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Dominic Wetzel,
"HIV Positive: Saints, Sinners, and AIDS protest movements in Fig Trees' Queer Religion"
(page 3 of 4)
Similarly, haunting sequences from Fig Trees invoke ways in
which the challenge and needs of those affected by HIV/AIDS spurred
attempts at appropriating, recreating, and playing with the spaces and
functions that traditional religious structures have often provided,
such as the rather "queer" legal function a church or sacred space can
take as a "sanctuary" to protect threatened members of a community, like
undocumented immigrants. Images of churchlike sanctuaries and the
soothing power of sacred music in the film indirectly invoke places such
as radical faerie
"sanctuaries"[13]—places
to which persons living
with HIV/AIDS have often retreated to seek protection and refuge from an
uncaring or indifferent world. The film disrupts typical associations
of liberal/secular and religious/conservative to open up, rethink, and
reimagine notions of community, ritual, and healing often associated
with primarily traditional notions of religion.
Fig Trees preserves and passes along queer historical memory
also through the careful sharing and documentation of stories and
vignettes of some of the early AIDS activists—a more solemn
counterpart to its playful queering and (re)appropriation of religious
imagery. For instance, it follows Tim McCaskill as he passes a candle
over the AIDS memorial in Toronto, communicating and commemorating the
hidden histories of the names listed—their personalities, personal
stories, and political awakenings experienced in their activist careers,
long or short.
Watching the film was powerfully affecting on a personal level,
and seems designed to invoke personal and collective reflection among
its viewers, encouraging them to weave in their own intermixed
experiences of fear, loss,[14]
trauma, shame and desire—as well as a
call to social action, struggle, and purpose—that HIV/AIDS has
inevitably created as a shared cultural heritage, if not baggage, across
generational and geographical boundaries. In my case, it brought back
vivid memories of a protest I attended in Philadelphia in 1999,
organized by the newly formed Treatment Action Campaign-inspired Health
Gap Coalition against then Vice President (and Presidential candidate)
Al Gore. At the time, Health Gap was protesting his role in putting
South Africa on the United States' punitive Global Trade Watch List
(which he as Vice President symbolically oversaw) for its interest in
buying generic versions of HIV/AIDS drugs for its millions of sick and
dying citizens; it was one of the first (significant) protests I had
ever participated in. Watching Fig Trees provided a rare and
complex cultural backgrounding of the experiences and struggles in South
Africa that touched and influenced me across the Atlantic Ocean, in ways
I didn't understand until watching the film.
Watching Fig Trees evoked memories of the moral indignation
stirred at those Health Gap Coalition protests, (inspired by the
Treatment Action Coalition, a fact which I was only vaguely aware of at
the time) at the seemingly "evil" attempts of the pharmaceutical lobby
(Pharma) and the U.S. government to prevent tens of millions of people
in developing countries around the world from getting life-saving
drugs—all to preserve pharmaceutical industry profits. Even more
unbelievably, to protect profits at home, not abroad! Given that
there were no real markets for AIDS drugs at the time in these
countries, production of life-saving generic drugs cost the
pharmaceutical industry nothing. The logic of the pharmaceutical
industry in opposing the production and use of generics abroad was to
prevent the questioning of the price of AIDS drugs at home in the West,
and ostensibly, the erosion of respect for "intellectual property"
rights globally, enshrined in the Agreement on Trade Related
Intellectual Property Rights,[15]
(later to become a central issue in
the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle)—Antichrist,
anyone?
A recent college grad, I had just obtained a job in the Intake
Department at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) on the front lines meeting
and greeting dozens of freshly seroconverted, HIV+ people each week—a
job that could very well have been highly depressing, if not morbid;
somehow it was not. Two long-term members of the Intake/Client
Registration Department would regale the rest of us with macabre
memories of the "bad old days" of AIDS advocacy work, when community,
ritual, and remembrance were often created on the fly, if not the "DL."
With so many people dying so quickly, so little time to account for them
and often no knowledge whether some—estranged from family and
friends—would ever receive a proper funeral, they donned makeshift,
priest-camp garments and miters each week, held a solemn, ritual "moment
of remembrance" for each of the newly deceased, made the sign of the
cross over their file, retired them and moved to the next. In
retrospect, the relatively upbeat atmosphere in those group
intake meetings (budget cuts had recently
eliminated one-on-one counseling) was clearly due to the recently
debuted, anti-retroviral AIDS drug "cocktail" that drastically reduced
AIDS deaths. Watching Fig Trees helps weave and fill in—with
visual and imaginary splendor—the often truncated view or penumbra
that former AIDS struggles often have for those of younger
generations.
Leaving my native Seattle to attend college in a small town in the
Midwest, by the time I got to New York City in the late 90s, I had
(thankfully) missed most of the haunting images of people slowly dying
from AIDS in the "big cities." Although not completely—I am still
haunted by the image of one beautiful young man, a Columbia University
student, I believe, about my age, who came in to register at GMHC. He kept his
left hand curled up and away from him, as the tips of two of his fingers
had blackened. He was tired and seemed to be giving up; he felt he had
become a burden to his friends and was ready to die, and the experience
shocked me. I remember acutely the pre-anti-retroviral fear—laying
up at night in my college bunk bed, shivering with panic at the
recognition of the force of my own sexuality, still in my teens,
worrying how I would ever survive my seemingly excessive desire—with
many years of sexual encounter and risk ahead of me. Hence the relief
when the new drugs rolled out my sophomore year—even if I did get HIV,
I needn't ever die from AIDS ....
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