We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production
With Alexandra Juhasz (2022)
A history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the pair focus on through conversation to understand HIV across time. Along the way, they share their own artwork, activism, and stories of the epidemic. Their conversations illuminate the vital role personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection play in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Throughout, Juhasz and Kerr invite readers to reflect and find ways to engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.

Copyright HIV: General Idea’s Infectious Process
In General Idea
Edited by AA Bronson, Adam Welch
¨General Idea’s earliest AIDS work sprouted from their exploration and expanded use of a logo, a staple of both Madison Avenue and the language of corporate culture. From there, they twinned the pandemic to a world-travelling meme, long before social media could, enabling the idea of a virus to circulate as material viruses do: far and wide, sometimes unexpectedly, without borders, and often both publicly and intimately. One day the AIDS crisis will be over, but one hopes that the infectious strategies of General Idea will remain.”

A Portrait of a Portrait of Us
In LJ Roberts: Carry You With Me, Ten Years of Portraits
¨I remember when LJ [Roberts] took the source photo for the portrait, a year and a half after NYC arrival. It was April 25, 2012, the day of the ACT UP 25th Anniversary / Occupy action. The air was chilly, but the sun was warm. A layer of sweat formed between the top of my back, and the “silencio = muerte” t-shirt that I bought at the 2008 AIDS conference in Mexico City. LJ captures the heat with few subtle white threads where my third eye should be.”

[The Death of David Kirby]
In Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism, and the AIDS Poster
Edited by Donald Albrecht and Jessica Lacher-Feldman
¨Let Peta´s wrist - and spirit - encourage viewers to look beyond the poster frame.¨

Dispatches on the Globalization of AIDS / A Dialogue between Theodore (Ted) Kerr, Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Sarah Schulman, and Eric A. Stanley
In AIDS and the Distribution of Crises
Editors: Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani (2020)
”Like you can learn the age of a tree by observing the cross section of a trunk and counting the rings, you can learn the age of a virus by charting its mutations. After HIV has entered the body, latched onto a cell, replication of the virus begins through recombination. This is where mutation occurs, and HIV’s high genetic variability becomes important. The reproduction of HIV never results in a perfect replica, so, the longer the virus has been around, the more recombinations there will have been. In sequencing the 1960 sample and then comparing it with the 1959 sequenced sample, scientists were able to determine that people have been living with HIV even earlier still: since around the late 1890s - give or take a decade.”

Seeing What the Patrimony Didn't Save, Alternative Stewardship of the Activist Media Archive: A Conversation between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr
In InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader
Editors: Christopher Robe, Stephen Charbonneau (2020)
”The past is filled with video work largely ignored, video that was created by and featuring a diversity of makers and communities. In going through the archive of tapes, a diversity of uses of the tapes (both then and now) also becomes apparent, uses that were initially central to their making, but which have largely fallen out of the conversation around video’s role in the history of AIDS activism.”

After the Second Silence: AIDS Cultural Production in the United States in the Twenty-First Century
for United by AIDS catalog (2019)
Editors: Raphael Gygax and Heike Munder
“One of the casualties of the Second Silence was the break in intergenerational communication. Due to mass death, mental health issues, and the lack of space that AIDS took up in public, the link of gossip, mentorship, bearing witness, intimate relationships, secret sharing, and other modes of dialogic bonding were broken. This ensured that less history and fewer lessons for survival were passed down, and that there would come a time in history when some catch-up would have to occur—the lapse in noise amid the silence would need to be filled. That time is now, and it is important to pay attention to how it is taking shape.”

From Tactic to Demand: HIV Visibility within a Culture of Criminalization
for WALLS TURNED SIDEWAYS: ARTISTS CONFRONT THE JUSTICE SYSTEM catalogue (2018)
Editor: Risa Puleo
”In the first decade of the epidemic, the visuality of the virus was propelled primarily by an urgency caused by desperation and death. Getting AIDS on people’s agenda—cutting past hatred and fear to care and action—was a core goal that was achieved with profound success. In the years to follow, with the introduction of life-saving medication in 1996 and the newfound ubiquity of the disease, one might have assumed that visibility for a person living with HIV would become less fraught. But, as the ongoing story of AIDS reminds us, that has not been the case.”

Who are the Stewards of the AIDS Archive? Sharing the Political Weight of the Intimate
with Alexandra Juhasz, for The Unfinished Queer Agenda After Marriage Equality (2018)
Editors: Angela Jones, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Michael W Yarbrough
”From the beginning of the known crisis, representation and response has included an understanding of race, sexuality, gender and other ways of understanding health care as a social justice issue. This understanding has not been uniformly pulled forward into all present-day conversations, leading the AIDS crisis to be often understood as more of a historical setback in the ongoing movement for gay rights.”

