Can AIDS activism battle the Tea Party?

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:15:00 +0000

The International AIDS Conference convenes in Washington, D.C., this week for the first time in 22 years, made possible by President Obama’s repeal of Reagan-era legislation that banned people who are HIV-positive from entering the U.S. While there have been incredible advances in the intervening decades, it's worth remembering the arts-based activism that helped bring it about.

Across town and weather permitting, volunteers will begin laying out the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The Quilt hasn’t been laid out in full since 1996, which was, not coincidentally, when we as a culture stopped talking about AIDS. After 1995, new retroviral therapies began drastically slowing the death rate, and conversation shifted to HIV: better treatments, better tests, slowing infection rates. AIDS, that gruesome specter that had dominated the conversation for nearly a decade, and the battle against it, was put back in the closet.

But over the past year, AIDS has reentered the conversation, this time not as a spook, but as inspiration. Maybe it’s the debates over Obamacare. Maybe it’s the rise of Occupy. Maybe it’s the battle for marriage equality. Or maybe, as many former activists mentioned this weekend in D.C., enough time has passed that the post-traumatic stress that marked the fight has finally begun to subside.

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Can AIDS activism battle the Tea Party?