Some of GANG, An Interview

Issue #3 of the Movement Research Performance Journal is most often remembered for the ensuing scandal caused by a one-page contribution from GANG, an artist collective that grew out of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) as much as friendships forged around networks of activism in the late-1980s and early-1990s. “Read My Lips” featured a closely cropped image of a vulva with the statement “Read My Lips…Before They’re Sealed,” referring to the so-called “domestic gag rule,” a policy originating in the Reagan-era that banned any federally funded health care providers from distributing information on abortion. Response to the printing of GANG’s poster played out nationally, as the National Endowment for the Arts threatened to withdraw its funding from Movement Research and Senator Jesse Helms took to the senate floor flashing pages of Issue #3 in front of his colleagues. Less often recalled is the response that played out locally, as members of the dance and performance community took to a town hall divided over inclusion over the inclusion of such an explicit body politic in the MRPJ (see Tom Kalin’s contribution to this issue for further reflection). 

When we began to revisit Issue #3 for Issue #60, I knew I wanted to research GANG further. I reached out to Zoe Leonard, the only member of GANG I knew of at the time, and inquired about developing a work as much in response to “Read My Lips” as it might be a reflection on how such sensationalized moments pull focus from other aspects of the historical record. With some clarity, I wrote that I was “less interested in an historical reflection on the GANG piece and more interested in some way of responding to that work across the 30+ years since it was printed.” Zoe was clear that a GANG project would only be possible if we could re-assemble the collective. Cold emails to GANG members, one after the other, yielded new names of potential participants, some who excitedly joined back up, others who never responded, some who are no longer living. The resulting conversation gestures to the breadth of GANG’s work which has hardly been documented elsewhere. It speaks a crucial moment in activism where shifting priorities met with a desire to stave off the exhaustion of militancy by reintroducing form of joy and pleasure. It serves as a reminder of that movements are never tightly bound to history, ebbing and flowing into one another.  

— Joshua Lubin-Levy 

Suzanne Wright: Gosh it’s so nice to see everyone. But I do want to start by acknowledging Michael Perelman, a central member of GANG, who passed away a few years ago.  

Daniel Wolfe: One of the great things about Michael, and it's related to my experience of GANG in general, is that he was simultaneously very serious and also somewhat aware of his own absurdity. Similarly, GANG wasn't as serious as Gran Fury, at least in many moments it had an awareness of a sense of humor about itself and its limits that was paradoxically freeing, so that we could do a performance or do the piece in the Performance Journal, or whatever. There was something light and comic about it compared to some of the other forms of activism. 

Adam Rolston: It was out of ACT UP, 100%, but I was also drawn to in GANG because there's the Venn diagram of the women’s rights, gay rights and AIDS activism—and while AIDS activism was getting tackled in a lot of the collectives coming out of ACT UP, the other two weren't as much. We wanted to focus on a broader agenda, and to me that's also what made GANG special. 

ZL: And I really love that about GANG and wonder if some of that playfulness had to do with when we started. We'd already all clocked several years of activism. I think my attraction to GANG was to be part of a collective driven by being artists, and collaborating in a way that didn’t use the same strategies that had become part of a recognizable activist style, the set strategies of taking commercial iconography or design tropes and playing with them. We gave ourselves a freer rein. And I don't remember what year we started, but I know it was at a point when a lot of us were starting to feel really burnt out from the amount of tragedy, the amount of loss, but also from going to so many meetings and so many protests and getting arrested so many times and wanting a different comradeship with each other. I felt like we also wanted friendship, and wanted sustenance inside this really overwhelming task of trying to change the world. 

AR: I agree so much with that. There was a churn. You would join an affinity group, you would work on something, and then you'd go on to the next one. There was a churn that happened. At the point GANG started, I know I was looking to find a slightly smaller cell to identify with and belong to,. But it's also interesting, Zoe, what you just said about the strategies of appropriation and advertising, because the topic here is “Read My Lips,” which does borrow from commercial advertising, but it also borrowed from Grand Fury’s “Read My Lips.” So, the piece of the Performance Journal is sort an appropriation of an appropriation. 

