In David Gere’s chapter “Blood and Sweat” he discusses dance and performance as a form of protesting that not only confronts harmful stereotypes made around the gay male body, but creates an alternative space between the performer and the audience for discourse and communication. During the mid-1980’s dance started to become associated with the LGBTQ community, which further connected it to stereotypes about AIDS. Since people identified AIDS as a “gay disease,” the transmission of the disease became a big concern to the public. Many believed that the exchange of sweat and bodily fluids could lead to the circulation of AIDS, which was proven false and yet the idea still permeated the consciousness of many performers and the general populace.
Gere examines a performance given by Keith Hennesy in December 1988 as a part of a San Francisco performance collective known as Contraband. (Gere 51) The piece that Hennesy performed was called Saliva and was split into four parts, that he called lectures. The performance begins in an “offbeat location” (Gere 52) that is spread by word of mouth and is filled with the sounds of drums. In comparison to the location, Hennesy sings gently and soothes his audience. These lectures would be “characterized by its discrete chunk of text or movement.” (Gere 53) The topics ranged from boys and their attraction to male role models, to being an anarchist( a part of his performance that involves him sporadically writing and moving on the ground.) Other lectures were more obscure and talked about self identity and the lack of external histories available to use in order to learn about oneself. His final and fourth lecture would receive the most crowd participation, Hennesy would shout out “the shortest lecture, the biggest punch”(Gere 53) and then proceed to kick and turn in the air. He mimics motions of ejaculations and has personal fist fight with himself before breaking out into monolouge about the “treatment of gay sex and AIDS.” (Gere 53) His audience identifying with his queerness resonated with the fourth lecture a lot, showing their encouragement and longing for what sex and gayness was.
The Beat Writers was a literary and cultural movement that gained traction in the 1950’s. The main leaders of the movement were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg was known for his performance of Howl in 1955, a poem that he would give at the Six gallery in San Francisco. This location was a hot spot for conversation around queer identities and AIDS. The poem was known for going against American capitalism and incorporated topics about sex and homosexuality. This was a poem for anyone who sat outside the American norm, but was dedicated to his friend Carl Solomon who had been sent to a psychiatric institution. The poem highlighted the idea that maybe his friend and others who could be put under the category of mentally ill could be known as “mad rebels.” He proposed the idea that maybe these “mad” people are the only sane individuals within the political and social climate of America in the 1950’s. By learning about arts’ role in activism I would like to believe that it offers an alternative space for people to express themselves and their activism in creative ways, because sometimes removing the sophisticated facade from political issues can lead to more people supporting and allying with the movement.
Work Cited
Gere, David. “Blood and Sweat.” How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004,
Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 1984, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl.