A History of Silence

The last fight I ever had with my father, was [after] a friend of mine had just taken his life in the early days of the AIDS crisis. And I was out at the beach staying with a friend. My dad lived on the North Shore (Long Island, New York) and he came down to console me. And we were talking about ACT UP and the work I was doing. And he gave me this, like, old lefty thing—he was a Bolshevik—and he said, “You know, I really love what you’re doing, Av, but there will never be a revolution in America so long as there’s television.”

I said, Listen, this is the last time we’re having this conversation. I have two choices: I can do nothing—and I know what happens if I do nothing. People continue to die. Or I can try something. Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. And maybe less people will die. So, we’re never having this conversation again. It doesn’t matter whether there will be a revolution. People are dying. There really isn’t a choice. If you look at it that way, there is no choice.

The thing that really kick-started our thinking about the content for the Silence=Death poster was William F. Buckley Jr.’s op-ed piece calling for the tattooing of the HIV-positive people. Half of our collective was Jewish, and we were horrified by that. So [that] was going to be the first subject of the poster. But, as we began to explore what the image would be, we realized, Okay, so what gender is the body that tattoo is on? What race? We knew that questions of race and gender were very much a part of where we were heading, although no one was really talking about it yet. So we decided to choose a pictographic image to avoid the questions of representation. And that’s how we ended up with the pink triangle.

There was something extremely performative about this poster. This kind of trickster, Yippie idea of forcing people to confront political questions without their maybe even realizing that that’s what’s happening. The design problem posed to the collective was, I felt it needed to function on two different levels. One was to imply to everyone outside of the communities who needed to organize that we already were completely organized and well-funded. And to everyone within the communities, we needed to create some Socratic space for people to begin to think politically about the issue—not just in terms of caregiving.

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