E-raamat: We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production

"In 2014, veteran HIV/AIDS activists and media makers Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (Ted) Kerr noticed a resurgence of mainstream interest in representing white gay male experiences of "the AIDS crisis" of the 1980s and early 1990s. This plethora of representations followed a long silence around HIV/AIDS (which the authors call the Second Silence, the First Silence indicating the environment of fear, homophobia, and racism that characterized the pandemic's early days). In We Are Having This Conversation Now, Juhasz and Kerr center conversation as a crucial method for sharing intergenerational activist knowledge and honoring the robust media ecology that has always surrounded HIV/AIDS. Identifying what was missing from Crisis Revisitation films like Dallas Buyers Club and How to Survive a Plague-the foundation of collectivism, intersectionality and feminism that the AIDS movement was built on-Juhasz and Kerr seek to reintroduce these commitments as crucial frameworks for continued conversation about HIV/AIDS"--

We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the pair focus on through conversation to understand HIV across time. Along the way, they share their own artwork, activism, and stories of the epidemic. Their conversations illuminate the vital role personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection play in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Throughout, Juhasz and Kerr invite readers to reflect and find ways to engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.

Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr—two scholars deeply embedded in the HIV response—present the history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations.