Ashes

Why do I remember the room as green? Photographs found online soon confirmed that its murals were mostly made of lurid flesh tones. The remaining surfaces of its walls, like its ceiling and the cast-iron columns that held it up, were a mix of grays and dingy whites. Yes, the peeling paint here and there revealed a layer of that drab green we tend to associate with hospitals, though the building had instead been a school until its abandonment by the City. Was my mind playing tricks on me, distilling those exposed patches into a false memory of the room as it had been long before I had ever seen it? This was far-fetched, but for a while it seemed to me the only possible explanation.

The mystery was finally solved by rare, grainy video footage of a meeting once held there. It at once revealed that I merely had been casting my mind’s eye in the wrong direction. The color was there in abundance, but it came from below, where linoleum tiles checkered the floor in ebony black and a green as emerald as Oz. I’m sure that anyone who ever sat there, on uncomfortable metal folding chairs, beneath shrill rows of fluorescent lights, would laugh to hear me compare the room’s green glow to that of James Whistler’s Peacock Room, now in the Smithsonian, or to William Orpen’s depiction of London’s Café Royal, where Oscar Wilde, wearing his signature green carnation, used to dine, or to the wallpaper of the Paris apartment of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, which set chinoiserie patterns against a minty background that bathed all in its reflected light. But for me the remembered color of those temporarily forgotten tiles played no less a role in setting the meeting room’s mood, in creating what we call an atmosphere.

Green, they say, is above all the color of renewed life, and perhaps that is why it seems so important to me not to forget its improbable presence in that room, in those circumstances. Everyone remembers the grief and anger that used to fill that space every Monday. But even those emotions sprang, irrepressible, from deeper roots in love and life. All of that is gone, as are so many of the people who once gathered there, who of course were dying in droves already then. The physical space still exists, but its neo-corporate makeover has preserved only a few of the gaudy murals, illuminated beneath glass, like fragments of Pompeian frescoes. The resemblance is oddly apt, since the air we breathed likewise was quickened with ashes that threatened to suffocate and bury us all. I speak as one of the survivors of that more recent Vesuvius, keenly aware that more ordinary ends continue to thin our lingering ranks.

Ashes! Calamitous, yes, but also sublime. I can still feel them in my nostrils and on the tip of my tongue. It is of those ashes, on that most particular day, that I am trying to speak. Their story, or at least my small part in it, had begun weeks before, in the room with the emerald tiles. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known by its acronym, ACT UP, had been founded in that very room, five years before. Among the group’s protagonists in its first years had been David Robinson, until he moved to San Francisco with his lover (no one said “partner” back then), Warren. Warren had died in April, and David was now traveling briefly back to New York to ask the group to help him scatter Warren’s ashes on the White House lawn—not quietly and surreptitiously, but in a defiant act of political protest. The idea of political funerals had been very much in the air since the death, a month or so before, of the writer and artist David Wojnarowicz, who had worn a leather biker’s jacket painted with the instructions, “If I die of AIDS—forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of the F. D. A.” He expressed the same sentiment, addressed to a slightly different center of power, in “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” first published in 1989 and republished in Close to the Knives, the memoir that appeared a year before his death:

But the Potomac-as-Rubicon had yet to be crossed. Wojnarowicz’s death had prompted a fiery protest in the East Village—an ashen omen, in retrospect—but not the sprint to Washington, body in tow, he had imagined. What the other David (Robinson) was now proposing was, because it involved cremated rather than whole corpses, both literally and figuratively an easier lift. (It’s oddly funny to hear myself slipping into the kind of gallows humor we all used back then precisely in order to make light of death.) David’s job, however, kept him in San Francisco. To pull this off, he needed a collaborator and coordinator based in New York.

I had moved to the City from North Carolina earlier that summer. My ostensible purpose was to continue my studies in Classics, and in due course I would cross the threshold of Columbia’s Butler Library (no relation), which greeted readers with advice from Seneca, Homines cum docent discunt, “People learn while teaching.” But all that could wait. First, I took the 1 or the now-defunct 9 downtown to immerse myself in the green-tinted air breathed by philosophers like Bob Rafsky who, like Seneca, lived while dying and taught while doing both.

I soon learned that one of the easiest ways to become involved in ACT UP as a newcomer was to volunteer for wheatpasting duty. These were graveyard shifts (there I go again), often beginning at the conclusion of the Monday meeting and running deep into the night. Wheatpaste is a simple mixture of flour and water that, with the aid of a paintbrush, can be used to attach posters and flyers to walls and lampposts. Before social media and the rest—and before Rudy Giuliani made it one of the minor “crimes” of which he pledged to scrub the City—wheatpasting was a major way that New York communicated with itself, especially regarding music (“come hear my band”) and activism (“come to my march”).

And so we would hit the streets, armed with a bucket and a stack of photocopies, determined to get through them all, powering even through the inevitable point at which the smell of the paste would become rather sickening. If the flyers ran out on the East Side, we often would head to Veselka, long before its lofty, luminous renovation, for a predawn breakfast, commandeering the dark old room in the rear, where you could smoke. On the West Side, the preferred venue was instead the Waverly Diner. One time at the latter I read aloud from a 1950s cookbook I had picked up from the sidewalk as we worked. A recipe for “strawberry-like appetizers,” made out of liverwurst dipped in breadcrumbs dyed red, prompted an artist in our group to laugh until tears were streaming down his face. I fell in love with him then and there, though it was some time before we began sleeping together.

Other, freer Monday nights were often spent at Wonder Bar, on Sixth Street, between Avenues A and B. At the back, past the crowded bar and behind the screen on which they projected Bette Davis films and the like, hung a heavy curtain. In passing through that curtain now, I am keenly aware that I am joining what I myself have always found to be a slightly irritating tradition of older gay men—Michel Foucault, David Halperin, Whitney Davis, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani—claiming revolutionary significance for the sex they had in their youth. Nevertheless, in we go.

The first thing to say about the room beyond the curtain is that one could not at first perceive it as a room, for it had been deprived of what usually is one of the first things to strike the eye upon entering a room: its shape. Relative darkness instead stretched equally in all directions, as if tracing the constant radius of a sphere. One came to know the room as a series of surfaces that offered support: the floor that held up one’s feet, a wall into which one leaned one’s back, in an almost Newtonian equal-but-opposite reciprocity. So too did the bodies in the room present themselves as a series of initially resistant surfaces, as one made one’s first way through a forest of leather-jacketed elbows.

The meeting of surfaces, including of surfaces readier to yield, filled the room with sound. Any speech, however, tended to be kept at a whisper. (The exception was when someone was pickpocketed by an interloper, which naturally broke the room’s spell, at least for a while.) What instead one usually heard, above the clinking and rustling of clothes and bodies in movement, were wordless voices, expressing pleasure or pain or a mix of both. Those voices blended with the rest to yield an almost oracular voice, like echoed mumbling inside an ancient cave, or the stirring of a sacred grove by an approaching storm. Everyone, each in his own way, entered into an intimate relationship with that murmur, which became the voice of the room itself, just as the odors with which one also became familiar, from sweat to the bleach used to clean the floors at the end of every night, were not so much ours as the room’s, collectively. The room contained all that the bodies in the room both did and did not manage to contain. And that meant, of course, that the room contained the virus.

Outside this room, the virus was said to be “in” some bodies but not in others. But here such neat geometries broke down. This is not to say that the backroom was necessarily a place where the virus spread. That could happen, but it also could very deliberately not happen. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the most important fluid exchanged there was air, the air that safely moved in and out of all the bodies in that room, indiscriminately. Out in the world, asked by reporters or cops if we were “infected,” we had learned to answer that we all were until the crisis was over. Here we put that knowledge into practice—or, better, found that it had always been there, in our senses, in the air we breathed. There is no “inside” and “outside,” this body or that body. There is only the matter out of which our seeming bodies are temporarily conjured, like clouds from the ether. It was as such temporary condensations that we came together in that room, merging into one dense atmosphere, bounded only by shapeless darkness, as if to form a tiny, molten planet, made only of flow.

I have left David Robinson waiting a very long time for a volunteer. I nervously raised my hand. I think I thought other, more experienced activists would raise their hands too. The reasons that this did not happen still elude me. Part of the hesitancy was surely on tactical grounds. ACT UP staged spectacles designed to attract media attention, and that was far easier when the props were nothing more than such and, so, endlessly replicable: fake coffins, fake blood, and so on. But it was also the case, though I did not know it at the time, that the Marys, ACT UP’s most significant “affinity group,” comprising many of its most experienced activists, were quietly planning political funerals of their own, to involve the uncremated bodies of their own members as they died. They may have held back from what could have seemed a diminished version of that plan. Whatever the reason, the role of East Coast coordinator fell to me.

There was much to do and no time to waste, with the presidential election looming in November. An October date was chosen that would allow the action to coincide with the final exhibition on the Mall of the AIDS Quilt, which was becoming too vast to be exhibited in its entirety ever again. Members of ACT UP tended to have an ambivalent relationship to the Quilt, which sometimes seemed to work to blunt and absorb political anger: many were the politicians who would, as we used to say, “wrap themselves in the Quilt” while opposing funding for research, education, and treatment. Nevertheless, we wanted our action to be seen not as a protest of the Quilt but as a possibly complementary alternative to its own opportunities to mourn.

The poster to advertise our plan was designed by James Thacker (fig. 1), the artist who laughed at the liverwurst strawberries. His striking design exploits the familiar optical illusion that forms a vase out of two human silhouettes. (My memory is that James came up with the concept on his own but that Richard Deagle, responsible for many of ACT UP’s most brilliant graphics, independently offered to me, one Monday night at the back of the meeting room, suggestions along similar lines.) The vase here is meant to recall a funerary urn, though we were not unaware of its simultaneous resemblance to a sacrificial chalice. The profiles, meanwhile, conjured out of darkness and facing one another, gave visible form to the somewhat surprising inward turn that would characterize the action from its planning stages to its aftermath.

The same is true of the very deliberate second-person address of the text within the urn, which was the work of, at least, Barry Paddock, Jen Yager, and myself, with some phrasing borrowed from David Robinson. Yes, the “you” juts jarringly from the page, like a wagging finger. (We thought explicitly of Norman Rockwell’s Uncle Sam: “I want YOU for U.S. Army.”) But we chose “you” precisely in order to escape the specific axiality implied by the far more common “we,” which of course opposes “us” to “them,” centering both. Here instead an “I” or “we” of unspecified number addresses a similarly unnumbered “you,” which could be singular or plural. That address, which might at first seem lyric or elegiac, thus opens up a space of intimacy that is also that of a collective, one that includes, since these words come from inside the urn and so potentially from beyond the grave, both the living and the dead. At the same time, that collective stretches its care toward a place of radical solitude (“you have lost someone”), not just a “one” but a “minus one,” perhaps repeated many times over, from which one’s own “one” might one day be subtracted. To be clear, I cannot pretend that we thought all of this through at the time. Rather, falling back on the figure I already have used, I can only say that the words, like the silhouette design, were in the air, and they made their way onto the page through only the most minimal of agencies on our part. ACT UP’s hulking Xerox machine, bigger surely than the backroom at Wonder Bar, later spat out hundreds of copies. And so out we went, into the late-summer, early-autumn night, with our buckets and brushes, to transmit to unseen others a message we ourselves seemed not so much to have generated as to have received.

It is shocking even to me that the poster provided my home phone number, attached to a cassette-tape answering machine that slowly began to receive replies. Some callers were merely curious; some were reporters; some wanted to join in; a few wanted to bring ashes of their own. That the action might expand to include ashes other than Warren’s was very much David’s hope. Some of the addition came from within ACT UP: Alexis Danzig, for example, carried the ashes of her father. The lover of Larry Kert, who had created the role of Tony in West Side Story on Broadway, gave his ashes to Eric Sawyer, another veteran of the group, to carry for him. Kert, as most of us would learn only after the action, had been invited to sing for George Bush at the White House. He had accepted but quietly planned to come out as a person living with AIDS just before singing. Somehow, the organizers got wind of this and, at the last minute, blocked him from going on, pretending to have lost his music. It’s hard not to guess that his set would have included West Side Story’s “Somewhere,” long heard as a more general anthem for forbidden love, starting with its first line, “There’s a place for us.”

