Winter 2020

EXCERPT - When the Odds are Stacked Against You, Be Ambiguous

Written by Kyle Crawford

From Ambiguity is the Answer: Timeless Strategy for Creating Change 

Preface

As anyone who has tried to bring about change in unequal power dynamics learns eventually, there comes a time when the approaches we were brought up on fail us and we need to figure out what our strategies were missing. In Ambiguity Is the Answer: Timeless Strategy for Creating Change, I set out to answer this perennial question: How do we succeed in environments where the odds are stacked against us?

Over and over, I found that ambiguity is the answer. Across fields and throughout history, it is the production and embodiment of ambiguity that gives people an upper hand when it looks like they have none. A good example of how this works is how the ambiguous form of Marlon Riggs’ film Tongues Untied enabled him to create a work capable of covering new ground, and how the early years of the HIV/AIDS movement reflected a similarly expanded and ambiguous form as it moved into previously untapped realms in need of change. Learning from them, what shape do our movements need to take moving forward? How do we allow them to expand into the forms needed to accomplish all we’re after?

When the esteemed experimental and documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs pictured his friend Gene, he didn’t see him as a single image. Instead, Riggs saw different versions of Gene superimposed with one another, overlapping and melding together. One particularly memorable version appeared in Riggs’ own groundbreaking film, Tongues Untied, where Riggs remembered his friend “standing upright, tuxedoed, finger-snapping, smoothly defiant.”

In some ways, this Gene is larger than life and lives forever. As part of Tongues Untied, he’s traveled the world, projected on the big screen in cities from Berkeley to Berlin. This wasn’t necessarily anticipated. What the critic Wesley Morris called Riggs’ “unclassifiable scrapbook of black gay male sensibility” was originally supposed to be a much shorter and more conventional film, only shown to a small number of groups.

Riggs’ original plan for Tongues Untied was to use the same powerful, if somewhat removed, style of filmmaking he had used in his earlier work. This approach had been drilled into him as the right way to create and had, in fact, recently earned him an Emmy award. Accordingly, Riggs did everything he could to stay out of the film. With a kind and an endearing sense of humor, he joked that, like a journalist, he was trying to find others to say the things he had already arrived at in his mind.

But in the same way that one version of Gene could not be pulled fully apart from the others, Riggs realized that he could not separate himself from his work. There was no way a film about being a Black gay man could ever not be personal for him. He had learned and experienced and worked through too much for it to be otherwise. His own story could not be cut out from the conversations he was facilitating.

“I had to say the things that I actually wanted other people to say,” reflected Riggs.

To do so, he needed to find a form beyond what he had been trained to use, one that expanded beyond his field’s conventions. It wasn’t about being experimental for the sake of being experimental. Rather, he was creating a form capable of accounting for all he hoped to accomplish. So, like the superimposed images of Gene, Tongues Untied layered poetry, dance, humor, protests, storytelling, and more. He allowed the pieces to swirl into a new shape, and found himself fortified in the process.

“My feeling is that there are imperatives in one’s life,” Riggs said. “There are some things you’ve got to do. You don’t know all the answers. You don’t know all of the consequences—but you’ve got to do something because you know it’s right.”

When the film premiered in San Francisco, Gene was in poor health. Riggs dedicated the evening to his friend’s quick recovery and, thankfully, when Riggs visited him in the hospital days later, he seemed to be improving.

“So clearly you spoke, so confident you seemed,” Riggs remembered.

But just two weeks later, Gene was in the intensive care unit, and Riggs was back in the hospital visiting him with friends. This time, Gene lay in his hospital bed, barely able to speak. One of the friends reached out and held his hands as a gesture to say We are here for you. Riggs noticed a pained look form on Gene’s face.

“You’re hurting him,” Riggs said. “Holding his hand hurts.”

Even a tender, loving touch was too much for Gene’s body to handle at this point. The friend let go and Gene’s face relaxed.

“Do you think I’m going to make it?” Gene asked weakly, with his eyes still closed.

The friends glanced at each other.

“They’re trying a new drug,” a former lover replied. “But you have to rest. You have to stop fighting the respirator. Let it breathe for you. Rest so the drug can start to work.”