The Sailor’s Daughter: AIDS before AIDS in the Present
for LOST & FOUND: DANCE, NEW YORK, HIV/AIDS, THEN AND NOW catalogue (2016) 
Editors: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Will Rawls and Jaime Shearn Coan
Publishers: Danspace Project
"When it comes to HIV/AIDS, we have a lot of history but not enough stories. We need more of both, and we need to ensure the stories circulate, because history will always be limited in its reach.."

You Used To Call Me On My Land Line: Gregg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up
A Conversation with Charles Theonia
for Dirty Looks Vol. 1 (2016) 
Editor: Dirty Looks
Publisher: Dirty Looks

Love Happened Here: Art, Archives, and a Living History
A Conversation between Amy Sadao, Nelson Santos and Theodore Kerr
for Art AIDS America catalogue (2015)
Editors: Jonathan David Katz and Rock Hushka
Publisher: University of Washington

I Remember West Edmonton Mall
for The Magnificent Malls of Edmonton (2015)
Editor: Vivek Shraya
Publisher: Riso print

Ted Kerr / David Deitcher
for Memories Can't Wait: Conversations on Accessing History and Archives Through Artistic Practices (2013) 
Editors: Bridget de Gersigny, Malene Dam, Kate Levy
Publisher: ICP-Bard/CCS Bard

Luck and the Need for Queer Bookstores 
for Future Perfect (2013)
Editor: Andrew Durbin
Publishers: Publication Studio and BGSQD

At the Same Time
Self Published
with Steven Beckly and Dylan MacNeil, Ted Kerr and Zachary Ayotte, Colin Quinn and Oisín Share

AS CO-EDITOR 
DUETS: Stephen Andrews & Gregg Bordowitz in Conversation (2014) 
DUETS: Che Gossett & Alice O'Mallery in Conversation on Chloe Dzubilo (2014) 
More info: DUETS

IN ERRORS WE SEE OURSELVES: THE MISREPRESENTATIONS OF ROBERT RAYFORD
- Published 2022 for SDUK, Blackwood Gallery
¨I think about this when I look at Clifford Prince King’s image that features Rayford’s name but that picture of Robert Rochon Taylor from the blogs and magazine. I see this artwork as an assemblage, a surface where the past, present, and future collide, where identity, ideas, conceptions, mistakes, questions, and feelings of yearning intermingle to make a vibe, or dare I say it—an archive, a mash-up of history, Black queer life, privacy, transmission, and a safe space to hold the unknown.”

ONE DAY THIS KID WILL GET MONKEYPOX
- Published 2022 for Dirty Magazine (message me for pdf)
¨Are stories like [David] Wojnarowicz´s normal? So easily interchangeable that anyone and everyone can and should be able to relate? Or, as monkeypox helps to illustrate, is there something exceptional about what Wojnarowicz, as a gay man, was getting at in his work that onedaythiskid.com is in danger of obscuring?”

GONE BUT NOT DISRESPECTED
- Published 2022 for Art Papers
¨ Within their remarks, many of the speakers named people they knew in the Philadelphia area who lived and died with HIV, including ACT UP Philly member and prison activist John Bell (d. 2012); trans leader Jaci Adams (d. 2014); and founder of the Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference, Charlene Arcila (d. 2015). These names were powerful to hear—reminders of mighty lives lived. But they also made the absence of names unuttered and unknown that much louder. What happens to a soul if it is given no place to rest? What happens to a community when mourning is left unfinished?¨

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE SEEN AS NEEDING A CURE?
- Published 2021 for Political Theology Network
¨ Feeling brown, which is to say, feeling like a problem, is not in fact the problem. Yet at the same time, being labeled a problem can not be dismissed. Therefore, brown is not in need of being solved. Instead, Muñoz states, “a more reparative move is required, which is holding on to the problematic, fractured, and negated status of self within the social and working through such a position, striving to find new ways of living in the world that are pleasurable, ethical, and indeed tolerable.´”

WHEN CARE PROVIDERS FALL THROUGH THE CRACKS
- Published 2021 for The Body
¨In Missouri, people working on the local level are exploring how such moments could also be useful for other populations. After years of focusing on barriers facing patients and clients, what happens when we include doctors, nurses, and social workers? Where do providers go to work through their fears, judgments, and questions about the virus? What happens when we include providers in the hard to reach category?¨

HOW DID TWO HIV+ WRITERS, DECADES APART, EACH END UP WRITING SHORT STORIES CALLED HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA?
- Published 2021 for CBC
¨In the end, two queer BIPOC HIV-related CanLit short stories both titled Hockey Night in Canada is not a fluke. It was inevitable”

WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR? ON OLIVER HUSAIN, KERSTIN SCHROEDINGER, AND THE COMMUNITY WHO EMBRACED DNCB AS AN EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENT FOR HIV
-Published 2021 for C Magazine (message me for pdf)
”…no one can actually know something on their own, even as it relates to one’s own past. Information is not (just) content, it is also the result of collection and assemblage, which, when explored with others, can highlight the multiple stakes undergirding a life, a movement, or even a shared community ethic.”

