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.
Abbreviations vii
Acknowledgments ix
The Time of AIDS. Timeline 1 xiii
Introduction. We Are Starting This Conversation, Again 1
Section One. Trigger
Trigger 1. What We See 19
Trigger 2. Seeing Tape in Time 30
Trigger 3. Being Triggered Together 49
Trigger 4. Being Triggered in Times 59
Trigger 5. Being Triggered by Absence 73
Trigger 6. How to Have an AIDS Memorial in an Epidemic 83
An AIDS Conversation Script to be Read Aloud. Timeline 2 95
Section Two. Silence
7. Silence + Object 101
8. Silence + Art 121
9. Silence + Video 139
10. Silence + Undetectability 159
11. Silence + Conversation 169
12. Silence + Interaction 183
13. Silence + Transformation 197
Conclusion. We Are Beginning This Conversation, Again 217
Sources and Influences. Timeline 3 227
Notes 251
Index 257
