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It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic Audio CD – CD, April 5, 2022
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The powerful story of art collective Gran Fury--who fought back during the AIDS crisis through organizing, direct action, and community-made propaganda--offers lessons in love and grief to today's marginalized communities.
By the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was deeply impacting gay and lesbian communities in America, and disinformation about the disease was running rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury was formed, to create graphics and media that campaigned against corporate greed, government inaction, and public indifference to AIDS.
In It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful, writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury's art and activism, from the iconic images like the Kissing Doesn't Kill poster, to the act of dropping thousands of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a group that expressed through art the profound trauma of surviving the AIDS crisis and formed essential solidarities between gays and lesbians in the activist community.
Gran Fury and ACT UP's strategies are today employed by a variety of activist groups, including survivors of school shootings, harm reduction organizers, and activists for universal healthcare. Their belief in the power of art to create social change and drive political movements is illuminating in this era when violence and unending structural racism continue to target the most vulnerable.
- Print length1 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHachette Book Group and Blackstone Publishing
- Publication dateApril 5, 2022
- Dimensions5.83 x 0.94 x 5.67 inches
- ISBN-101668609940
- ISBN-13978-1668609941
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- Publisher : Hachette Book Group and Blackstone Publishing; Unabridged edition (April 5, 2022)
- Language : English
- Audio CD : 1 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1668609940
- ISBN-13 : 978-1668609941
- Item Weight : 10.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.83 x 0.94 x 5.67 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jack Lowery is the author of It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (Bold Type Books), which tells the story of Gran Fury—the collective of artists and activists associated with ACT UP. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement and The Awl. He has taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University, where he also received his MFA in Nonfiction Writing. As an editor, he has published the poetry of David Wojnarowicz. He lives in Brooklyn.
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The historical parallels between the AIDS epidemic (circa 1981-1995) and our current cultural moment, in which Americans are faced with COVID-19, Trumpism, and the impending overturn of Roe v. Wade, makes the timing of this book's publication perfect. History may not move in a straight line but it often repeats itself. Although the queer community enjoys more freedom, acceptance, and civil liberties now than it ever has before, anti-LGBT legislation is sweeping across the nation, rousing another call to arms. It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful is an historical document and, to me, an elegy. But more important, it is a playbook modern-day activists can use to rally, resist, and disrupt the systems and individuals who seek to destroy us.
Lowery explores every facet of activists' measures to call out Reagan, Bush, and Clinton for their callousness, lack of funding, and for deliberately spreading homophobia and disinformation to the public (sound familiar?). Lowery's access to members of ACT UP and Gran Fury, many of whom are still alive and thriving in the NYC art scene, allows him to weave together years worth of stories, anecdotes, records, archival footage, and interviews to fashion a book that is simultaneously accessible to all readers yet exhibits his prowess as an historian. He gives this period of Queer American history its due, venerating the contributions and sacrifices the queer community made to defend and honor itself, reform public health, alter public opinion about the disease and its victims, and propel the fight for equality into the twenty-first century.
Though several groups worked to fight the AIDS pandemic, Lowery places particular focus on Gran Fury, a collective of eleven artists who created some of the most powerful, lasting works of protest art in modern history. Anyone with a Silence = Death T-shirt can thank them for it. This group of artists took risks and meticulously collaborated, often contentiously, on the many posters that would become hallmarks of the movement. Of particular interest to readers will be the controversy of their Kissing Doesn't Kill poster. The fearlessness and anger of those individuals cannot be overstated. Some of them were sick with HIV/AIDS, and all of them witnessed friends and lovers die from the disease daily. To think that an entire generation of gay men was nearly wiped out due to a political genocide in America seems unconscionable, nevertheless it was activists like Gran Fury who stepped into the fray and brought about the reforms we see today.
Yet Lowery and his interviewees are quick to point out that balanced with the palpable rage of this era was also tremendous love, and that activists need to muster both fierce rage and boundless love to effectively achieve their aims. Not every poster or instillation was successful but each moved the queer community closer to its reckoning with the federal government, the CDC, and pharmaceutical companies. Lowery leaves no topic off limits, and I'm grateful he took lots of time to discuss the issue of women and Black and Brown men who contracted the disease, going so far as to express that even Gran Fury and ACT UP had to reckon with their own sexism, racism, and class bias in terms of responding to the need represent these members of the community.
It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful is an appropriate title for an expansive book that exhibits the brutality of individuals who marshal their bigotry and self-interest to exploit and scapegoat afflicted populations in contrast to those who lavish tremendous love and care upon the sick. That our nation still views illness as a moral judgment, and that our public health system continues to falter, is appalling. The gift of history is our ability to look back on the past and learn from it. Art has tremendous value beyond mere aesthetics, and readers will be all the more grateful for it after reading this phenomenal book.