A MEMORY CIRCLE FOR THE LOBBY
- Published 2020 for The Corner at Whitman Walker
”Here is the thing, our friend Bryn was beautiful. Dolly Parton style, with Elizabeth Taylor eyes. She dressed to accentuate her cleavage and the sensual smoothness of her skin. She made us all blush, and feel seen. In the end, she took her own life, and it took our breath away. We were not surprised, but it stung nonetheless. She had tried before. It is not easy being a woman with a southern accent in the north. It is not easy being a trans woman living with HIV. It’s not easy being the smartest person in the room when no one has any expectations of you beyond looking pretty. It is not easy growing up without money, and never getting on the other side of economic stability.”

39 Years Later, The New York Times’ 1981 ‘Gay Cancer’ Story Continues to Distort Early AIDS History
- Published 07 / 20 for The Body
”As someone who has been writing, organizing, and educating about the AIDS epidemic for the past 20 years, with a specific focus on the virus before 1981, I have come to see the importance of a crisis’ early history. By looking back, we can often see a template for how the story unfolds by seeing how it began.”

How to Live With a Virus: The COVID-19 pandemic becomes a part of our ongoing understanding of HIV
- Published 03/2020 for Poz Magazine
”And then it hit me. I realized the need for comparison of HIV to the coronavirus is not simply a comparison of two viruses or our country’s response to them. By comparing COVID-19 to AIDS, people are finding a way to work out their emerging fears regarding the present health scare as well as to deal with ongoing HIV-related trauma. In the face of our current uncertainty, we are recalling examples of a deadly virus we know from the recesses of our mind, body and soul. We are trying to make sense of what is happening now, by comparing it to the past. When it comes to trauma, time is not a line.”

Framing The Issue
- Published 09/19 for On Curating
”For me, as someone who has been working at the intersection of art, AIDS, and culture for over fifteen years in the USA and Canada, both within AIDS service organizations and art organizations, and as a writer, curator, activist, and artist, I am invested in thinking about how liberating it may be for AIDS movements to consider how it is too late, too complicated—and stigmatizing even—to “end AIDS.” As I see it, standing between that goal and the truth are the millions of people living/suffering/thriving with HIV, specifically, the 8.1 million people living with HIV globally who do not know or wish to confirm their positive status. We don’t know who the latter group of people are per se, but we can assume they don’t take to social marketing, public health messaging, or any other mass media intervention that may bring them closer to the AIDS response or treatment. And we can assume that they are a heterogeneous group that, while not having much in common beyond their positive status, are doing their best, and nonetheless—like everyone else—weighing their best options at a good life, a meaningful death, and some joy in between.”

How to Have an AIDS Memorial in an Epidemic
-Published 07/19 for C Magazine
”There are over 40 AIDS memorials and monuments across the US and Canada (memorial referring to a site that names and remembers the dead; a monument being a marker of a period or an event). Like much of AIDS culture, memorialization projects reflect the nature of the crisis as it was when they were created. In the silence around AIDS that permeated western culture after 1996 and in the shadow of 9/11, memorials made in the early aughts are intimate, hyperlocal and often tucked away or hiding in plain sight. They are the work of small yet mighty communities using modest means to remember dead friends, and the Herculean efforts that were mounted against their premature death.”

How Red Does The Line Have to Be? HIV activists are working to move AIDS 2020 out of Trump’s America
- Published 10/18 for POZ Magazine
”During the next 30 minutes, various leaders from within the AIDS community spoke about how life under Trump had become worse. There have been the cuts to Obamacare; the increased violence towards Black people, trans women, and others within the LGBT community; news that AIDS money had been used to pay for the separation of families at the U.S. border with Mexico; and the fact that people living with HIV would no longer be welcome to serve in the U.S. military. At AIDS 2018, Dázon Dixon Diallo, founder and president of SisterLove, Inc., said that now was not the time to hold a conference in the United States.’I am too embarrassed to have anyone come to my house when it is dirty.’”

