As I’m writing this, the world is on fire.
My last post on this website on March 13 was about the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, a massive New York art show with a hundred independent curators packed together into tight corridors and literal cubicles. I wrote about the art I saw, the theme of “In Excess”, and even made some subtle gestures at satisfaction that the show was less blatantly political and more of artists doing their own weird thing. It’s dumbfounding to look back, just under 3 months ago, to see how utterly myopic that now all feels.
As I’m writing this, the world is on fire. Seven days after posting that blog, Governer Cuomo ordered a mandatory quarantine for all New Yorkers in the wake of a massive outbreak of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. It is June 5. 108,000 people have died in the US. Millions have lost their jobs and will lose their homes. The threat of this pandemic loomed over the heads of everyone participating in SPRING/BREAK. But we as citizens had been lead to believe that this virus was no big deal, and if it was, it wouldn’t really effect us much. The disease had only been known to be widespread in China, and China is very far away. Little did we know that this pandemic was already sweeping through the city. Well before we were told to wear face masks, keep 6 feet away from each other, and to not shake hands. That art show, with a hundred curators and thousands of visitors packed into cubicles and hallways, was most likely a hotbed of disease. I say that with confidence because I developed a mild case of the coronavirus just as we were put into quarantine.
As I’m writing this, the world is on fire. Today is June 5, and the entire world is now in its second week of enraged protests against police and systemic racism. On February 23, a 25 year old black man named Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while jogging in Georgia. His murderers were “attempting a citizens arrest”, and in doing so they hit him with their truck, called him a racial slur, and shot him. On March 13, the day I last posted, a 26 year old black EMT named Breonna Taylor was murdered by the Louisville Metro Police. They were raiding for narcotics, and had the wrong house. On May 25th, a 46 year old black man named George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police Department after being arrested without incident. The arresting officer wrestled him to the ground and knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, while 3 other officers stood and watched.
As I’m writing this, over 10,000 people have been arrested in the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out in reaction to these murders. Some of those 10,000 are being held under a bogus charge of breaking quarantine rules. There have been hundreds if not thousands of filmed instances of police escalating violence against peaceful protesters, hitting them with their police cars, cracking their skulls with ‘less than lethal’ bullets, ignoring bleeding elderly men in the streets, pulling down coronavirus face masks to mace demonstrators, and performing false gestures of solidarity to bring citizens closer only to shoot them with tear gas. Police have been documented raiding a gay bar for harboring protesters and shouting homophobic slurs at crowds.
Today is June 5, and twenty six years ago today Felix Partz died in his bedroom.
The photo was taken by A.A. Bronson, Partz’s dear friend and collaborator in the art collective General Idea. Felix, Bronson, and Jorge Zontal formed their collective in 1967 and became extremely influential figures in the emerging world of conceptual and media-based art. In the mid 80s, their work became focused on the growing AIDS epidemic ravaging gay communities. They left their hometown of Toronto and fled to New York under the threat of ramped-up homophobic policing in their city, Zontal being arrested in a routine bath house raid. It was in New York that they made their most famous work, namely giant inflatable pills of the suppressant drug AZT, and the IMAGEVIRUS series which appropriated from Robert Indiana’s LOVE brand and turned the letters into A I D S.
Most people do not know this, but AIDS was not the first acronym used to describe the disease. Originally it was GRID, which stands for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Many were fed the lie that only gay people could get HIV, and gay people are very far away. This pathologizing of queer sexuality and weaponizing of targeted misinformation, fueled by systemic racism and overpolicing of gay areas populated mostly by people of color, is one of the reasons this epidemic went ignored in the US for almost a decade.
In 1990, Partz and Zontal were both diagnosed with AIDS. They attempted to continue making work for the next 4 years, but they both eventually went back to Toronto for home hospice. Zontal died first, on February 3. Felix died four months later, the day this picture was taken. Felix had been dead for a few hours when Bronson took the picture, though he looks like he’s been gone for much longer. His shirt and bedsheets are fabulously patterned, and he’s surrounded by vibrant colors, a pack of cigarettes, and a tape recorder he carried almost everywhere. His eyes are fixed at the camera lens, but there is nothing behind them anymore.
I first saw this photograph in early 2011, when I had just turned 18. It was at the Whitney Museum in a show called Singular Visions, where a floor of the museum was divvied up into individual rooms that each housed one piece of art. This photograph is the size of a billboard, blown up from its original size so that when you get close to it you can see each dot left from the printing process. The room that housed this image was the smallest of them all. At that time I was just barely cracking the door of the closet open. A year previous, a friend had committed suicide. When I entered that little room, I was confronted with death, queerness, otherness, disease, despair, vibrancy, color, and a violent realization that the person I was going to become will always be tied to what is happening in that photograph.
Twenty six years ago today, Felix Partz died in his bedroom. There are still a great many fights queer people need to fight, and we are by no means equal citizens, but gay rights has become a worldwide movement since 1994. It continues to gain massive support and effect systemic change. AIDS is no longer the killer epidemic it was in the 80s and 90s, and the stigma of gay men being diseased has very very slowly begun to fade into history.
As I’m writing this, the world is on fire. It’s June 5. Breonna Taylor’s birthday is today. She would have been 27. We are in the midst of two pandemics in this country. COVID-19, and racism, It seems as though things have not changed much for black Americans since 1994. They especially have not changed for black gay people, and black trans people. I worry that by writing this and describing the deaths of Breonna, Ahmaud, and George, I have contributed to the long history of white artists using black suffering as an abstract for their own purposes. These protests have made me realize that the emotions I felt at 18 when confronted with Felix’s death are emotions that black Americans have been drowning in for centuries. That realization that the person you’re going to become will always be tied to the trauma of those who came before you.