Wonder Woman Makes a Triumphant Comeback in a New Comic Series

First published on The Daily Beast, March 13, 2014. Read the original here.

Amid all the recent kerfuffles at DC Comics—the Batwoman lesbian wedding that wasn’t, the brooding big screen reinvention of Superman, Ben Affleck’s controversial casting as Batman—it would be easy to overlook the most exciting reinvention in recent comic book history: Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s Wonder Woman. Her epic two-year inaugural story arc wrapped last September, and War, the final graphic novel collecting that arc, came out yesterday.

It’s been a decade in the wilderness for Wonder Woman. She’s the only one of DC’s iconic three without a recent film franchise (though Joss Whedon wrote a script in 2007). In 2011, David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal) attempted a new TV series starring Adrianne Palicki, but it died in the pilot phase. And earlier this year, the CW finally killed Amazon, a Smallville-esque origin show that had been in development since 2012.

On the page, she hasn’t fared much better. Allan Heinberg briefly wrote Wonder Woman for four poorly reviewed issues in 2006. DC temporarily replaced him with bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult, whose brief run fared even worse. In 2008, super-fan-feminist turned comic book writer Gail Simone took the reins, and for a time, Wonder Woman flourished. While not the most brilliant run of all time, Simone’s arc was interesting, smart, and consistent—in fact, with 30 issues under her belt, Simone is the longest-running female writer in Wonder Woman’s history.

But eventually Simone moved on. Though she continued writing two WW related titles (Birds of Prey and The Secret Six), the main comic passed to J. Michael Straczynski, of Babylon 5 fame. The new run featured Wonder Woman’s first major costume redesign in decades (created by Jim Lee), and debuted in 2010 to fantastic sales … only to collapse amid a morass of missed deadlines and mediocre reviews. Straczynski left with six months to go on his contract. After that, the Princess of the Amazons spent months bouncing back and forth between various writers and artists.

Then came the major event in the DC Universe: The New 52. Starting in September 2011, DC cancelled all of its existing titles, and debuted 52 revamped versions—Wonder Woman included. WW’s new writer, Brian Azzarello, had spent time at the helm of both Batman and Superman, and he was also the co-creator of the hardboiled detective comic 100 Bullets. Illustrator Cliff Chiang, however, was a relative newcomer, having moved to the art side of DC after being an editor for years (Tony Akins, another lesser-known talent in DC’s illustration stable, also provides some artwork for the comic).

From the beginning, the New 52 was plagued with concerns about the representation of women and the fact that the new Wonder Woman was the work of two men. But Azzarello and Chiang’s excellent work defused most of the criticism. By turns gorgeous and grotesque, issue number one featured intelligent modernizations of the Greek and Roman myths that make up Wonder Woman’s baggage. Unlike Superman and Batman, prototypical sons of the 20th century, Wonder Woman has always struggled to stay relevant to a young audience that often cares little and knows less about her storied mythological history. She has so much past, it’s sometimes hard to see her future.

In that regard, Azzarello and Chiang are visionaries. In the first few issues, Wonder Woman’s old origin story literally crumbles before our eyes, as she learns that she was not made from clay by Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Instead, she is the natural daughter of Queen Hippolyta’s brief but passionate dalliance with Zeus, the king of Olympus. This instantly humanizes Wonder Woman, while also making her divine. She learns her true history at the same time we do, allowing readers to experience her all-too-human feelings of betrayal upon discovering that everything she believed about her life is a lie.

This seamless melding of modern humanity with epic divinity is realized on the page in Chiang’s beautiful representations of the Olympiads. Whether portraying withered, root-like Demeter or drunken colonialist Aries, his artwork brilliantly captures the essence of what a god among modern mortals might look like. Thus, the story and style work in delicious harmony.

From this simple new back-story, the rest of the two-year arc flows naturally. Wonder Woman becomes enmeshed in the ultimate family feud, as the gods of Olympus vie to replace Zeus as king, and she seeks to protect her numerous half-god siblings—one of whom is prophesied to kill an Olympian and claim their throne. In this final installment, Wonder Woman ends up somewhere completely unexpected, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out in forthcoming issues.

And yet, for all the superpowers and divine beings that flit across the pages of Wonder Woman, the arc is most successful because of its humanity. She slams out her aggression in a London punk club when she’s upset. The Gods of Mt. Olympus squabble like eternal children. If this arc has a central theme, it is about love, family, and betrayal—profoundly human emotions that make Wonder Woman sympathetic in a way that Justice, Peace, and Divine Creation never could.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum Is a Haven for Artists Who Are Too Gay for Art School

First published on Vice.com, March 2, 2014. Read the original, with images, here.

As we unwind the bright red packing tape that joins the two coffee cans together, Hunter O’Hanian, the director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, explains what I’m about to see.

“We think this is his only finished work,” he says, separating the cans to reveal a long scroll made of computer paper taped end to end. Black and white photocopies of twinks—whipped, gagged, crucified, tattooed, and tied—writhe across the pages, filling them almost to the margins. The image has no punctum, white space, or dominant figure to draw in the eye, allowing the viewer's gaze to rest. Instead the eye skitters across the pages, noting a hard cock here and a flagellate there, without stopping on any particular moment.

Hunter isn’t sure if this is the artist’s only finished work for three reasons: The artist is dead, his partner—who asked that they both remain anonymous—donated the work, and the donation consists of 77 large cardboard boxes filled with gay porn, photomontages, pulp novels, mail-order sex-toy catalogs, books about Dracula, and images of opulent, but empty, rooms lacerated with careful slits to allow for the insertion of pornographic cut-outs.

