Building a Community amidst the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is Nan Goldin’s best-known work. She first started taking the photographs that make up the project in the 1970s, and it continues to be exhibited regularly in major museums worldwide, nearly fifty years since it was begun. In this work, Goldin extensively documented her artistic community of friends and lovers, foregrounding their lifestyles of sexual liberation. She exhibited the photographs in various venues across the 1980s as a slideshow set to a musical soundtrack that contained roughly seven hundred photos, revising and refining the order of photos for each viewing.1 Many of the subjects of the photos in this work were members of the art scene in downtown Manhattan, who also composed her audience when she first exhibited the slideshow in the early 1980s in bars and nightclubs across New York City. But as the project began to develop a following, she started showing the work in gallery and museum spaces, including notably at the Whitney Biennial in 1985. Following that, she published a selection of 125 photographs as a book in 1986.2

Critics who review The Ballad of Sexual Dependency often focus on Goldin’s troubled romantic relationship with a man named Brian that she threads through the work. Though the photographic work featuring Brian depicts scenes of violence and pain, particularly the images showing the effect of his domestic abuse on Goldin, she included the images of him and of the abuse in the slideshow and book version of the work because, as she later revealed, they reminded her never to go back to him.3 In her subsequent work, Goldin continued to draw on The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, publishing additional photographs from that era while also creating new photographs of people within her artistic community, which had proven to be a sustaining force for her work. Her photographic projects in the 1990s showed how the HIV/AIDS epidemic affected many of Goldin’s close confidantes who later died from AIDS-related illnesses. The cumulative losses in her community recast the meaning of her photographic record, whereby “pictures of friends seen in moments of joy or excitement unexpectedly became elegiac tributes, memorials to a lost generation.”4 How Goldin repeatedly returns to this era and revises its meaning demonstrates how the enduring acclaim for her work emerges from the fact that she is not simply a photographer, but also a curator.

Goldin, like all the artists featured across this book, was invested in representing diverse sexual identities, but this final chapter examines how she and other artists responded when the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s fractured their communities. Artists scrambled to preserve their queer worlds—not only through direct action on the street, but also through their own artwork. For example, Roberta Gregory and Alison Bechdel, cartoonists analyzed in earlier chapters, contributed comics to Strip AIDS USA (1988).5 This collection featuring the work of 121 artists sought to destigmatize perceptions of HIV/AIDS and raised over $11,500 for the Shanti Project, an organization that supported people with AIDS.6 Even more than the art forms analyzed earlier in the book, photography allowed Goldin to directly portray the individuals in her community whose lives were curtailed because of the virus. At the same time, her photography also remained vital to feminists rallying for explicit depictions of sexuality within the feminist sex wars and was featured in Caught Looking (1986), the volume discussed in the first chapter that Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson visually designed to challenge legal efforts to restrict sexual expression.7

Goldin’s photographic and curatorial praxis show how these two arenas of social justice—pro-sex feminism and HIV/AIDS activism—were interlinked. She had to struggle to preserve both her artistic community and artwork in the face of conservative forces who wanted to erase deviant individuals and welcomed the convenient lethality of HIV/AIDS. This chapter reflects on how artists, their artwork, and the archives work together to preserve communities of individuals. The two previous chapters, on Bechdel and Gloria Anzaldúa, have shown the deliberateness with which both artists gathered a larger community with their artwork and preserved it in their papers. This final chapter examines how Goldin first brought her sexually liberated community together through her evolving Ballad of Sexual Dependency photo series and how she later remobilized them to raise awareness about the HIV/AIDS epidemic through her curation of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. Goldin’s work documents collective change and how discourses around sexual liberation adapted to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic as she underlined the vital significance of the community her earlier photographs made visible.

In the 1980s, particularly in New York where Goldin worked, the AIDS crisis tore rapidly through artistic communities. At the time, the disease was not understood, which led to extraordinary suffering, confusion, and death whose effects continue to reverberate to this day. During this time, Goldin began to rethink her early photographic work. Particularly through the act of curation, she focused on bringing to light and detailing the impact that HIV/AIDS had on her community.8 When Susan Wyatt, who was director of Artists Space, a downtown Manhattan gallery, asked Goldin to curate an art exhibit in the late 1980s, Goldin “quickly decided to spotlight AIDS because of her firsthand experience of the impact of the disease. Goldin left New York in 1988 to enter a drug treatment program in Boston. By the time she returned, many friends and acquaintances had died.”9 Goldin’s Artists Space exhibit, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, the first art show about HIV/AIDS in New York City, ran from November 1989 through January 1990.10 In the exhibit, Goldin brought together the visual artwork of roughly two dozen artists she counted as members of her community, including many whom she had previously photographed.11 She also curated a catalog that contained a handful of original essays that described how HIV/AIDS had devastated this community, including one in which she articulated the rationale for the exhibit through her own personal experiences of HIV/AIDS, which were shifting her understanding of her own life and artwork. As I discuss later in this chapter, Goldin’s curation of this catalog and exhibit underscores how Witnesses acted as a personal turning point that changed her relationship to her community, highlighting how the disease’s devastation among her chosen family of friends and fellow artists began to determine the course of her future work, including how she drew on The Ballad of Sexual Dependency going forward. Like the other artists discussed in this book, activism and artwork were intertwined for Goldin, with each shaping the other.

In the years after Witnesses, Goldin would even more directly examine how HIV/AIDS had affected her community by recontextualizing her earlier photos within the framework of HIV/AIDS.12 In 1990, she exhibited The Cookie Portfolio, 1976–89, which brought together her photos of Cookie Mueller from across the entirety of their close friendship, beginning in the mid-1970s when Mueller was already a subcultural icon for having starred in a number of John Waters films like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). This collection included many images strongly associated with The Ballad and Mueller’s iconic status more broadly, but it also documented her decline and untimely death from HIV/AIDS in 1989 at the age of forty. In 1992, Goldin exhibited and published The Other Side, which featured her photographs of drag queens and trans women from the 1970s through the 1990s, opening with the community of these women with whom she had lived in Boston in the early 1970s. In her textual preface to the printed volume, she recognizes AIDS as a presence across these photos: “The plague of AIDS has affected this community. One of my closest friends in the pictures from the 70s died a few years ago and one of the beauties in the recent pictures, a few weeks ago.”13 Similarly, she has linked her Ballad photos to the HIV/AIDS crisis through textual afterwords she wrote in 1996, 2012, and 2021 for new editions of the book version of The Ballad.14 In 1996, concurrent with a huge retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of Art, the I’ll Be Your Mirror documentary surveying her work devoted over half the film to discussing the impact of HIV/AIDS on her community, including in the continued declines and deaths of loved ones in the 1990s.

Like the creators in previous chapters, Goldin made deliberate artistic choices that underlined her collective ethos and her commitment to documenting her community and their diverse sexual and gender expressions in order to make these groups of people visible. Goldin’s practice of exhibiting her photographs as a slideshow to share it with a public audience echoes Anzaldúa’s embrace of image making in public talks to make her written ideas accessible to a larger community. Just as Anzaldúa’s published books allowed her ideas to travel even further and get her invited to give the very talks where she deployed her community-building imagery, so did Goldin’s publishing of a selection of her Ballad photography as a book make her work accessible to an even larger audience. Because the book couldn’t replicate the dynamic experience of the slideshow, many scholars and critics have downplayed its role. However, the book succeeds in introducing her community and framing them through her vision that she articulates in a textual introduction and afterword to the photographs. Both she and Anzaldúa demonstrated across their careers a dedication to preserving their community in their work because there was the very real possibility that their worlds wouldn’t be recorded otherwise.

In this chapter, I centralize the book version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency to ask how Goldin builds her community through this format. Other critics focus on what is lost in the transition from slideshow to book, with Chris Townsend positing, “[The photograph] was reduced to an individual, static object of contemplation that could be considered for a protracted period, outside the context of the images that surrounded it and also outside the context of the audience that surrounded the spectator in live screenings. . . . Publication also separated the images from the music that accompanied live performance.”15 Like others, Townsend casts the book as a reductive format that decontextualizes the photographs by removing the bulk of the photographs as well as aspects of the live performance, including the audience and the soundtrack. In the analysis that follows, I instead read the book as a distillation of her project and examine how the added elements, like photo captions and textual paratexts, make her work of community formation legible to a larger public and account for the shifting meaning of the photographs as HIV/AIDS affects her community. I then focus my analysis on the Witnesses catalog as the central site of Goldin’s curation, examining how she mobilizes this document to frame the exhibit and the community and articulate their experiences with HIV/AIDS. As discussed above, this catalog provides a blueprint for Goldin’s work in the following years, including in how she reframes The Ballad to speak to the epidemic. Because both of these print volumes combine visual and textual elements, they allow Goldin to directly weigh in on and further curate the meaning of the visual artwork through text, thus making her editing legible. Together, the book and the catalog give us two complementary snapshots of Goldin’s community: one in formation and the other in action as the community was under threat.

Curating Cultural Memory in Photographs and Archives

When Goldin published The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book in 1986, she wrote a preface that not only theorized the project but also described the personal circumstances behind why she became a photographer in the first place and how they informed her artistic process going forward. Goldin discussed how her older sister, Barbara, died by suicide at eighteen due to feeling sexually repressed and trapped in her life and how that trauma spurred an eleven-year-old Nan to pursue a different life path, running away from home at fourteen and attending the Satya Community School where she learned to photograph at eighteen.16 Goldin has repeated this anecdote throughout her career as her origin story. More than the specific details that Goldin narrates, it is crucial to note how she wields them to articulate an artistic ethos, pairing her words in The Ballad with a photograph of Barbara in the last year of her life (Figure 5.1). Her discussion of how she photographs to guard against loss speaks more broadly to her artistic process as photographer and curator. Goldin’s process is a notable departure from how other critics and photographers have conceived of photography, and her approach links her to the modus operandi behind contemporary archives that preserve the cultural memory of LGBTQ individuals, particularly those living with HIV/AIDS in this period.

Goldin includes the photograph as the final element of her preface, directly below a dedication to her sister. Goldin did not include the image just to honor her sister’s memory—its inclusion allowed Goldin to make a broader critique of the oppressive conditions that led to Barbara’s death, which Goldin strives against both in her own life and her photographic career. In the text, Goldin discloses that she “lost the real memory of [her] sister,” a sentiment she echoes in her dedication as well as when she encapsulates her drive to photograph: “I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again.”17 Though the photograph depicts Barbara, Goldin effectively argues that it doesn’t preserve her “real memory”—in text she posits, “I remember my version of her, of the things she said, of the things she meant to me. But I don’t remember the tangible sense of who she was, her presence, what her eyes looked like, what her voice sounded like.”18 Goldin thereby infers that her own photographs aim to capture these personal details that are absent from the photo of Barbara she includes, which depicts her standing just outside the family home. Because Goldin had not begun photographing until years after Barbara’s death, we know that this image is not Goldin’s own and likely one her parents took of Barbara as they would’ve liked to see her.

What we see in this photograph is how Barbara was trapped by the social norms of where she was raised, communicated through the family home, which dominates the frame and dwarfs her figure. Because of her small size in the image and because she looks away from the camera, her gaze is inscrutable—we cannot see “what her eyes looked like.” Rather than the real Barbara who attempted to rebel against the strictures of home, we see her confined to this space—a tiny, perfect paper-doll rather than a real person. We don’t see Barbara as Nan saw her or likely how she would have wanted to be seen. We see her alone and lacking a like-minded community of support that proved so vital for Goldin’s own survival and livelihood.

We can see these things about this photo not simply in the context of Goldin’s words, but also in how this photo provides a stark contrast with Goldin’s own, which portray her chosen community. That is, Goldin’s curatorial eye is at play in making her argument about how her photography both connects to and departs from this familial midcentury tradition. Goldin’s own photographs are printed roughly twice as large in size and often center bodies in the frame, sometimes in close-up. As a result, the members of Goldin’s community are many magnitudes larger than Barbara, and we come to know their “real memory” through the proliferation of photos that Goldin takes of each individual and later on through Goldin’s curation of their artwork in exhibits like Witnesses. Even more fundamental than that, Goldin and her subjects are able to express themselves freely and embody the sexual liberation that Barbara could not attain. Goldin photographs these freedoms openly, which is one of the reasons why her work speaks so powerfully in making visible representations that had previously been taboo.

How Goldin juxtaposes this photo with her own reveals her aesthetic genius as an editor and curator. As Tahneer Oksman has noted, Goldin’s own photos begin on the following page, so this curatorial placement puts the photo into sequence with hers, heightening the aforementioned differences.19 Though we can see little of Barbara in this photo, her posture of peering out and away to the right suggests that she is looking ahead to Goldin’s photos and the community that her younger sister was able to make for herself. A number of Goldin’s subjects echo Barbara’s gaze, evoking the possibility that these lives could have been Barbara’s own, had she survived. Goldin’s selection of this particular photo of Barbara allows for these interpretations.

In contrast to this singular and distant photo of Barbara, Goldin shows us with The Ballad how she preserves the “real memory” of other people by photographing them repeatedly over a number of years, including and especially in intimate moments. She visualizes what she lost of Barbara and what Barbara was never able to have for herself. Though she had to select a smaller grouping of photos for the book version of The Ballad, there are still numerous individuals we see multiple times over the course of the work. All these individuals and how she sequences them together for emotional impact speaks to the power of her editing. Through these photographs, Goldin made hyper visible an expansive community brimming with LGBTQ individuals by photographing them again and again, so that you could not miss them. Whereas many of the earlier artists were creating through collage, comics, and drawings multiple models or characters for their audiences to relate to and welcome into the movement, Goldin was staunchly determined to directly document the movement itself through photography, creating instead a visual index that spoke to the size of this community and its vibrant artistic and sexual practices.

