A less-than-brief essay recounting the community found in artistic expression by the gay community in the wake and aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. Features the work of Adrain Chesser (I have something to tell you), James Lapine and William Finn (Falsettos), and John Boskovich (collected works).
Few things are more threatening to the human social population than the unknown, especially when the unknown is deadly and close. Pandemics, or epidemics, give that fear form. A sweeping plague, unknown by name or by source, taking lives seemingly without reason. It is understandably harrowing, of course, and with the ever-growing size of cities and closely knit networks on a scale never seen before, society has unfortunately created a very accessible place for illness and infection to spread fast. It is further complicated when pandemics are centralized, their status and danger confined. Blame begins to spread, insecurities arise, and too often, communities are forever marred by their proximity to something seen as contagious. In essence, an epidemic is a simple but monumental way to increase hostility, hesitation, and alienation toward a group of people, and examples of this occurrence are seen repeated throughout history.
The HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) epidemic swept the globe toward the end of the 20th century, and affects millions of people globally to this day. The disease is most often sexually transmitted– as infection spreads by internal contact with bodily fluids– and due to the nature of the virus’s transmission, biological men having sex with biological men make up the majority of HIV/AIDS cases. In the 1980s, when the spread of HIV/AIDS in American populations truly began, LGBT communities were tightly knit, interconnected, and, in this case, hazardously interactive. With outside stigma already training a fearful eye toward LGBT individuals, a deadly epidemic began to make things worse. Young, healthy men began receiving life-changing diagnoses in waves, too often ending in death. Communities united by their identities were being torn apart by the very thing that allowed them sanctuary.
Art is important to all communities, though it plays a special role in preserving the individual experiences of those affected by hardship. In the case of the LGBT community, art consistently serves as a vital sustaining force in telling the stories of individuals and communities lost. During the 1980s, many stories across the globe were undeservingly cut short, and oftentimes these were people without traditional living situations or families. Especially in cases like these, it is vital to document the realities of their lives, and to uplift the voices sharing their stories.
Adrain Chesser’s I Have Something To Tell You
Chesser is a photographer who captures his various stories in many ways. Some of his photos are posed with direction and purpose, while others are reflective, candid. All of them share a reality, a truth. Chesser, in his series I Have Something To Tell You, documents his experience informing members of his life and community of his HIV diagnosis. The series is presented in an unbound book with a deep red cover, measuring six inches by nine. Within, three signatures unfold into posters that equate to ninety-six pages. Mostly photographs, the posters paint a bittersweet portrait of the most important people in Chesser’s life, the people he came to with perhaps the most terrifying news one can give. The portraits are impossible to view without immersion, as the pages unfold to reveal more and more. In that way, its presentation alone harkens to the simultaneous overwhelm and all-encompassing care of the action– there are always more people to tell, and those people will care beyond measure.
Fig. 1 - Fig. 4
Source: Chesser, Adrian. I Have Something To Tell You. Minor Matters, June 24, 2018.
In a note within the final signature, Chesser details how his hesitation and fear to inform those around him of his diagnosis led to the photography sessions that eventually became the book. Even without this detail, that realization floods the work, forcing a viewer to acknowledge the photographer without seeing him. Each captured moment of human emotion is raw, unfiltered, and framed by the subject of the sentiment. Without context, some information can be understood implicitly, but within the mix of shocked and teary depictions, there will be a simple smile, or even a perceived glare. The portraits not only depict a thorough journey of a man’s community, but also of displays of love, of care.
I included Chesser’s work partially because I was intrigued by it immediately, despite having never heard of him before, and partially due to a personal connection. “I have something to tell you” is a sentence reserved for so many of life’s irreversibilities, and the instances in which people utter it vary drastically. Each one of us, at some point in our lives, will be forced to deliver bad news. Whether that news is our own or that of one close to us is yet to be known, but it is an inevitability either way. This series, in its own way, showed me that I am not alone. While many may not relate on as literal a level as myself, I do believe that this piece can resonate with anyone, should they allow it the space to.
Chesser’s book came out in 2018, in a world that sees itself as increasingly post-HIV/AIDS. Students attend lectures in sex-ed classes with infographics detailing the epidemic and instructions on how to “practice safe sex.” The topics are repeated shallowly ad nauseam while young people learn to see AIDS/HIV as a deadly, but past, threat. Statistics showing the decrease of new cases spell out a triumphant victory, while ignoring the millions of individuals who did survive, and continue to. I Have Something To Tell You documents the reality of understanding such a dangerous diagnosis while simultaneously giving voice to people behind the statistics. Chesser is one man, with dozens who care about him.
