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”1—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,2 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,3 (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 ….
- Harry Hay and Will Roscoe, eds., Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). [↩]
- David Eng, David Kazanjian, and Judith Butler, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). [↩]
- See “Frontline: The Age of AIDS: Timeline—25 Years of AIDS,” PBS; and the Health Gap (Global Access Project). [↩]
