A Gesture Larger Than Death: On Bill T. Jones’s AIDS Elegy “Still/Here” at 30

There is an invisible abundance of writing assignments that come with leading a nonprofit literary arts organization, including crafting introductions to readings and conversations, and the authors featured in them. During the ten plus years I helmed a national poetry institution, I likely wrote close to 100 of them—some short on word count and light in tone that I could draft on the subway during my commute, others substantial and serious that took research and the better part of a weekend. As with all writing, even these intentionally ephemeral, seemingly proforma texts take time to craft and can clarify thinking. Preparing to write one introduction in particular did more than that; it led me back to two heroic people from the midwestern past I’d long left 885 miles behind.

We were taught to love our neighbors, to care for the sick, to act with compassion.

To showcase poetry’s relevance and influence across the arts, I curated a series in partnership with the New York Public Library that featured an award-winning poet and an artist from another discipline on stage together for an unmoderated, free-flowing conversation. For the first year, I paired Claudia Rankine with photographer Carrie Mae Weems, Sharon Olds with actor Cynthia Nixon, Kevin Young with chef Gabrielle Hamilton, and Mark Doty with dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones. While they had never met, each duo shared things in common, Mark and Bill especially. Both have southern roots and eventually moved as young men to New York City where they made their homes for many decades. They’re both gay, close in age, and, tragically, lost lovers to AIDS—Wally Roberts in 1993 and Arne Zane in 1988. With incredible fortitude, both transformed their grief and the anguish of a catastrophic public health crisis cruelly unattended to by the White House into powerful artistic acts of remembrance and resilience.

Before I opened my laptop to begin my introduction, I pulled Mark’s third book My Alexandria from our bookshelves and re-read the last poem “Lament Heaven,” and these lines:

He says death is peace.

__I don’t believe a word he spells;

__I don’t believe the lamenting

stops at the borders of this world or

__any other. Why give ghost letters

__and the twin poles of yes and no;

isn’t everything so shadowed

__by its own brevity

My Alexandria, which was selected as a part of the National Poetry Series by Phil Levine and published in 1993, is rooted in Wally’s struggle and in confronting mortality, and remains an essential documentation of the AIDS crisis through a most personal lens. Mark explains in the book that “lament heaven” is a phrase from the Rainer Maria Rilke poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” As translated by Stephen Mitchell:

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which all
nature reappeared: forest and valley, road and
village, field and stream and animal; and that
around this lament-world, even as around the
other earth, a sun revolved and a silent star-filled
heaven, a lamentheaven, with its own, disfigured
stars —:
So greatly was she loved.

I sat for a moment remembering what it felt like in the LGBTQ+ community in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, existing in a galaxy of lament. Mark wrote with acute awareness:

I heard it, the music that

__could go on without us, and

__I was inconsolable.

AIDS was first reported in the United States in 1981, the year that Ronald Reagan became President. Yet, even after thousands had died from the disease and many more thousands were sick, he did not mention AIDS until 1985.

“Shame!” BD, my housemate then, yelled in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the asphalt teeming with heat. We had left Milwaukee in darkness to drive east to New York City for the march to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the June 1969 Stonewall Riots. In the months ahead, more than 441,000 cases of AIDS would be reported and 270,870 of those infected would be dead.

As we approached St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 51st Street, the march slowed to a stop.

“Shame!” We yelled again and again with thousands of other people, each time louder and with more outrage on behalf of all the beloveds lost and those who were too weak to protest. The leader of the Catholic church in the city, Cardinal John O’Connor, reportedly claimed that condoms and clean needles didn’t prevent HIV—morality was the real medicine. His message was contrary to the church we knew, the church of our immigrant ancestors, that we were baptized into, that was the center of much of our education, that had shaped our understanding of peace and justice and the inherent worth and dignity of each person. We were taught to love our neighbors, to care for the sick, to act with compassion.

“Condoms not Cardinals! AIDS won’t wait!”

I searched online for videos of Bill’s performances and landed instead on a PBS documentary produced by Bill Moyers that I’d never seen about the remarkable 1994 performance piece “Still/Here,” which critics have called “a landmark of 20th century dance.”

Moyers explained that to create his piece, Bill conducted movement and storytelling workshops with people facing terminal and debilitating illnesses, such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS, in a handful of cities across the country, including Milwaukee.

In a clip from the film, Bill is working with the participants, a small group of people of different ages, genders, and backgrounds, as they slowly pace in a circle, and later, take turns gently laying one another down on the wooden floor, as if imagining letting each other go. One participant with AIDS wears a sweatshirt that reads, “Being terminally ill is a bitch.”

“I ask them to capsulize or crystallize their essential situation, dilemma, in a gesture. The whole group learns the gesture and that gesture becomes what we call ‘the Milwaukee phrase,’” Bill elucidated in an interview with Discourse journal. Eventually, he would incorporate the phrase into his final piece.

At nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds into the documentary, my friend Jay Hanson suddenly appears. My hand sprung from my keyboard and landed flat and hard on my chest as I gasped. I stared at the screen in utter disbelief. It was more than twenty years since Jay died, and there he was, suddenly returned, a gorgeous apparition, a gift.

Bill asks the workshop participants, “What do you love? And, what are you afraid of?” Looking directly into the camera with his sterling blue eyes and his fiery red hair buzzed into a flattop, Jay says purposefully:

I love to make others smile…
I love that I’m still needed…
I love to share love…
I fear the loss of my friends to AIDS…
I fear that my struggle to survive will be too painful…
I fear that I will be the last to die.