As a photographic series, this work aligns itself with movements of the present while also relating back to photography's use as a tool for documentation. The work is technically beautiful, simple in its composition but incredibly effective, while also being contextually so. In presentation, it serves almost more as a diary than a collection of artworks; its personal nature is altogether compelling and heart-wrenching. More than anything else, however, it does assert photography as a sense of truth, even unintentionally. It asserts that these people do exist, that their care exists, and that devastating news is being told to them. It asserts the truth of Adrain Chesser: that he exists, and that he is cared for.
William Finn and James Lapine’s Falsettos
“Let’s be scared together” (Finn 233). In just four words, William Finn paints a lovingly accurate picture of a modern uncertainty. Falsettos is a 1992 musical by William Finn and James Lapine that tells the story of an unconventional Jewish family in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Marvin divorced his wife Trina for his lover Whizzer, but is still committed to keeping his newfound family together as a unit. The musical follows him over a period of three years as he comes to terms with his identity as a man in a gay relationship and grapples with the reality of the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The musical never explicitly says the illness’s name; taking a personal, emotional approach to its depiction. The first act of the musical, initially the stand-alone one-act March of the Falsettos, introduces the audience to the conflicts of Marvin’s life, while the second act, initially Falsettoland, disrupts the newfound coexistence of a family with the harsh reality of an unknown disease.
William Finn is a lyricist and composer who primarily creates quasi-autobiographical work, often centering around topics of LGBT identity, loss, Judaism, and family structure. His most notable work is Falsettos, originally three one-acts collectively entitled “The Marvin Trilogy”/”The Marvin Songs.” He compiled the one-acts into a musical that premiered on Broadway in 1992, winning the Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score in the same year. The musical was revived in 2016, when it was recorded by PBS, and finally toured the U.S. and West End in 2019. Falsettoland was written nearly a decade after March of the Falsettos, as the AIDS epidemic struck the LGBT communities of the United States. I chose this work due to its personal reflection on the epidemic, in the simplest terms. Marvin and Whizzer existed as characters before HIV/AIDS changed the tone of LGBT communities across the nation, and Finn and Lapine’s writing of Falsettoland brought a devastating current event closer to a small community. The musical serves as a microcosm of the reality many families faced in this time period: just when Marvin had finally come to terms with himself, his life, and his loves, the world began to change around him. Marvin, in Act Two, sings “We laugh, we fumble, we take it day by day… What more can I say?” (Finn 217), in a sentimental reflection of the uncertainty of his unconventional life, even before his partner begins to falter. Falsettos does not care about the messiness of Marvin’s story, on the contrary, it thrives in it. Put simply, Marvin’s story is a real one.
Fig. 5 - Fig. 6
Source: Marcus, Joan. Falsettos. 2016. New York.
Telling LGBT stories has always been important, and it will remain important as history evolves and changes around us. While Marvin’s is not the individual story of a real person, and Whizzer’s eventual passing is not that of a living man, they tell a story all too familiar in far too many families. According to the WHO, in 2022, just over half a million individuals died of AIDS, and 39 million individuals continue to live with the disease. Even now, with modern medicine and more medical and scientific understanding of this condition, LGBT individuals are disproportionately affected by its terrifying and still deadly affliction. It is often frustratingly easy for individuals who are scared, for themselves, their children, their lives, to find a scapegoat. It is then scared people who point at another, one who is unmistakably different, and shout that it is them who is “other”– that it is the individual who is the infection. In a time so rife with misunderstanding, we need complex stories to teach us about other people.
Marvin is not a perfect person. He is a subpar father, though he wants to be better; a difficult husband; and too often a flat out control-freak. He is torn between the life he has crafted for himself, the stereotypical Jewish home with his wife and son, and the one he is wholly drawn to. In his final solo before the show’s finale, “What Would I Do?,” he refers to Whizzer not as a lover, boyfriend, or partner, but simply as his friend. The complexity of Marvin’s identity as an LGBT individual and overall human being is the central point of Falsettos. The HIV/AIDS epidemic happens around him, as it happened to so many individuals at the time. Stories like this are vital to the sustained understanding of a group of people, because it is far easier to show a family torn apart on stage than it is to beg an understanding of the millions of individuals whose lives followed the same path.
Theatre is important to telling stories for many reasons, which is likely why it has remained fairly consistent as a medium for centuries. Musicals can be most accurately related to performance art in the contemporary art world, especially with how they often over-exaggerate elements of movement and vocal inflection to evoke feelings in a viewer. The best example of this from Falsettos specifically is the song “March of the Falsettos” from the starting act of the show. The four main men— counting Marvin’s twelve-year-old son and Trina’s new husband, and Marvin’s psychiatrist, Mendel — comment on their immaturity. They achieve this by singing the entire song in their falsetto range and, in the 2016 revival, wearing clown-like white outfits while being reflected by UV lights. More so than many musicals of its kind, this show uses performed slapstick humor to bring brevity where it is needed. It is truly difficult to place this musical on a timeline of contemporary art due to its medium, but it exists as more of a performance piece than many similar works covering the same material, which does warrant the comparison.
