1991), Women’s Action Coalition (WAC; f. 1992), and the Lesbian Avengers (f. 1992). These groups merged the toolkit of AIDS cultural activism with the in-your-face strategies of Queer Nation and contemporary feminist art and engaged in direct actions and poster campaigns across a range of shared strategies and resources.

In addition to appropriation from the spheres of art history and advertising, activist-artists drew from each other. For example, DAM! was able to create posters with state-of-the-art photo and digital equipment secured by bartering design services, with printing donated by the regional gay publication HX Magazine, in exchange for logo placement on the posters (Moyer, 2008, p. 197). The result was a photo-based series of works even more streamlined than Gran Fury posters, because they were close appropriations of contemporary advertisements. A DAM! poster campaign in 1991 replaced underground celebrities in GAP clothing ads with local activists, academics, and other dyke “celebrities,” which seemed to riff on extant Queer Nation “outing” graffiti that changed the “P” to a “Y” in k.d. lang GAP ads then on display in bus kiosks. An abortion rights poster by the collective Gang paired a close-up photograph of a hairy vagina with the all-caps phrase “READ MY LIPS” (a decidedly feminist appropriation of the slogan used by Gran Fury and later by President George H. W. Bush). This image, sourced from photographs taken by Zoe Leonard, also appeared in a fierce pussy campaign protesting homophobic and misogynistic policies that sent greeting cards to New York City Cardinal John O’Connor and New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato during the election season of November 1992 (Leonard, a member of Gang and fierce pussy, used these images in her well-received installation at Documenta IX in 1992). The Lesbian Avengers logo of a bomb with a lit fuse that appeared alongside slogans such as “We Recruit!” in posters and stickers plastered throughout Manhattan and elsewhere embodied the confrontational ethos of the period. To raise awareness and show support for the female plaintiff in a highly publicized rape trial at St. John’s University in Queens, WAC placed an advertisement in the St. John’s student newspaper featuring the heading “Stop Rape at St. John’s” over a large hand pushed out with “No Means No” printed over its palm. This echoed Gran Fury’s bloody handprints graphic, which itself directly recalled, as Richard Meyer has pointed out (1995, p. 70), a 1928 John Heartfield poster featuring the large outstretched palm of a worker’s hand, made for the Communist party. As Crimp and Rolston (1990) stated in AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS, “what counts as activist art is its propaganda effect; stealing the procedures of other artists is part of the plan—if it works, we use it” (p. 15).

Ephemeral materials displayed in the urban environment of downtown Manhattan were central to the ways in which “the AIDS movement, like other radical movements, creates itself as it attempts to define itself” (Bordowitz, 1987/2003, p. 197). In the photo-based artworks of ACT UP member Lola Flash, for example, this ephemera-filled urban environment becomes the stage for a critique of ACT UP aesthetics with regard to issues of race, ethnicity, and gender exclusions (Navarro & Saalfield, 1991 p. 347). The intertextuality of AIDS cultural activism and its offshoots demonstrates that public political art projects in New York City constituted a vibrant field of reference, wherein slogans became “deeply seated in downtown queer fashions and New York City’s landscape, tight shirts on taut bodies and stickers in every corner phone booth” (Navarro & Saalfield, 1991, p. 346). As one participant noted in 1992, “in New York, it was feeling more like the 1960s again, as posters—and demonstrations—became frequent spectacles” (Hess, 1995, p. 325). The contingency of activist ephemera is lost when these materials are considered in isolation as examples of graphic design, rather than as constellations of embodied collectivity. In the former category of reception, the aesthetic dimensions of agitprop seem less complex than studio-based artworks touching on similar themes (think of Gran Fury’s The Government Has Blood on Its Hands compared with a Felix Gonzalez-Torres “endless supply” installation).

We should consider the art/history of these ephemeral materials in spatial terms of collective agency and representation. Because of their ubiquity and range, activist graphics in downtown Manhattan not only discursively rendered the queer activist community but also came to signify the presence of activists to the broader public, particularly because of the frequency and size of demonstrations in the area. In April of 1990 when a pipe bomb exploded in Uncle Charlie’s, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, Queer Nation mobilized over a thousand people in hours for a street demonstration in which activists marched with a banner that read “Dykes and Fags Bash Back!” A 40-foot version of this banner had been displayed on the side of a local building only a week earlier. At the time, the escalation of antigay violence in New York City seemed to be a social response to newly empowered and organized gay and lesbian communities. As Kevin Berrill of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Anti-Violence Project observed, “Greater gay visibility and activism have opened the doors to understanding and acceptance. However, our increasingly open and unapologetic existence has triggered hostility and made us a more identifiable target for potential assailants.” (Berrill quoted in Brozan, 1991).

