Using India’s great definition of tactical media as “temporary performative interventions in the media ecology” brought me to a place of thinking about the political videos produced by ACT UP in the early 90s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. ACT UP’s subcommittees were infamously creative, and one of their more well-documented was DIVA (Damned Interfering Video Activists TV), a group that made videos documenting their response to the crisis (Wingfield, 10). Though some curated clips of these works are available through the more widely viewed ACT UP documentaries, so much of the material is either lost or inaccessible—which is where I’m leaning on the use of “temporary” and imagining a fit into the category of tactical media at all. In general, DIY/activist films from roughly ‘85-‘95 have much to tell those interested in queer histories about affinity formations and responses to increasing state surveillance—but access barriers on the internet have made them less available to organizers as perhaps compared with other moments in time. One particularly colorful fictional work with ACT UP at its center lives on, somewhat obscurely, in the Canadian dramedy musical Zero Patience (dir. John Greyson).
I fell for this film in my undergrad while taking a class on HIV/AIDS representation in literature. One of the central films of focus in the New Queer Cinema movement, this high camp film is a reclamation of the “patient zero” narrative that mainstream TV news and newspapers pushed in North American when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak. The narrative was a pseudoscientific misread of data (supported and disseminated largely by gay journalist Randy Shilts) that drew lines between gay sexual partners in the seventies to reach “patient zero,” the alleged first person to bring HIV to North America (a Quebecois flight attendant characterized as an irresponsible sexual actor). Zero Patience begins with the resurrection of “Patient Zero” and annihilates that narrative by also resurrecting Sir Richard Francis Burton (a 19th Century British orientalist, etc. and sexologist) who is being funded by pharmaceutical companies and a national museum to make an exhibit on all the individual sources for humanity’s greatest epidemics. He ends up falling for the Patient Zero ghost (or zombie-ghost hybrid); there is a wild scene where ACT UP reclaims/vandalizes the museum to more humanely represent human tragedy as linked to a misuse of data and industry, and Patient Zero placidly returns to his afterworld state through a mystical water-on-the-circuit board cyberpunk quasi-ejaculation.
This film may not be precisely “tactical media” as offered in our reading, and it is perhaps better in conversation with Fag Mask and the freaky, collective subversion of facing the machine as a blob of flesh (tainted) that becomes intimidating in its alien queerness. ACT UP could possibly be read—for its frenetic moment in time—as successfully non-hierarchical and united in its idealized state.
Besides just existing pre-internet (and with a fairly small budget and viewership), there is also the tactical fact that this film was made just three years before effective drug therapy would be introduced to the market, after many people deeply invested in this fight and guerrilla media had already died. Though ACT UP multimedia clearly had strategic purposes, it’s important to remember that they were held in a futurist dystopic fist. People knew they would die before the idea of cure or anything close to Truvada would be available, and they knew that their tactical disruptions of pharmacy, Reaganism/Bushism, tech, and actual business as usual would fuel the collectivity needed to stay alive in their hope. I don’t mean to characterize ACT UP as either a perfect moment (we can think about how TAG came to be and looked less like “glitching” the streets and more like lobbying: see a very particular retelling of the rift here) or metaphor. But the element of mirth/camp/surprising performance feels in conversation with the persuasive game genre, and the game TuboFlex that Raley offers as example (4). I find it useful to think about how phenomenal primary video texts, made during and from historical flashpoints within my lifetime, have yet to be curated to their full potential in this digital age.
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Works Cited outside of Raley/Fag Face:
Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played on: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic. Souvenir Press,
2011.
Wingfield, Valerie, et al. “ACT UP New York Records.” Edited by Laura Slezak Karas, Guide to the
ACT UP New York Records, New York Public Library, May 2008,
www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/actupny_0.pdf.
Greyson, John, director. Zero Patience. Alliance Atlantic Home Video, 2007 [1993].
Class was with visiting Timothy Lyle, 2015: HIV/AIDS and the Color Line at Bates College.
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