Kert’s ashes exerted a hold on my imagination partly similar to that of the ashes of Achilles on Ovid:

It was not, however, the contrast between Kert’s exiguous remains and his international fame that struck me most. The deeper paradox is captured by Plutarch’s famous anecdote of the hungry diner who, finding little meat on a roasted songbird, exclaimed, “Why, you’re just a voice and nothing else.”³ I myself had known Kert only as a disembodied voice—unless one may count as a body the black vinyl, shrouded in paper and stored in a cardboard coffin, out of which I had conjured it countless times while he was still alive. A famous voice, through recording, can indeed spread through the world, just as Achilles’s kleos spread via Homer’s poem. Nevertheless, each single realization of that voice, like each single performance by the singers who initially transmitted Homer, necessarily describes a more intimate space: the theater in which Kert originally sang, the various rooms in which I listened to his records. I would go so far as to say that a voice can trace the semi-porous boundaries of what we call “an” atmosphere, as distinct from the “whole world.” Even Achilles’s mighty shout, after the death of Patroclus drives him back to battle, fills only the Trojan Plain, transforming it into an auditorium of grief and rage—a vast expanse, to be sure, but not one coterminous with the world, except via its representation and retelling. Along similar lines, we were not staging Kert’s final performance merely by allowing him to address, as he had not been allowed to address, the man at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Rather, we sought for him not just a place on a map but the room and resonant air any aria properly needs.

We began preparing ourselves for the action itself. We knew we would face police, especially at the White House (assuming we even got that far), where they would likely be on horseback. The usual training in civil disobedience and arrest accordingly included special instruction about horses. One of the veteran lesbian activists who tended to run these training sessions told an incredulous class that, if charged by mounted police, the best thing to do was to sit down, since horses are trained not to trample people and would resist doing so even if spurred on by their riders. I sincerely doubted whether any of us would ever find the guts to follow such advice.

Time constrains me to hurry toward the end of my story. We made our way to Washington and assembled near the Capitol Building on the appointed day, at the appointed hour. We were pleased to see that more than a hundred people had answered the call to join the march to escort the nine or so individuals who had by then decided to bear ashes down the Mall to the White House. The march, as we had planned, remained solemn, accompanied only by a beating drum rather than the chants for which ACT UP was famous. Along the way, we passed out flyers explaining our purpose to bystanders, most of them there to see the Quilt. By the time we neared the White House, thousands of them had fallen in behind us (some estimates put the total around 10,000), stretching back as far as the eye could see. Even more remarkable, several people who had brought ashes of their own loved ones with them, unsure whether they would join us until they saw our numbers, stepped forward along the way and were escorted to the front.

The police, as expected, were there in force and on horseback. During training I had seriously risked my credibility by persuading the others who would be at the front that we should be prepared to deploy the “wedge” technique that was a favorite of Julius Caesar’s in battle. We joined hands, bent our line back from its center, and took aim at a gap in the horses. The strategy works for psychological reasons: if even the point of the wedge gets through, the rest of the opposing line whirls around to look, and the battle is won. In an instant, the police were at our backs.

As those who had followed us through the police line pressed us forward from behind, we risked being crushed against the White House fence. But instead its iron bars, like the backroom’s walls, became a support and handhold, as we clambered upward onto one another’s backs and shoulders. The ashes flew, a few at first, then in waves that fell upon the lawn while generating an expanding cloud that billowed back, filling the air we breathed, coating our faces and clothes in fine powder. Deep inside I felt a well of grief finally pushing up against weeks of tense planning, erupting convulsively into tearful sobs. I looked around. Most of us were crying.