Loring McAlpin: Just going back to our origin, GANG came at a time when Queer Nation had started, so there was already activist energy that was siphoning off from ACT UP into queer politics. And it was a moment when there was a division within ACT UP and there was some uncertainty about where it was going to go. There was burnout, we'd all been doing it for a couple of years. We formed really through affinity, through friendship networks rather than coming from the floor of a larger organization. And that really meant that the tenor was different. The other thing about appropriation, the one thing that we did do that was different was that we did a couple projects where we tried to appropriate the voice of governmental authority. We created a poster that was something you would see in an immigration hall with a picture of Bush and the statement, "Undoing the restrictions of not allowing foreigners with HIV into the country." And we did another thing that was related to the police department. Remember the yellow and blue sticker? 

DW: Yeah, it was like a sticker for the subway that said that gay bashing would be punishable under a certain statute, even though there was no such statute. The idea, as rendered by our colleague Peter Bowen was to do things that were ob-scene, behind the scenes and bringing that forward. But in addition to that...I mean we did performance, we did those stickers, we did a video, and it was experimental in the sense of, "Okay, well let's just try this mode or that mode." And one of the greatest things for me about the power of groups is that they enable you to do something you wouldn't have the courage to do on your own. I never performed before or sincebut there were a lot of things that we did together that I wouldn't have been able to do by myself. That, and the fact that we were men and women together was something that was parallel to healing some of the tensions within ACT UP. One of our first things was just a very simple graphic that said, "EVERY DYKE IS A HERO,” and it's relevant to the subject of “Read My Lips” Obviously those are not my labia, and I don't even know whose they were. I was like, "I can't remember. Whose were they?" And I don't even know if I ever knew.

AR: Yeah, no, it was never disclosed. 

SW: No one will ever know. 

ZL: I don't want to digress too much, but we know that a lot of women were working on issues related to women and at the same time because of the amount of homophobia and gay bashing, and the horrific response from the mainstream of this country and the government, one of ACT UP’s biggest charges was to celebrate gay male sexuality. And speaking for myself, I felt like I was missing my own sense of pleasure and the sense of my body—and something about my body and my life that wasn't only about illness or fear or transmission of disease. fierce pussy formed explicitly to create more lesbian visibility and to celebrate lesbian desire in the face of all of that homophobia, and as a space for us women to connect. And then I think Suzanne joined GANG and I was like, "Oh, I want to do that too, that sounds really fun." Because it just seemed like there was an energy and sense of friendship a smaller group where everyone seemed to enjoy each other's company. And GANG was not organizing protests, but was making creative work that would sustain us and give us a sense of pleasure as we made it. 

AR: Our little group embraced looking beyond just the politics of AIDS activism and a broadening of the agenda. 

ZL: I think we were interested in intersectionality, even before that term was being used. 

SW: Also, what about Holly Hughes? She was in GANG for a little bit, remember? Is she on the list? 

AR: Is there a list? 

DW: In the BAM performance that you referenced with you and Michael, remember she was supposed to get an award and she too was totally burned down by all of the NEA scrutiny and she was like, "I'm sick of being myself. Could you guys be me instead?" 

DW: And you guys went up and performed as her. But in terms of people who aren't present, there's Martin. There was Peter Bowen, who was on the cover of Out Week as the new clone or that was just my idea that he should have been… 

LM: He was. 

DW: And then there was Heidi Durrow, Maria Perez… 

WL: And Bob, formerly Bob Beck was in, and wasn't Jessie Folstein in as well? 

AR: Yes. Yes. 

ZL: Also, somebody brought up that first poster, "EVERY DYKE IS A HERO," and although she wasn't in GANG, it was [Nancy Brooks-] Brody’s arm in that photograph. 

SW: That's right. Oh my god. 

ZL: So that's another serious moment of rest in power for one of our people that's not with us anymore. Rest in Power. 

Wellington Love: Picking up on Zoe's comment about intersectionality, the conversations around diversity, equity, inclusion, and I'm sure there are precursors that you guys could point to even before GANG and thinking about House of Color and Gang of Four and Grand Fury and all those groups. Those were sort of precursors to contemporary discussions around DEI. Obviously it's advanced, but it is interesting to think about the generation that has come after us, what they maybe don't know, or that there was always somebody who was fighting, there was always somebody who was pushing, and these conversations aren't exactly new.  