A number of the boxes contained only carefully washed plastic clamshells (the kind that might hold a salad from a take-out Thai restaurant) filled with individual male figures meticulously excised from six decades of porn—the processed raw materials for the artist’s apocalyptic sex montages. Like the scroll in the can, each piece of paper has been carefully packed, as if the artist feared their rustling might hint at their true nature, their sexual shame. The line between fear and reverence is nonexistent here. These totemic boys are tools of artistic creation, but if discovered would mean destruction. The scroll itself is an act of mediation between these two poles, a spell cast in porn, simultaneously birthing and caging the artist’s secret desires.

To date, the museum has cataloged approximately two-thirds of this collection. Despite the detailed sheath of notebook pages that list the contents of each box, it’s a slow process because the closer you look the more you see. For instance, the centerfold of a 1950s physique magazine might hide a cut-out of a Saint Sebastian-esque ephebe in bondage. If you look closely at the image, you will notice that the figure’s tiny handcuffs have been transposed from another image and that his pentagram tattoo was added by hand. As the magnitude of detail hits you, you realize these 77 boxes contain a man’s lifework, his world, his everything—the story of an anonymous artist told through grainy reproductions of sexual torture.

Call it outsider art, intuitive art, art brut, or neuve invention; it is work made precisely at this intersection of art and obsession, pride and shame, sex and death, that has me scavenging through the museum's archives. Jean Dubuffet, the 20th century painter and impresario of the insane who coined the term art brut, famously said, “Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it; it would sooner run away than say its own name.” How apropos to go looking for it amongst the love that dares not speak its name.

Intuitive artists tend to share traits from a grab bag of commonalities: obsessive tendencies, mental illness, repression, confinement, isolation, a lack of formal training, sexual hang-ups, a sense of persecution, religious or visionary zeal, a focus on the process of art-making rather than its outcome, a disconnect from cultural centers of power, and a belief in the importance of their own work that is separate from its salability or critical appreciation. The original outsider artist, in an American context, is Henry Darger, the orphaned, occasionally institutionalized recluse who spent more than sixty years creating his 15,000-page masterpiece The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is an ideal place to search for such artists. For the last 40 years, the museum and its founders, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman, have been dedicated to rescuing and preserving gay art. They’ve created a haven for art makers whose work was unappreciated during their time, whether because of their identity, the frankness of their homosexual work, or their mental instability.

I am fascinated by the delicate interplay between pride and shame in the lives of these men—their desire to be anonymous while simultaneously believing their art is important enough to dedicate their lives to it and ensure its preservation. (And so far all the intuitive artists I’ve found there are men. The museum now has a broader mission, but it began primarily as a collection of erotic male art, and the majority of its collection is focused on males.)

Much of the work could be considered survival art, rough pieces created in a hostile environment to make sense of the artists’ conflicting desires and unstable worldviews. Even when these men had formal training, they wanted to explore themes removed from what was speakable during their lifetimes. The insider art status was never available to them. Instead their art was an act of pure creation and dedicated to their own vision. Aside from the work that now sits in storage, little is known about most of these men.

Take, for example, Edward Hochschild. In 1995 three of Edward's friends walked into the museum to see if someone could rescue Edward's art shortly after he had died of AIDS-related causes. Wayne Snellen, the museum’s Deputy Director for Collections, recalled that his apartment was “trashed” when they arrived, but they were able to save three pieces: The Vial Cross, an approximately 5' tall wooden cross studded with vials of hair, blood, pills, sand, and all kinds of ephemera and effluvia; a shirt made from Edward’s hair; and a large dildo studded with acupuncture needles, placed under a bell jar, and affixed to a smoke-detector base. Crudely made but powerfully evocative, the three pieces present an inarticulate meditation on sex, religion, illness, penance, and identity.

Then there is Joseph Friscia, a self-taught sculptor who lived with his mother. In the museum’s files, he has but a six-sentence biography, which notes “his sculpture was the result of a severe Catholic upbringing.” His first donation to the museum was The Church Has Its Way, which consisted of clay figurines of men in various states of religious torture. (One man pleasures himself with a crucifix, which is a sight I will never forget.) After disappearing for years, Joseph reappeared and told Wayne that his mother had died and he was “now free.” He gave the gallery new sculptures, man-beasts molded from the peach pink bodies of fetal mice, and never returned.

Joseph and Edward are emblematic of the outsider artist who is a reclusive creative working out personal anguish through art. The museum’s collection also includes Hokey Mokey, who has anonymously mailed art to the gallery every month for the past 15 years.

Here, the same dynamic of pride and shame is worked out in a more playful manner. Hokey’s work primarily consists of flat erotic montages placed inside envelopes. The art dares viewers to both open the envelopes and destroy their contents. Each packet is themed around some aspect of the month, like a holiday or a turn of season, and suggests an ongoing attempt to make sense of the world through pornographic art. Over the years, Hokey’s work has developed three-dimensional aspects, layering of colors and materials, and suggestions of an awareness of other collage makers, like artist Barbara Kruger. When finally tracked down, Hokey expressed no interest in having a show of his work or coming to the gallery. He had sent art to a few other people, but said the overwhelming majority of his work (nearly 200 packages to date) has gone to the museum.

Ted Titolo is another artist who has given all, or nearly all, of his work to the collection—a vast and stunning collection of art in a dozen mediums and a hundred styles. Of all the outsiders in the collection, Ted’s work is the most powerful. Deemed too gay for art school and too crazy for the army, he worked on Wall Street and dreamed of being a “fat lesbian,” according to Wayne. Ted's compulsion to create is cataloged in reams of notebooks, sheaths of drawings, boxes of VHS tapes, and untold scores of photos.