The Call of the Mall
: Strange but unavoidable, West Edmonton Mall Shaped my Life
- Published 09/18 for 18 Bridges Magazine
”The dolphins were a major tourist attraction. People would gather around the lagoon or pay extra to sit in amphitheatre near the tank to watch them jump and high-fived their trainers. But from almost the beginning of the dolphins’ lives in Edmonton, animal rights activists campaigned to free them. This peaked in 1996 when a baby dolphin was born dead in the tank. Six years later, one of two adult dolphins died, leaving one called Howard as the last living dolphin of West Edmonton Mall. He would rarely crack the surface—a sign of trauma, the activists said. In 2004, as the city slept, Howard was transported to an aquarium in Florida. For a few years after, the dolphin stage and tank were used for practice for a team of post-pubescent diving guys. In my early 20s, I remember standing outside a Club Monaco store on the second floor and finding myself at eye level with a curly haired wet dude in an aqua speedo, his chest rising and falling as he steadied himself to jump.”

The AIDS Crisis Revisitation
- Published 01/18 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"The image, 'David Kirby on his deathbed, Ohio, 1990,' was taken by Therese Frare the spring that David died of complications related to AIDS. Months after, the picture was published in Life Magazine. Two years later, it was used for what became an infamous Benetton clothing ad. The photograph provides an important and familiar narrative–a frail young man, dying needlessly before his time. And in that, the picture also contains details and absences that speak to stories and dynamics of the ongoing AIDS crisis largely untold, teetering on the precipice of being lost." (CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS ESSAY BEING READ OUT LOUD.) 

How Six NYC Activists Changed History With “Silence = Death”
- Published 06/17 for THE VILLAGE VOICE
"The origins of Silence = Death, which stands alongside We Shall Overcome, Sí Se Puede, We Are the 99%, and #blacklivesmatter as a touchstone of social justice movements, can be traced to a New York diner in 1985. Nights earlier, Socarrás recalls, he was “walking down Broadway towards Astor Place and having this irresistible impulse to throw myself on the sidewalk and pound my fists on the ground. I had to stop myself. I wanted to wail to heaven.” Over the previous few years he had lost so many men he loved that he stopped writing down their names after his list reached 100. That night, he remembers, he “watched that potential scenario [play out in my mind] and thought, ‘I can either do that or I can try to do something with this energy.’ ”

A Families Affair
- Published 06/17 for THE VILLAGE VOICE
"For as long as Kia can remember, she’s been seeking cultural representations of anyone who looked like her: a queer woman of color. She felt a spark of kinship when she first saw the drag ball documentary Paris Is Burning while in high school. By then she already knew classmates who belonged to various Houses, but had yet to walk herself. Eventually a co-worker at Webster Hall invited her to become more involved in the ball scene. It ended up being a revelation. 'As a young brown person born with HIV, I began to meet many others [who] acquired the virus,' Kia told the website BH Is Voguing last year. 'It was the first time since my mother’s death that I felt I was not alone.'"

HIV WITH: Writing Within an Epidemic
- Published 04/17 for POETS & WRITERS
"So much of writing is about being vulnerable on the page, alone, and then sending it out into the world. So much about HIV is about our bodies, risk, and judgement. Support from Poets & Writers has enabled the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective to build communal spaces where we can work to reduce the harm of HIV, transform the pain and stigma surrounding it, and be active participants in ensuring it metamorphosizes into health and resilience, through written word." 

Connecting the Polka Dots: AIDS in Plain Sight
- Published 03/17 for BOMB
"Like many others on the Generation X/Millennial cusp, I came of age as a political and sexual being during this Second Silence period. When I started to process what AIDS meant for me, I did so in isolation. I came to find that there’s something profound about being consumed by something not reflected in the world. It leads many of us to see 'it' even if 'it' is not there: in code, hiding in plain sight, in absence. Within silence, we do what we can to reconcile the world we need with the world we have. " 

As HIV Activists in the Age of Trump, We Need to Look Beyond the Gay Paradigm
- Published 12/16 for THE BODY
"As someone involved with the AIDS response for almost 15 years in the U.S. and Canada, and as someone who has recently been researching the lives of people living with HIV before 1981, it seems to me that, with hindsight, we can see that white supremacy prevented people from seeing HIV's impact in the U.S. throughout the 1970s and after because premature death within already minoritized communities was accepted. And then homophobia -- coming from the president, no less -- prevented the U.S. government from stopping it."

TESTING BEYOND CONTROL
-Published 10/16 for THE NEW INQUIRY
"Testing alone is not care. It is not the problem, nor the solution. It is a moment of transition, which should result in continued support. Until control, surveillance, and criminalization are replaced by care, support, and community, testing will remain a risk factor for people living with HIV."

AIDS 1969: HIV, History, and Race
- Published 9/16 for DRAIN
"The story we tell about AIDS in America is that the United States government failed to address it due to the pervasive homophobia of the Reagan administration. True. What is also true is that the virus that came to be known as HIV had been circulating in other minoritized communities—communities of color, people who do drugs, and those living in poverty and without housing—long before it was noticed in homosexuals in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. We don’t know how to tell the history of AIDS before AIDS because we don’t know it yet and we don’t know how to hear and share what we do know. Instead, we keep repeating the history we think we know to be true, the one that starts in 1981."

Cause I Am Here To Remind You
- Published 02/16 for LAMBDA LITERARY
Alanis Morissette and memory. 

Was Taylor Swift Singing About HIV Criminalization?
- Published 1/16 for THE ADVOCATE
Taylor Swift’s lyrics resonate in a troubling way for those who’ve seen blood reconfigured as a weapon by misguided HIV criminalization laws. A longer version of this essay appears on the Visual AIDS website. 

'AIDS - Based on a True Story'
- Published 1/16 for DANDELION
"AIDS: Based on a True Story is an exhibition curated by Vladimir Čajkovac for the German Hygiene Museum. The foundation for the exhibition was the museum’s extensive collection of AIDS posters from around the world, from which Čajkovac added other historic objects, art works and activist memorabilia. The exhibition looks at HIV/AIDS through the lens of media and representation. In this article writer and organizer Theodore Kerr explores the exhibition putting it in conversation with contemporary representations of HIV/AIDS and questioning the role that nostalgia plays in how AIDS is understood in media."

A History of Erasing Black Artists and Bodies from the AIDS Conversation
- Published 12/15 for HYPERALLERGIC
Exploring the urgency and history of the Tacoma Action Collective's protest of the Art AIDS America exhibition. 

HIV Criminalization Never Made Sense
- Published 10 / 15 for POZ MAGAZINE
Exploring the archives for proof that even at a height of the AIDS epidemic, there were many who opposed the criminalization of people living with HIV. 

SHOULD WE CRIMINALIZE HIV?(written with Opal Jones) 
- Published 07/16 for ST. LOUIS AMERICAN
Asking the question that need not be asked. 

Putting Faith Into Action: HIV/AIDS Advocacy
- Published 07/15 for BELIEVE OUTLOUD
"As people of faith we can often feel strong in our conviction. It is good to be passionate, speak our minds, call out injustice, be unruly, disrupt business as usual, and not worry about making others comfortable. We never need to bear witness idly to injustice."

Can Christian Ethics Take Down Stigma and Bias Against Women With HIV?
- Published 02/15 for THE BODY
"What would it mean if a lesbian living with HIV was not deemed as impossible, unethical or unworthy of service, but rather was held in the same regard that the Holy Ghost holds for the Father and the Son?

Who Is HIV For?
-Published 11/14 for WOMEN'S STUDIES QUARTERLY
"The Denver Principles and womanism illustrate that within the community of marginalized others there should be opportunities to name oneself, and from there—the thinking goes—it should be “Nothing About Us Without Us,” a phrase made popular by disability activists. Yet assertions of subjectivity around HIV/AIDS have become more complicated, blurring the line between, as Paula Treichler writes, “what is self? what is not-self?” (Treichler 1999), with language being a site for clarity and confusion."

Without Our Rooms of Nostalgia: AIDS, Communication and Each Other.
-Published 02/14 for IN THE FLESH
"I have never heard it myself but friends have told me many members of ACT UP from the 80s and early 90s talk about the power of “The Room”, referring to the large meeting space on the main floor of New York’s LGBT center where ACT UP met (and still meets) on Monday nights. There is a longing to return. And with good reason..."

There Is So Much I Want to Say About AIDS
- Published 01/13 for POSTERVIRUS
"I want to share with you that for me AIDS—on some level—is a remix of our shared desires and prejudices transmitted in the most vulnerable of moments, played out through our bodies. I hear the discordant moans of ecstasy bumping up against the steady political beat of no, no, no. I want know if you also experience that awkward moment when you find yourself crying on the dance floor, feeling nothing but ghosts."

WALKING WITH GHOSTS
- Published 11/11 for KEEP THE LIGHTS ON
"Sex is not something separate on Fire Island; it is the breeze that blows through everything. The longer one spends in the meatrack, the more it becomes a series of inviting staging grounds connected by well worn paths, and less like a frustrating maze. Throughout, black plastic garbage bags hang from trees – the heavier they are with empties and condoms – the busier the spot. Garbage acts like a recommendation “I’ve been here and I liked it”." 

Towards Transparency and Justice, Learning from Wikileaks and Wojnarowicz
- Published 12/10 for HYPERALLERGIC
"What do Wikileaks and the art world’s response to the censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s  “A Fire in My Belly” by the Smithsonian have in common? More than may be apparent at first. Both make public what elites want to keep secret. They illustrate how little, if anything, can be hidden anymore and demonstrate how the more something is concealed the more the demand for it to be revealed grows."