Just as Goldin contrasts Barbara’s isolation with her community’s connectivity, so also does she make her photographic praxis communal—collaborating with her community in the making of her artwork as did each of the artists discussed in the earlier chapters. All the artists in this book used visual culture to nurture and make community visible. Throughout their careers, their artwork made the lives, experiences, and bodies of feminist and queer people more broadly legible to an increasingly larger public. Goldin created, exhibited, and edited her photos in such a way as to allow for dynamic feedback from the subjects of her work. She discusses how she encouraged those she photographed to give her input—whether while sharing photos of her roommates with them and having them nix the ones they didn’t like20 or from feedback gathered at viewings of The Ballad as a slideshow in its first years when the audience members were mainly the subjects of her photos who would audibly vocalize their assessments, “screaming when they [saw] themselves on-screen.”21 These iterative, public viewings of the slideshows shaped the form of the work, and they provided a space for community input that Goldin took into account while editing. For example, after Goldin exhibited an early version of the slideshow at the Times Square Show in 1980, Maggie Smith, who employed Goldin and other women artists at her Tin Pan Alley bar, told Goldin she was “a very political artist” and “helped [her] see the work is about gender politics.”22 This support and these remarks profoundly influenced the project and how Goldin sequenced her subsequent slideshows to examine the relationships between genders. Other individuals like art curator Marvin Heiferman participated more closely in helping her find venues for her artwork, stage many of her slideshows, and ultimately select the photos for the book version of The Ballad—a process that also involved Aperture editor Mark Holborn and Suzanne Fletcher, an old friend who featured prominently in Goldin’s photos.

Her curatorial process with Witnesses was similarly a collective endeavor, foregrounding how such a collaborative mode underlies much of her work. With Witnesses, Artists Space director Susan Wyatt invited Goldin to serve as a guest curator, and Goldin decided to focus the exhibit on the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on her community of fellow artists—many of whom she had photographed previously. By welcoming her community to participate, she invited them to shape the meaning of the exhibit in a manner similar to how they had shaped her photographic work. The exhibit itself ended up courting controversy as John Frohnmayer, the new director of the National Endowment for the Arts, threatened to revoke funds for the show based on the inflammatory political critique that artist David Wojnarowicz made in his essay for the exhibit catalog. The Artists Space records for Witnesses, which are archived as part of the Downtown Collection at New York University’s Fales Library, document how the exhibit made front-page news nationwide as a result of this dispute, which was eventually resolved with funding restored when Frohnmayer visited the exhibit and Artists Space found another source of financial support for the catalog. Steven C. Dubin analyzes the conflict in his scholarship, describing how the collaboration between Wyatt, Goldin, and Wojnarowicz inflamed the situation as each acted from a different position in response to the crisis—with Wyatt seeking to preserve Artists Space and the funding relationship with the NEA while Goldin and Wojnarowicz were upholding artistic integrity by communicating hard truths about the real impact of HIV/AIDS.23 Beyond the controversy, in both the catalog and on the walls of the exhibit, it was clear how the artists were interconnected in a larger network and how their work was shaped from being in conversation with each other, underlining the impact of each loss. Goldin herself lost dear friends who had been sources of inspiration in the months and days leading up to the exhibit and in the years thereafter.

The collaborative nature of Goldin’s photographic process, where both her individual photos and their larger sequence were shaped collectively, sets her apart from how other photographers and critics conceived of the artform. Across her career, she has positioned herself in distinction from Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the first street photographers who was accepted as a high-art photographer at the time when she was establishing her craft.24 On numerous occasions, she has described her process with reference to his concept of the “decisive moment,” recently alluding to his notion again in an interview included in an issue of Aperture devoted to The Ballad: “I never believed in the decisive moment. I never believed that one photograph encapsulates the whole of one person. Of course, published, there are single images on a page, but the whole way that I frame my work is in multiple images.”25 Cartier-Bresson’s concept communicates the idea that a good photographer can capture a scene at just the right moment, which Goldin pushes back against in this quotation but also in her process, wherein she takes many photos of an individual at any one moment, akin to the process of fashion photographers, and later decides on an image. Her critique goes further in suggesting, however, that there’s no single decisive moment where a photograph can reveal the essential nature of a subject, but that multiple images, over time, can impart their presence.

The work is not finished when the photographer clicks the shutter; her process foregrounds collaborative editing and sequencing individual photos into a larger whole. In discussing her own process over the years, Goldin has insisted her artwork emerged through how she worked with the photographs after she took them, recently saying, “I would say that my work is editing. I’ve always said that primarily the art is not photography, the art is editing. . . . The point is about making cinematic work out of still images, and the editing is where I feel my intelligence lies.”26 In identifying her work as editing, Goldin is crucially not referring to the technical capacity to perfect an individual photo but instead her ability to see each image as part of a larger whole, place them into conversation with each other, and have them speak to a larger cultural context. For Goldin, that process invites in the participation of her larger artistic community and, thus, her artwork makes visible the ethos of that community as a whole as it portrays their bodies and lifestyles. In this manner, her praxis articulates a different method to understand the nature of photography than Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes theorized in their contemporaneous volumes of critique that are often cited in scholarship.27 For both critics, they theorize through individual photos and auteurs, while meaning accumulates for Goldin through multiplicity—both of images and of collaborators.

The ethos of Goldin’s drive to guard against loss by taking multiple images at any one time and over time aligns her process with the other artists discussed in the book, who preserved their communities by documenting them in their work. Her methods also parallel not only the work of archivists acquiring and processing LGBTQ material just like the artists discussed in prior chapters, they also specifically resonate with those collections focused on preserving the work of individuals who died of HIV/AIDS. There are countless tales of lives forgotten because homophobic families destroyed the ephemeral traces of an individual after death or, as Goldin’s example of Barbara shows, of individuals whose identities were denied expression during their lives. The first and third chapters focus on the role of grassroots archives in preserving LGBTQ material because those works weren’t being preserved elsewhere, but this chapter considers how more official repositories started to preserve such lives, like the numerous Gay and Lesbian and HIV/AIDS Collections at the New York Public Library, which began when the grassroots International Gay Information Center donated their collection to the library in 1988; and the Downtown Collection, which Marvin Taylor founded at New York University’s Fales Library in 1994.28 As Marika Cifor relates, such archival collections were built out of the extensive documentation that HIV/AIDS activists explicitly created in order to preserve their culture: “In the accelerated registers of ‘epidemic time’ during the 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS activists responded by enacting the care work that Ben Alexander and Andrew Flinn call ‘activist archiving’ at a furious pace, creating documentation, and collecting, preserving, curating, and making these records accessible. They accumulated rich, extensive archives that they mobilized for contemporaneous social change.”29 As this chapter documents, Goldin participated in this same “care work” as she photographed numerous friends who were HIV positive and memorialized friends who had died from AIDS-related illnesses, including in exhibits like Witnesses.