Ted is often the subject of his own work, although his self-portraits tend to obscure or remove his face. Occasionally, the portraits go so far, they call for Ted’s own annihilation. (In their context, these self-destructive scratches might have more to do with Ted’s desire to obliterate his maleness than his self-hatred.) Much of his art is divided up into “projects,” such as Rasa, an epic collection of writing, drawing, and photography that nearly fills a dozen three-ring binders. Perhaps his most interesting work is American Kouros, an illustrated book created in the late 1960s, which details the “War Between the Monosexes and the Herms.” In this epic battle for humanity’s sexual and emotional future, Ted posits hermaphroditism as our only hope.

All but two of these men are dead or missing, and of those two, only one is in contact with the museum. They have left their work to say what they never could. For artists who made art outside the broader context of gay life in the 20th century, these outsiders speak powerfully to the experiences of gay men in their time and place. The fact that these artifacts remain—and were created in the first place—is a testament to the ability of pride to occasionally mediate shame in private, on paper, on canvas, or in the bodies of dead mice.

“Dirty 30”: Talking AIDS To The Basketball Wives Set

First published on The Daily Beast, February 16, 2014. Read the original, with video, here.

The statistics are upsetting and well known. Despite an encouraging recent drop in transmission rates, black women still represent two-thirds of all new HIV infections among women. In fact, they are 20 times more likely to seroconvert than white women—a greater level of disparity than ever before. The cavalcade of AIDS anniversaries over the last few years has spawned a corresponding interest in producing museum exhibits, documentaries, and feature films about the early years of the crisis. But with a few notable exceptions (Frontline’s “Endgame: AIDS In Black America;” Precious; Tyler Perry’s despicable Temptation), there has been no similar rush to tell the stories of the (black, female) face of the modern epidemic.

Hannelore Williams, filmmaker, actor, and creator of the new docu-series “Dirty 30,” is hoping to change that.

“My target demographic are the people who watch ‘Basketball Wives’,” Williams says with a laugh, which I’ve learned means she’s about to say something darkly honest. “Or let’s just be real—people who don’t want to talk about HIV.”

Like the hundred or so people around the globe that Williams has interviewed, I find it easy to talk to her about HIV/AIDS. She’s relaxed, cool, confident, and quick to laugh about difficult things. Indeed, she ends every interview for “Dirty 30” by asking her subjects to “tell their favorite AIDS joke.”

As with many working on the epidemic, Williams has a personal connection to the crisis: her sister’s father passed away due to AIDS-related complications. But it wasn’t until years later, when she was preparing to volunteer at Nkosi’s Haven, a center for destitute HIV-positive mothers, children and AIDS orphans in Johannesburg, South Africa, that that connection hit home. “How am I flying across the globe,” she found herself wondering, “and I didn’t even go across the country to be with my sister” when her father died?

Williams was in South Africa to do arts education with children, but the women of Nkosi’s Haven were so similar to women she had known her whole life that she was drawn to work with them as well. She taught them to use her camera and let them turn the lens on their own lives. In so doing, she became hyperaware of all the ways in which black women—in the U.S. and around the world—were lacking opportunities to talk about AIDS. Quickly it became an obsession.

“It was a hurricane coming at me from the far west,” Williams says with a distant look in her eyes, discussing that feeling. “Once you start to look at this pandemic there's no way you would ever turn your back.”

There was just one problem: At the time, Williams didn’t know much about HIV. She realized, however, that the journey to knowledge was the story she had to tell. So she put her life on hold, borrowed two cameras, and spent six months traveling the world gathering footage. “I'm learning about this from the standpoint that most Americans are,” she says, “which is not knowing, or sort of knowing, but easily sweeping it under the rug.”

Far from being limiting, this acknowledgement allowed her to make a series that speaks directly to the epidemic as it is today. In “Dirty 30,” there are no ponderous attempts to chart the entire history of the crisis in order to set the scene. Instead, AIDS is treated simply as a fact of life—something we all know about, even if we don’t talk about it. And from New York to Baton Rouge, from Cape Town to Paris, Williams’ goal is to get people talking.

“It's not Hanne telling you jack shit about anything!” she laughs, when I ask if she’s worried about the responsibility that comes with approaching such a fraught issue from a place of relative ignorance. “I’m creating a platform for somebody else to talk.”

And that platform is, in a word, slick. Stylistically, “Dirty 30” feels more akin to a music video than a typical AIDS documentary, with beautiful shots of foreign cities, quick-cut motion graphics, and “featured artists” whose R&B tracks provide the backbeat to the show. Currently, Williams is meeting with commercial brands that might want to underwrite the series, and networks and other media platforms that might give it a home. She’s planned 16 episodes, with topics like “Monogamy & Sexual Healing,” and “Drugs & Escapism.”

“There are sexy issues tied to this pandemic,” she says unapologetically. By exploring them, she hopes to attract a young audience that doesn’t often tune in for stodgy healthcare PSAs—and therefore might need them most.

Williams acknowledges that aspects of the series might seem triggering at first, like using the word dirty in the title. But she says her choices have been informed by her subjects, and that she’s backed away from topics—like AIDS conspiracy theories—that her interviews led her to believe wouldn’t further a real conversation about the crisis. Still, she’s not afraid to talk about difficult issues. “If you try to talk about stigma and don’t actually put it out there,” she says, “what are we talking about? Bullshit. Lies.”

