Bebashi/Amfar Dub; Keep Your Laws off My Body

Bebashi/Amfar Dub; Keep Your Laws off My Body

AIDS, activist video, documentary, woman filmmaker, lesbian

This is composite tape of 2 videos acquired for research for my doctoral disseration, then monograph, AIDS TV. It was digitized for my VHS Archives class, Fall 2018. I like that these projects are aligned on one tape. Both mix the private and the public, and are community produced, DIY, and made during what co-auhtor Ted Kerr and I understand as the time of "AIDS Crisis Culture." But their communties, authors, and users are as connected and dissimilar as are women in ACT UP NY and its linked art worlds and Black Philadelphia and its community-based AIDS service infrastructure.

Ted Kerr and I write extesnively about the Bebashi tape for our book, "We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production" (Duke: 2022). It was community made and was done for a use: a "trigger tape" in that time's parlance. A piece of media (or in this case three) made to be stopped and discussed in a group conversation, ideally with a facilitator. Ted and I named the first section of our book "Trigger" in honor of the ways that these unnamed activist women from Philadelphia can still get us talking, thinking, feeling, and learning through honest and often difficult stories recorded on video.

Bebashi

unknown, late 80s?; 1990

By Bebashi (Philadelphia AIDS service organization, Blacks Education Blacks about Sexual Health): three "trigger tapes": unnamed, Final Decision, Grandma's Legacy

Black and white recorded documentary video exploring themes of Lesbian relationships, the AIDS pandemic and the criminalization of LGBTQ+ media. -- Lesbian Herstory Archives

A wordless comment on legislation affecting the human body, including pornography, obscenity, prostitution, and sodomy laws, as well as Roe vs. Wade, Webster, and the Helms Act. Some film footage shot in New York City at the AIDS ACT UP demonstration at City Hall, March 28, 1989.

Over the last 5 years, academic, writer, and videomaker Alexandra Juhasz and writer and organizer Theodore Kerr have enjoyed a public conversation project around changes within the AIDS media ecosystem. In the text below, they build upon two previous conversations where they discussed movies like The Dallas Buyers Club, How to Survive a Plague and the HBO remake of The Normal Heart to explore how and why media about AIDS has only relatively recently begun to take up space in public after a long silence. Previously, they reflected upon how a good deal of what is currently being made, seen, and talked about stays rather narrow in its focus, looking at stories of the epidemic’s impact on primarily white, middle class, often gay men and their communities. Here, looking at their own past work and how this conditions what they as researchers, scholars and activists look for and want to save, Juhasz and Kerr begin to consider what might be needed so that many inheritances of AIDS could be salvaged, shepherded, and mothered into a legacy of plenty. — “You know how it is when people die? Folks always be putting words in your mouth. This way, if I don’t say it on tape, I ain’t say it baby.” These words are spoken by an actress in Grandma’s Legacy, a video where she is playing a soon-to-be-grandmother living with HIV. The tape is most likely from the mid-1980s and was created by Bebashi, an AIDS Service Organization in Philadelphia. Our uncertainty about most of the details of the tape’s provenance, despite several attempts to research it, demonstrates what will be a recurring question in this discussion about the patrimony of AIDS history: who is authorized and empowered to pass on what to whom? We will consider what might be needed to keep all of our valuable inheritances live. This seems critical, given that, while saving people’s lives in the present was a primary concern for the making of AIDS tapes, some of the impetus to make activist videos in the first decade of the crisis was also to claim a well-deserved place in what would become history, especially given that this was a time of so much loss. Taking the Bebashi tape at face value, one of Grandma’s legacies is a bridge to a neglected past via a VHS dub of a DIY-educational video project. In it, she speaks proudly and publicly from her time, and yet somehow she has been quieted in today’s making of AIDS activist history. -- Juhasz and Kerr

Watching and Talking About AIDS: Analog Tapes, Digital Cultures and Strategies for Connectionand Strategies for Connection, Juhasz and Kerr

Bordowitz, G., Meyer, J., & Crimp, D. (2004). The AIDS crisis is ridiculous and other writings (1986-2003). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

36:44 mins; 13 mins

Bebashi; Catherine Saalfiend and Zoe Leonard

https://brooklyn-cuny.yuja.com/V/Video?v=10593828&node=46263891&a=139816661

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbavFpCI9rQ