The Downtown Collection is of particular interest for this chapter since the Artists Space Records contain documentation of the Witnesses exhibit (although the collection as a whole is also important since it chronicles the downtown New York City art scene that Goldin and her fellow artists participated in). The scope of the collection is bigger than the subject of HIV/AIDS, but the virus and the devastation it wrought is a central part of the story, since the decimation of New York City’s artistic community and the way that threatened the preservation of artistic legacies played an important role in spurring Taylor to create the archives. As Olivia Laing writes of the impetus behind the Downtown Collection:

Like many archives, the Downtown Collection was created out of a state of peril. When Marvin Taylor founded Fales in 1994, many of the possessions belonging to artists who were dying of AIDS in New York were literally being thrown into the trash by indifferent landlords or antagonistic families. The combination of homophobia and AIDS stigma meant an entire world was at risk of being destroyed twice over, since without documentation or abiding relics, no one will be remembered long.

The Downtown Collection is a witness to the monumental losses of the AIDS crisis, and it also exists to counteract that loss, to ensure that the people who died are not forgotten, to keep some essence of their lives secure.30

This description of the founding and purpose of the Downtown Collection echoes Goldin’s photographic ethos in capturing people in images to guard against their loss. Just as the archives remember the artists by preserving their work and the documentation surrounding it in exhibits, correspondence, posters, et cetera, so also does Goldin remember these individuals and how they formed a community, made visible through her editing and sequencing of her own photos in The Ballad and in her curating of their artwork in Witnesses. Especially when HIV/AIDS started to affect her community, which inspired both the Witnesses exhibit as well as her photographic focus in the following years, her motive directly parallels that of the Downtown Collection. Indeed, if you replaced the Downtown Collection with Goldin’s name in Laing’s final sentence excerpted here, you would have a fair summary of the principles of Goldin’s work. While the Downtown Collection achieves this goal through gathering collections from artists and galleries, Goldin photographs and curates her community, preserving them in photographic projects and exhibits. Just as the archives continue to acquire materials from this period, so does Goldin continue to publish and circulate new photos from this time, keeping these individuals alive in the present moment and in dialogue with contemporary photographs she takes.

The following two sections examine how Goldin edits, sequences, and curates her community by analyzing the book version of The Ballad and the catalog of Witnesses, both of which combine image and text and communicate Goldin’s motives through these hybrid means. Many scholars focus on the documentary aspect in how and what Goldin photographs, but by close reading these books, I aim to dig a level deeper in examining the actions Goldin takes after she photographs, which are similar to an archivist processing a collection and striving to make the material accessible to a larger public.31 As this section establishes, the work Goldin does is necessarily collaborative and her ethos in guarding against loss echoes that of contemporaneous archives seeking to preserve the same communities that Goldin herself is a part of and records in her artwork.

Editing and Sequencing Community through The Ballad

On its surface, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is about the fraught relationships between men and women. The focus on Goldin’s own troubled history with Brian may make the project seem heteronormative in nature. However, Goldin herself is not straight, nor is her community. A number of them aren’t cisgender, either. When you look through the photos with these facts in mind, you can see how she’s examining the toxicity of gender roles at the same time that she and those around her are actively deconstructing them. Goldin’s identity as bisexual, which she has often foregrounded in discussing her work, shaped not only how she engaged her subjects in the taking of the photos but also how she edited the work and understood people from multiple angles.32 While Goldin does include a number of her lovers in The Ballad, the bulk of the project documents her wide-ranging community of friends, who were often also aspiring artists and close like family. In recollecting his experience with Goldin in the 1980s, novelist Darryl Pinckney recalls how she navigated multiple social circles with ease: “What amazed me then—and still amazes me—was how many people Nan knew and knew well. She has a gift for friendship.”33 In reviewing the book form of The Ballad, this section focuses on how Goldin structures her community through these often-homosocial friendships that fill her photos and shape her career. These are the sustaining individuals who continue to support Goldin and whose memories Goldin keeps alive, by curating Witnesses and with her photographic work across the 1990s, when many of them died from HIV/AIDS.

The earliest photo Goldin includes as part of the book version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency demonstrates how this project was founded in queer community and how this support structure shaped her life and work. The 1973 image shows a group of women sharing cake and laughter at an Easter picnic (Figure 5.2).34 The five women are from the social circle of drag queens and trans women that Goldin lived with in Boston for a few years before she went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to pursue her bachelor’s degree. It is a rare early color photo from Goldin, who was mostly photographing in black and white at the time; and, partly due to the fact the image is in color, it is the only photograph from this period in Goldin’s life to appear in The Ballad (The Ballad is composed solely of color photographs). After this photograph, the next earliest photos are from 1976. In the context of The Ballad, this photo is the initial image in a section of photos featuring gatherings of Goldin’s community, and these evidence how much her community departs from normative gender roles. These trans women and drag queens each have their own individual relationship to the female gender (Goldin explores this subject directly in her book The Other Side), but here they’re together, relaxing in these identities and completely at ease with one another.35

Across the book version of The Ballad, Goldin pairs two photos from different times and places. The two photos typically feature different people across the page spreads, suggesting a relationship between images and individuals. However, at a handful of section breaks in the book—such as the section that opens with this picnic photograph—Goldin includes a white page on the left-hand side, thus leaving the initial photo on the right-hand side unpaired. This artistic choice has implications for the way one understands the photographs. In the case of this photo of the picnic, without a paired photo, Goldin suggests that the community is unparalleled. Ivy, centered in this photo, whom Goldin would photograph extensively over time, was her roommate for many years, including when Goldin later moved to New York City. We also see her in a number of other photos in The Ballad outside of her drag identity, as Kenny. By the time Goldin curated Witnesses, Ivy was among those Goldin had lost to HIV/AIDS.36 When Goldin released an expanded edition of The Other Side in 2019, she lamented how, aside from a couple of the drag queens and trans women she associated with in the early 1970s, “AIDS and violence have wiped out our tribe, a whole generation of pioneers gone.”37 We don’t encounter the picnic photograph until relatively late in The Ballad, but the image and the community it depicts represented an undeniably important influence on her life and work. In the years to come, she would continue to use photography to build queer community for herself in Boston and New York City. When she exhibited and published her work, she made her queer community visible to an even larger public, making a loud argument for the vibrant universality of this community perhaps even more so than the previous artists in this book since she showed and named specific individuals.