POSTER ART: Three curators discuss their recent exhibitions and the pivotal role of HIV and AIDS posters
- Published Aug 2022 for POZ Magazine
¨While HIV remains a contemporary scourge, the history of the disease has increasingly been the focus of journalists, scholars and curators, among others. For decades, HIV and AIDS posters have urged people to protect themselves and others and to question—and even change—their own behaviors. Employing innovative graphic design, HIV and AIDS posters have also inspired protest and forged a sense of shared identity among activists. Three recent art exhibitions emphasize the pivotal role played by HIV and AIDS posters since the virus emerged in the early ’80s. Donald Albrecht curated Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism, and the AIDS Poster, which was presented at the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery. Andy Campbell worked with the ONE Archives and ONE Archives Foundation to curate Days of Rage. Theodore (ted) Kerr organized AIDS, Posters & Stories of Public Health: A People’s History of a Pandemic for the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Below is an edited conversation between the three curators on the role of HIV and AIDS posters.¨

THE PUBLIC AND THE VOID: A Conversation between Carlos Motta, Koray Duman, and Theodore (ted) Kerr
- Published Sept 2021 for HOOSAC INSTITUTE
¨At some point in our process I shared the notion of a counter-monument, a term from James Young’s work. Key to counter-monuments is refusal. Sites are designed to promote public memory work as an active process of retrieval and negotiation. Among the most famous counter monuments is Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s The Hamburg Monument Against War and Fascism and for Peace, a pillar that between 1986 to 1990 was designed to recede into the earth. As the pillar was disappearing, (and now that it is gone), it fell upon the people who remember the monument, and why it was constructed in the first place, to witness, remember, and share.¨

Keith Haring’s Line: RICARDO MONTEZ with Theodore Kerr
-Published Nov 2020 for the BROOKLYN RAIL
”Emerging from the conversation is one of Montez’s most important offerings from the book: exploration through multiple points of view—including one’s own desires—better enables us to work within the complexity of reality, rather than submitting ourselves to a flattened idea of right or wrong. Montez exemplifies this throughout his book as he considers Haring’s relationship to whiteness, and the way it relates to his meaningful relationship with Black and brown people.”

AIDS Normalization: An Interview between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr
- Published Summer 2020 for X-TRA
”KERR: The “end of AIDS” is something that splits AIDS activists as a goal or even near-term possibility. While we all yearn for this as a future, we suggest that these contemporary claims paper over how AIDS stays present (even when undetectable), and simplifies its presence to merely being a matter of medicine or biology.”

Walt Odets on Sex, Pleasure, and Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives
-Published for LAMBDA LITERARY 01/20
”Kerr: Speaking of which, let’s talk about sport sex, a term you use in your book to describe sex that doesn’t allow for emotional communication.”

Watching and talking about AIDS: Analog tapes, digital culture, and strategies for connection: Conversation with Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr
- Published 2020 for FIRST MONDAYS
Editors: Marika Cifor, Cait McKinney
”Ted: Agreed. Every generation grapples with their own technological advances. Today we have to deal with what to do as more information becomes unfettered, less censored, more available. This influx of representational possibility initiates the current cultural calls for slowing down and pausing. Maybe trigger warnings are as much about the real and traumatizing content that can so easily float past someone’s field of vision, as they are about creating some sort of dam on content, a levee to ease the breaking tides.”

Five Questions With Theodore Kerr: By Nicole Drayton
- Published 01/19 for THE NEW SCHOOL
”I don't believe in villains. But, I do think a lot about problematic faves such as: Azealia Banks; Estraven from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness; Amy Jellicoe, Laura Dern's character in Enlightened; Villanelle from Killing Eve, played by Jodie Comer; John D'Agata; Kanye and everyone in Valley of the Dolls.”

Black LGBT Health: In Conversation with Dr. Lourdes Dolores Follins + Dr. J M Lassiter
- Published 05/18 for LAMBDA LITERARY
”Early in the book, Lassiter writes, “Refusing silence is essential to maintaining our health.” This becomes a theme of the book, a mantra a reader may find themselves humming along with as they read.”

Looking Back, MELT!ing Forward: A Conversation with artist James Scruggs
- Published 05/18 for FRIENDS OF THE HIGHLINE
"This future president is basically trying to push this idea of everyone meeting in this idea of a middle, and soon enough, there will be pushback. 'Why can't I be called a black man? I work really hard to be a good man.' And the response will be: 'That is un-American. You are Hume. You are Human. Call yourself Hume.'"

How Brother(hood) Dance! Is Surviving the Plague
-Published 01/12 for POZ
 “There is a lot to be said about dark-skinned bodies being in the same space. It makes me think about what histories and traumas come up when we start to move together. When our bodies move in the same space, our work becomes ritual, prayer, something I can’t put into words.”

