Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.
Patrick Clifton now spends his days teaching high school in the East Bay, but his Facebook page serves as a retrospective of his former life as an activist photographer. From 1986 to 1991, Clifton focused his camera lens on his San Francisco community, capturing militant AIDS activism through the medium of black-and-white film.
Gerard Koskovich, a curator at the GLBT Historical Society, met the photographer during the high-queer era of the mid-1980s, when the newly discovered human immunodeficiency virus had already infected a large percentage of the city's queer men.
There was no treatment, and the federal government responded at a glacial pace. Homophobic politicians and alarmists in the public sphere attempted to dominate the discourse, using the epidemic to spread hate and fear while the death toll steadily mounted.
San Franciscans reacted with intensity, employing tactics from labor, and civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements as well as existing queer networks. They marched without permits, occupied government offices, and staged die-ins. When Koskovich began planning the GLBT History Museum's current exhibition on the period, "Life & Death in Black & White," he directed co-curators Don Romesburg and Amy Sueyoshi to Clifton's Facebook page.
All three agreed, according to Koskovich, that "the photographs are a reminder that in the midst of one of San Francisco's darkest periods, the city also witnessed one of its most inspiring movements for social justice." The three wished not only to include a selection in the exhibition, but they also asked Clifton to consider the GLBT archives as a permanent home for the works. He agreed, formally donating his works to the collection.
Two of the prints close out the exhibition. The graphically forceful photographs from the Sixth International Conference on AIDS prominently feature the signs "Silence = Death" and "No More Words, We Want Action." They were taken during the first and last protests at a weeklong demonstration in late June 1990. The photographs capture an important moment. Activists from all over the country flooded into the city, forcing the public's attention at a time when a federal ban excluded HIV-positive individuals from entering and immigrating to the United States. Koskovich points out that in one sign, "Silence = Death" is in Korean, and the photograph features a strong, geometric composition. Faces are turned away from the camera. The print "evokes the oppressive quality of the federal ban and the absence of the people with AIDS who might otherwise have attended the conference."
The final print, "No More Words, We Want Action," was taken at the closing session of the conference, and it features a raucous crowd of people with AIDS, along with their supporters, who refused to be silenced or excluded.
There was no denying it: They were visible, and they were vocal.
"Life & Death in Black & White" continues until July 1 at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St (at Collingwood), S.F. Admission is free-$5.
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