Timothy E. Bradley, July 22, 2020

All This Clamoring for Life: The Performance Art of Frank Green

Research Fellow Timothy E. Bradley explores the work of Frank Green (1957–2013), a performance and installation artist who worked in New York and Ohio. Bradley focuses on The Scarlet Letters, a searing and iconoclastic performance that questioned medical knowledge about AIDS in the mid-1990s.

In the Q & A following his 1991 performance at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, Frank Green was asked if his decision to place a live rabbit and a dead rabbit together on stage made the AIDS epidemic out to be “more terrible and distressing than it actually is.”1

The audience had just seen “Just Say Yes to Bugs,” a forty-minute multimedia frenzy in which Green roams the stage conducting lab experiments with glass beakers, insects, a charcoal grill, a bed frame rigged into a restraining device, and more. The performance begins with the artist wrapped in bandages, injecting himself with needles and swallowing pills while crying out, “One more time!” He then transforms into a menacing health official in a hazmat suit and gas mask, handing out vials of strange concoctions to the audience. Finally, he strips down to a jockstrap, revealing his near-naked body painted into segments, as if primed for an operation. Throughout, a television placed high above the action shows scenes of biological warfare, lab technicians, and sexual acts, all set to an ominous soundtrack of phrases like “disease centers control, control centers disease” and “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” The piece ends with Green locking himself in a cage, much like the live caged bunny twitching its nose on stage near a dangling, dripping rabbit carcass.2

To the audience’s question, Green responded: “I don’t see how it could be more terrible and distressing. I think the AIDS epidemic is one of the most terrifying things happening on the planet now, and I think that’s why this piece had to be so terrifying.” He added, “A lot of times, when I’m trying to show something . . . the best way to do it is to show it.” By then, he had been living with HIV for two years.3

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Headshot of Frank Green for Tremont Art Walk, 2008

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Frank Green was a beloved and defining figure of the Cleveland art scene from the late-1980s until he passed away in 2013. He staged maximalist performance art pieces, published extensive art criticism, and was considered a “cultural force” and “mischief-maker” by his friends and collaborators in Tremont, a west side neighborhood whose cheap rents in the 1990s attracted a community of artists and galleries.4 Fearless in his approach to showing the gritty sides of life, Green made work that responded to the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS with an iconoclastic stance towards the medical establishment and a fervent insistence on the health and integrity of his own body. In a 1994 press release for “The Scarlet Letters,” a solo piece he wrote and performed, Green stated: “My work differs from much of current cultural work on AIDS in its radical refusal of victim or patient status. Rather than appealing to institutional power for help, I challenge the power of the institutions themselves.”5

I was not familiar with Green when I first encountered his name in the Visual AIDS archives, but his biography’s resemblance to my own—a queer writer who came to New York from the middle of America—made me want to know more. I wanted to know how he experienced the city in the ’80s, how he grappled with AIDS, and what shape his performances took, if I could even find them. I wanted to know, in the spirit of José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, how the traces of Green’s life and work live on today. When I discovered that Green is conspicuously absent from critical anthologies documenting the performance art of his time, I grew even more curious. 

Early in my research, I discovered that Green published a powerful essay in 1998 that addressed a controversial feature of his practice: he was an HIV-positive artist who questioned the link between HIV and AIDS. This outlook impacted his critical reception. He writes:

Marginalizing me as an artist who fails to accept that HIV causes AIDS, critics ignore the most interesting aspects of my work. They don’t talk about its liberating belief in the possibility of survival. They don’t talk about its exploration of the psychological mechanisms of concealment and isolation. They don’t talk about the appropriation of medical imagery I employ to turn my diagnosis into a position of strength. They don’t talk about multimedia strategies or my performance’s relation to a body work tradition. They don’t talk about its ritual structure or the postmodern strategies applied to Hawthorne’s novel or the way autobiographical discourse expands out from a classic text. But then, critics don’t talk about my work at all. Though I’ve performed The Scarlet Letters in a dozen North American cities, it hasn’t been discussed in a single book or critical article, and has never been reviewed.6

These devastating words left me wanting not only to give “The Scarlet Letters” the appraisal Green felt it deserved, but also to learn what preceded and followed this particular work. Who was Frank Green, and what might his practice reveal to us today? 

