Not Queer, But Human

For reasons I will never understand, my Daoist parents decided to enroll me in a Christian school when I was six.

For our lesson one day, Mrs. Galliver read the story of Lot to our first-grade class from our children’s illustrated Bible. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were so deeply depraved that God sent angels to smother them with fire and brimstone. God respected Lot and forewarned him to gather his family and leave without looking back. As they escaped, Lot’s wife turned back in defiance of God’s command. The Almighty, in His vengeance, transformed her into a pillar of salt. “That’s why we call them sodomites,” Mrs. Galliver noted, “because men who like other men are wicked in the eyes of God.” Her words seem inappropriate in retrospect, but so were the praise songs we were taught to sing every Friday: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.”

I would spend recesses watching this blond boy named Stephen — who happened to be the school pastor’s son. Stephen was amazing at kickball. He was the first boy I knew to put gel in his hair. I would sit and watch it glisten in the mid-day sun. We went to the same school for seven years, but I never dared tell him how I felt. Instead, I tried earnestly to pray the gay away and vowed never to turn back.

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah by John Martin

Despite steady opposition from the religious right, the LGBT movement has made significant strides in recent years. Same-sex marriage is now legal in five states and the District of Columbia. And just this last Thursday, the House of Representatives and the Senate Armed Forces Committee voted to authorize the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that has prevented gays from serving openly in the military.

While it is important to celebrate these markers of progress, I can’t help but feel that we have a long way to go. Legal victories are one thing; popular attitudes are another entirely. I honestly wonder if I will live to see a generation where children are no longer taught to fear homosexuality. I wonder if I will ever live in a society where the shame I have come to internalize about my sexual orientation will finally be regarded as a relic of bigotry past.

As a graphic designer, I believe that part of the solution lies in creating images that redefine the very way sexual orientation is understood and discussed. Despite the advances we have made, homosexuality is still portrayed as something alien or pathological to mainstream sexuality. This “otherness” is the basis on which discriminatory attitudes are built and sustained, and where designers play a significant role in engaging the struggle for LGBT rights.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell by Jeff Sheng

This essay analyzes the role of graphic design in the interconnected history of the gay rights movement and early AIDS activism. It suggests that the disease-prevention tactics of the past are ineffective at promoting LGBT equality in an age where HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence, and offers new communication strategies aimed to include LGBT people in the context of mainstream society.

Presently, the argument against LGBT rights stems from the logic that homosexuality violates traditional, “natural” institutions like marriage and childbirth. For example, the National Organization for Marriage posits that the authorization of same-sex marriage would harm families by forcing them to accept an aberrant condition: “Two men might each be a good father, but neither can be a mom. The ideal for children is the love of their own mom and dad. No same-sex couple can provide that.” Though empirically false, this argument is powerful precisely because it is implicitly rooted in the same fears that Mrs. Galliver proselytized: homosexuality goes against God, and the wages of sin is death.

It comes as no surprise, then, that stigma surrounding LGBT status is intricately tied to its pathologized history: it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The movement for LGBT rights, furthermore, has been unwittingly connected to the history of the AIDS epidemic. Originally referred to as GRID (Gay-related immune deficiency) or the “gay plague,” AIDS was thought to be transmitted exclusively through homosexual contact and was characterized as punishment for sexual promiscuity. This “serves them right” mentality led to the design of slogans like “AIDS Kills Fags Dead” (a play on the bug spray tagline “RAID Kills Bugs Dead”) and “AIDS Cures Fags,” all based on the belief that the epidemic was divine retribution for sexual immorality.

God’s Children Hate Fags. Photo by K. Ryan Jones.

Activists faced a daunting task: they had to dispel homophobic misperceptions surrounding AIDS as a “gay disease” while coping with the reality that the epidemic seemed to disproportionally affect men who had sex with men. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) decided to confront this challenge head-on and invented the tagline “SILENCE = DEATH” set in stark white type (Gill Sans Extra Condensed Bold) on a solid black background. They cleverly adopted the pink triangle – a downward-pointing version of which was used by the Nazis to mark homosexuals in the concentration camps – and turned it upright, taking a symbol of shame and discrimination and reclaiming it to represent the fight for survival.

In a single breath, the “SILENCE = DEATH” campaign enjoined LGBT people to speak out about their sexuality and release themselves from the shame of getting tested for HIV. By registering mainstream anxieties about the connection between “gay” and “plague,” ACT UP used graphic design to attack stigma by exposing it. According to sociologist Joshua Gamson, this mentality galvanized activists into staging raucous, theatrical kiss-ins that usurped public spaces like baseball games and cocktail parties – commonly considered the territory of middle America: “ACT UP here seizes control of symbols that traditionally exclude gay people or render them invisible, and take them over, endowing them with messages about AIDS; they reclaim them, as they do the pink triangle, and make them mean differently. In doing so, they attempt to expose the system of domination from which they reclaim meanings and implicate the entire system in the spread of AIDS.”