It was then that the police charged. I heard voices, perhaps including my own, shouting, “Sit down! Sit down!” And we did sit down. And the horses stopped, just as we had been told. And so I wept, ridiculously, for the horses too, trapped, just as we were, in the law’s cruel contradictions. And it is only now, looking back from more than thirty years’ distance, that I can finally see how perfectly we thus became the Niobe of myth, whose children were struck down, one by one, by Apollo and Artemis. For we too were victims of a merciless countdown by the god of plagues—but remained unbowed. We too gathered ourselves into a miniature mountain and poured forth tears from inexhaustible veins. We too asserted our humanity, not by moving but by becoming immobile, by becoming rock, around which others flitted in fear and wonder.

“The Niobe of Nations, there she stands…An empty urn within her withered hands,” wrote Lord Byron of ruined Rome. Our own bodies, living and dead, were instead the ruins of the empire ruled from the building beyond the fence and lawn. “Rise, with thy yellow waves,” Byron commands the river Tiber, “and mantle her distress.”⁴ But it was Ouranos who miraculously and absurdly completed our own scene, sending down a gentle rain that joined our tears to nourish capillary rivulets of water and ash, insuring that what we had brought would remain and that the ashes on the lawn beyond the fence would sink into the earth and so too become unmovable. A monumental work of resignification had been completed: the green grass of White House garden parties was now, and forever would be, that of a grave.

                      * * *

At first glance, Meg Handler’s now iconic image of the Ashes Action might be seen to embody a persistent misrepresentation of ACT UP’s labor by showing a young, healthy-looking gay white man atop a pyramid of other protestors. Handler herself, quietly behind the camera rather than in front of it, taking pictures she mostly began to share only a few years ago, thus doubly embodies the often hidden work of activist women, many of them Jewish, that Sarah Schulman brings back to light in Let the Record Show, her revisionist history of the group, which also explores how the false view of the group as exclusively white was largely crafted by the media, albeit not entirely without collusion on the inside. This is one of many of Handler’s photographs that help to undo that whitewashing, and, across her body of work on ACT UP, her camera actually offers a rather thorough cross section of all the group was (and was not). What I like most about her images, however, is the way that they tend to avoid seeming to be about this or that individual. For one thing, most of her photographs are of groups of people—“friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers,” in the insistent phrasing of Wojnarowicz—interacting with one another rather than with the camera. And this enables her to capture, as few others managed, the kind of atmospheric situation I myself have been trying to depict in words.

I have, furthermore, a secret reason for loving this photograph: not for the fact that I am in it, but for the way that I am, just a tiny sliver of a head, barely visible beyond another head. That sliver seems to me the right measure of my own negligible agency in what happened that day. Yes, there had been weeks of planning, some of which recycled truly ancient scripts, as I have explained. But when push finally came quite literally to shove, no aggregation of human effort, past or present, could account fully for the forces at work in that extraordinary pocket of time. Nature itself seemed to conspire with us: the iron, defying the violence with which it had been wrested from the earth and then wrought into menacing bars, instead lent us leverage and support; the horses, if not rebelling entirely against the law, at least chose to obey a more humane one; the rain mingled with our tears, making it impossible to know what came from inside, what from outside. All of this may sound like a worryingly picturesque politics of the pathetic fallacy. But I think there is a stronger sense in which that day provides an example of what philosopher Tonino Griffero has called “the atmospheric ‘we,’” animated by a shared affect that comes as much from the ambient air as it does from the bodies that occupy it.⁵ This is Leo Spitzer’s Stimmung more than it is Martin Heidegger’s, fruit of centuries of mostly literary meditation on the agency of places and things.⁶ That such agencies drove our “action” as much as or more than we did is proven to me each time I try to recall my own mood on that day, which I find I cannot do without first cataloguing the matter that surrounded me. I thus reprise a collective effort that began a few days later, back in New York, as those of us who had reached the White House fence stood on the green and black linoleum and told the rest of the room what it had been like, bodying forth words that vibrated inside and around us—like the cloud of ash that had engulfed us days before, and then was gone.