Farzana Doctor: On Resiliency, Terrorism, and Swingers
- Published 12/17 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"I do intentionally try to write the world as diverse as it is. I think there is a growing momentum in which writers are populating their books with the people that are our friends and are in the audiences of our readings." 

26 questions with CHEEKY LaSHAE
- Published 08/17 for FRIENDS OF THE HIGHLINE
"21. What is performance?
Why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when ew could just be quiet?
22. What is performance?
Guilty feet have got no rhythm.
23. What is performance?
Sublime loneliness"

On Care, Activism and HIV with Alexandra Juhasz
- Summer 2017 for HEMATOPOIESIS PRESS
"But how do we begin to account for all the work that can’t be seen, or that is for some less exciting to see? Asked another way: how should caring be named, seen, applauded, or noted?" 

Stacked on Her Office Shelf: Stewardship and AIDS Archives, a conversation between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr
- Published 01/17 for THE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES
"I often come back to this idea that I am working through a cultural inheritance of AIDS, what we are calling its patrimony."

Tim Murphy: On His New Book, HIV/AIDS, and How Scruff is a Kinder Place Than AOL Profiles
- Published 08/16 for LAMBDA LITERARY
“AIDS is like a prism through which all these social pathologies like poverty, homophobia, sexism and racism are refracted. It can be daunting to try and capture all of that.” - Tim Murphy about his novel, 'Christadora.'

A conversation between Vika Kirchenbauer and Theodore Kerr
- Published 08/16 for VISUAL AIDS
“I wanted to take the notions of AIDS out of the past, out of the archive," - Theodore Kerr on his residency at the German Hygiene Museum. 

Mike Albo: On Sperm and Its Uses, Spirituality, and Learning to Feel
- Published 04/16 for LAMBDA LITERARY
“I am a religious person. I did not grow up that way. I found it on my own, and often I do not feel worthy of saying it.” - Mike Albo on his new release, 'Spermhood.' 

A Conversation with Brenden Shucart
- Published 04/16 for THE NOVUS HOMO
Shucart interviews Kerr about AIDS, activism and ethics. 

The Uncoolness of Grief: An interview with Tiona McClodden about Essex Hemphill, Legacy and Art
- Published 02/16 for VISUAL AIDS
"The internet is not enough. We have to talk to people. Oral history is everything for the black queer and survival. Once we stop talking, we don't exist." McClodden on race, history and memory

Erasing Black AIDS Histories 
- Published 01/16 for THE NEW INQUIRY
An interview with the Tacoma Action Collective after the protest of the Art AIDS America exhibition. 

LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN! – Jessica Whitbread, Jonny Mexico & Theodore (ted) Kerr
- Published 01/16 for NO POTLUCKS
 "I like the idea of something being more powerful than love. Not that I want to throw love out, I just feel it is often used in a shallow way. If you really love someone I think that you cherish them and want positive energy to follow towards that person. I think about this in the context of the HIV work I do," Jessica Whitbread.

A conversation between Joss Barton and Theodore Kerr
- Published 12/15
“There is a huge impact that not telling Robert’s story has on the past, present and future of AIDS," - Theodore Kerr on research around the early cases of HIV/AIDS. 

Diamond Dan and the Rise of the AIDS Punchline with Bryn Kelly 
-Published 10/15 for INDIEWIRE
"If a massive number of people were still dying in the US in extreme ways they used to, I do not think it would be possible to make these jokes, at least not in a mainstream way." - Bryn Kelly on how AIDS jokes have made it to primetime. 

Cory Silverberg : On His New Book ‘Sex is a Funny Word’ and Sex Education for Kids
- Published 08/15 for LAMBDA LITERARY
“I get to present sexuality and gender in a way that I hope gives kids more options than I felt I ever had.” - Cory Silverberg on his book, 'Sex is a Funny Word.'

A Conversation with Neil Goldberg
- Published 08/15 for VISUAL AIDS
“She’s A Talker is a document and a documentation of people’s lives in a time of extreme peril.”- Goldberg on his film ' She's A Talker.'

Who is Unbreakable? The Messy Joys and Reservations of ‘Kimmy Schmidt’’s World with Claire Barliant
- Published 06/15 for INDIEWIRE
"Rather than resisting the system, which may be futile, it seems as though a new generation is going about finding nimble ways to circumvent it or coexist alongside it. Do you agree?" - Claire Barliant on a new generation of comedies. 