AR: Well, it's a good thing to point out, particularly because this is targeted towards an audience that is looking back. And Wellington, one of the things that I was struck by in your film was that term transcestors, that there is this consciousness that there is this generation that came before that actually did set the stage. And I have to say, when you said that Zoe, about intersectionality, I felt proud because in GANG we were having fun but we were also trying to connect across differences. 

ZL: When the COVID-19 pandemic happened and every article in the Times and every post on Instagram was like, "Oh my god, what the pandemic has revealed!” I was like, are you fucking for real? That drove me so bananas, because I was like, no, thirty years ago, when we had a totally different pandemic, we were all like, “Look how this reveals the inequity” And the activists that had come before us in the feminist health movement and the civil rights movement… 

AR: That was the sense of humor Suzanne was talking about, just to point that out. 

SW: When I look back at Issue #3 now, as a professor and somebody who is still an activist in not only my life but my work, I felt so dumbfounded by the fact that there's no sense of urgency, that we have gone back in time, that I was fighting for reproductive rights. Now we're finally saying the word abortion on a daily basis, but that's about it. I really feel like we've gone into a time capsule and gone back. And that image of a woman's pussy with “Read My Lips,” I was just struck by how freaking kick-ass that is, and where is that now? But I don't know, it got my feathers up. I was just like, "I feel really angry." And I'm like, "All right, well, I got to start another movement. That's it." But I'm a little long in the tooth to be doing this. I want other people to do it as well and find where that is, locate in themselves where that is to then actually do something , and that's one of them, reproductive rights. 

DW: I can't remember who, if any, of you guys were with me when the Movement Research community had a tribunal after Issue #3 was published, but these were all people who were dancers, contact improvisors, about liberating the body from constraint , and their objection was really that our piece was too on the nose, too crudely political. They were super upset that somehow this crude activism had infiltrated the province of the artistic. And it was Bill T. Jones who stood up for us. So I will say that one of the things about GANG, for me, I never considered myself an artist, but the artists who were there, Adam and Suzanne and Zoe and Loring and Wellington, et cetera, were all willing to go there to the more direct activist confrontational place in addition to making art that was not only that. And that was an incredibly valuable contribution, but it felt out of sync with the Movement Research community. 

LM: How did it come to the group? Was it through Richard [Elovich] who made the offer? 

DW: Yeah, because Richard had funding from Philip Morris to do that Performance Journal, and so he offered it to Tom. I don't know if it was whether Tom or Richard gave us a page, but we just had a page in the journal. 

WL: My thought about this is that everything is escalated. Yes, we have much more visibility, much more exposure. We're not just in these marginalized queer film festivals or these exhibitions at PS 100 . We have many more access points, but at the same time, the people who come after us , they also have more access, they have towers for the war. Even if I think about my mornings with MSNBC, it's already evolved from “abortion care” to “abortion healthcare.” Even in recent weeks you can hear the language has changed, and I think it's interesting because they're planting seeds, which I think are great because it's not just abortion, it's healthcare.  

ZL: It occurs to me in relation to this thing about explicit language and specifically this poster, the "read my lips before they're sealed" poster, that there was this moment when we made that poster and it could be on a journal that was sold on newsstands, that it could actually circulate through the world. And right now, I wonder if you even tried to show that in a museum there would be… 

AR: It would be a problem. 

SW: Oh yeah. Signs everywhere warning "Don't let your children in here." 

DW: Trigger warning. 

ZL: Talking about the relationship to art and iconography, and what kind of iconography can be used, maybe I can trace the genesis of the photograph in that poster. We really wanted to respond to the legislation that was not going to allow healthcare providers to even say the word “abortion.” But the poster came out of a conversation that Suzanne and I were having when we were in San Francisco on a trip, and something clicked where one day we were just like, "Yes, that's it, put a pussy there, and then those words 'read my lips before they're sealed.'" Make a pun on this already existing activist thing. So we were literally responding to censorship with an explicit image. 

SW: It was shock and awe. 

ZL: Later, in my own work, I ended up making an artwork where I used a lot of pussy shots and recently I had the occasion to revisit that work and gather a lot of the documentation, which I made for Documenta in 1992. That project was definitely, in some ways, inspired by the piece that we made in GANG. But looking back, it occurred to me I don’t know if I would have the guts to do that work now, but I also wonder what museum, what publication, what kind of platform — no matter how progressive — would even allow that to be published no matter how progressive? We're seeing how the conversation is being so shut down about Gaza and institutions firing people and refusing to allow their students to protest. I think there's a real shutdown around explicit imagery — although there's massively sexualized imagery obviously all the time in advertising. 