Just as Anzaldúa’s visual public talks forged a community who joined her in dialogue about intersectional feminism, so does Goldin make use of the book format to welcome individuals to see and feel a part of a larger queer community. She translates aspects of the slideshow for the book version, making her project more readily accessible, since it doesn’t depend on the handful of museums who own copies screening it. To account for the musical soundtrack that accompanied live viewings of the slideshows, Goldin includes a table of contents where the section titles are named for the songs that she paired those images with, such that a savvy reader could construct their own playlist. This eclectic mix of “songs from opera, Top 40, downtown New Wave dance clubs, and obscure blues records” included titles like Maria Callas’s “Casta Diva,” Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This,” Ennio Morricone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” theme, the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” and Dionne Warwick’s “Don’t Make Me Over.”38 In interviews, Goldin has described the music as “the narrative voice” of the slideshow where she could “make more political points about sexual politics, about gender, about relationships. That comes from the juxtaposition of images with narrative, with lyrics.”39 With the book, image–music becomes image–text, as Goldin trades the lyrics of popular music for her own words in the form of a textual preface. Moreover, the textual afterwords Goldin pens, which she has revised in each newer edition, has allowed her to keep the project open to new interpretations—as mentioned above, these afterwords are where Goldin has discussed how she lost many of the individuals depicted in the photos to HIV/AIDS in the intervening years. To her, the community is a living one, so its meaning changes over time, echoing how history has affected and shaped broader queer communities.

Along with these paratexts that introduce the project and the community to the reader, descriptive titles below each photograph welcome outsiders into the distilled version of the community that the book portrays. The format of the slideshow, where each photo flashes on screen “for three or four seconds,” does not allow for such text, so this addition provides book readers further insight into the community.40 The photos occupy most of the available space on the page, with small italic text tucked neatly underneath them. These captions follow a general pattern in giving the viewer factual information about the photographs: first, the people in the photograph are identified, most often by their first name; then, a few words about the action or space being photographed are included; last, the geographic location and year when the photograph was taken are listed. For example, Suzanne on the train, Wuppertal, West Germany 1984 or Roommate as Napoleon, New Year’s Eve, New York City 1980.41 This practice of titling photographs in this descriptive manner is one that Goldin would continue throughout her career. These titles allow viewers another avenue for reading the photographs and understanding the relationships that emerge between depicted individuals that Goldin creates through sequencing, especially since a viewer can linger at length with each spread and make meaning from their juxtaposition. This ability for the audience to sit with the images and sort out their relationship is akin to the comicitous action of closure that Scott McCloud defines in Understanding Comics (1993), where he differentiates how comics allow for greater audience participation because readers actively engage in making meaning from one image to the next.42 The captions also grant viewers the ability to trace new pathways through the photos, tracking the appearance of one subject or one location, for example, and considering their role throughout the project.

The photographs of women Goldin included throughout The Ballad often illuminated homosocial intimacy between women, underscoring how crucial female friendships are to the success of feminist community. While this book most often focuses on lesbian and bisexual women’s sexuality, it is important to note that the power of each artist’s depictions of women lies not only in how they depict women who are lovers, but also in their portrayals of women’s intimate friendships, which are made stronger by their investment in a shared community. For example, one of the individuals who emerges quite prominently across The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is Suzanne Fletcher, who is the most photographed woman in the volume and whose presence dominates the photos in the first third of the book in particular, illustrating her close friendship with Goldin.43 Their friendship dates back to adolescence when they both were students at the Satya Community School.44 Their friendship continued even when Fletcher moved to New York City in the 1970s to attend Columbia University while Goldin remained in Boston for her degree.45 Fletcher connected Goldin to Manhattan life and social scenes during these years and served as a point of connection when Goldin moved there herself in 1978 after she had completed her degree in Boston.46 As mentioned in the previous section, Fletcher was also one of the individuals who helped Goldin edit and sequence the book version of The Ballad.47 The eleven photos of Fletcher in the book depict her both in her daily life in New York City48 and traveling the world with Goldin. They journey across Mexico49 and Germany50 together, and Goldin also brings her on a visit home to her parents.51

The photos Goldin takes of Fletcher subtly demonstrate how community works and what emotional support it can provide. Whereas other photos document the vibrant sexualities and lives of the community, Goldin’s photos of Fletcher go deeper in showing the many levels of informal support that women in community together can provide for each other, just as Marrs’s and Gregory’s comics visualized the different kinds of feminist support groups that existed within the broader community. Goldin’s photo of Suzanne from the trip home to her parents exemplifies the intimacy of their friendship, especially given that Goldin had a notably strained relationship with her parents. In a page spread, Goldin juxtaposes two photographs of Fletcher lying in bed—the left-hand photo from their Mexico trip in 1981 and the right-hand photo from their visit to Goldin’s parents in 1985 (Figure 5.3). In the Mexico image, Goldin reveals their somewhat spare hotel room in Mérida. She shoots the image while standing near the end of Fletcher’s bed, positioning her full body on the mattress near the center of the photo, while also capturing much of the atmosphere of their spartan accommodations. The focus on the room obscures Fletcher’s individuality in this photo, but the facing photo provides a stark contrast, showing Fletcher in close-up as she lies in bed with no representation of the room around her. The proximity suggests their long-time friendship, since Goldin photographs her so closely in an unfiltered moment where Fletcher appears somewhat ill at ease as she rests her head on the pillow. The photo’s title adds additional context that deepens the sense of their relationship: Suzanne in The Parents’ Bed, Swampscott, Mass. 1985. Not only do we closely encounter Fletcher in a private moment, but she’s also lying in one of the most intimate of locations: Goldin’s parents’ bed. While much of The Ballad shows Goldin’s community in more revealing and sexual encounters in bed, the significance of this particular bed foregrounds the level of trust that exists between the two women.

While these photos evidence the intimacy and care that exists between the two women, Fletcher’s indispensable support of Goldin in her troubled relationship with Brian is only subtly reflected in the photo record. Besides Goldin, Fletcher is the only named individual to appear in a photo with Brian when Goldin photographs the two of them sitting at the opposite ends of a bench on the boardwalk at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, in 1982.52 She occupies the same narrative timespace as Brian, offering Goldin the support of sustaining friendship in the face of his violent destruction. After Brian brutally beat Goldin in 1984, it was “Fletcher [who] helped get [Goldin] to a hospital so that her eye could be saved.”53 As briefly mentioned at the outset of the chapter, his violence gets discussed often in part because of the iconic photo Goldin makes of herself that shows the aftermath one month after he beat her.54 What’s absent from these discussions is the fact that Fletcher took this photo; Goldin thanks Fletcher for her “hands on the shutter” in her acknowledgments for the 1996 version of The Ballad.55 These two details indicate Fletcher’s crucial presence during a difficult period in Goldin’s life and how what we see of her in the photo record is only the tip of the iceberg. The fullness with which Goldin attempts to represent her subjects echoes the work of all the artists across the book, who strove to create fully fleshed subjectivities to counter narrow stereotypes and provide portrayals of diverse sexualities. All the artists depicted women in community with each other, but it is Goldin who really theorizes and visualizes the succor that a feminist friendship can provide.