In my estimation, the “SILENCE = DEATH” graphic derived its power from anger among the LGBT community towards governmental inaction regarding the AIDS crisis. The bottom of one campaign poster actually reads: “Why is Reagan silent about AIDS? What is really going on at the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Vatican? Gays and lesbians are not expendable…Use your power…Vote…Boycott…Defend yourselves…Turn anger, fear, grief into action.” This spirit of rebellion manifested itself in powerful images of social protest laced with personal grief, including Tibor Kalman’s infamous photo of Ronald Reagan with Kaposi’s sarcoma. By demonizing the Reagan administration, the campaign put the onus on individuals to speak out fiercely and engage with participatory democracy as a matter of life or death, effectively linking individual accountability with social activism in the battle against disease.

SILENCE = DEATH Poster by ACT UP

In recent years, it seems that the urgency surrounding HIV/AIDS activism has waned. Certainly, this has to be viewed in a positive light. Anti-retroviral therapies have been successful at confronting the virus, HIV is no longer regarded as a death sentence, and the general public has been made aware that protection against sexually-transmitted infections is a matter of how you have sex and not whom you have it with.

This relaxing of attitudes surrounding HIV/AIDS, however, is not without its problems. According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), people who self-identify as “men who have sex with men” (MSM) continue to be the cohort most severely affected by HIV, accounting for more than half of all new infections in the United States. While the incidence of HIV has declined among the general population since the 1990’s, the rate of new infection has steadily increased in the MSM population, especially among the youngest age group (13-29). In a CDC study of five U.S. cities, one in four MSM were found to be infected; among those infected, half were unaware of their status: “Results were particularly alarming for black MSM and young MSM, with more than two-thirds of infected black MSM, and nearly 80 percent of infected young MSM (aged 18–24), unaware that they were infected.”

The CDC posits that the MSM population is particularly at risk because of a lack of knowledge about HIV issues, complacency about risk, and fear of social discrimination. Especially among the younger population, who did not experience the illness and death indicative of the early AIDS epidemic, HIV is not a serious reality. Younger gay men are less likely to speak openly about their HIV status and more likely to make false assumptions about their partners’ status. Many participate in “serosorting,” or having sex with people they believe to be of the same HIV status.

ACT UP Archival Photo

For my generation, the “SILENCE = DEATH” design is relatively meaningless. On a superficial level, we simply don’t believe that AIDS will kill us or that our proclivity for disease is in any way affected by our degree of “out-ness.” On a deeper level, a campaign couched in the bifurcated language of outrage, on the one hand, and the fear of death, on the other, bears reduced significance for younger LGBT people.

Though it is arguably easier to come out than it ever has been, those who are still uncomfortable committing to the “gay” label are unlikely to align themselves with the proposition that their silence is inherently self-destructive. Strangely enough, then, the very slogans and symbols that once empowered a generation of activists have now become effete and even self-stigmatizing.

In part, this has to do with the disease-prevention premise of slogans like “SILENCE = DEATH” or “Don’t Die of Ignorance.” While powerful at the time they were produced, designs aimed at using fear and shame to compel at-risk audiences to be tested for HIV/AIDS now only redouble stigma. Many LGBT people are already afraid of playing into society’s beliefs about the unnaturalness of their sexual orientation and would sooner silence themselves than admit to participation in risk behaviors: “There is evidence of a desire to conceal that which might stigmatize [yourself], in an effort to allay the threat of censure…The link between AIDS, gay men and God’s punishment contributes to a spoiled identity.”

Contrast by Olivia Marie

To successfully address these issues, we should not merely aim to prevent disease or infirmity; we should strive to promote health — that is, the right to a fulfilling, satisfying life free of stigma and shame. If that’s the case, then the visual language we use to confront HIV/AIDS should empower people to choose lives that are consistent with their own ideals and not merely lecture them to use condoms. On a broader level, this approach invites people to participate in defining what health is on their own terms, as opposed to forcing them to restrict that understanding to the terror and dread of disease.

This is not to say, however, that we should fail to register the sense of loss that accompanies the onset of HIV. Sunny, optimistic campaigns like LIVESTRONG might succeed in raising money for cancer research, but they often fail to provoke real awareness for the struggles that survivors, their families, and the bereaved face on a daily basis. The branding approach has a tendency to reduce the complexities of disease to a colorful fashion accessory, emotionally detaching audiences from the stakes of inaction. Particularly with a disease so complexly intertwined with issues of sexual orientation, a wristband or ribbon doesn’t really cut it.

