The Queer Poetics of AIDS Misinformation

• In Event: Dissenting from Diagnosis: Embodiment and Visual Culture

Abstract

This talk considers the evolving cultural and aesthetic archive of Robert Rayford, a poor African-American teenager from downtown St. Louis who has erroneously been cast as “the earliest known case of AIDS in this country.”  With Rayford standing as a subject of journalistic sensation, weak racism, and biomedicalized homophobia, posthumous reports of his HIV diagnosis and subsequent death in 1969 serve as an especially egregious instance of what Cindy Patton terms “AIDS (dis)information,” or what we today refer to as misinformation spread.  Yet while this talks acknowledges all-too-predictable moral panics over urban African-American populations that Rayford exemplifies, it also risks the counterintuitive to ask how such AIDS misinformation has been of aesthetic use.  What else might distorted discourses about his outrageously short life teach us about pre- and (supposedly) post-AIDS American cultural landscapes alongside a flawed origins narrative?  To answer this question I focus not solely on the medical inaccuracies that enabled representations of Rayford to anchor a provocative Journal of the American Medical Association article entitled “AIDS in 1968,” which concluded that “a native-born American first seen by us in 1968 … in retrospect fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for AIDS.”  I also look to contemporary artist reconsiderations that situate Raymond within an incomplete timeline of late modern biopolitical racism that recasts such medical exhibitionism.  In particular, I turn to the recent artwork of Canadian-born and New York City-based artist Theodore (Ted) Kerr, whose collages and writings on Rayford queerly create confusion about Rayford’s cultural diagnosis and rethink the aesthetic possibilities as well as historical limitations of AIDS misinformation in the second decade of the twenty-first century.  Closely reading his writings and interviews as well as his digital artwork such as AIDS 1969, St. Louis, I explore Kerr’s contribution to what he terms “AIDS Crisis Revisitation,” “a period where the epidemic went from explicit … to implicit, from public to private.”  This archive enables us to better appreciate not only the complexities surrounding ongoing individual and cultural diagnoses of HIV, but also the queer poetics of misinformation discourses that were once rightly disparaged by first-generation AIDS activists but now create unforeseen prospects for aesthetic renewal amidst diagnostic reassessment.

Author

• Terrell Scott Herring, Indiana University Bloomington