It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
by Jack Lowery
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"By the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was deeply impacting gay and lesbian communities in America, and disinformation about the disease was running rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury was formed, to create graphics and media that campaigned against corporate greed, government inaction, and public indifference to AIDS. In It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful, writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury's art and show more activism, from the iconic images like the SILENCE = DEATH graphic and the Kissing Doesn't Kill poster, to the act of dropping thousands of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a group that expressed through art the profound trauma of surviving the AIDS crisis and formed essential solidarities between gays and lesbians in the activist community. Gran Fury and ACT UP's strategies are today employed by a variety of activist groups, including survivors of school shootings, harm reduction organizers, and activists for universal healthcare. Their belief in the power of art to create social change and drive political movements is illuminating in this era when violence and unending structural racism continue to target the most vulnerable"-- show lessTags
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I didn’t know much about this history of AIDS in America, in fact what little I did know came from watching RENT, reading Tales of the City, and hearing older queer folks talking about our own lost generation. For the longest time I thought AIDS had taken place in the 70s. Which is pretty ridiculous given that I was in HIGH SCHOOL in the 90’s.
However, that’s kind of the point. People weren’t talking about it. We didn’t have social media and the government was actively ignoring the epidemic. This is not even mentioning the fact that it actually had been around longer in black and brown communities who were deemed not important enough to pay attention to. It’s really only because of white supremacy that people finally started show more listening, when it started to affect wealthy white people.
This book is both a valuable history lesson and a look into the personal lives and dramas of the people who made up an art collective called Gran Fury. They created the slogan Silence = Death and were very involved with the AIDS activist group Act Up!
Personally, I found the book to be a little too heavy on interpersonal relationship dynamics and not as much on the history as I might have liked, but it was still a very valuable history to learn about. show less
However, that’s kind of the point. People weren’t talking about it. We didn’t have social media and the government was actively ignoring the epidemic. This is not even mentioning the fact that it actually had been around longer in black and brown communities who were deemed not important enough to pay attention to. It’s really only because of white supremacy that people finally started show more listening, when it started to affect wealthy white people.
This book is both a valuable history lesson and a look into the personal lives and dramas of the people who made up an art collective called Gran Fury. They created the slogan Silence = Death and were very involved with the AIDS activist group Act Up!
Personally, I found the book to be a little too heavy on interpersonal relationship dynamics and not as much on the history as I might have liked, but it was still a very valuable history to learn about. show less
Just an extraordinary book. It's weird to read a history book where so much of it I fermenter from my own lifetime. This book has it all. Public history, interpersonal dynamics, politics, art, design, there's just so much here. And it's an eminently readable prose that's really hard to put down.
The postscript say the book began as a masters thesis for a MFA degree. But it's not a study academic read by any means.
This is an important book. Read it.
The postscript say the book began as a masters thesis for a MFA degree. But it's not a study academic read by any means.
This is an important book. Read it.
A fascinating and important story, and a good entry point for a lot of other reading and research into the AIDs crisis, ACT UP, and Gran Fury. A thorough but very engaging read—I finished it in record time for non-fiction, which I usually struggle to get through.
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The Best LGBTQ Nonfiction
149 works; 60 members
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- Art & Design, Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction, LGBTQ+
- DDC/MDS
- 362.19697 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Social Welfare People with physical illnesses Services to people with specific conditions Diseases Other diseases Diseases of immune system
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- RA643.75 .L69 — Medicine Public aspects of medicine Public aspects of medicine Public health. Hygiene. Preventive medicine Disease (Communicable and noninfectious) and public
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