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Frank Green, still images from The Scarlet Letters performance, 1993

By the time he moved from Ohio to New York City in 1980, Green had already begun making the kind of edgy work that would define his practice. As a student at Kent State University (KSU) in the late seventies, he studied with experimental filmmaker Richard Myers and made 16mm and Super 8 films, including The Dark, a dialogue-free portrait of three young women moving through haunting scenes of captivity and escape.7 He also began exploring spoken word. Green met his friend Cindy Penter in a modern dance class at KSU in 1975, and she writes that even then he was an impassioned artist, an engaged collaborator, and a person of social conscience.8

Documentation of Green’s New York years is limited, but in 1981, at the age of twenty-three, he was living downtown on East Fifth Street between Avenues A and B. Recounting an early visit, his friend Mike DeCapite writes that Green’s apartment was strewn with books and manuscripts and that he had a kitten named Billy. Green worked in bookstores, including Gotham Book Mart and Samuel Weiser Bookstore. During this decade he performed what he referred to as “sound/text pieces” at iconic venues like Limbo Lounge, Pyramid Club, 8BC, Neither/Nor, ABC No Rio, and the Nuyorican Café.9His published writings from this time offer a view of the artist just setting out, years before HIV would reshape his life. The works focus on provocative, countercultural subjects—interests that would sustain him throughout his career. In their Winter 1981/1982 issue, for example, the downtown arts journal Benzene published “Concussion,” a performance piece for five voices that deployed hazy vignettes and wordplay to evoke a bedridden, convalescing male whose “eyes weren’t on right,” with references to Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.10

In 1983, Green published a trio of prose pieces titled “Thin Air” that features transitory street characters struggling to get their bearings, including a woman who sits and sleeps on street corners and yells at passersby, “Spell it! Spell it!”11

Perhaps the most illustrious artifact from Green’s early career is “A-RAIN-MENT,” a sound/text performance for two voices that he presented as early as 1985. The script was published in the performance art journal The Act. An undated, partial video remains of Green presenting it, accompanied by his own recorded voice.12 On the page, “A-RAIN-MENT” has the aimless, recursive look of a Gertrude Stein text, but in performance the intended effect becomes clear. The piece begins with an imposing droning sound from which Green’s speech emerges (an opening motif that reappears in “The Scarlet Letters” and elsewhere). Through accumulating fragments, a loose narrative forms: after forty days, Noah and his Ark fly over the sea, aided by birds and buffaloes and Noah’s embrace of an adventuresome refrain that “you can Marco Polo too.” Noah eventually lands in the plains of “Oklo / homo,” where he becomes Geronimo, “a scientist of the highest order” who “spent many years searching for a vaccine to combat the white plague.” Geronimo describes seeing “buffalo jumping through a hoop over the flames”—a transformative hoop appears in “The Scarlet Letters,” too—and this vision enables him to summon rain and extinguish fire. In the video, Green prefaces the performance by telling the audience: “I need to do this piece every once in a while, it’s kind of a cathartic piece to me.” Dressed in black with an elaborate mullet, his delivery is pure punk as he yells out the names of animals and ship parts and sways to the rhythm of his recorded voice. This early work exemplifies Green’s unconstrained imagination, his attraction to reinvention, and his belief in art as a healing force, all of which would continue to define his oeuvre.

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Frank Green, page from A-RAIN-MENT script, 1985

By the mid-1980s, drug addiction commanded Green’s life in New York—eventually leading to his departure from the city.13 In 1987, he was “squatting on 13th street in a place without a floor,” DeCapite writes. “He slept on a beam . . . His life was mostly about drugs and raw survival.” Green recounted this time in a humorous, digressive text he later wrote called “Shining Moments of a Trashophiliac,” stating that he “did a minimum of four YEARS time on the street”:

I spent most of my days and nights either thinking about cocaine, carrying out elaborate schemes to get the money for it, buying it, shooting it, smoking it, sweating from it, trying to come down off it, or feeling guilty about it . . . Crack had just begun to proliferate and I was alternating between shooting up nickle [sic] bags of street coke and smoking nicks of rock, one or the other every half hour or so. 14

Green moved back to Cleveland in 1988 and “courageously licked a drug addiction.”15 Soon after, he learned he was HIV-positive. He also leapt headfirst into new artistic opportunities.