 This was another part of the superimposed images Riggs saw: Gene in the hospital. Gene at the end.

The early years of HIV had a way of collapsing time, of squeezing the space not only between healthy and sick, but also the past, present, and future. Gene during filming. Gene snapping on the big screen. Gene dying. Each moment was superimposed over the others, as though they were layers of film all playing out at once.

This simultaneity was no philosophical exercise for Riggs. It was personal, as the images he saw were not only of his friend. They were also of himself. Remembering the moment in the hospital at Gene’s bedside, Riggs wrote in a posthumous letter to his friend, “I studied you as I might study a mirror, witnessed the reflection of my own probable future, my not too dissimilar past.”

Riggs, too, had been diagnosed with HIV and he, too, knew the medications of 1989 would not work. Like Gene, he was also embedded in and supported by a community that would create new artistic works one day and visit a friend in the hospital the next. And while many of us have been relearning the interconnected nature of things, the overlaps and intersections had long been clear to Riggs’ community. There was simply no understanding an individual without understanding those around them. As Riggs affirmed in his work, “My life is of value and so is the life of my community.”

The writer E.B. White once told an interviewer that the difficulty with each day was that one had to decide how to use it. “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy,” he said. “If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.” But instead, the world is a bit of both. So the writer who penned timeless children’s tales, along with hundreds of essays on nature and the human condition, had to choose whether to focus on working to preserve the good in the world or simply enjoying it. To save or savor? he asked himself each morning.

There is a certain temptation in imagining, like White, that we might divvy up our days so clearly, as though loving hard or working hard could simply be assigned to this or that place on the calendar. Instead, the parts intertwine and, in the process of trying to pluck one out from another, we realize how connected they truly are. The urge to savor the last moments with a lover might come in tandem with the urge to scream in the streets until it saves their life. We might mourn and mobilize at the same time, caretake and future build in the same act. In the same breath, we might revel, rest, and resist.

This is especially important to remember in the face of difficult challenges. As politics change and cultures shift, as new crises emerge, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. It can seem like there are too many issues at play, too many problems braided too tightly together, to not feel daunted in the face of it all. Rather than sacrifice our focus on one piece for another, it is in these times that we must find the forms, as ambiguous as they may need to be, that allow us to do and be all that is required of us.

It was on June 5, 1981, that the first article describing what would come to be known as HIV showed up in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publication. Its banal title, “Pneumocystis Pneumonia—Los Angeles,” belied its devastating nature. Five young gay men between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-six were confirmed to have a form of pneumonia that only shows up when the immune system stops protecting the body and, though early conjectures were made, there was no clear understanding of why it was happening.

A young Harvey Milk–mentored politico named Cleve Jones remembered reading the article over and over in his office. Just the day before, he had strolled through San Francisco’s Dolores Park thinking about the potential of the queer community’s political power. “Anything was possible,” he remembered thinking.

The next morning, he went to work and came across the CDC publication in a stack of mail on his desk. After reading and rereading the article in disbelief, Jones grabbed a pair of scissors and cut it out. Before pinning the piece to a corkboard above his desk, he scrawled a note onto the page: just when things were looking up.

“By 1985, almost everyone I knew was dead or dying or caring for someone who was dying,” said Jones.

“That’s how we lived then,” he added. “Our friends died; we made new friends; then they died. We found new friends yet again; then watched as they died. It went on and on and on.”

If the frontlines of HIV were a site of devastation, behind the scenes was one of dysfunction. Government agencies limped along pretending to care. Pharmaceutical companies showed little interest in getting involved. Researchers were counseled that working on anything associated with gay men was a career-ending move. Hospitals even turned people away for fear of being associated with AIDS. Just about every aspect of an effective response, from accurate testing and accessible health services to the development of effective medications, was delayed for years.

HIV/AIDS was a crisis met by indifference. While it contained a host of evergreen issues and players, like timid liberals and capitalizing conservatives, it was an altogether new amalgam. Never before had all of the pieces—politics, homophobia, business, media, and more—come together in such a dazzling display of danger.