Although the show looks at the crisis through the lens of black womanhood, Williams is adamant about including diverse subjects and experiences in her frame. To her, it’s simple: “You can't talk about black women in the context of AIDS without talking about everybody else at the same time.” AIDS, which was once considered a niche disease, is now as much a part of the fabric of our lives as cotton.

At the moment, “Dirty 30” is in production, but even now Williams can’t stop. While I’m interviewing her, she’s setting up an additional shoot in Toronto. She doesn’t know yet where the show will end up, but she’s certain it will find a home, and she’s already begun planning more episodes.

“Not even one season of a show,” she says, shaking her head with a mixture of sadness and reflection, “could address all of the issues tied to this pandemic.”

Model Melanie Gaydos’s Fight for High Fashion

First published on The Daily Beast, February 3, 2014. Read the original here.

Sitting across from me in an immaculately tailored dark blue jacket, Melanie Gaydos is so petite she seems almost like a child dressed up as a model. She picks at the cuffs of her coat as we talk, the only sign of her anxiety. This is her first in-person interview.

“A lot of people don’t realize it, but I’m actually quite nervous all the time,” the Connecticut-born, Brooklyn-based Gaydos tells me at one point. Then, as frequently happens during our sprawling, multi-hour conversation, a smile flits across her face. “But I’m a survivor.”

She needs to be. Although she has been modeling for nearly three years, was flown to Europe to star in a video for the band Rammstein, and has had (or has lined up) shoots in New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, and Berlin, Gaydos is still finding her place in the world of high fashion. As she’s quick to point out, this is in part the same struggle any young woman has when trying to break into that nearly impossible industry: the fight to get work, avoid being exploited, and make the fashion world take notice. For Gaydos, however, this already difficult task is complicated by a rare genetic disorder called ectodermal dysplasia, which “affects your hair, teeth, nails, pores, skin tissue, and sometimes even bone formation.”

Ectodermal dysplasia affects everyone differently. Gaydos has a relatively severe form, which has meant a lifetime of people being scared of her, or assuming that she was cold, “a bitch,” or even mentally disabled—things that are patently untrue if you talk with her for even a minute. Indeed, if her medical condition has done anything to her personality, it has rendered Gaydos a remarkably self-aware and self-confident young woman.

“I didn’t want to live my life the way other people thought I should,” Gaydos says of her childhood in Connecticut, ”and I certainly didn’t want to be the sort of person that other people wanted me to be.”

After moving to New York to study art at the Pratt Institute, Gaydos began experimenting with being the person in the picture, as opposed to the one making it. Her first modeling shoot came about almost by accident. After emailing a photographer whose work she admired, she was invited to sit for him. Although she had always hated having her picture taken, she found she loved modeling from the very first click of the camera. After that, she began picking up work on Craigslist, and, eventually, from the amateur modeling website, ModelMayhem.com. Soon, she was doing two to three gigs a weekend.

“I never had any difficulty finding a shoot,” Gaydos remembers, though she would only work with people whose vision she found compelling. Somewhat retiring in person, she has a powerful, almost regal presence when the cameras are on, and her art background gives her a broad understanding of composition, color, and angles.

As she gained experience, Gaydos found herself wanting to create images that told a story and conveyed emotion, much as she once had as a visual artist. She was less interested in selling the clothing and more in making the viewer have an experience, which is what she believes separates commercial work from high-fashion modeling. “Besides,” she adds with the grin of a confident fashionista, “people are going to want to wear the clothes that I wear anyway.”

Looking for new opportunities, Gaydos began sending her portfolio to the big names in the fashion world, nearly all of whom told her she was too much of a “risk.” Just thinking about it makes her roll her eyes. “If you’re afraid of taking risks, why are you in fashion?” she asks in exasperation.

Not that she doesn’t realize the challenges facing her. “You should always understand where you are in the industry,” she says philosophically. When people tag and share her images online, “the word ugly is almost always with each photo.”

“It’s not anything I haven’t heard before,” she shrugs. “But I never thought of myself as ugly, and I still don’t.”

Her look is an opportunity, and she intends to make the most of it. But she also has to contend with photographers looking to exploit her as a one-trick pony to shock their audiences. Most of her career, she says, “has been trying to make good choices so people understand that I’m a serious model” and not just a unique face. Gaydos knows it would be easy for her to rest on her look, and not bring the vitality, the depth, and the spark that separate supermodels from the pack of wannabes. She feels sorry for those girls who think they can rest on looks alone. If you want to be a true model, “you can’t just be a body that’s there,” she cautions.

Eventually, Gaydos wants to join a high-end fashion agency, but knows it might be a while before that day comes. “I don’t think I can just walk in and they would accept me,” she says. “I have to get people to understand where I’m coming from. I have to earn respect.” Far from intimidating, the prospect seems to excite Gaydos. She demands to be taken seriously, much as her photos demand attention. So far, she’s found more success in Europe and Mexico than in America, but she has faith that as her body of work grows, “it will help other people be on board with the Melanie train.”

What Does Trans* Mean, and Where Did It Come From?

First published on Slate, January 10, 2014. Read the original here.

It’s widely accepted that computer-mediated communication—emailing, texting, sexting, commenting, chatting, and so on—has changed the way we speak, even when we’re away from the keyboard. But a new label being embraced online by some transgender people may represent a linguistic first: borrowing from computer language itself.

The label in question is trans*, and the asterisk stems from common computing usage wherein it represents a wildcard—any number of other characters attached to the original prefix. Thus, a computer search for trans* might pull uptransmission, transitory, or transsexual. But in this neologism, the * is used metaphorically to capture all the identities—from drag queen to genderqueer—that fall outside traditional gender norms. (The asterisk usually goes unpronounced in spoken English, though some users do say “trans star” or “trans asterisk” for clarity’s sake.)

