[Page 2: Another Kind of Love: A Performance of Prosthetic Politics by Debra Levine]

Affinities

I joined ACT UP in the spring of 1988.  ACT UP became my community, my entire world.   Vito Russo, a vocal, "out" PWA and author of The Celluloid Closet, accurately depicted this cosmos within a cosmos in his 1988 speech, Why We Fight:

Living with AIDS is like living through a war, which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches ... And it's worse than a war, because during a war people are united in a shared experience. This war has not united us, it's divided us. It's separated those of us with AIDS and those of us who fight for people with AIDS from the rest of the population.     (Russo 1988)      

José Muñoz situates the binary articulated by Russo into spheres of affect.  For Muñoz, working through Raymond Wiliam's term "structures of feeling," community is constituted and strengthened by the modes in which affect is performed.  Reading Russo through Muñoz, there is a "national affect" which here could be described as straight or "heteronormative,"  displacing  those affected by AIDS from a hegemonic "culture of consent." (Muñoz 2000: 68)   It is essential that  heteronormative affect not be read as a neutral operation against which AIDS-activist affect is portrayed as hysterical excess.  Instead, the  community Russo defines through the divide must be understood as a set of displaced or exiled subjects whose activism constitutes a point of solidarity in time.  AIDS activism was not predicated on an essentialist gay identity, but on an ever-shifting set of concerns that often intersected with the social needs of many constituents within the gay community.  Individuals acting through and with affinity groups developed fierce affective relationships because the construct of affinity accounted for Norma Alarcón's concept of "identities in difference"  (Muñoz 2000: 67).  Action and affect were the two key components inherent in the concept of affinity when ACT UP adopted it as a theoretical organizing structure; what AIDS activists added to that equation, given the conditions of our political struggle, was the necessity of support.

Affinity groups, conceived by the Spanish anarchists in the 1930's, were small groups of individuals whose "kinship ties were replaced by deeply empathetic human relationships ... nourished by common revolutionary ideas and practice."  (Bookchin 1986: 221).   Originally designed to be a catalyst for revolution, affinity groups became micro-sites of resistance: politically inspired alternative-lifestyle formations existing within dominant culture.   ACT UP, already embedded within the gay community, which by necessity had formed  "intensely experimental and variegated lifestyles" (Bookchin 1986: 222), recovered the use of affinity as an organizing structure to support independent individual political praxis within the larger organization.

Imagine ACT UP through the laws of physics, as self-determined gendered and raced celestial bodies orbiting around a combustible source of affective energy, which ACT UP defined as anger.  Bodies were activated by anger but magnetized by intellectual, political, erotic and aesthetic attraction. Some individuals formed affinity groups based on specific subjectivities or issues and remained in tight orbit; others were natural satellites revolving around sick bodies; and still other affinity groups were constituted as quick responders to a provocation: like meteors, they flared up and flamed out.  Bodies were in constant movement, reconfiguring and adapting to the evolving political climate as well as the pressing health needs of PWA members.

Gregg Bordowitz recalls:  "ACT UP was a kind of anarchist-inspired ideal.  Someone could stand up and say 'I'm doing this action, who is interested in this action?  Meet me in the back corner.'  It was about stepping up, it wasn't about delegation ... it was the part of the affinity groups to constitute the larger group" (Bordowitz 2004).  In the summer of 1988 I stood up on the floor of ACT UP and asked for collaborators for an AIDS education project at El Museo del Barrio. That fall, Ray and I conducted an after-school safe-sex workshop for teenagers. At El Museo, we curated an exhibition of their artwork that focused on the impact of AIDS in their East Harlem neighborhood.  Ray produced a videotape incorporating images from the workshops as part of the installation.  Through that collaborative experience, and countless others which followed, Ray became an intimate member of my affective ACT UP affinity group.

Subjects of desire

Ray developed many intimate relationships through his political and artistic praxis.  And we all came together to care for Ray when he became symptomatic.  Ray completed two artistic works in the month before he died.  He wrote an essay for an exhibition, An Army of Lovers: AIDS and Censorship (1990), through Aldo Hernandez.  He created Equipped (1990), a triptych of photographs, through Zoe Leonard.  Ray needed Aldo and Zoe because he could no longer see, walk or touch.  He could barely hear.   Aldo and Zoe, along with Catherine, Gregg, Ellen, Kim, Julie, Lola, Tracy, Robert, Jean and me, were one self-selected affinity group produced by ACT UP, trained to orbit around Ray.  When affinity groups were organized to protect activists during demonstrations, a key component of the group was the support person whose "role" was to be:

the personal extension of the care and concern an affinity group shares among its members, an extension of the need all the participants have to see that individuals who participate in nonviolent direct action are not isolated, neglected, and overburdened because of their political statement.  (Alach 2004)

 Our activist bodies, produced by ACT UP, applied the same ethic towards care-giving responsibilities when PWAs in our affinity groups became ill.

The PWA was always portrayed in the dominant media as a "victim" destined for a certain death.   Activist art practice, never wavering from privileging the PWA's subjectivity, creatively inverted the "typology of signs that promises to identify the dreaded object of desire (the infected body) in the final moments of its own self destruction" (Watney 1993: 207).   Attacking cultural representation of the HIV-positive body in the media, ACT UP unveiled the hegemonic biases around the social construction of the AIDS crisis.   Collectives of activist artists and video producers such as the Silence=Death Project, Testing the Limits Collective, Gran Fury, and  Ray's very own DIVA TV (Damn Interfering Video Activists) took it upon themselves to create non-commodified alternative images which were distributed to maximize political impact, "usually on TV, out of doors, being mailed, miniaturized or just given away ... [work which] bursts forth from the edges of its frames and through the gallery doors seeking liberation"  (Navarro 1990).  The force of these collectives, manifested in the counter-images and counter-narratives that appeared in both dominant and alternative media, were works of "art and invention – which communicates with an extremity of play, of sovereignty, even of ecstasy" (Nancy 1991: 7). 

Ray's final two works are the artistic trace of an activist force.  Jean Luc  Nancy in The Inoperative Community calls this "the challenge of our times ... an art or thought adequate to politics and a politics adequate to art"  (Nancy 1991: 8).  His essay and photographic triptych added to the accumulation of counter-imagery working to eradicate the stigma surrounding the PWA body. The political performance of this artmaking, through Zoe and Aldo's participation as prosthetics, introduces a new dimension to what could be considered the "affected body." Their prosthetic praxis was just one kind of  "force which could not be contained" (Navarro 1990).  In conceptualizing this work, Ray engages his own question regarding the visual representation of queer theory.