AR: More than ever

ZL: But in this particular instance, I think either we wouldn't be allowed to show it or we would have warnings all over the galleries. But for me, it’s the directness of our language, and our ability to actually depict our bodies and match our bodies with language that has to do with government legislation and say, "You know what? It is that direct. It actually is this: get out of my pussy.” 

SW: And a hairy pussy. 

AR: Not beautifully groomed. 

ZL: That would be the thing. People being like, "Oh my god, she didn't wax." 

SW: How ungroomed! 

AR: But there is a platform that the internet was invented for where everybody is looking at things like that, and that's porn. 

DW: I actually think funding was pulled after the issue because the real infraction was the inclusion of legislation — because the poster violated the divide between not-for-profit foundation dollars where you're not allowed to legislate for particular pieces of legislation. I mean, I’m sure it was the pussy plus the legislation, but just to say that those constraints vis-a-vis politics are already built into the foundation, not-for-profit institutional establishment — which is you can make art but don't connect it to political actions so explicitly or you're in violation of the terms of the funding. 

DW: But I would also say that, for me, there's something about time travel or moving back and forth in time, about GANG. That poster seems, of course, totally relevant now, except of course the lips are sealed, the repeal of Roe vs. Wade has happened. But even beyond this poster, Suzanne mentioned Michael Perelman, I always associated Michael Perelman’s involvement in GANG with my sense that his gay education had happened in a different era of gayness — he was very familiar with Christopher Street Queen tropes and Betty Davis imitations. 

AR: It's like he teleported out of the 1950s or something. 

DW: And he had made a conscious effort to be an emissary between the 50s and the 90s. And then, I mentioned Peter Bowen who was so terminally 90s…there was a lot we did about contemporary performances of gayness or straightness, performances that were about performing moments in time or representation. There was always a time travel piece for me, more in the people maybe than in the products. Even that video about movies that were important to us when we came out, that was all about past period in time. 

AR: “Read My Lips,” to take it back to that, is about putting our bodies forward and using our bodies and in a way that does connect to performance, but it’s also where we came out of. We were literally putting our bodies in the street. There was something physical about the attack on our bodies, disease, but also just that we were putting our bodies on the line. And so that makes sense that it would appear in the work. 

LM: but I'm struck today by how little there is on the street that's oppositional or political. There's practically nothing. 

AR: Zero 

LM: In that era, there were people wheat pasting all over downtown and you just don't see that anymore. Of course, there's the internet, but I don't even know whether that's happening on the internet. So it's harder, in some sense, to reach a broad range of people than if you physically encountered it walking around the street in the city. 

AR: Okay, I've got an idea. Let's redo “Read My Lips” on the street. 

SW: Do you remember at BAM when we had everybody stand up? That to me was the most memorable part of our performance. We all did these little things. We basically appropriated this idea of standing up if you are Jewish or gay… 

DW: It was the King of Denmark's expression of solidarity to get all Danish citizens to put on a Jewish star so that no one would be able to identify the Jews. So we asked everyone to stand up as if to be identified with Holly, who was being targeted for the defunding in the NEA controversy. 

SW: That's right. And we had everybody stand up to say they were gay.  

AR: This is becoming a GANG meeting. We're spit balling ideas. I love it. 

ZL: I really remain deeply interested and committed and excited by the idea of affinity and by how energizing this conversation was, how good it is to see all your faces and to feel like we can talk about things and get each other riled up and excited and want to make something new. But I'm not always sure about what public space is right now and where you reach people that aren't already, preaching to the choir. What does that mean when you're not speaking to people who are already absolutely going to agree with you?  

SW: I wonder though, a little bit, Zoe, I totally hear what you're saying and I agree with it and I think that we are in a very vulnerable space. You just don't know where people are coming from, what their filter, history has been in regards to how they view you. But I wonder how much we're preaching to the choir because I'm rethinking the choir, I've been really shocked about the choir lately. If we came up with something that was as shocking I don't know if it would be preaching to the choir. I suspect it might be refreshing.