“It was about 2009 or 2010 when I started using trans* to describe my own experiences,” says Nash Jones, who works as the Bridge 13 Community Education Program Coordinator at the Q Center, an LGBTQ center in Portland, Ore. Like many of those who embrace the term, Jones is under 30, college-educated, and actively seeks out “queer and trans* spaces.” Jones, who uses “they” as their gender pronoun, says that they use trans* both as a personal label and as “a more inclusive, broader umbrella term than transgender.”

For most of the last two decades, transgender has been the umbrella term of choice, much as trans* is being positioned today. Labels like transmasculine, or transvestite were considered to denote specific identities that fell within its scope. Before that, the most widely used term was usually transsexual, which fell out of favor in part because it focused attention narrowly on physical sex. Today, transsexual is usually used to refer to someone who wants to undergo gender reassignment surgeries (Confused? Here is a handy list of terms from the National Center for Transgender Equality.)

For some, the appeal of trans* might be similar. By removing -gender, which instinctively brings to mind images of men or women, trans* might help transcend the gender binary and provide more space for people who are in the middle, who move back and forth, or who don’t identify with the binary at all.

An historical use of the term gay*, from the 1979 March on Washington.

As transgender gained ascendancy in the 1990s, many lesbian and gay organizations, pressured to present at least a veneer of inclusivity, added it to their names or mission statements. It’s possible that a younger generation turned against the term in part because the spread of the word transgender was often accompanied by little in the way of significant change to include actual trans* people.

Jenny Lederer is a San Francisco State University lecturer in linguistics who studies the metaphors by which people understand gender transition. She likens this falling out of favor to the cognitive linguistic concept of salient exemplars, which are “complex but relatively well-shared societal prototypes attached to any given label.” She suggests that “this younger generation of trans-folks want to disassociate” from the few famous transgender people they’ve seen, because those celebrities don’t seem relevant or similar to their lives. Instead, they’re looking to the Internet to find—or create—words, communities, and celebrities with which they feel comfortable.

There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer to when and where trans* first came into usage. But it seems clear from its roots in computer language, anecdotal research, and the fact that no one agrees on how to say it aloud, that trans* first—and recently—appeared online.

But trans historian Cristan Williams cautions against leaping to any conclusions. “In talking with older trans community members, they tell me that they had used t* as a short code for all things trans back in the early 1980s message boards.” She believes the word may well be gaining popularity as a way of sidestepping an ongoing debate in part of the trans* community about the origins and uses of the terms transsexual and transgender (a longer history of which can be found on Williams’ website).

It may well be that the asterisk has been appearing and disappearing from gayspeak for decades. But why is it suddenly so popular? Jones has a theory: “When communities are no longer limited by physical proximity,” people are more likely to look for words that invoke broad inclusion, out of sheer necessity. As our (virtual) worlds get bigger, so must our language and our salient exemplars. Before the Internet, an isolated trans* person might have used a term that didn’t really fit because it was the only one they’d encountered. Now, a new label is just a click away.

We Can End AIDS Without a Cure

First published in Slate, November 29, 2013. Read the original here.

This Dec. 1, as we mark yet another World AIDS Day without a cure, a vaccine, or an intelligently interdependent global response to the crisis, I’d like to propose a thought experiment based on a radical—yet commonsense—proposition: We can end AIDS without a cure for AIDS.

After all, we have learned ways to prevent transmission between mother and child, discovered drugs that bring the viral load down to undetectable levels, and placed a critical understanding of sexual health in the hands of (some of) those who need it most. With proper funding and political will, these advantages can be replicated in every population, in every country, in every corner of the globe. Incurable is not unbeatable—as we already know from polio and smallpox.

So why haven’t we beaten AIDS? Clearly, it’s not because we don’t need to. In the United States alone, an estimated 1.2 million people are living with HIV. Globally, it’s around 35.3 million people. For one reason or another—because they are black or brown, gay or transgender, drug users or sex workers, and overwhelmingly because they are poor and disenfranchised—the life-or-death needs of these people do not dictate global policy or move world markets. Because AIDS has from its very beginning been a disease of the marginalized, we have allowed it to spread like a weed through the cracks in our society. Inaction, more than transmission, is at issue here. HIV causes AIDS, yes, but the AIDS crisis is caused by stigma, oppression, discrimination, and apathy. The virus is not our biggest enemy—we are.

And here, the thought experiment begins.

Currently, the popular understanding of HIV/AIDS is that it is a disease that affects certain “high-risk groups”: gay men, for instance, or black women. To be sure, rates of infection among these groups are disproportionately high, as any number of depressing statistics show. According to recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 30,000 men who have sex with men (MSMs) contracted HIV in 2010—up a significant 12 percent from 2008. While infection rates among black women seem to have fallen recently, they are still 20 times higher than those of white women. Such strong correlations between racial or sexual identities and infection rates suggest that this model is informative, that it is an accurate way to understand the AIDS crisis.

But these statistics conceal as much as they seem to reveal. In three distinct ways, the “risk group” approach to conceptualizing HIV actually impedes efforts to end the crisis. First, it pathologizes all people within a broad category, regardless of their actual sero-status or real likelihood of contracting HIV. Under this simplistic rubric, all gay men or black women or injection drug users are treated as likely sources of infection.

Second, this approach diminishes our ability to properly understand and target the real vectors for the disease by hiding them inside nearly useless categories. After all, there is nothing inherent to being a black woman that makes one more likely to contract HIV. It is the social position of black womanhood in our society that puts these women at risk, not their identities.

