untitled, 1993

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was clinically reported in the United States, although not yet named, in 1981. Until the advent of antiviral drugs in the mid-1990s, no effective treatments existed. The epidemic first aggressively infiltrated marginalized populations such as the queer community and intravenous drug users, creating a stigma that exacerbated the trauma to patients and their loved ones. David Wojnarowicz used his art to confront these and other related social-justice issues. In 1986 the cartoonist James Romberger began working with Wojnarowicz on a graphic memoir of the latter’s life, from his years as a homeless teenager to his struggles with AIDS. Romberger continued to work on the project after Wojnarowicz’s death, publishing 7 Miles a Second in 1996. This screenprint of one of the layouts merges the format of the graphic novel with an illness narrative, conveying failure, loss, and moving expressions of love.

Student response:

In the midst of a global pandemic and at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, I, like David Wojnarowicz, am angry. As a young gay person from the Midwest, I have been denied any sort of "positive" queer cultural inheritance. In fact, the queerness I have inherited has been molded significantly by the AIDS crisis. In the gay community, I have observed sexual anxiety and a desire for assimilation, as well as white supremacy and a still-prevalent disgust toward HIV-positive people. These all linger as effects of the rigorously regressive moral politics of the 1980s and ’90s. In the 1980s, a time where sexual liberation was at its height, the appearance of "Gay-Related Immune Deficiency" lent right-wing politicians an excuse to erroneously link homosexuality to immorality. My generation (along with, of course, our elders) is still working to erase those pernicious residues.

Although I would love to read this piece as beautifully intimate, an eternally apolitical cry for more time in the arms of a dying lover, I don’t think it would be what David Wojnarowicz, the activist who is my namesake, would have wanted. The violence he represents in this scene reminds me not only of the atrophy of the AIDS-ravaged body, but also of the destruction of the queer subject by the administrations and institutions who, during this crisis, would rather we had died than be accepted.

Now, still feeling the repercussions of our denial to life (BIPOC and trans people most prominently), my generation has been tasked with making up for lost time.

David Timm ’22