The Cleveland Performance Art Festival (PFA) ran annually from 1988 to 1999 and became the largest festival of its kind in the United States. It presented over one thousand artists from twenty-seven countries, including each of the artists who would become known as the NEA four—Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller.16 The festival embraced experimentation: “We’re going to start a few fires and see how hot it gets,” Founding Director Thomas Mulready wrote in the 1990 program, the year Green piled found objects on the stage for “Trashophiliac.”17 These were also the years when queer solo performance was “booming” in America, as David Román and Holly Hughes observe in the anthology O Solo Homo, reflecting a rise in queer self-representation and the accessibility and inclusivity of performance art.18

Green was among the first waves of artists to present at the PFA. He appeared in the festival four times, sharing the stage with artists like Hughes and William Pope L.19 As a Cleveland-based artist, “he certainly had a following,” says James Levine, founder of the Cleveland Public Theater, where the festival was hosted. “There was a Frank Green contingent that would come see whatever he was doing.”20

Green’s PFA performances were transgressive affairs that took viewers to “bizarre, powerful, intriguing, surprising” worlds.21 Grounded in autobiography, they nevertheless avoided linearity and realism, instead favoring associative sequences and satire. (Doctors were among his most satirized subjects.) He maintained a focus on maligned and neglected subjects, from trash and bugs to the last pleading letters of an ailing Jane Bowles, but his approach evolved to include video, sculpture, movement, costumes, and props. With these additions, he seemed intent on affecting overstimulation in his performances, as though by inundating audiences and pushing mediums to their excesses, he could force viewers to understand the intensity of his lived experience. By 1991, the dehumanizing stigma of living with HIV became his explicit subject. In his final festival piece, “Adventures in Safe Sex and Advances in Orificial Surgery,” Green challenged what he described as the “sex-negating” aspects of safe sex culture under AIDS by farcically eroticizing the disease itself and proposing a medical procedure that limited sexual compatibility to one other human.22 The work oscillated between sarcastic irreverence and affectionate care. Climaxing with an orgy of physicians—“we all pumped the pus out of each other’s lesions . . . and we shook it up in plastic test tubes until it fizzed”—it closed with Dr. Frank Green tenderly confessing that “I carried everybody, kicking and screaming, to my safety, and I stuck my tongue out at everybody, and I put my arms around everybody.”23

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By the time Green premiered “The Scarlet Letters” at the Cleveland Public Theater in 1993, his self-determined approach to living with HIV had crystallized. He wrote of how his diagnosis initially left him feeling “pretty damn depressed,” convinced he would die young.24 When his T cell count dropped but then bounced back, he attributed the rebound to his positive attitude and to taking cues from how his body felt: healthy. Having lost friends who had taken AZT, he rejected doctors’ prescriptions and instead amassed a catalogue of research that seemed to poke holes in mainstream theories about AIDS causation. If testing positive indicated the presence of antibodies, for instance, didn’t that imply resistance to progression? How to explain all the HIV-positive Americans who hadn’t gotten AIDS? Didn’t the CDC’s evolving definition of AIDS seem rather arbitrary? Drawing on the work of a handful of doubting researchers, Green often also expressed skepticism about pharmaceutical companies’ profit motives. Finally, in his notes for “The Scarlet Letters,” he tracked dozens of cases in which those living with HIV had been stigmatized and punished.25 “The more I read,” Green wrote, “the more convinced I became that the HIV paradigm is a sham. This knowledge gave me strength.” With this spirit of defiance and determination, he took to the stage in 1993 in “The Scarlet Letters” and declared: “I am HIV positive. And I say, so fucking what?”

In the face of a damning society, Green challenged the sentence imposed on him. The Hawthorne novel, in his hands, readily lent itself to mapping out the villains of the AIDS epidemic. The deceitful priest Arthur Dimmesdale evoked, in Green’s work, America’s culture of concealment and shame; Roger Chillingsworth conveyed the doomsday prophecies and self-interest of doctors. In Hester Prynne, Green found a kindred “‘high-risk’ sinner who transcends her stigmatization by embracing it,” while her daughter Pearl’s refusal to be pinned down by moral codes made her a “pagan anarchist wild child” and helped Green reclaim his autonomy.26 The anthology Sharing the Delirium posits that by the early nineties, a new wave of performers moved beyond mournful, elegiac accounts of the epidemic to instead “defiantly postulate an alternative discourse which opposes hierarchical structures, asserts subjectivity, and challenges cultural suppression of sexuality.”27 Green’s new work reflected these “second generation” trends emerging in AIDS-related performances around this time.

