[Page 4: Another Kind of Love: A Performance of Prosthetic Politics by Debra Levine]

Equipped is a fetish containing a metonymic object.  There are so many transferences involved: photographs conceived in Ray's head, machines employed by his body, translated to Zoe's brain, located by her eyes through the lens of a camera, imprinted as a negative, developed as a positive, wrapped in a pinkish prosthetic frame which then became an art object exhibited in a gallery and sold at an auction to raise funds for ACT UP. It is an object imbued with healing and commodity value.   And its title, Equipped, tantalizingly engages issues of sexual fetishism and desirability in disability.

Ray evaded the political problems associated with the photographic portrayal of the body with AIDS by representing himself through three intermediary objects he depended on for circulation in the world.  In doing so, he also cleverly invoked post-colonialist desire for the other, specifying that photograph frame be constructed from pinkish colored plastic – the "flesh-color" of prosthetic limbs.   Ray's metonym for his brown body is both circumscribed and supported by this artificial white flesh.

Although I have attempted some description and offered some interpretation of Equipped, I feel compelled to say that the photographs do not move me.  I am happy that in my interview with Zoe, she reminded me that Equipped is really a conceptual work.   Staring over and over at the wheelchair photograph, I find beauty in the reflection of the asphalt on the outside metal edge of the seat.  There also is a small object lying on the ground, covered by a leaf.  My gaze often settles on the leaf as a potential entrée into the photo.  But it doesn't take me far.  The chair is smack dab in the middle of the photo and it blocks me from entering.

I suppose that is part of the point.  Ray was fully aware of where he was going.  The work points out the instabilities, the impermanence of affinities. We could only go so far with him.  As he began to disappear, we disappeared too.  In Elective Affinities, Goethe observes, "affinities really become interesting only when they bring about separations" (Goethe 1963: 40).

Making Equipped, Zoe was the invisible body in the process, the prosthetic device that is unacknowledged in all the links most spectators could now bring to the piece.  However, what I see when I look at the photographs is that performance of affinity.  I see Zoe lifting Ray out of his wheelchair in Tompkins Square Park, propping him against a fence so she and he would be facing the same angle, turning the chair over and asking, "Background?  Do you want to be able to see a tree?  Do you want to be able to see a bench?"  I can imagine Ray's response, but I no longer hear it in my mind. His body and voice are ever slipping away from this frame.

 Equipped is a placeholder for the time between Ray's death and now.  It has been shown only one other time, at a Day of the Dead exhibition in 1991, at the Los Angeles Photography Center.   The original piece has languished in storage at an activist archive in Ohio.  Barthes says "there is nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me, and I think back on it"  (Barthes 1981: 53).  Fourteen years later I realize the punctum is the affinity we all shared for Ray and each other.   I have performed a romantic archeology of my past to resurrect this work: pulling work prints of the photographs from Zoe; hounding Patricia, Ray's mother, for her replicas of the plaques; digging through boxes and boxes of Art Positive materials in Aldo's tiny East Village apartment for a copy of the exhibition essay; and visiting with Aldo, Gregg, Zoe and Catherine to recover more than their "official" memories of Ray recounted elsewhere.   

But I too am a subject in this archeology of affinity.  I have used my current identity as a scholar to reconnect relationships that have dissipated over time.  Douglas Crimp has warned that activism suppresses mourning.   Lola and Julie, Catherine and Gregg, all cite Ray's death as a catalyst to their decision to separate from ACT UP.   I would argue that separation from ACT UP, the dissolution of affective bonds, induces melancholia for the affinities of activism.  I have come to understand that I am writing because I have refused to fully grieve the loss of the activist cosmology.  The political implications of this refusal echo in the present discourse regarding recidivism in safe-sex practices.  

Activism, as represented by ACT UP, was far more than joining a demonstration to shout at some symbol of authority.  Because the group was constituted as an assemblage of fragments, cantankerous and desiring bodies attempting to connect through affinities, we were held in a force field that offered the individual support from the collective.  We all miss that feeling, even those younger, politicized people who have never experienced it.  Several months ago, someone remarked to me that ACT UP was the last great possible movement – that it could not exist in this day and age.  My first impulse was to disavow that statement, but my disavowal leads me back to my own melancholia.