In essence, Falsettos tells a story that needs to be told, not only because it is well-written and interesting, but because it is real. It is not a musical about HIV, or even a musical about being gay. It is a story about a man, a very realistic, very flawed man, and his attempts to understand the world. He fails sometimes, but don’t we all? He laughs, too, even in the end. Because what else is there to do? What is there to do but live in what we can understand?
Fig. 7
Source: Marcus, Joan. Falsettos. 2016. New York.
John Boskovich
Art can be used for many things, and the first that comes to mind while looking at John Boskovich’s work is the idea of art as documentation. Each one of us live complex, helplessly entangled lives, and it is extremely easy to forget the sheer scale of humanity in our day-to-day. Boskovich, in his own way, worked to combat this. He used art, mostly photography and installation work, to tell the story of his life and that of his boyfriend.
The work of his that is perhaps most contemporarily well-known, “Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate,” is a visually simple piece. An electric box fan sits atop a plexiglass pedestal, housed in a display case with several holes. The fan is functional, implying unexerted breath as thin streams of breeze emanating from the structure. The fan may seem avant-garde, stirring memories of Duchamp’s “Fountain” or similar pieces that present as objects, but the description of the piece tells a different story. As stated by the plaque beside the work: “Soon after the death of his lover Stephen Earabino from AIDS… Boskovich discovered that Earabino’s family had completely cleared out his apartment, including the artist’s possessions, save for the electric box fan…” This piece tells the story of what was deemed unimportant, of what was stolen in the attempted claim of ownership over one who had passed.
Fig. 8
Source: Boskovich, John. Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers). 1997. Los Angeles.
Boskovich’s work documents, even in visually conceptual settings. He takes the values of photographers before him and elaborates on them, questioning notions of reality and temporality. While the aforementioned fan is certainly an example of this documentation, Boskovich’s most frequent medium tended to be photography. Andrew Bernardini writes for ArtForum that, “...Boskovich queered the Pictures-generation critique, twisting it back on itself as if it were a smirking snake eating its own tail and coiling ever more tightly around its broken heart.” He creates work for a world that understands the statistics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but does not comprehend the scale of it. In gifting this fan to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Boskovich relinquishes his last piece of physical evidence of the apartment he shared with his boyfriend. He forces a viewer to understand that this seemingly meaningless item is the final remnant he had been left of someone that he loved. In his portraits and photography series, Boskovich documents the LGBT communities of the West Coast, often in abstracted or deeply personal ways. His pieces present their subjects as truth, the work frequently being contextualized by their titles, as with “Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers).”
An unembellished box fan atop a pedestal in a museum space can certainly be referred to as conceptual art, and Boskovich himself considered his work to be rooted in the conceptual. Even in more literal photography pieces, Boskovich builds out around the frame, adding text below his work separate from the title. Many of these pieces are self-portraits, reflecting on grief and mourning brought about by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a deeply personal way. In contrast to fellow artists in grief over the loss of their friends, lovers, and family, Boskovich retreated into himself, centering his pieces on alienation and fixation. Works like “Self Portrait Sculpture – Honey Bear” relay ideas of consumption and annihilation present in pieces by similar artists like Felix Gonzales-Torres, but stand apart due to their lack of remedy. Boskovich gave his work to the Museum of Contemporary Art in memory of his partner, but he did not allow for interaction with his pieces, only the ideas of connection. Overall, John Boskovich’s work is a blend of the realism themes present within the Pictures Generation and the conceptual art movement.
Choosing Boskovich’s work to focus on was not a difficult decision for me. I knew I wanted to reference one of his pieces in some way, as I believe that his perspective on grief is vital to a complete view of the LGBT community following the events of the late twentieth century, but the decision to write about him came as a surprise to even me. I came across his catalog on MOCA’s website, one without pictures, and began to make my way through his work, piece by piece. When I came across the picture “Last photo taken of dead boyfriend,” I nearly started crying. John Boskovich captures the humanity of the individual through his work, the simplicity and complexity contained within a life and its memory. Sometimes, there is nothing we can do as a viewer to carry on an artist’s mourning. Sometimes there is nothing we can do to aid our own. There is no piece of candy to pick up from a dwindling pile, no breeze coming from holes in the plexiglass of a fan’s display case. The last photo taken of the most important person in our lives may be blurry, unfocused, and overexposed. We may think that we have all the time in the world.
Fig. 9
Source: Boskovich, John. Last photo taken of dead boyfriend. 1995. Los Angeles.