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Frank Green, cover of The Scarlet Letters script, 1993

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Frank Green, page from The Scarlet Letters script, 1993

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“The Scarlet Letters” begins with Green, bandaged in white, pacing across a white circular tarp. He extracts letters from the tarp—a metaphor for his body, the script notes indicate—that are written to him by Hawthorne’s characters. As he reads the messages, Green paints the floor red with his footprints to spell out the letters HIV. With his body now dramatized as a source of information, he becomes gradually able to “see the virus” with each new letter. The messages trace his journey from being “just another American boy” to becoming a bisexual junkie, and then a dissenter against HIV’s forces of concealment, deceit, and victimization—until ultimately, he becomes a self-healer. In the final act, once he takes Hester’s advice to “use your artwork as a needle,” a ritual unfolds. To whispered incantations of “trust your body, love your body,” Green slathers his skin in red paint and then slips, slides, spins, and glides across the floor. A caduceus descends from the ceiling, from which he unsheathes a sword. He carves out a hula hoop from the tarp. Jumping through it, Green delivers a mantra:

I heal myself of concealment and shame.
I heal myself of isolation and guilt.
I heal myself of helplessness and medical dependency.
I heal myself of frustration and anger. 
And I declare myself cured.

By the end of the ritual, the audience has witnessed Green’s brave and vulnerable path to healing. A new softness emerges in his closing appeal to his mother, when he says: “You know, the ironic thing, in all this clamoring for life, mom, is that death does not seem to me to be such a bad thing. In the end, all I really want is to go back inside you. All my love, Frankie.” The lights go down on his anointed body, and we feel indeed that a cure has been attained.

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Frank Green, still images from The Scarlet Letters performance, 1993

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Frank Green, still images from The Scarlet Letters performance, 1993

After Ohio, Green performed “The Scarlet Letters” at Franklin Furnace in New York, as well as in San Francisco, Denver, Saskatoon, Calgary, and Phoenix.28  He also presented the work three nights in a row at a first-of-its-kind conference in 1996 called Performing AIDS, held in Cleveland. The program states: “Frank marshals alternative information to challenge the authority of the medical profession and enacts a shamanistic ritual of self-healing. The result has been described as a graphically stunning multimedia bodywork performance that explodes the current ideology of HIV = AIDS = Death.”29

Green’s practice continued to evolve and mature, with two more major performances rounding out his career. In 1996, he wrote and starred in “Science Gets Serious,” a play about a doctor attempting to photograph his psyche as it appeared to him from the days when he was an addict.30 For this production, Green worked with a director for the first time. The Cleveland Plain Dealer called the result “a tour-de-force multimedia performance.”31

In 1997, he produced Anonymous Test Site, a charged interactive performance in which volunteers submitted to clinical examinations of their hands that left them with vague, unsettling diagnoses about the risks of everyday touch.32

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Frank Green, photo from Anonymous Test Site, 1997

In 1998, a few years before his health turned, Green responded to a question in a public access talk show, filmed at Tremont’s Literary Café, about whether there was a guiding thread in his work.33 With an easy grin, he said: “All the work that I’ve done has come mostly out of pain, things in my life that I’m trying to understand and work through . . . My work is not known for being happy and pretty, at all.”34  He added that he was no longer interested in performing, that he’d been doing it for twenty years and wanted to write a novel instead. Finding time was difficult—he’d been busy driving a taxi, writing for the Cleveland Free Times, and trying to pay the rent—but he said he had an idea. He remained engaged in the arts community and lived for another fifteen years.

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Frank Green reading in Cleveland, 2008. Courtesy of LBM Photography.

About the author

Timothy E. Bradley is a fiction writer, playwright, and essayist. His work explores queer aging and memory, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and visual art. His work has been published in Foglifter Journal and art exhibition catalogues for ICA San Francisco, Monique Meloche Gallery, and Galleria Poggiali. Timothy has received residences and awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Summer Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Good Hart Artist Residency. He is a 2025 Lambda Literary Fellow. Timothy attended Yale University and received his MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College. He lives and works in New York City.

 

Writing from the 2024 Research Fellowship is edited by Sophia Larigakis.

