Smashion Special Feature
Pride Style Guide: 1977-2021
AIDSGATE: We lived and died through the AIDS pandemic and all we got was this lousy T-shirt (1980s)
Smashion plumbs the bowels of its LGTBQ “fashion” archives in search of actual gay style.
The results might bore…er, surprise you!
Exhibit B: AIDSGATE T-shirt (1980s)
A key ingredient of success for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was the AIDS activist group’s mastery of.visual media to get the message across. This meant the movement’s fashions were fierce and versatile, taking your typical queen from the street all the way to the holding cell after a busy day of civil disobedience. Flippancy aside, ACT UP’s fight against the homicidal hatred of the right wing was rooted in a culture, and that culture had style. (Fast forward to 2021, and the LGBTQ-plex is still in a life-or-death struggle with the same old bigots. But does style continue to play a part that matters?)
To Smashion, the ne plus ultra T-shirt of the movement, even beyond the classic black Silence=Death shirts with the pink triangles, was AIDSGATE (above, worn on the Lower East Side in June 2021). The high-concept shirt featured a ghastly yellow image of Ronald Reagan, the president who did his best to kill off an entire segment of the American populace by ignoring the deadly AIDS virus for years. A blueprint for Trump’s handling of COVID-19 decades later? Perhaps.
In his book Wearing History: T-shirts from the Gay Rights Movement, Steve Goula describes the intention and history behind the image. (Spoiler alert: it’s actually a Warhol reference.)
From Wearing History: T-Shirts from the Gay Rights Movement (2007) by Steve Goula:
“The AIDS emergency was a test for any national leader. Addressing a disease contracted through intimate male-to-male sexual contact required a level of sophistication, tolerance, acceptance and compassion that President Reagan never displayed.
“The refusal of the Reagan administration to publicly address the growing AIDS crisis brought up questions of conspiracy. Could the infection agent, the HIV virus, possibly be a man-made, laboratory invention created specifically to wipe out the minorities the establishment found abhorrent? It sounded like paranoia, but the idea that thousands of people would be allowed to become ill, and die, without intervention was mind-boggling. What kind of individual would allow that to happen? Wasn’t this a form of genocide?
“AIDSGATE almost seemed like a plausible explanation. On T-shirts scrawled with the word across Reagan’s likeness, the president’s AIDS apathy was cast into the realm of scandal. The AIDSGATE T-shirt’s accusation of a cover-up echoed Watergate, the blight that brought down the Nixon administration. The putrid yellow tones used on the T-shirt to tint Reagan’s face mirrored Andy Warhol’s “Vote McGovern” posters in which Richard Nixon’s portrait was colored a fetid shade of green.
The T-shirt also displayed how much had changed since the gay movement had fought back against Anita Bryant with the “orange”-themed T-shirts. Wearing an article of clothing bear gin an image like the monstrous AIDSGATE portrait of a United States president was evidence of how gays had learned to push back.”
Ah, the more things change, the more things stay the same, no?