Third, by leading us to believe that these broad groupings have some causal relationship to HIV infection, this model limits our understanding of the crisis to our local context. Because we are actually dealing with correlation, not causation, these groupings do not have the same relationship to HIV in other places. Efforts to work globally—or even in different communities in America—will always be hampered by our own preconceived notions of who is and is not at risk.

But what if we flipped the lens? What if we focused more on marginalization (and its real-world effects) and less on identities? What if we understood AIDS not as a disease affecting certain types of people, but rather, as a disease that affects those living at the intersection of a constellation of conditions, such as poverty, lack of access to education, inadequate health care, stigmatized sexual practices, drug and alcohol abuse (legal or illegal), and political disenfranchisement?

This would not only reduce the stigmatization of identity groups with high rates of HIV infection, it would also allow us to tailor our health remedies to those who really are most at-risk. For example, in a further breakdown of that statistic regarding rates of infection among MSMs, the CDC notes that the numbers of new infections among white and black MSMs were almost identical—despite the fact that non-Latino whites represent 63 percent of the U.S. population and blacks only 12 percent. Additionally, the greatest number of infections was seen in the youngest age group. Again and again, it is those who sit at the intersection of marginalized identities—those with the least social capital and political agency—who are most at risk. We must discard generic categorical bromides in favor of health remedies targeted to their specific needs.

Further, this way of understanding the crisis would turn our attention away from prevention models based solely on behavioral change, which studies have shown are often difficult to enact in real life. Though it is tempting to isolate a single action or inaction that could stem the tide of infection, in truth, we are complex social animals whose behaviors arise from our specific circumstances and experiences. Thus, without broader contextual shifts, our actions tend to be change resistant.

For example, behavioral models routinely admonish young women with little education, no access to health care, and a cultural lack of sexual agency to make difficult decisions in highly sexual situations. In an (oversimplified) metaphor, it’s like telling someone to use a condom every time they have sex—without considering where they will get the condom, who their partners are, how they will negotiate safer sex acts, what the word sex means to them, and so on. A more successful (and, to be blunt, fair) approach would be to ensure that these women are empowered to enter these situations with adequate support, knowledge, and decision-making agency—things marginalized groups often lack. This requires HIV prevention efforts that also work to create political power for marginalized groups; address issues of poverty and social justice; help individuals find or prepare for meaningful employment, housing, and health care; address mental health issues—efforts, in effect, that address a client’s life circumstances as a whole. Many, many on-the-ground service providers already work in this kind of model. But this is a long and slow process, which requires support from an informed populace and a government that sees the vital connection between civil rights, community empowerment, and HIV/AIDS.

By focusing on marginalization, not identity or behavior, we could begin to address the root causes of inequality that leave certain members of our society more at risk for experiencing any negative life or health outcome, AIDS included.

If we can stop AIDS and have chosen not to, the hard truth is that it is because certain lives don’t seem worth saving: They would cost too much, or have brought it upon themselves, or aren’t our concern, or don’t even exist in our worldview. And this is what needs to change. Until we see every life as equal, we will never end AIDS.

Being a Queer Writer: Talking With Hugh Ryan

I was interviewed on October 22nd, 2013 by Edge, about being a queer writer. Read the original (with photos) here.

Nearly a decade ago, Hugh Ryan needed to make a career choice between artist or writer. Wisely he chose writing. Since then he’s become one of the most published LGBT (or ’queer,’ as he prefers) writers in print and the web. EDGE spoke to Ryan about his passion for writing (and being queer).

Back in 2004, while leisurely wandering the streets of Berlin, Hugh Ryan realized that he had a decision to make. He had been in the German capital three months, and had yet to settle on his next career move. Ryan refused to entertain the notion of a career that didn’t allow him to travel or work in his pyjamas - a resolve that permitted two, rather bohemian options: artist or writer. Fast forward nearly ten years, and with numerous writing and editing credits to his name, it is clear that Ryan made the right decision. After all, he is, by his own admission, "a terrible artist."
Indeed, Ryan’s resume boasts experience in a number of genres: from travel reporting, to entertainment journalism, to ghost writing children’s books - he is a versatile, concise and engaging writer. At the heart of his work, however, is a dedication to the issue of social justice for queer subjects. Edge caught up with Ryan to discuss his blossoming career, LGBT issues and writing for the New York Times.

Hugh Ryan

Being pigeonholed?

EDGE: So let’s start with some background - how did you get started? I know you completed a stint here at EDGE early in your career!

Hugh Ryan: Yeah, it feels kind of nice to be on the other side of an EDGE interview! (laughs) And well I’d always loved writing, but I never thought it would be a viable career option! Even as a kid I was very practical. I went to school originally for human development, and then I switched majors about 19 times and ended up as a feminist studies major. And it was only after a couple of years spent working as a youth worker and social worker that I decided that type of work wasn’t what I wanted to do, even though I thought it was very important work. So I took some time away from everything - I quit my job and moved to Berlin, Germany with my friend for four months. I spent all of my days walking around the city doing nothing, and by the third month I realized that I had to start doing something! (laughs) And I realized I wanted a job that enabled me to work in my pyjamas and explore the world, and that only really left two options: artist or writer. Of course I am a terrible artist, so the choice became easy - I settled on writer!

EDGE: You are an openly gay writer, and as with any "gay writer," there is the risk of becoming pigeonholed and restricted by that label. Is the term "gay writer" something you embrace, or do you find it limiting and frustrating?