  • [1] Performance Art Festival 1991 audience discussion (F. words, Pope, Green), Knektiv (performance & discussion (Jane, Rae, K), PAF00061, VHS tape, March 21–24, 1991, Identifier 1, Box 7, Object 27. Performance Art Festival Archive collection, Spec-Coll-00054, Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections:  https://archivesspace.case.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/24944 ↑
  • [2] Flying Words Project, William Pope L., Frank Green, PAF00053, VHS Tape, 1991 March 21, Identifier 1, Box      5, Object 26. Performance Art Festival Archive collection, Spec-Coll-00054, Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections: https://archivesspace.case.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/24897. In a 1996 review of a later work, Amy Bracken Sparks, a writer and friend of Green’s, describes “Just Say Yes to Bugs” as “utter chaos on stage.” See Amy Bracken Sparks, “Frank Green Unleashes His Mad Science at CPT in Science Gets Serious,” Cleveland Free Time, (May 8, 1996), Box 22, Folder 3, Visual AIDS Artist Files. ↑
  • [3] Frank Green, “Escaping the AIDS Zone,” Cleveland Free Times (March 15, 1995), Box 22, Folder 3, Visual AIDS Artist Files. ↑
  • [4] See Cindy Barber, “In Memoriam #2: Frank Green,” CoolCleveland (January 2013):       https://coolcleveland.com/2013/01/in-memoriam-2-frank-green/; and Laura Putre, “Wall of Voodoo,” Cleveland Scene (October 23, 2002): https://www.clevescene.com/news/wall-of-voodoo-1480688. ↑
  • [5] Frank Green, “The Scarlet Letters” press release, 1994. Mark Bloch Postal Art Network (PAN) Archive, MSS 170, box 12, folder 8, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. The press release states that Green was to perform “The Scarlet Letters” on Friday, February 18, 1994 at 8 pm in Woolman Hall at the New School for Social Research at 65 West 11th Street. ↑
  • [6] Frank Green, “Resisting Victim Status: Art Against Medical Nemesis,” Journal of Medical Humanities 19 (1998), 127–131: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025075113230. Green published the essay as part of a special edition edited by Therese Jones, director of the 1996 conference “Performing AIDS.” ↑
  • [7] Frank Green, “The Dark,” c. 1970s. See tremontarama, YouTube, March 31, 2017, 16:48: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdqU6Gb3H7Q. Videos sourced from the “tremontarama” YouTube channel are credited to Andy Timithy. ↑
  • [8] Cindy Penter, “In Memoriam #1: Frank Green,” CoolCleveland: https://coolcleveland.com/2013/01/in-memoriam-1-frank-green/. ↑
  • [9] See Mike DeCapite, “The Green Letters,” tremontarama, YouTube, August 7, 2008, 18:16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KXURSYx7hI; and Green, Frank, 1989–1995, Identifier 4, Box 7, Folder      45, Performance Art Festival Archive collection, Spec-Coll-00054, Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections:      https://archivesspace.case.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/2195. Green’s 1989 “Performance Resume” additionally lists the following venues under “Other Sites of Performances in New York City, 1981–1987”: “Times Square, Tompkins Square Park, subways, etc.” ↑
  • [10] Frank Green, “Concussion,” Benzene 1, no. 4 (Winter 1981/1982), 22–23. Green, Frank, 1989–1995, Identifier 4, Box 7, Folder 45, Performance Art Festival Archive collection, Spec-Coll-00054, Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections: https://archivesspace.case.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/2195. Green’s 1994 Performance Resume states that he performed “Concussion” at Club 57 in New York in February 1982. ↑
  • [11] See Frank Green, “Thin Air,” Identity 6 (Summer 1983). See “Frank Green reads at the Literary Cafe 12/5/92,” tremontarama, YouTube, 25:08: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6f6-WvFncY. ↑
  • [12] Green’s 1994 Performance Resume states that he performed “A-RAIN-MENT” at 8BC in New York in October 1985. ↑
  • [13] In the artist’s biographical statement in the Visual AIDS archives, he writes: “Heroin and cocaine addict 1982–1988.” See Frank Green, “Biographical Information,” Box 22, Folder 3, Visual AIDS Artist Files. ↑
  • [14] Frank Green, “Shining Moments of a Trashophiliac,” September 12, 1989. Mark Bloch Postal Art Network (PAN) Archive, MSS 170, Box 77, Folder 8, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Green mailed the ten-page typewritten text as part of the participatory postal mail exchange.  ↑
  • [15] Penter, “In Memoriam #1.” ↑
  • [16] See T. A. Kinsey, “Cleveland Performance Art Festival Closes,” Afterimage (August 1, 1999), Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 3: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1999.27.1.3. ↑