Ann Cvetkovich, in her book, An Archive of Feelings, recounts oral testimonies of former activists to offer a public space for the resolution of melancholia.  Several contemporary queer theorists have recuperated melancholia as a potential space where rage converts into activism through a psychoanalytic alchemical conversion.   Crimp calls for public discussions of creative erotic connections to counter the shame induced by the "failures" of gay men to uphold an impossible heteronormative mimesis.   But Paul Farmer implicates capitalist culture with a deceptively simple statement.  He quotes a resident of a small village in Haiti speaking of his community's attempt to support members with AIDS.  "The poor have the patience to struggle with people's illness," says Saul (Farmer 1992, 120).  So where does that leave us?

Goethe says "the unity is never lost unless broken by force or some other determining factor" (Goethe 1963: 38).  The fissures in any kind of project like ACT UP were too great to be mended. Some of the group wanted to struggle on for national health care, others were satisfied narrowly focusing on better and better drugs.  Some founded Queer Nation to struggle for expanded gay rights and visibility.  Many of us moved on to specific projects initiated in ACT UP, which then became institutionalized and funded by the very people we had screamed at for so long.  I linger on Paul Farmer's Marxist-inspired assessment of the Haitian response to illness.  Maybe we are melancholic specifically because we are not forced to turn to each other. We have private spaces to which we can retreat when suffering from burnout.  Some of us are afforded the privilege to turn away, to earn money as a buffer, to ignore. 

Both Kramer and Crimp, at odds about the means to resolve this new crisis of HIV disavowal, have to take in the factors enabling this amnesia. For many with health insurance, the consequences of HIV infection have lessened. Finding new activists means re-forging a community contained in a collective space that supports embodied resistance.  Some say that the push for gay marriage is a healing response to the melancholia produced by struggle and loss.  I say that our practices and collective organization, the affinities which formed and reformed, belie that solution.  But it is certainly possible that "united in anger" is no longer effective and that we must allow new activists to proceed from a different affective sphere, one that acknowledges the current state of melancholia and alienation.

The prosthetic performance in the making of Equipped is an invitation to practice a politics which bonds singular bodies and accommodates ruptures.  Initiating Equipped, Ray was simultaneously caring for himself and for all of us. All the members of his affinity group, including me, affirm the privilege we experienced caring for Ray.  And Zoe and Aldo, within the space of our community bound by affinity, were fortunate to maintain a political relationship with him until he died.  As beings-in-common, they made his work.  And so I confer upon Ray the honor formerly awarded to chemists: he proved himself to be an "artist in separating" (Goethe 1963: 40). 

image by: DIVA TV

I am taking advantage of Equipped to recuperate the possibilities that affinities may offer for the present.   I begin by resurrecting a healing image, one that separates Ray from me and gives him to you. In this, I bring back Ray's body, replete with so many layers of meaning.   This image was taken at the Stop the Church demonstration at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in 1989.  Ray interviewed demonstrators as the on-camera commentator, "J.C.," from the "Fire and Brimstone Network" (DIVA 1990).   In this image, I find Barthes' idea of that which represents "the impossible science of the unique being."  (Barthes 1981: 71)  His hair was wild and long, he was covered in a ridiculous blanket intended to be a toga, his cheekbones were even more prominent because of his weight loss, and he was wearing the requisite crown of thorns draped over his forehead with a few leaves stuck in the branches. His eyes were fierce and he wields a very big microphone.  The image I am reading is a video still, shot by another member of DIVA TV.   His face, so very Ray, frozen from a moment in the videotape, is only a pause in a community of images.

Acknowledgements:  For their generosity and time I owe a great debt to Patricia Navarro, Zoe Leonard, Aldo Hernandez, Catherine Gund, Gregg Bordowitz, Julie Tolentino, Lola Flash, and Mike Spiegel.  I would also like to thank the readers of this essay as it has developed: Barbara Browning, Glenn Kessler, Helen Polson, and Karen Shimakawa.