BIRTHDAY MEMORIES: C OMMEMORATING AIDS A CTIVISM AND F ORGING Q UEER F UTURES E RIN J. R AND, S YRACUSE U NIVERSITY

“The importance of history to gay men and lesbians goes beyond the lessons to be learned from the events of the past to include the meanings generated through retellings of those events and the agency those meanings carry in the present. Lesbian and gay historical self- representations—queer fictions of the past—help construct, maintain, and contest identities—queer fictions of the present. For this reason, we need to look at how the images of the gay and lesbian past circulating among us animate the present and to read lesbian and gay historical self- representations as sites of ongoing hermeneutic and political struggle in the formation of new social subjects and new cultural possibilities.” Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past

ACT UP IS A DIVERSE, NON - PARTISAN GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS UNITED IN ANGER AND COMMITTED TO DIRECT ACTION TO END THE AIDS CRISIS. W E ADVISE AND INFORM. W E DEMONSTRATE. WE ARE NOT SILENT

“The return to memory…is not a traumatized refusal to live in the present but an active refusal to live in that present as it is normatively constructed, a determination to use the past to propose alternatives to current social and sexual systems. The past here offers models for how, if memory serves, the present might be renovated not into a replication of what came before but in the image of the pleasures, intimate arrangements, and social justices imagined by those living now.” Christopher Castiglia & Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves

“We were moving from the streets into history, a shift made quite apparent in this museum-like exhibit, where ACT UP joined other movements safely encased behind glass.” Deborah Gould, Moving Politics

“For those of us who were directly involved in ACT UP and lived I think it definitely lives in us in an everyday moment. But I do see it as a remarkable model of what can be done in the best of ways, when people draw on their different strengths and do things they don’t know they can do.” Anna Blume, member of ACT UP “Beyond the people, there were the ideas, the philosophy, the politics, [and] the culture that came out of ACT UP that is still with us and has had an enormous impact on this country.” Michelangelo Signorile, member of ACT UP “What is needed now is an aesthetics of memory that can articulate the relationship of loss and hope, of commemoration and idealism in relation to gay culture…As important as commemorating the past, these memorials (and memory narratives more generally) must renovate the past in light of our present ideals, inviting [us] to create inventive hybrids of a past loss that will…turn the past into a more just and satisfying present.” Castiglia & Reed, If Memory Serves