Queer Nation sustained this momentum in frequent direct actions and zaps throughout the 1990s. However, the life span of activist movements, like ephemeral materials, tends to be brief. Among activists interviewed in the ACT UP Oral History Project, there is a commonly described breakdown of collective momentum in the mid-1990s. Whereas AIDS and queer activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s are often described in terms of a “transformative experience that freely mixed politics with art, eros, and underground sociability in a New York that feels poignantly distant” (Weiner, 2012, p. 104), the mid- to late-1990s are described as a time in which frequent direct actions gave way to exhaustion and despair. Gran Fury members describe this emotional climate, and the difficulty of translating increasingly complicated AIDS discourses into pithy sloganeering, as a prime reason for the group’s unofficial disbanding around 1992 (McCarty, 2004, p. 37). Even the efflorescence of identity-based activist art collectives that formed in the wake of ACT UP could not sustain itself for more than a few years, with most groups nearly or totally defunct by 1994.

Beyond these affective conditions of AIDS activism, there was a structural reason for the waning of ephemeral interventions in New York City in the early- to mid-1990s. Describing the Guerrilla Girls’ shift away from poster campaigns toward performance in the early 1990s, one collective member said, “It got harder and harder for us to poster. The police became more attentive.” (Hess, 1995, p. 324). In fact, Guerrilla Girls began hiring snipers to poster, thus losing control of the placement locations. Carrie Moyer of DAM describes how in the mid-1990s “the locations traditionally used by activists and other marginalized groups to communicate with each other became battlegrounds for public recognition” (198) as limited public space available for wheat-pasting was increasingly co-opted by sniping companies working for corporate clients, who paid to have competing posters removed nightly. While police turned a blind eye to protect corporate revenues in unofficially designated posting zones, noncommercial wheat-pasting became a prime target of the “Quality of Life” policing of misdemeanor crimes prioritized by the administration of the new mayor, Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001).

Activist graphics for ACT UP were produced with the same skills as commercial advertising but deployed with an entirely different intent. The power of the images enabled them to occasion further ephemeral interventions—beyond the original circumstance that spurred their production—as they circulated in the public domain. The reproducible and ephemeral nature of these works was key to their distribution—hence their impact. Once the materials were distributed, they served to construct collectivity well beyond the initial intent of use. Outside New York City, posters by ACT UP New York’s visual collectives enacted microinterventions when displayed in public and institutional settings. At Yale University in 1992, controversy erupted when a student hung Gran Fury’s Sexism Rears its Unprotected Head poster on a wall reserved for student comments in a hallway of the law school. After a dean posted an objection to the obscenity of the poster’s depiction of an erect penis, a 2-hour debate about free speech took place in front of the poster between the dean and more than 25 students. One second-year law student described, “It was like Plato’s Republic!” Another said, “It’s just a penis—you only have to go over to Woolsey Hall to see lots of naked women in stone” (Rosenthal, 1992, p. 6). At Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, a gay professor brought harassment charges against a Catholic student after a disagreement about the professor’s display of Know Your Scumbags, a 1989 poster by Richard Deagle and Victor Mendolia that morphologically compares archconservative Cardinal O’Connor to a condom (Associated Press, 1994).

Rather than simply responding to instances of negative stereotypes and implicit norms in mainstream news media and society, ACT UP New York and its affiliated collectives engaged in a complex and transformative dialogue with scientific, political, and media institutions, as well as the heteronormative public sphere. The ephemeral network of ACT UP aesthetics, from Gran Fury posters, to SILENCE = DEATH T-shirts, to fierce pussy greeting cards, made possible the microactivism of individual bearers long after the crowds of demonstrations cleared. Ephemeral materials with ACT UP graphics continue to inspire AIDS activism and other movements for political and social change. Any history of ACT UP aesthetics should resist isolating its achievements in terms of originality or innovation and instead examine the far-reaching impact of AIDS cultural activism and the wide range of references it drew on through its unique distribution. Activist graphics, like the political movements that sustain them, are predicated on collectivity: They are produced collectively and construct collectivity through their distribution. When posted in a public urban space, ephemera transformed that space by evoking the specter of collectivity. Because of their mobility, the ephemeral materials created smaller collectives as they circulated in numerous unpredictable contexts. This unique capacity of ephemera—to bring about interventions on a variety of scales and in numerous settings—accounts for its power well after the waning of the initial period of intense political activity. The apparent fragility and insubstantiality of ephemera, as the case of ACT UP graphics clearly demonstrates, belies its actual efficacy as a means of intervening in public life.