I watched the clip again and again through my streaming tears.

Jay, you should be here today.

Jay, your government betrayed you.

Jay, I remember your anger and I don’t want to forget it again.

Fight back! Fight AIDS!

I clutched Jay’s hand at a rally knowing then that he was HIV positive and that his death was inevitable. His inescapable fate surrounded us; just as we were beginning to understand ourselves and the possibilities our futures might hold, our generation was being decimated. By January 1995, AIDS had become the leading killer of Americans aged 25 to 44. The lifesaving cocktail of drugs— protease and reverse transcriptase inhibitors—hadn’t been discovered yet. It wouldn’t be until later in the 1990s that an antiretroviral therapy called HAART would begin to save significant numbers of individuals, having what some would call a “Lazarus effect,” as if Jesus commanded them, wrapped in burial linen, to wake and come out of their premature tombs.

Jay knew he didn’t have a miracle to count on and he fought with the strength he could muster, oftentimes in the streets, for the right to live. One humid June day in 1991, I ran into him at a coffee shop and was shocked to see that he was sporting some terrible looking bruises. He explained that he had been down in Chicago at an ACT-UP protest outside an American Medical Association conference taking place and been beaten up by the cops and arrested. Vice President Dan Quayle was a speaker at the event and in response to protesters said, “This is going to be fun.”

“We die! They do nothing!”

How much hatred must you have to clench your hand into a tight fist, which is shoved in a surgical glove because you are terrified of being infected, and forcefully swing it at a young man’s face, knowing he is most likely sick and dying.

“Health care is a right!”

I dragged the cursor to the beginning of the documentary. Watching more closely this time, I noticed another friend in Bill’s workshop, Christopher Fons. He is emaciated but smiling as he marches in place along with the other participants. I sat unblinking, following his every movement.

“You say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die in two months,’” Christopher, who had contracted HIV when he was 19, said in an interview with a local LGBTQ+ publication. “Well, then those two months are over and you haven’t died yet. As you have time behind you, you realize it’s possible to have time ahead of you.”

I had looked up to Christopher. He cofounded ACT-UP Milwaukee and was the city’s most prominent and effective AIDS activist and organizer. Imbued with preternatural courage and cloaked in a bad ass leather motorcycle jacket, Christopher spoke truth to power, often through a bullhorn, and quickly earned the respect of city leaders, whether or not they could admit it at the time.

“Still/Here” was performed at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre, an ornate 19th century venue designed in the style of a German Opera House, a short time after its fall 1994 Brooklyn premier. Christopher worked there as an usher and the last time he was at the theater was to see Bill’s piece. Everyone I knew was in the audience that evening, I now realized, because part of it was made in our small city.

“Conceptually I feel that a part of the work will belong to Milwaukee,” Bill said. “Because a lot of thinking I did about it was here, the stories that I heard were here.”

Christopher died in February 1995 at the age of 27. His memorial was held at the theater he loved and where just a few months prior we watched the elegy in motion he helped make, a marking, a refusal to not be seen, and, as Bill described the piece, a poem.

A few days later an ad appeared in another local LGBTQ+ publication:

NEEDED: 25 people to replace Christopher Fons in the fight against AIDS. Christopher Fons died of AIDS complications, but it was Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference that killed him. We need people to help carry on the fight that was so much of his life, the fight against AIDS.

It had been placed by his lover and members of his family.

I didn’t write the introduction to Mark and Bill’s event that day or the next. On my way home from work that week, I got off the subway at 14th Street and walked over to the New York City AIDS Memorial—a slatted steel canopy composed of triangles shading a granite fountain that was dedicated in 2016. The artist Jenny Holzer encircled the fountain with paver bricks engraved with excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” an exuberant celebration of the body, “the rush of the streets,” and our place in the cosmos. Yet, at that moment, it seemed insufficient to me and too small to memorialize all those millions of dear lives lost, to hold the pain.

“WE DIE! THEY DO NOTHING!”

I walked across 7th Avenue to the site where St. Vincent hospital stood, now a luxury condominium. In the early 1980s into the 1990s, the hospital was at the epicenter of the AIDS crisis in New York City, and in 1984, it opened the first and largest ward for AIDS patients on the East Coast. For many, St. Vincent’s became a kind of holy site the way places do when they hold too many tragic deaths. Many decades earlier women injured in the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire were brought to St. Vincent’s, as were survivors of the Titanic less than a year later. On September 11, 2001, and in the days following, the walls of St.Vincent’s were covered in flyers made by friends and relatives with faces of the missing, hoping they might be rushed through the emergency doors. The flyers stayed up for months. Thousands of us stopped there to pay our respects as Ground Zero burned. A hospital, a shrine.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose middle name was given to her in honor of the hospital that had saved her uncle, wrote the perfect epitaph for it in her poem “Dirge Without Music,” which reads in part:

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

“Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave,” her poem ends. “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

When I met Bill in the green room of the library’s Celeste Auditorium, I didn’t mention that Christopher and Jay, who had participated in his 1994 Milwaukee workshops, were my friends, and that I was grateful to know their hand stamps were on his piece. But in my prefatory remarks I described how Bill’s work, including “Still/Here,” embodied what Mark wrote was our “ongoingness.”

A gesture larger than death, a Milwaukee phrase, infinitely repeatable.