For all the support that Fletcher provided to Goldin, we can also see Goldin’s care for her in another photo of Fletcher that Goldin structurally links to her iconic photo documenting the aftermath of Brian’s domestic abuse. In the “Sweet Blood Call” section of The Ballad that features photos of women suffering physical and emotional pain, Goldin begins with the iconic photo of herself and ends with a photo that depicts a distraught Fletcher in tears (Figure 5.4).56 Just like the photo of Fletcher in Goldin’s parents’ bed, we encounter Fletcher again in close-up, such that we can intimately read the distress on her face through every furrow of her brow as a single tear rolls down her cheek. A critic said that this was “the closest a human being could get to another.”57 Because this photo is paired in sequence with Goldin’s, it foregrounds the reciprocity in their relationship—Fletcher was there for Goldin and now, in the timespace of the photo, Goldin is there for Fletcher. Not all of Goldin’s photos capture her subjects at such close proximity, but these photos provide an especially jarring contrast to the Barbara photo she curated in the preface, underlining the level of emotional vulnerability she is able to develop with her chosen family as they open themselves up to her and vice versa.

Focusing on Fletcher illuminates both the close connections that Goldin had with the subjects of her photos and how she amplified that rapport through how she arranged the photos in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. My reading shows how the descriptive titles play a role in the book version in further contextualizing the photos, identifying individuals and providing information that shapes the meaning of each image. As the exhibition of Goldin’s project moved further away from her community who attended many of the slideshows in the early years, the additional information that Goldin provides in the book version through captions and paratexts allows her new audience to become acquainted with her community. Along with the afterwords in which Goldin names those who have passed away—many of them from HIV/AIDS—the photo titles allow the viewer to identify these individuals and hold them in memory. Like Goldin herself, Fletcher is still alive, but many members of Goldin’s community, like those trans women and drag queens making merry at the picnic, are not.

The most recent photo that Goldin includes in The Ballad subconsciously anticipates those losses. Juxtaposed with an image of her parents’ wedding photo sitting on a dresser in a yellow bedroom, Goldin brings us to the wedding of Cookie Mueller and Vittorio Scarpati, who were both HIV positive when they married in 1986 (Figure 5.5).58 She shows the couple in medium close-up, as Scarpati smiles and gazes on the tearful Mueller. Despite their diagnoses, these are tears of joyous celebration, for both were determined to keep living.59 By pairing this photo with her parents, Goldin insists on the distance between these two modes of marriage—while Mueller and Scarpati’s marriage might seem straight, Mueller was avowedly bisexual and previously in a long-term relationship with Sharon Niesp. Her relationship with Scarpati was one they both came to in their thirties, and each accepted the other’s artistic lifestyle of sexual liberation.

When Goldin turns to curate Witnesses, she does it in honor of those in the community who were living with and had died from HIV/AIDS, naming several individuals who were a part of The Ballad: Kenny Angelico (Ivy), Max diCorcia, Mark Morrisroe, and Vittorio Scarpati.60 Mueller, whom she didn’t name, would die from AIDS-related complications on the eve of the exhibit’s opening, two months following the death of Scarpati.61 The following section, in examining Goldin’s curating of Witnesses through the catalog, demonstrates how Goldin continues to wield images to make her community visible and, together with text, mobilize them for action. The increasing political tenor of Goldin’s work at decade’s end echoes that of Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson in chapter 1, whose Caught Looking took a more strident and explicit approach in advocating for sexual expression in response to the feminists who were joining up with conservative politicians to try to enact anti-pornography ordinances. For all these women, the conservative political backdrop exacerbated existing problems, especially when it came to the HIV/AIDS crisis, which President Reagan rarely acknowledged in public statements.

The Witnesses Catalog: Curating Loss, Theorizing Response

Between the release of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book in 1986 and her curation of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing in 1989, Goldin went to rehab for drug use, having spiraled into deep addiction following the end of her relationship with Brian. In an interview, Goldin recounts how the presence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in her community influenced her decision to enter rehab: “In 1987, a friend of mine said, ‘It’s ridiculous watching you trying to kill yourself on drugs when all our friends are trying to stay alive with AIDS.’ It took me a while, but that had a big effect on me.”62 In 1988, she left New York City to start rehab in Boston, and it was while she was there that Artists Space invited her to curate a show, which Steven C. Dubin describes that “she conceived of . . . as a memorial, a therapeutic experience for sick and/or grieving artists, and a way to increase public awareness about the disease. Witnesses was a logical extension of the type of work Goldin has done throughout her own career. She has continuously photographed herself and her friends in the most intimate situations.”63 This sense that Dubin articulates of how Witnesses is connected to Goldin’s previous work through its “intimate” focus on her own community is one that Elisabeth Sussman echoes in her essay on Goldin’s career, written for a major retrospective of Goldin’s work that she curated with photographer David Armstrong at the Whitney Museum in 1996: “In a period of much political art, this exhibition stood out. Like Goldin’s work, it had a simple directness and was a product of a community.”64 In looking again at Witnesses and Goldin’s curation of the exhibit, this section focuses on how she politically activates her community and their losses through image and text in the exhibit catalog itself. By making HIV/AIDS visible through her community, Goldin refused to allow HIV/AIDS to remain a shameful, private matter. She began her own catalog essay by openly discussing her experience with rehab and how “when [she] came back to life, [she] realized how much had changed, how many of those [she] most admired were sick or had been killed by AIDS.”65

Goldin’s own essay and the four others in the Witnesses catalog connected the exhibit to larger conversations about social justice work around HIV/AIDS, which was furthered through associated actions that transpired during the exhibit’s run from November 1989 to January 1990. For example, on November 28–29, just after the exhibit opened, a group of literary artists held a two-night reading in the exhibit space, contributing the proceeds from the event to the activist AIDS group ACT UP.66 On December 1, the Witnesses exhibit also participated in the first Day Without Art action that the AIDS art organization Visual AIDS called for, joining over eight hundred other galleries, museums, and art institutions by closing for the day to acknowledge how HIV/AIDS was ravaging the artistic community.67 Wojnarowicz’s essay, with its damning critique of the homophobic actions and remarks of Cardinal John O’Connor, an archbishop in the Catholic Church, foreshadowed ACT UP’s major Stop the Church demonstration on December 10 where members staged a die-in in St. Patrick’s Cathedral while O’Connor was holding mass for his congregants.68

In the thirty-two-page catalog for Witnesses, about half the catalog is devoted to the essays, while the other half focuses on introducing the twenty-three contributing visual artists by pairing a featured image with a short biographical statement. Artists Space director Susan Wyatt’s acknowledgments at the outset of the catalog introduce the exhibit as a whole and the sources of funding that supported the show. Each of the following essays, including Goldin’s own, personally grapple with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in different ways, outlining the range of emotional responses present in this hard-hit community, which the exhibit artwork also echoed.