In 1989, the same year Tongues Untied premiered, the New York Times editorial board published their take on the crisis. In a piece titled “Why Make AIDS Worse Than It Is,” they wrote with heartless confidence that “Once all susceptible members are infected, the numbers of new victims will decline.” It was nearly a decade into the devastation wrought by the virus and their openly stated plan was to sit by while thousands and then millions of people became infected.

“What AIDS revealed was not the problem of the virus; what AIDS revealed was the problems of our society,” said the artist and activist Zoe Leonard. “It was this fissure through which everything, all the ways in which our society isn’t working, became really clear.”

The HIV/AIDS movement’s great success was to recognize and utilize, rather than discount and ignore, the interrelated nature of the many factors. It was to see the countless issues as bound up with one another. Like the approach Riggs took in making Tongues Untied, the inclusion of this unique combination of factors became an opportunity to expand the picture of what a movement could look like by allowing it to move into previously untapped realms. The situation was unprecedented, so the strategies were as well.

Embroiled in crisis and surrounded by insouciance, the HIV/AIDS movement adopted what Steven Epstein called a “distinctive character.” It took on a form that was both like and unlike previous movements. One might look at it and see familiar components, but there was also much more happening than anyone might expect or be familiar with.

There was loud, spectacular, in-the-street activism. And there was quiet, palliative care. There was the passage of watershed public policy.  And there were underground health services. There was art and messaging that witnessed and empowered. And there was painstaking research into the problems of, and potential solutions for, the design of experimental drug trials. The movement worked in so many forums and at such an urgent pace that many queer people quickly found themselves in the position of knowing more than doctors and policy makers about the virus, opportunistic infections, potential medications, and the range of services needed.

The movement’s ambiguous form emerged out of the urgencies of the moment and the need to usher in lasting change. Different histories and knowledge bases came together to build a new, expanded way of working. The moving parts were many and there was too much to do to only focus in one area at a time. The movement’s various arms could work on issues of greatest importance to them with the understanding that all of the pieces were necessary and connected to the others.

This orientation was reflected in a strategy Sarah Schulman called simultaneity of action. “It was a simultaneous approach of literally designing change while escalating pressure on the society at large to step up and be accountable,” she explained.

Activists often had to both call out ineffective approaches and design new solutions for institutions to implement. Part of the reason for this was that, in the early years of the movement, friend and foe were often overlapping categories. Activists didn’t have the luxury of simply opposing federal agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and media outlets because of their negligent concern for people living with HIV/AIDS. What they needed was for them to move in more effective ways and with far greater urgency. So the relationships were simultaneously adversarial and collaborative. They might protest an institution one day and present new solutions to them the next.

It was during the filming of Tongues Untied that Marlon Riggs learned he was living with HIV. Almost immediately, it changed how he approached the film.

“Funny how crisis has a way of either deepening or disrupting our delusions,” Riggs said.

In order for Tongues Untied to do everything he wanted, like the movement, he had to expand its form. He needed to move beyond his training, into a new realm. And so he let his vision broaden, fusing together formerly discrete categories to build an ambiguous form capable of embodying everything he sought to do. He spliced poetry with protest, and merged humor with tenacity, allowing the work to take on a new shape. 

Not only was Riggs’ expansive new form effective—Tongues Untied remains a landmark work that continues to inspire today—but it was also successful. The film won awards in categories ranging from best documentary to best performance art. And while Riggs might have initially intended to use more traditional methods, he ultimately allowed himself the freedom to see beyond them, to resist confining his new awareness into a familiar old form.

He recognized that his history and community gave him an understanding of the world many people do not possess. With it, he created an ambiguous work expansive enough to affirm and celebrate many complexities of Black gay life. And from there, Riggs had no intention of stopping or slowing down. In fact, he was emboldened like never before: “Having come through that fire, they can’t touch me.”

New challenges call for new forms. As the shapes of the issues we confront evolve, so too must our solutions. We need to allow our work to defy people’s expectations and our own past practices, to find the forms that expand our thinking beyond the rigid conceptualizations we’ve grown accustomed to, and give us the freedom to articulate full-bodied pictures of success.

Reflecting on the brilliance of Black feminist readings of complex material and conditions, Chanel Craft Tanner said, “We don’t search for the ambiguity, but we don’t refuse it either.” Our responsibility is to bring it in if that’s what we need to do.

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