HBM114: Envisioning AIDS

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a warm and dark room in the winter of 1987, people lay on the ground with their eyes closed. A facilitator from the Shanti Project guides those assembled on an intimate visualization through the process of dying from AIDS.

Content Note:
Visualizations of death and language.

This took place at the Interfaith Conference on AIDS and ARC for Clergy and Caregivers in San Francisco. The conference hoped to give religious organizations tools to help their dying congregants. The conference featured speakers representing Catholicism, Judaism, many Protestant denominations, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and New Age religions.

AIDS was a major issue at the time, with no cure in sight, and many many deaths per year. And anti-queer rhetoric (see Jerry Fallwell), laws (see Bowers v Hardwick) and attitudes (see Pew poll on political values 1987) were all common.

Around the same time as this conference, the FDA approved a drug called AZT for the treatment of HIV. It was highly anticipated, but ultimately considered a failure. More years would pass and many more people would die before the approval of effective anti-retroviral drugs. And even more years before the first (and possibly second) cases of HIV would be cured.

But back in that darkened room in 1987, people laid on the ground with their eyes closed for an hour, while they tried to imagine what it would feel like to be covered in lesions...to sit in a doctor’s office when the receptionist refuses to make eye contact...to watch from above as people try to resuscitate their dead bodies...and to observe their own funerals...all in effort to better understand better the questions people with AIDS were likely asking of themselves and their loved ones—a practice that AIDS scholar Lynne Gerber says was common at this time in the new age circles of the Bay Area.

On this episode, Lynne explains some of the context around queerness and medicine and religion and AIDS. She’s writing a book about these topics, and also making an upcoming podcast series with audio producer Ariana Nedelman. Ariana provided us with the audio from the visualization practice via the UCSF Archives.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Circling Lights

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi there. What we're going to do is get ready to start on a visualization and we're going to
0:09.6	encourage people to relax and to lie down. And so perhaps you could begin now to lie down and to close
0:16.8	your eyes and to put aside anything that's in your hands to make sure that you're warm.
0:28.5	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters.
0:31.8	Now for a long time, my girlfriend's been working for an
0:34.2	independent scholar named Lynn Gerber. Lynn studies the religious responses to
0:38.7	AIDS in the 1980s and 90s in San Francisco and so recently my girlfriend was in San Francisco.
0:42.8	And so recently, my girlfriend was in San Francisco
0:45.4	at an archive digging through old cassette tapes
0:48.0	and she found an unusual one.
0:50.0	The tape is called Visualizing Death and Dying and is a recorded session from a conference that happened in 1987.
0:56.0	The conference was for religious leaders who wanted to find better ways to help the members of their congregations who were HIV positive.
1:04.0	And so in this tape there are a bunch of people lying on the floor and the dark
1:08.0	imagining the scenes told by the facilitator.
1:11.0	The facilitator is from a kind of new-agee organization called the Shanti Project, and over the
1:16.7	course of the next half hour he'll guide us through the experience of dying from AIDS.
1:22.0	And I'll also talk a little bit with Lynn Gerber
1:24.5	about the places where queerness, religion, fear,
1:27.3	and dying all overlap.
1:29.9	Okay, enjoy the show. What I'm going to be asking you to do is to try to drop this conference and simply go on an extended journey on a voyage
1:57.5	that I'm going to take you on and that voyage is going to suggest to you
2:01.5	that you could be diagnosed with AIDS. Some people cry, some people
	...

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