Hugh Ryan: I embrace it 100 percent. I think there is the assumption that the mainstream media’s effort to ghettoize you or pigeonhole you is always necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t agree with that. I found very early on in my writing career that a lot of my stuff was very focused on the personal side of my life, and that necessitated being a ’gay’ writer (That said, I don’t love the label ’gay’. It isn’t a bad term, but I prefer to be known as a ’queer writer’) And then from there I always knew I had an interest in queer history and queer communities, and all of that led to me writing more and more about queer issues - issues which I felt I had a wealth of personal expertise and a wealth of personal knowledge that I had gained over the years.

Hugh Ryan

Not exclusive

EDGE: What are, arguably, the common themes in your work? I notice a focus on queer social justice, and social justice in general?

Hugh Ryan: Oh definitely- I think queer social justice is definitely at the heart of it, because that is the place where I know the most, and I have the most connections. I think it is a place where I can give the most back to the conversation. That said, I don’t write exclusively about queer issues. I am also a travel writer, restaurant critic and ghost writer etc. I have also written about social justice issues concerning other minorities. For example, I wrote recently about racism on reality television, but that is more from the perspective of a viewer. With queer social justice, well that is a topic I know intimately, so the criticism comes from a more personal place.

EDGE: You mentioned earlier that you write in other mediums - you are a travel writer and a copy editor for example. Is there a medium that you prefer working in? Or is there an equal balance?

Hugh Ryan: That is a tough call! I love the personal essays, and creative non-fiction. I love issues concerning poetics and the mechanisms of language, and I think the creative pieces are the areas where I really shine. I also really love writing kids’ books! I have worked as a ghost writer on a number of children’s books.

EDGE: Are you allowed to name those books?

Hugh Ryan: (laughs) No I am not unfortunately!! But I can tell you that they are well known and cherished books! I will admit that I wasn’t the originator of that series - I was extending someone else’s vision. That said, it was certainly exciting and rewarding.

Hugh Ryan

A queer context

EDGE: You recently penned an incisive critique for the New York Times about the "AIDS in New York: The First Five Years" exhibit that recently closed at the New-York Historical Society. And I certainly agreed with you when you posited that "bad history has consequences." Indeed, it is often the case that historical narratives work to uphold the values of the dominant culture, and are therefore less inclusive of marginalized voices. So I want to ask you, if you were given license to overhaul the exhibit, what changes would you implement to make it more balanced and inclusive?

Hugh Ryan: That’s a great question! I would start by working with people who know a lot about the subject. Because, for example, so much of my writing has been inspired, influenced and enriched by talking to lots of different people. So with queer issues, it is important to start by talking to the queer community, because there is so much knowledge there concerning our collective history. It has been kept and recorded by queer people, and I think that is something we shouldn’t forget in our rush to record and present our history for a mainstream audience. It is incredibly important that we do record and make note of our history, and that it features in mainstream venues, but I think it needs to start from a queer place.

For me, also, I think there was maybe too much of a focus on the medical response to AIDS in the exhibit, and less of a focus on the personal side of the epidemic. I would also critically revise the curatorial pose: the director said they were aiming for ’neutrality’, and ultimately I think ’neutrality’ is non-existent, and I think the idea that something can be ’neutral’ is dangerous and destructive. I think we need to acknowledge and embrace the fact that AIDS is situated within a queer context.

EDGE: You are fascinated with queer history, but what are your thoughts on the current state of the global LGBT rights movement? This past summer has witnessed some monumental gains and crippling setbacks - for example the attainment of marriage equality in the UK and France was overshadowed by the enactment of anti-LGBT legislation in Russia.

Hugh Ryan: I think that the longer queer issues are in the public realm, and are talked about, the more complicated they become. I am interested in the way that "queerness," as a lived identity, has changed over time in this world, for different types of people. I think progress is measured differently for certain groups within the LGBT community. So for example, take the issue of gay marriage, I support it 100 percent and I think it is important that people have access to that institution.

However, I certainly don’t think it is the most important or pressing issue, because there are transgendered people, for example, who face violence and work place discrimination on a daily basis just for being themselves. And there is still very little, if any, legal protection for them. So I certainly think there are more significant issues that I want to see the queer community as a whole rallying around. I do think worldwide the picture varies between different countries, and I wish I had more knowledge about that. In this country, though, I would argue that the general picture is improving, despite the fact that we still have a long way to go.

EDGE: And have you encountered any struggle or discrimination in your career due to your sexual orientation?

Hugh Ryan: I may have. I have definitely had moments where I pitched articles about LGBT issues, and I have had publishers refuse because their respective publications have never dealt with queer concerns. But I like writing for publications in this niche community, because we have our own stories. To offer an example, when the Chelsea Manning story came out, and it was revealed that she was in the process of transitioning, I had people in the mainstream media ask me "wow did you know?" And I was like "of course I knew", because it was a queer story, and I had already heard about it - it was a story pertinent to our community. So I guess in other words, being in a niche community can certainly help you in this business!

For more information on Hugh, visit visit his web page.

The Quest to Build a National LGBT Museum

First published in Slate, October 18, 2013. Read the original here.

Someday, somewhere in Washington, D.C.—perhaps on the National Mall, kitty-corner across Maryland Avenue from the sinuous, sandy-colored Museum of the American Indian, or tucked behind the sprawling complex of the Natural History Museum—there may sit a National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Museum. That might sound surprising, considering that sodomy was illegal in the District until 1993, but Tim Gold, CEO of the Velvet Foundation, is convinced the time is right.

“I’m hoping to see this in the next five years,” he says confidently. That might seem like an ambitious  timeline for an institution with an initial funding goal of $50 mllion to $100 million, but he and his husband, high-end furniture magnate Mitchell Gold, have been quietly working on the museum project since 2007. That’s when they first conceived of the Velvet Foundation as a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to “creating the National LGBT Museum in Washington DC.”