  • [17] Thomas Mulready, 1990 Performance Art Festival Archive program. Performance Art Festival Archive collection, Spec-Coll-00054, Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections:     http://hdl.handle.net/2186/ksl:2006069234. Mulready maintained a collection of more than 2,000 hours of video recordings, 6,000 photographs, and many festival programs, posters, and other records, which were donated to Case Western Reserve University’s Kelvin Smith Library in 2015. A short video about the Performance Art Festival and its archives can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7xMukaHkzQ. ↑
  • [18] David Román and Holly Hughes, O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 1. ↑
  • [19] Putre, “Wall of Voodoo.” See also “What Grows In The Ashes Of This Garden?” directed by P.J. Doran/Buda Kid Collective, 2003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecf0KRRQ-lA. Green created performance art outside of institutional spaces, most notably as founder of “The Temple of Lost Love,” a 1991 art installation under Cleveland’s Eagle Avenue Bridge that lasted until it was painted over in 2002. The Doran film includes footage of Green talking about the origins of the Temple. ↑
  • [20] James Levine, conversation with the author, December 4, 2024. ↑
  • [21] Brooke Willis, conversation with the author, December 4, 2024. ↑
  • [22] Frank Green, “Adventures in Safe Sex and Advances in Orificial Surgery,” 1991. Camera 2, Tape B, Frank Green, PAF00092, VHS Tape, 1992 March 22, Identifier 1, Box 6, Object 26, Performance Art Festival Archive collection, Spec-Coll-00054, Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections:      https://archivesspace.case.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/24920. Green at 1:16:21: “Where I started from is a position . . . that these ideas about safe sex... sexuality should take certain forms now physically, you can but this organ in this orifice, but not in that orifice, you know, you can do this but you can’t do that. There are physical things that we can do that make sex safer, but the only really safe thing is abstinence... a lot of it seems really sex-negating to me. At the same time, I know that sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS are very real and scary things. And I thought that maybe what we need to do is, this is gonna sound weird, but sort of embrace new forms of sexuality. From that idea I got into: why not embrace the disease itself, you know, why not sexualize that?” ↑
  • [23] Ibid. ↑
  • [24] Frank Green, “Escaping the AIDS Zone,” Cleveland Free Times (March 15, 1995): 8–12. ↑
  • [25] Frank Green, notes for “The Scarlet Letters,” 1993. Green’s script and production notes are preserved in the Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection at the Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. ↑
  • [26] Frank Green, “Resisting Victim Status: Art Against Medical Nemesis,” Journal of Medical Humanities 19, Issue 2-3 (1998): 127–131: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025075113230. ↑
  • [27] Therese Jones, “Introduction,” Sharing the Delirium: Second Generation AIDS Plays and Performances, ed.      Jones (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), xi. Jones included “The Scarlet Letters” in the programming for the 1996 conference      “Performing AIDS.”  ↑
  • [28] Green received reviews and writeups about “The Scarlet Letters” in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (November 29, 1995), Bay Area Reporter (November 30, 1995), Colorado Daily (December 8, 1995), and Gay People’s Chronicle (February 9, 1996). ↑
  • [29] Therese Jones, “Performing AIDS: Politics, Pedagogies, and Practices,” conference program, Cleveland, Ohio, February 22–25, 1996. Green appeared in “Performing AIDS” alongside his contemporary, Tim Miller, whose work is widely anthologized, including in the collections cited in this essay, O Solo Homo and Sharing the Delirium.  ↑
  • [30] Bracken Sparks, “Frank Green Unleashes His Mad Science at CPT in Science Gets Serious.” Of this later work, Sparks wrote: “Clarity has replaced chaos.” ↑
  • [31] Linda Eisenstein, “One-man show is psychic trip into artistic personality,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (May 18, 1996), Box 22, Folder 3, Visual AIDS Artist Files. ↑
  • [32] See “Green, Frank,” 1st 7A*11D Festival, (April 9, 2021): https://7a-11d.ca/festival_artist/green-frank/. Paul Couillard, the curator of Green’s Toronto performance of “Anonymous Test Site,” notes in a posthumous reflection that Green had criticisms of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival: https://7a-11d.ca/in-memoriam-frank-green/. ↑
  • [33] Douglas Max Utter, “Degrees of Frank: About Frank Green @ Arts Collinwood,” Angle: A Journal of Arts & Culture, Issue 30, accessed May 18, 2025, http://www.douglasutter.com/FrankGreen.html. ↑
  • [34] Frank Green, “Literary Cafe Talk Show, episode 17. Frank Green, Bill Fold Pie in Face. 7/98,” tremontarama, YouTube, March 7, 1998, 29:19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocjDQuPoXBA. ↑
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