Goldin explains her goal for curating an emotional diversity of work in her own essay, asserting, “I want to empower others by providing them a forum to voice their grief and anger in the hope that this public ritual of mourning can be cathartic in the process of recovery, both for those among us who are now ill and those survivors who are left behind.” Crucial here is how her approach empowers not only attendees but also the contributors themselves, by giving them this space to “voice their grief and anger” and join with others to create “this public ritual of mourning.” Such a gathering is very different in tone from but overlaps in attendance with Goldin’s early slideshows. Her curatorial latitude reveals how Goldin’s collaborative spirit in her photographic process gets translated into curatorship; because Goldin allows each contributor autonomy in “select[ing] work that represents their personal responses to AIDS,” most opt to make “new work especially for this exhibit.”69 Like Anzaldúa’s supportive mentorship, Goldin’s personal approach encouraged her contributors to dig deep and produce work that freshly articulated the continuing toll of HIV/AIDS in their immediate lives, a vision for the show that only gained in gravity as contributors and intimates died, or their health worsened, in the months leading up to the opening.

Goldin’s essay, penned in October 1989, accounts for this ever-growing number of losses not only through her autobiographically informed text but also through two devices that deepen her statements and make visible the personal losses within this community: a fatalities roll call and a funeral photograph (Figure 5.6). These paratextual elements visually frame Goldin’s essay in personal reminders of loss. In the column below her title, Goldin dedicates Witnesses to seven people whose deaths from HIV/AIDS touch, shape, and personally inform the exhibit: Kenny Angelico, Keith Davis, Max diCorcia, Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, Vittorio Scarpati, and Bibi Smith. At the end of this list, she adds to the dedication—connecting these local deaths to the broader expanses of HIV/AIDS losses—“and everyone else we have lost to AIDS.” This larger invocation was added to a fairly final draft of the essay kept in Artists Space’s records, suggesting that the list is necessarily partial and the real count is continuing.70 The October 1989 timestamp at the end of her essay and others, which was added in final page proofs, further underlines how this list would continue to grow. As Goldin’s essay mentions, two of the exhibit artists had died in the months leading up to the exhibit: Morrisroe in July, followed by Scarpati in September. Goldin also refers in her essay to the decline of Cookie Mueller, whose earlier writing she includes in the catalog and who would die as the exhibit opened in November. In addition to Scarpati and Morrisroe, the other five people that Goldin dedicated the exhibit to were friends and family of the exhibit artists. Kenny Angelico was a close friend and roommate of Goldin whom she also photographed in drag as Ivy (as discussed in the previous section); and Peter Hujar, whose photographs she included in the exhibit, was Goldin’s professional mentor and David Wojnarowicz’s lover. Keith Davis was Wojnarowicz’s close friend, and Max diCorcia and Bibi Smith were the siblings of Witnesses artists Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Kiki Smith, respectively. This brief list demonstrates the intimate devastation within this interconnected artistic community, which the exhibit as a whole would lay bare. Also, the fact that this list is one of collective loss echoes the collaborative nature of Goldin’s curation, which resonates not only with Anzaldúa’s collaborations with fellow artists and audiences in her edited collections and talks as I discussed in the previous chapter, but also gestures back to how Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson visually incorporated the conference organizers and presenters into the Barnard Diary as I examined in the first chapter.

As she does in The Ballad where she gestures to a larger community while also depicting her own individual experience, Goldin juxtaposes this list of collective grief with her own local loss. In the space below the end of her essay, Goldin includes a new photo of her own from the month before, “Vittorio Scarpati and Cookie Mueller, 1989,” which makes the losses from HIV/AIDS freshly visible. This photo depicts essay–contributor Mueller standing in front of the open casket of her husband and Witnesses contributor, Scarpati. It provides a stark contrast to the photo of their wedding that Goldin included in The Ballad. Though this photo is reproduced in black and white and at about an inch high, it clearly communicates an experience all too familiar in their community as deaths stacked up. Rather than another paragraph of words, this photograph forcefully and ironically speaks, for it depicts a moment in which both Scarpati and Mueller could no longer speak themselves (AIDS took away Mueller’s power of speech in her final weeks). This photograph would be the first piece of artwork that viewers would encounter inside the catalog. And, notwithstanding the high attendance rates for the exhibit, Artists Space’s records document a number of people mailing in requests to purchase the catalog, suggesting that, for some, it may have been their only physical encounter with the exhibit.71 In this manner, the photograph frames not only Goldin’s words but also the rest of the exhibit.

Goldin’s inclusion of this photo and placement of it at the end of her essay also echoes her curation of Barbara’s photo at the end of her preface in The Ballad. Like that photo, this one reflects the textual content but speaks to a deeper emotional reality. This juxtaposition is especially striking given that her close friendship with Mueller was a sort of sisterhood; as Hilton Als remarks of their relationship, “Looking at the warm, playful, and wrenching photographs of Mueller in The Ballad is like seeing a ghost—the woman Barbara Goldin never got to be. Mueller survived girlhood in postwar Maryland and became herself. Barbara didn’t. (Mueller died, of AIDS, in 1989.)”72 Both images foretell Goldin’s loss of these women, but Mueller was able to craft a life on her own terms, even if it was one cut short by illness at the age of forty. Paired with her dedication list, this photograph visualizes those losses, and, through the inclusion of Mueller in the frame, foreshadows the imminent and additional losses to come, including other Witnesses contributors in the coming years.

The tonal diversity of the other essays in the catalog by Wojnarowicz, Linda Yablonsky, and Mueller reflected Goldin’s curatorial aim: “The focus of the responses vary: out of loss comes memory pieces, tributes to friends and lovers who have died; out of anger come explorations of the political cause and effects of this disease.”73 Goldin traces how loss and anger coalesce a number of the responses, which these essays exemplify. Wojnarowicz—in the longest essay in the catalog—excoriates how HIV and AIDS have been handled politically and socially. Mueller laments her earliest HIV/AIDS loss in 1982 and all those that have followed, and Yablonsky speaks poetically about the ghosts gathering around her and explicitly discusses Mueller’s decline and imminent death. Together, they set the tone for the artwork to follow.

