If the whole world is (still) watching...

Early in the AIDS crisis, activists were sensitive to how graphic images of people suffering could subconsciously substantiate the political ideologies that were killing them. Emaciated, scarred, defenseless-looking people populated the public imagination in the early days, months, and years of the epidemic. Some argued that these pictures engendered sympathy and care for those who seroconverted, but activists were concerned that such images were disempowering, framing people with AIDS as tragic victims whose death was inevitable. Rather than feed the public’s appetite for images of dying gay men, ACT UP and other activist groups worked to visualize those responsible for the worsening crisis. One of the signs that reappears in the footage from the 1991 Day of Desperation features Xeroxed headshots of six suited politicians, including then-president George Bush Sr., with spray-painted neon letters reading “AIDS is a political crisis.”

Our media landscape overflows with images of extreme suffering. JVP interjects to ask why might this suffering be happening and how can one join the struggle to stop it? Why is occupation, apartheid, genocide thought to be inevitable, or even unstoppable? During JVP’s recent DUMP AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) march—itself a reference to the Young Lorde’s Trash Offensive of 1969—I held a wobbly six-foot cardboard tube affixed with the message: “AIPAC GAVE $101,570 TO CHUCK SCHUMER WHO OPPOSES CEASEFIRE.”

When our government is incapable of passing legislation that would save lives instead of expediting the mass death of people deemed disposable, the media of activist organizations plays a specific role: to hold those in power accountable; to rouse those under the trance of complicity in state violence; and to visualize resistance within the news cycle and in public space.⁵

Quick and Dirty Propaganda

Most acts of resistance go unseen by the press-badged media workers and cell phone camera citizens of the world. JVP strategically uses photography to mobilize people’s desire to be part of the picture. Affinity group coordinators are encouraged to reference photos from the Grand Central action as tools of inspiration when doing one-to-one outreach for upcoming actions. Because of information security, many of the civil disobedience actions are planned in secret through trusted networks until the action is live—and then the images circulate indefinitely.

As part of its visual strategy, JVP presents itself as a multigenerational and multiracial movement of antizionist Jews and friends. Shatzi Weisberger, an HIV/AIDS nurse and antizionist Jewish activist who died in 2022, became an image of multigenerational struggle on JVP NY’s Instagram and twitter in the final years of her life. In a photograph distributed at the 2023 Dyke March—the first without Shatzi’s presence—the seasoned activist sits in her wheelchair holding a sign, smiling wide in satisfaction with the quiet work her message does: “All I want for my 90^th birthday is to abolish police and prisons.”⁶ Shatzi invited those who knew her and those who want to know her to claim her as The People’s Bubbie, or grandmother.⁷

In its communications, JVP group spotlights elders and disabled folks, like Shatzi, within its majority white Ashkenazi Jewish and queer demographics. Black, Indigenous, Jews of color, and/or Sephardi, Mizrahi members (dubbed the JVP BIJOCSM Network) alongside other member-initiated affinity group formations. The organization centers racial justice as produced within a grassroots model, to confront white supremacy in a United Statesian context, just as ACT UP continues to.⁸ Activists with different tactics and political analysis have nicknamed JVP and other organizations the “Peace Police” for its adherence to a disciplined form of civil disobedience, which on the surface might appear to be a majority white organization making hierarchical decisions that capitulate to the police, like getting permits to march or choosing to leave an action without arrests.⁹ JVP’s tactics of cautious trust building with a goal of considering one’s relation to state power and violence, and one’s possible role in acting collectively, aims to protect the more vulnerable at a demonstration. These tensions are addressed directly, imperfectly, as if to build across cross borders, class experiences, languages, generations, cultures—the tension and differences between us here and now. The organization has roles for disabled people and people who cannot get arrested, caretakers, the immunocompromised, carceral system impacted, undocumented, New York City Department of Education employees—the list goes on.¹⁰

For every visual message JVP dispatches of dramatic moments of mass civil disobedience, there are always anonymously organized interdependent groups and individuals resisting who are not visualized. People reading texts together in a prison, for example, do not populate social media.

Congregational Wisdom

Crisscrossing then and now, illness and ongoing war, the images of ACT UP’s Day of Desperation start to blur into the images of JVP’s Grand Central “Jews Say Ceasefire Now.” Cameras swarm around the dramatic banner drop. To catch the message in the chants and amplify it. I pull up the footage and linger.

Recorded images and oral histories of resistance provide an always changing way for me to defy time and place and follow the photographer where they want to take me. Often, at the front of the march, a more staged image beckons. But I’m relating to an image, a fragment, an apparition of a fact. I notice someone is wearing a Keffiyeh tucked into their leather jacket, back in 1991. I see him walking alongside demonstrators and cops in their rows of riot gear and mounted horses. The first intifada was simultaneously happening in Palestine from 1987–1993.

Activists referencing other successful actions reminds me of the Jewish tradition of textual study and debate. To reference—not re-enact—is to enter a humble register: many generations before us and after us will learn to fight oppression (imperfectly) in all its forms. To borrow and extend, as opposed to coin or claim, is a way to maximize the tools we already have when the stakes are life and death.

The similarities and echoes between the New York chapters of ACT UP and JVP are not limited to strategy—the two groups are built from a shared group of people and experiences. I would guess the brainstorm sessions leading up to JVP’s Grand Central action drew upon conversations like the one that Sarah Schulman, herself a board member of JVP, narrated in her book Let the Record Show. Perhaps this essay is my book report for that tome. One oft-repeated tactic of this organization is if someone didn’t agree with an action, you simply did not participate; you would go do your own thing. ACT UP and JVP in New York are just one nook and one cranny. Countless other groups are organizing in countless other dimensions of place, identities, and time, such as Black Women Radicals and Palfest with excellent resources online.¹¹

Through the duration of my writing this piece, The Poetry Project hosted The Potency of Images: A Conversation and Study Session on Gaza and the Politics of Visuality with Palestinian scholars and artists Amany Khalifa, Alia Al-Sabi, Ruanne Abou-Rahme, and Basel Abbas. Creative Time hosted the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do to launch a zine about HIV and Palestine and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art hosted an event with Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) on Reclaiming Queerness, Reclaiming Palestine.

On a rainy Saturday last month, I went to a march organized by Palestinian Youth Movement that began in Washington Square Park. Everyone was drenched. It was a warm day—in that climate change boomerang warm winter day way. I paused in the downpour next to a contingent holding a soaking wet banner where the iconic pink triangle of ACT UP’s “Silence Equals Death” logo had grown some black seeds and the mantelpiece of a watermelon. Since October 7^th, ACT UP New York has had a resurgence in activity, and collaborated with JVP on a December 1^st action recreating the iconic “The Government has blood on its hands” with a red paint handprint over a keffiyeh design replacing the “One AIDS death every half hour” with “1 child killed every ten minutes in Gaza.”