Photograph of defaced poster in Chicago, Illinois, 1990. Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989). Assisted by the cyclical prevalence of retro aesthetics, the images’ inhabitation of the present is similarly consummate. That the aesthetics have barely dated speaks to the sophistication of Gran Fury’s image-making strategies, utilising advertising and media praxis of 1980–90 in order to seamlessly assimilate messaging into spaces where a vast audience could be reached, galvanising and educating the public about the complexities of AIDS. 6 In this show Gran Fury’s works are reproduced anew: huge billboards and posters in overwhelmingly bright, virile colours. It has also coincided with the recent American midterms (the US polls remain anxiety-ridden indicators of the immediate concourse of public health down the same party lines) and a revival of interest in the artistic legacy of those associated with the counter-narratives of HIV/AIDS.
Currently showing at Auto Italia South East’s project space in Bethnal Green, 5 the exhibition marks thirty years since the formation of Gran Fury and ten since the inception of Auto Italia. Kissing Doesn’t Kill is a central work in ‘ Read My Lips’, Gran Fury’s first comprehensive retrospective in the UK. That there was cause for joy in same-sex kissing – that queerness was not death – was similarly so. That victimhood was not inherent in the nature of queerness, but a result of government negligence and social and political marginalisation, was radical messaging to reach the mainstream. But Gran Fury’s messaging urged for that victimhood to be seen on a collective rather than individual level: combatted through urgent changes to the derelict public health policy (five years into the epidemic at the end of 1986, there had been over 28,700 diagnosed cases and over 25,500 deaths the same year then-president Reagan had only just uttered the word ‘AIDS’ in public) 4 4 as well as to the public perception that AIDS was confined to certain communities. Because of their marginalisation and socio-sexual positioning the outbreak of AIDS particularised queer men as victims. This gave the disease’s emergence a particularly complex ontological relationship to that identity: with no cure, diagnosis often meant a forced ‘coming out’. In the late 20th century the idea of gayness as an identity was slowly replacing the mainstream assumption of a ‘lifestyle choice’, as well as some former fluidity between sexual activity and LGBT identity categories, particularly for men who had sex with men.
The overt messaging of Kissing Doesn’t Kill overlays a more subtle, embedded communication: that queerness is and was also joy, even amid the chaotic emergence of AIDS. This work’s positive expression of queer sexuality can be viewed almost in opposition to General Idea’s iconic AIDS (1986), which through its open appropriation of Robert Indiana’s LOVE (1967) 3 always contained the paradox: if love is directly replaceable by AIDS, which remains incurable and at the time signified a swiftly-advancing death, what was the potential for queer expressions of love? Were queer love and AIDS to be polarised, thereby implied as binarily inevitable? Gran Fury emerged from ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the now-influential activist group who sought to combat governmental negligence of the blooming AIDS catastrophe at both policy and societal level. 2 The adoption of this narrative during the emergence of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome as a global health crisis in the early 1980s tore gashes into the hard-won, tentatively liberalising US attitudes towards homosexuality at the time. The posters and billboards were routinely defaced: a growing and pervasive narrative positioning HIV as a threatening epidemic ‘fuelled by gay promiscuity’ 1 led city inhabitants in anger to cross out all the kissing figures within two days. When Gran Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do first appeared plastered prominently over Chicago’s public spaces in 1990, its purpose was to combat the panic-circulated myth that the human immunodeficiency virus could be transmitted through saliva.
Installation view at Auto Italia, London (2018).