Several months ago on a witchy weathered California night not unlike the one I write this on, I rediscovered something on YouTube I had thought to be long lost; the commercials I was once so captivated by when they aired on the WB (and elsewhere) on nights in the late 90s. Sometimes whimsical and always crafted to spill into memory, Cotton Incorporated’s late 90s ad run featured portraits of people from all realms of life from a bejeweled Ivanka Trump in a lime green cotton robe to an elderly couple in cotton sleepwear, another series of ads featured officeworkers careering and dancing in cotton outfits. In both of these series of ads, the music would consist of a woman ethereally singing several choice phrases about cotton along with Cotton Inc’s memorable tagline “The Fabric of Our Lives”. At that time, I rarely wondered what such things meant but as I grew older and more aware, I questioned how brave Cotton Inc. was to declare their tagline, how audacious it was to claim such a grand statement. And in my mind, I always imagined one thing - not letting them get away with it.
As we approach the thirtieth anniversary since the alarms first rang over the clusters of immune related illnesses which would later be recognized as the calling cards of AIDS, there is still a disquiet which has now permanently etched itself into the human timeline and fabric. Having been born in 1988, a year when the epidemic raged especially hard, I can only look back at the decade as one framed in elegiac tones and hard-won sunlight. A decade where weeks went by when circles of friends were reduced by halves and thirds, where mothers and fathers and other guardians lost children but not before having to watch as their health unraveled into dark, deep and jagged edges; peels of their former selves.
The guard, or the body of people dedicated to public awareness and research as a means of battling AIDS (and HIV even when it was still a nameless thing) in the first decade of AIDS, were composed of people from all realms of life. Among their ranks were artists, doctors, high school principals, writers, nurses, grandmothers with baskets who passed you on the street, and so much more. Many members of the guard were ill themselves and very few of them are alive today, having passed long ago, to mark this grim anniversary. But though they are no longer living, the bodies of work they have left behind have waited, in libraries, bookstores and other refuges; their contributions maybe having lassoed portions of time and space, a warning constantly and endlessly on loop.
The emblems of AIDS health care from the first decade have begun to fade. In 2010, Manhattan’s St. Vincent Hospital, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, closed for good. It was in the mid-1990s when AIDS was transformed from a death sentence into a chronic condition, a testament to the dedication of the medical and scientific wings of the guard. This breakthrough would be shared by few outside the 1st world, however, and AIDS remains an acute condition in Africa and many corners of the world where AIDS education is so meager. The first decade has never truly ended.
The children of the first decade of AIDS have now grown into adulthood. Many of them still unknowing about what occurred around them as children, many with so little interest that a president and bureaucracy moved as if wearing a suit of armor, only able to navigate doorway to doorway with careful maneuvering because of a hard and unforgivably accommodating collective silhouette; a preciously budgeted amount of energy spent late despite an ability to recharge. It may be the generation still in childhood, the one dubbed “Generation Z” who may one day summon the curiosity to know. To find a path from now to next - to place a wreath on a phantom tomb in an ether which shimmers violently.
In the time we live in, the guard is now powerfully adept at controlling HIV and AIDS. The momentum towards a future without HIV and AIDS has taken blows but it advances forward, with hands and feet which are never intimidated and are removing obstacles brick-by-brick as if it’s second nature. This piecemeal has not only the etched disquiet as its observer but the fast mutater as well. The disquiet hums and styles itself, and it will always be there; priming itself if something new were to ever emerge, if someone new were to ever ascend. The austerity of the Inaugurated Dead President has been catalogued, his vision has been blueprinted, his charisma crafted into charms for teenage wear. The glow of his former movements still lingers and it fades slowly. In 2011, the bodies of work from the old guard lay like stones in the garden as young generations walk among them, sometimes skipping; a hopscotch learned into muscle memory while a generation still in childhood learns for the first time that the disquiet is truly the fabric of our lives.
-DREAM CANYON