Is it possible, then, to give people the freedom to make choices about their health while being honest about the grief and devastation that accompany HIV/AIDS? More broadly, how do we deal with the challenge that gay and bisexual men are the most susceptible group to infection without reinforcing the connection between sexual orientation and disease? In an age where “SILENCE = DEATH” and the like are no longer effective, how do we empower young LGBT people to protect their sexual livelihoods?

Elton John at the bed of Ryan White. Photo from LIFE.

The strongest technique, I believe, is to recognize the specific challenges the LGBT population faces while couching those challenges in a broader, empathic narrative about the universal desire for health. As an example, our designs could tell the stories of young LGBT people who are living with HIV — living on their own terms and not dying on somebody else’s. Instead of emphasizing the link between silence and death, we should draw a connection between openness and life. Being tested for HIV and asking about HIV status before sex should be regarded as an essential part of this openness.

In addition, we need to provide a basis from which non-LGBT people can relate to these stories by making the case that every person living with HIV/AIDS — gay or not — is somebody’s son or daughter and deserves an equal measure of respect and dignity. Broadly speaking, we need to portray LGBT people as part of the collective human tapestry rather than antagonistic or external to it. We need to put a stop to the “us against them” mentality that has typified the thinking behind the previous generation’s design solutions: instead of trying to reclaim words like “queer” in attempts at resistance, we need to get mainstream society to see us as “human.” Instead of staging kiss-ins intended to elicit feelings of disgust among the heteronormative mainstream, we should strive to create a condition where two men kissing in public is just as acceptable as a man and woman kissing.

To be clear, I am not arguing that we should diminish the individual ways in which LGBT people express their sexuality or abandon the impulse to speak out against discrimination and homophobia. Matthew Shepard was tortured, beaten, and hung on a fence to die because he was gay; it is our responsibility to keep his story alive. But in a world where the “unnaturalness” of the LGBT population is still used as an excuse to withhold otherwise inalienable rights, I believe that we can do better. Social dissent is not more powerful simply because it aims to antagonize.

Vigil for Matthew Shepard. Photo by Reuters.

We need a visual vocabulary that celebrates the individuality of LGBT people within the context of mainstream society rather than one that aligns the goals of the LGBT effort against the values of the rest of the population. Even as we focus on individual cases of discrimination in order to countenance the experience of homophobia, we need to connect the dots and show how that discrimination damages our values as a society.

In concrete terms, the way gay pride has been imaged is an insufficient response to homophobia. While I have nothing against celebrating sexual openness and the diversity of LGBT sub-cultures, the promiscuity and flamboyance of the pride parade ought not be the only take-home image mainstream society has of LGBT people. We can’t just drape everything in rainbow and call it a day.

As a case in point, in the penultimate episode of Ugly Betty, Justin, Betty’s nephew, debates whether to come out to his traditional Latino family. Though the audience has witnessed Justin struggle for weeks with his sexuality and even openly deny being gay, his family finds out about his new boyfriend and tries to plan a party replete with rainbow flags and feathers. Marc, the show’s resident gay, rushes to stop the party because it tramples on Justin’s right to come out on his own accord, despite his family’s positive intentions. A person’s sexuality does not define them; they define their sexuality.

Instead of a clichéd, weepy scene worthy of the show’s usual melodramatic tenor, Justin decides to come out by bringing his boyfriend to the dance floor at his mother’s wedding party. The power of this approach lay in its subtlety: by making Justin just like any other kid with feelings of self-doubt, the show dealt with his coming out in a sweet, sensitive way that provoked feelings of understanding and empathy.

Justin Comes Out on Ugly Betty

There are days when I am furious that my home state, California, voted to “protect marriage” and thereby made it illegal for me to marry the person I love. When organizations like the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) claim that the gays are trying to “redefine marriage for the rest of us,” they are willfully ignorant of this reality: that by upholding the status quo, they are defining marriage for me. I have proudly participated in street demonstrations against the injustice that NOM peddles as traditionalism, but I often wonder how effective these are in effecting lasting change.

We need to find a way to convince the Mrs. Gallivers of the world to stop teaching first-graders that sodomites are worthy only of the wrath of God. We have to offer comfort to young LGBT people growing up in countries where it is still an executable offense to be gay. Difficult as this fight is, I believe that the day will come when we will begin to realize that the greatest sin is not being gay. The greatest sin is giving up on tolerance, compassion, and hope.