Before 2007, Gold spent most of his professional life working in the Smithsonian at the National Postal Museum, and he credits that experience—in a roundabout way—with generating the idea for the LGBT Museum.

“I thought we could do a great exhibition on James Smithson, who is the benefactor of the Smithsonian Institution,” he recalls. But when he suggested the idea, it didn’t go over well, “because he was British, and he was potentially gay, and that doesn’t really fit into what they wanted to project.”

Yes, you read that right: The founder of the institution that conservatives threatened to defund and destroy over the display of work by queer artist David Wojnarowicz, was quite possibly gay himself, according to Gold’s own research. (Even more intriguingly, a recent Smithson biography, The Stranger and the Statesman, suggests that Smithson’s nephew, who was originally slated to inherit the fortune that funded the Smithsonian, was also gay.) This is a perfect example of the kind of story that Gold hopes the museum will one day tell, stories “of the LGBT communities as a part of—not apart from—the American experience, where the intersections of diverse cultures, shared by diverse people, define us as individuals and as a nation.” And what could be more American than reveling in the fact that the founder of a great American institution was possibly gay and definitely British?

In many ways, the idea of a national LGBT museum is sharply divergent from the general trend of LGBT history organizations. “From the ‘70s to now-ish, it’s been about collecting, preserving, and investing,” says Anna Conlan, a Ph.D. student and adjunct professor of art history at Hunter College, whose master’s thesis at Columbia focused broadly on queer museology. Private individuals and grass-roots organizations such as New York’s Lesbian Herstory Archives, which was founded in 1974, preserved the legacies of LGBT people and communities long before it was possible to even consider an institution on the scale of what the Velvet Foundation is proposing. Over time, these groups “start having museological functions,” Conlan says—curating displays from their collections, hosting speakers, etc. Some even develop into museums of their own, or create museum offshoots, as is the case with New York’s Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, which started as a private collection by Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman, and the San Francisco GLBT History Museum, which was created from the collection of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.

Still, making that transition can be hard, as archives and museums serve different, though related functions. Archives tend to be more in-group oriented, with a primary audience that is congruent with their collections focus, while museums target a wider populace. Archival holdings usually involve more paper and fewer objects, and instead of telling stories about history, they allow visitors to discover these stories on their own.

In Conlan’s view, LGBT communities need both long-running, grass-roots organizations focused on historical preservationand newly formed organizations that follow a “more traditional model” of historical presentation. But Conlan’s enthusiasm comes with a caveat—one shared by almost everyone I spoke to: It has to be done right. Or as Gold himself puts it, “It’s like building a cathedral. Once it’s done, you can’t tear it down and say, let’s start over.”

To that end, the Velvet Foundation has embarked upon a long planning process, which included focus groups with a number of sub-communities within the larger LGBT community. Conlan herself participated in one for lesbian- and bisexual-identified women, and two main concerns were captured in the report from the meeting: First, that the primary organizers were all wealthy white men, and that other members of the LGBT community need to be deeply involved in the planning process, not tacked on at the end. And second, that the museum must embrace a broad vision of social justice.

These concerns were echoed by Amy Sueyoshi, the associate dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and co-curator of the GLBT History Museum. In her view, history is an important part of the psychic armor that allows marginalized people to survive in a difficult and often hostile world. “The way I think about the history of people of color or of queers is to imagine situations that are much worse than the situation I’m living in, which gives me courage and inspires me to keep going,” she says.

She hopes that a national LGBT museum will embrace a wide spectrum of LGBT experiences and identities. “I want it to be very vigilant in its mission so it doesn’t just produce stories about gay white men,” she says, and so that all the stories they tell are layered and complex, not just “histories of heroism.”

As with most things in life, whether the museum is able to pull this off has to do, in part, with where the money comes from. In creating a national institution, Sueyoshi points out, “there’s this tension of ‘how much are we really going to be able to talk about things’ that might offend folks who have power in America. … I want the national museum to not always mount exhibits that will bring in the largest financial audience.”

When asked, Gold talks at length about attempts to ensure staff diversity, and particular stories that the museum hopes to tell that don’t feature gay white men—like the story of civil-rights organizer Bayard Rustin. He is resistant, however, to what he calls “check-box identity politics,” and only time will tell if the museum can adequately address the issues raised by the focus groups. But when it comes to the question of funding, and the strings it can put on an organization, he is of one mind with Conlan and Sueyoshi. “If we go the route of an old-school capital campaign, we would be in danger of leaving out the most marginalized people,” he says. Years of experience and feasibility studies have convinced the Velvet Foundation that raising funds from private individuals is both doomed to fail and likely to leave them unduly influenced by the whims of rich, gay white men.

Instead, the Velvet Foundation plans to utilize a new form of for-profit business called a “benefit LLC,” which is similar to a traditional real-estate company, except that it has a “social benefit” built into its mission. Whereas a traditional LLC is mandated to pursue the highest return for its investors, and its staff can be penalized for behaving otherwise, a benefit LLC has both shareholder return and its social benefit (in this case, securing a home for the National LGBT Museum) as its prime directives. Thus, the creation of Oliver-Grayson Holding Co., which the Velvet Foundation hopes will operate as a successful Class A real-estate company—while simultaneously finding a home for the museum.

In the end, Gold is adamant that this strategy will work—or perhaps it is more accurate to say he is philosophically opposed to pursuing any other strategy. “I would rather not see a museum,” he says, “than see a museum that left out the stories that need to be told the most.”