Goldin’s curation of Wojnarowicz’s essay deserves special mention—not just because the essay precipitated the aforementioned NEA funding crisis, but because it also became iconic in AIDS activist circles in the coming years. During the dispute with NEA, Goldin stood firmly beside Wojnarowicz and his words, evidencing her support of his fury.74 His essay foreshadowed the aforementioned Stop the Church demonstration in December 1989 and also inspired the October 11, 1992, Ashes Action where ACT UP activists threw the ashes of dead lovers, friends, and family onto the White House lawn. Two recent ACT UP documentaries, in describing the orchestration of this action, cite the word of Wojnarowicz, who writes near the end of the essay:

I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or friend or stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers, or neighbors would take their dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles to washington dc and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and then dump their lifeless forms on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.75

While his anger here fuels an impossible fantasy of busting through the White House gates to “dump . . . lifeless forms on the front steps,” it suggests a very public action in the face of death. ACT UP embraced such tactics as HIV/AIDS deaths grew exponentially with little public health response from the federal government. While Wojnarowicz died three months before the Ashes Action, his own death was recognized in the manner that he details at the outset of this passage, as activists marched his casket in a procession that wound through the East Village on July 29, 1992, a week after his death.76 In interviews, Goldin describes Wojnarowicz as her “moral litmus test,” and by encouraging him to write this essay and giving it ample space in the catalog she links her exhibit to this living history of activist approaches.77

Goldin’s personal approach to introducing each of the show’s twenty-three visual artists in the second half of the catalog echoes that of Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s process in the Diary that they put together for the Barnard Sex Conference in 1982. In that case, they wanted to represent the diversity of feminist perspectives by incorporating as many women in the Diary as possible, evident in the conference presentation section through collaging in postcards that the workshop leaders sent with handwritten annotations. With Witnesses, Goldin also wanted to emphasize the range of perspectives on HIV/AIDS, but her collaborative approach to sharing the artwork and words of others goes further in that she is working to memorialize explicitly the three contributing artists who had passed—Hujar, Morrisroe, and Scarpati (Figure 5.7). Along with an image of an artwork and a brief artist biography, personal details under each artist’s name note the year of their birth and their current city or the city and year in which they died. Where the living contributors described their artistic vision for their work in this space, Goldin included artist biographies for these men that described their physical presence and their artwork, viscerally connecting them to the attendees. These entries echo the obituaries that were a common and countless phenomenon at this time, particularly in the gay press. Goldin wrote elegiac biographical statements for Hujar and Scarpati, while she excerpted Morrisroe’s own words, from earlier that year in January, for his entry about actions he imagines taking in response to being ignored by his nurses while hospitalized for HIV/AIDS. In her final sentence for both Hujar and Scarpati, she insists on their continuing presence in their artwork: “AIDS robbed us of Peter’s vitality, but not of his vision”; “[Scarpati] has left behind an indelible record of his fight for life and given us a gift of wit and wisdom.” As the curator of an exhibit on AIDS, Goldin tasked herself with building a bridge between the living and the dead so that we might remember their contributions and participate, alongside her, in being active witnesses against our own vanishing.

To further this goal, it is likely no coincidence that Goldin features a self-portrait of these three men in the catalog alongside their biographies. As these artists could no longer represent themselves in new words or works, their autobiographical artworks let us know who they were via their own hand. Morrisroe’s photograph and Scarpati’s drawing show them in the last year of their lives, while Hujar’s photograph depicts him in 1975, over a decade before his diagnosis and death in 1987, gesturing to the length of an artistic career that began in the 1950s.78 Again, in this small sample of work, we see the range of representation that echoes the diversity implicit in Goldin’s curatorial vision of the exhibit. Similar to the range of her photography, her curatorial work insists that there are many modes of representation, many registers of witnessing. This representational multiplicity used in the service of HIV/AIDS activism is of a piece with the other artists in this book, who visualized their communities to advocate for sex-positive, intersectional feminism. Moreover, Goldin’s participation in HIV/AIDS activism echoes that of numerous other queer women in the late 1980s, and her work provides one artistic way of contributing that seeks to guard against loss.

Archives and Afterlives: Continuing Activism

Goldin’s work with both Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency makes visible a grouping of artists who defy traditional heteronormative tenets and embrace sexual liberation in their lives and artwork, even before the AIDS crisis. Goldin’s work honing the political angle of Witnesses and connecting it to the direct action of groups like ACT UP not only evidences her own personal consciousness-raising but also points to a broader societal shift that was underway in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly a tightening conservatism that Goldin fought with deliberate radicalism. As she wrote in her catalog essay, “The influence of the New Morality and the effective use of AIDS as the most powerful tool for sexual repression makes it even more imperative to continue to create and exhibit art that portrays sexuality as a positive force.”79 As Witnesses makes visible, such a response was necessary, for people were dying and would continue to die. In a long review of Witnesses published in the Washington Post, Goldin explained the loss in personal terms, contrasting it with what the media reported about HIV/AIDS: “I’m 36 . . . and I’ve lost half my friends. It’s important for people to know what they’re losing. A lot of people have told me that the Witnesses show gave AIDS a human face for them. Reading the statistics, reading the medical costs, seeing the news—that doesn’t really show people what is being lost.”80 In this sound bite, Goldin argues that Witnesses makes visible “a human face” not apparent in other public sources, which remain impersonal. The exhibit as a whole performs this action, but it is most poignantly apparent with the biographical entries for Hujar, Morrisroe, and Scarpati in the catalog. For Goldin, this visibility was a matter of witnessing against a vanishing not only of physical death but also of social death. In her work as photographer and curator, she makes people visible in the frame or on the gallery wall, preserving their lives and memories in a manner akin to the archives mentioned throughout this book.

As discussed at the outset of this chapter, Goldin would focus on HIV/AIDS in her subsequent photography, memorializing those who had already died and documenting those who were still living with HIV/AIDS. The way she mobilized her community for activism by making their personal struggles public with Witnesses is a tactic she has again embraced in recent years as she formed PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2018 to address the opioid crisis and target the Sackler family, major funders of the arts who profited off the crisis by producing and aggressively marketing OxyContin. In a recent interview, she linked her work with PAIN to that of Witnesses, averring, “The opioid crisis is the epidemic of our times, like AIDS was, and it’s also related to government malfunction and to the lack of medical practices and lack of prescriptions that are used to help people. They also share the same stigma, and so a lot of our work is to try to destigmatize addiction, and to educate people on that. Our battles are similar.”81 As with Witnesses, her work with PAIN draws from what her personal community is facing, making visible and “destigmatiz[ing]” their lives. These activist projects align with and draw energy from her photography, all pushing for openness and honesty against the secrecy of her upbringing. Together with the other artists in this book, Goldin makes visible the sexual lives of women freed from repression. All these media align with the sex-positive politics of the coming third wave of feminism in the 1990s. By returning to these works now and considering how they intersect with archives, we can ask how these and similar women will be remembered in the future and what capacity archives of different sorts have to remember and structure the memory of such diverse visual media.