Photo: Mark Harrington, copyright Stephen Barker
Halston. Robert Mapplethorpe. Keith Haring. Freddie Mercury. Eazy E. Antonio Lopez. Martin Wong. David Wojnarowicz. Herb Ritts. The list goes on – and on. More than 675,000 people have died of Aids-related illnesses since the epidemic first hit in 1981, devastating a generation coming-of-age in the wake of the gay, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s.
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Where it was once an all-consuming force decimating lives, survivors of the terror and trauma rarely revisit those horrific times. It is difficult to express the scale and scope of the agony of illness and the pain of death that happened day after day, year after year, for decades. Imagine a funeral for friends and family every week. Envision the fear spread by misinformation and ignorance, in the wake of a government that turned its back on the victims of the virus.
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During the first four years of the crisis, President Ronald Reagan never said a word about the disease, which had infected nearly 60,000 people – 28,000 of whom had died. In 1987, Senator Jesse Helms amended a federal bill to prohibit Aids education, saying such efforts “encourage or promote homosexual activity.”
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The battle lines were drawn: it was the people vs. the government.
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In 1987, ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in response. Organised as a leaderless network of committees working with affinity groups, members of ACT UP took it upon themselves to battle the disease and the government firsthand. Their slogan, “Silence = Death,” became the rallying cry for activists, who, to paraphrase poet Dylan Thomas, refused to go gently into the night. They raged until their actions turned the tide.
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ACT UP took on every aspect of the crisis, coming up with grassroots solutions to clearly defined problems. Photographer Stephen Barker worked as part of ACT UP’s Needle Exchange Program on New York’s Lower East Side. He also participated in the first “Funeral March,” one of the most powerful public protests against the regime, wherein Mark Fisher’s body was carried in an open coffin from Judson Memorial Church to the steps of the Republican National Committee on the eve of the 1992 presidential election.
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Barker’s photographs made during these actions, along with a selection from the “Nightswimming” series made in places where men regularly went for trysts, will be on view in the exhibition Stephen Barker: The ACT UP Portraits – Activists & Avatars, 1991–1994, at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York (September 14 – October 28, 2017). Below, he speaks with us about the lessons he learned in the fight for life and the war against death.
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Photo; Funeral March, copyright Stephen Barker