“I radiate joy and happiness”
The LGBT community is full of artists, as most communities are. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was a tragedy, and damaged that community, as tragedies do. But as with any event that can cause such sheer devastation, it brought with it the release of art. As Andrew Blades details in his essay “The Past is not a Foreign Country:” “As the number of AIDS deaths in the USA fell sharply during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the generation of writers at the frontline of the AIDS crisis no longer had “irreversible declines” to chronicle; instead, they had, and continue to have, the space and time to work through what Ann Cvetkovich calls the ‘archive of feelings.’” At a point, there is naught to do but to attempt to unpack the grief that someone leaves behind, and there is nothing that tears apart a life quite like the loss of a loved one.
Through art, people have a chance to utilize their skills to give voice to their feelings. Chesser recognized this in photographing his friends to overcome the fear of sharing his diagnosis. Finn and Lapine used the character of Marvin to talk about the individuality and care of people affected by a new unknown. Boskovich told the story of his love; love for his community, and love for his partner. Each creator sought art as both comfort and documentation, writing down, in their own ways: “I am still here. I am still here, and I still feel.” Boskovich’s piece “Kaddish: First bloom of sunflowers, a year after his death” repeats a mantra of hope, despite the crushing weight of knowing that the world has moved on, while life has slowed. Even without direct relation to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a viewer is allowed to feel with their pieces. We are shown that grieving is messy, varied, loud, deeply personal, and wholly communal. There is no greater message than that we can understand one another, even in times when alienation seems inescapable.
Fig. 10
Source: Boskovich, John. Kaddish: First bloom of sunflowers, a year after his death. 1996. Los Angeles.
Works Cited
“The AIDS Epidemic in the United States, 1981-Early 1990s.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 26 Mar. 2021, www.cdc.gov/museum/online/story-of-cdc/aids/index.html.
Berardini, Andrew. “Close-up: Inside out: Andrew Bernardini on John Boskovich’s Boskostudio.” Artforum, Artforum, Mar. 2020, www.artforum.com/features/andrew-berardini-on-john-boskovichs-boskostudio-1996-2006-246604/.
Blades, Andrew. “The Past is Not a Foreign Country.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 44, no. 1, spring 2017, pp. 139–160.
Boskey, Elizabeth. “Why Do Gay Men Get HIV?” Verywell Health, 20 Mar. 2024, www.verywellhealth.com/why-do-gay-men-have-an-increased-risk-of-hiv-3132782.
Buckland, Fiona. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer Worldmaking. Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Chesser, Adrain. I Have Something to Tell You. Minor Matters, 2018.
Colleran, Jim. “Falsettos: Three Decades of Love and Heartbreak.” Breaking Character, 28 Apr. 2022, breakingcharacter.com/falsettos-a-history/.
Daylight Media. “American Fine Art Photographer Adrain Chesser Presents Powerful Photographic Series ‘i Have Something to Tell You’ and ‘The Return’ at TEDxVienna.” PR Newswire: Press Release Distribution, Targeting, Monitoring and Marketing, 30 June 2018, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-fine-art-photographer-adrain-chesser-presents-powerful-photographic-series-i-have-something-to-tell-you-and-the-return-at-tedxvienna-259366291.html.
Finn, William, and James Lapine. The Marvin Songs: Falsettoland, March of the Falsettos, and In Trousers. The Fireside Theatre, 1990.
Goldfarb, Nilo. “The Irredeemable Individual.” X-Tra, vol. 23, no. 1, 2020.
Halpert, Juliana. “The ‘schlock Apocalypse’ of John Boskovich.” Frieze, 10 Dec. 2019, www.frieze.com/article/schlock-apocalypse-john-boskovich.
“The HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the United States: The Basics.” KFF, 7 June 2021, www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-in-the-united-states-the-basics/.
Isherwood, Charles. “Review: ‘Falsettos,’ a Perfect Musical, an Imperfect Family.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/theater/falsettos-review.html.
Lamasney, Ian. “But What Is Troy: Art in Queer Mourning.” Kennesaw State University, 2021.
Larson, Jonathan, and David Auburn. Tick, Tick... Boom!: The Complete Book and Lyrics. Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, an Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation, 2009.
Larson, Jonathan. Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2008.
Marcus, Joan. “Falsettos.” 2016. New York.
Schneier, Matthew. “An AIDS-Era Musical in an Age of Marriage Equality.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 27 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/theater/falsettos-broadway.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer.
Sherman, Chloe. Renegades. San Francisco: The 1990s. Hatje Cantz, 2023.
Spargo, Tamsin. Foucault and Queer Theory. Icon Books, 2000.
“Timeline of the HIV and AIDS Epidemic.” HIV.Gov, 2023, www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline.
Whiteside, Alan. HIV/AIDS. Oxford University Press, 2016.
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