Another Kind of Love: A Performance of Prosthetic Politics
by Debra Levine


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ABSTRACT:

Ray Navarro is a Chicano artist, media maker and AIDS activist who created a photographic triptych titled Equipped, assisted by photographer and fellow AIDS activist, Zoe Leonard, as part of a gallery exhibition “"An Army of Lovers: AIDS and Censorship”" (1990).  Equipped is Navarro’'s last work,  — completed two weeks before his death due to complications ofrom AIDS.  While making Equipped, Navarro had been blind, partially deaf and incapacitated with peripheral neuropathy due to the toxic effects of AIDS medications.  Leonard, along with other members of Navarro’'s ACT UP affinity group, acted as a human prosthetics, enabling him to make art and write theory up until his death.

Networks within AIDS activist culture en-abled members, dis-abled with physical complications ofrom HIV and AIDS, to retain their own creative, sexual and political identities rather than relinquish those capacities to the process of dying.  The practices and modes of knowledge transmission effectuated through these affinity groups offer an alternative approach to the current crisis of safe-sex recidivism in the GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender) community.