Book Launch: AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War by Robert Atkins

Join Visual AIDS for a conversation with Visual AIDS co-founder Robert Atkins on the occasion of his new book, AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War: Selected Writings of Robert Atkins. He will be joined by Sarah Schulman and Jackson Davidow to discuss the Culture War, defined as a Christian Nationalist assault on the increasingly multicultural society and liberal ethos that emerged in the 1960s in the new form of attacks by Americans on other Americans. Media-savvy politicians and religious figures took advantage of relatively new and little-known groups–artists, queers, and people with AIDS. Despite their initial lack of support, members of these groups soon applied their art and media practices to effectively oppose authoritarian inroads on the Constitution’s First-Amendment guarantees of free expression. “But,” Atkins wonders,” “have we already slid too far back from the future to avoid another full-scale medical crisis?”

AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War presents three-and-a-half decades of articles and essays stemming from these contentious assaults on the rights of individuals, institutions, and, by extension, all Americans. A staff columnist for the Village Voice during the 1980s and 90s, Atkins produced both eye-witness reporting and thoughtful analysis from 1987 and the debut of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, DC to the most recently published piece collected for the book, his 2019 review of Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag. The book also features When the Culture War Became the Culture, his lengthy, recently written cultural history of the past half century in the US against which the book’s narrative plays out.

To reserve a copy of AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War  please write to the Bureau at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War for March 1 event” in the subject line. Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011. Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel: youtube.com/@bgsqd

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.