A Conversation with Adam Geary
- Published 02/15 for VISUAL AIDS / THE BODY
"Anti-Black racism in particular has been central to the structuring of vulnerability to HIV, in the US, in the western hemisphere, and globally. It's also, I fear, one of the key reasons why social, cultural, and even social-movement concern about the epidemic has shifted so dramatically in the last decade, if not dissipated altogether." - Geary on his book ' Anti-Black Racism and the AIDS Epidemic'

Andrew Durbin: On His New Book ‘Mature Themes,’ the Power and Uselessness of Love, and the Joys of the Perfect Pop Song
- Published 01/15 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"Once I began to write about the environment and “nature,” I could expand that to thinking about the media ecosystems that surrounded me." - Andrew Durbin on his book 'Mature Themes.'

A conversation with Demian Diné Yazhi' from R.I.S.E.
- Published 12/14 for VISUAL AIDS
"HIV/AIDS is quiet at times in native communities," - Demian Diné Yazhi'

Tommaso Speretta on His New Book ‘REBELS REBEL: AIDS, Art, and Activism in New York 1979-1989’
- Published 11/14 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"The history of the anti-AIDS activist movements in 1980s America is still largely unknown, especially to the European audience. Later, I realized that the work I was doing was relevant for the American audience, too. I had been wrong in my conviction that AIDS activism history was part of the common knowledge in the U.S. The younger generations still do not know the stories I am talking about in my book." - Tommaso Speretta on 'Rebels Rebel.'

A Conversation with Naina Khanna, Executive Director of Positive Women's Network
- Published 10/14 for VISUAL AIDS
"Study shows (PTSD) among women living with HIV may be 5x that of the general population of women." - Khanna on women and HIV in the USA. 

Roxane Gay: On Messiness, Not Belonging, and What Being Queer Taught Her About Being a (Bad) Feminist
- Published 09/14 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"My fiction and non-fiction work on a spectrum. This idea being that life is messy and complicated and it is rare that we have neat endings and tight conclusions to anything. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things." - Roxanne Gay on her book 'Bad Feminist.'

Alysia Abbott: A Trip to Fairyland
- Published 08/14 for LAMBDA LITERARY
“A lot of the book is about me feeling closeted about my father’s sexuality.” - Alysia Abbott on her book ' Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father.' 

AIDS Reruns: Becoming ‘Normal’? A Conversation on ‘The Normal Heart’ and the Media Ecology of HIV/AIDS with Alexandra Juhasz
- Published 06/14 for INDIEWIRE
"When we conflate and erase histories we loose the truth of nuance, the order of things, the ability to go back and trace steps, and make sense of why something had to happen. Urgencies get lost." - Theodore Kerr on how AIDS history is/is not being passed down. 

A conversation with Jennifer Brier
- Published 04/14 for VISUAL AIDS
“Curating the exhibition meant I got to revise some of the thinking I’d done for Infectious Ideas." Brier on her exhibition, “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture.”

Home Video Returns: Media Ecologies of the Past of HIV/AIDS with Alexandra Juhasz 
- Published 04/14 for CINEASTE
"Well, maybe the cost of the second silence is the lack of circulation of AIDS tapes from the Eighties and Nineties, and so contemporary filmmakers feel as though they have to start from scratch." - Alexandra Juhasz on how AIDS history is/is not being passed down. 

Conversations with Rosalind Solomon
- Published 07/13 for VISUAL AIDS
Part One: “I didn’t know what to do after the AIDS project. It was so intense.”
Part Two: “People didn’t want to look at the work. Perhaps people are more willing to look at it now.”

In Conversation with Topside Press: Tom Léger, Julie Blair, Red Durkin, and Riley MacLeod 
- Published 04/13 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"When you talk about how nobody knows how many trans writers there are in the world, you are forgetting that nobody knows how many writers there are in the world. It is not suddenly more mysterious or more spectacular because we are trans." - Red Durkin on publishing

Shane Allison: He Remembers
- Published 07/12 for LAMBDA LITERARY
“You have to decide how honest you want to be in your writing: if you want to leave it in your diary or put it in a book. Yes, the experiences are intense but you have to allow yourself to go there, to cross that line.” -Shane Allison on his book 'I Remember.'

SARAH SCHULMAN: AN AMERICAN WITNESS
PART 1: GENTRIFICATION, TRAUMA, & SEX
PART 2: OCCUPY STUDENT DEBT, AND THE BEAUTY OF BEING UNCOMFORTABLE
"You can’t have 80,000 people die in a country and it have no impact." - Sarah Schulman on the AIDS crisis. 

1996 Allows Readers to Consider Key Moments from the 1990s
- Published 11/20 for LAMBDA LITERARY
”In terms of tone, a welcome sense of irreverence emerges in many of the individual essays. Writers tackling topics such as HIV/AIDS, climate change, LGBTQ rights, and Palestine provide humanity, humor, and insight. It is one thing to produce something smart, it’s another thing to produce pleasure. 1996 on balance gives readers both.”

‘Sweet Dreams’ by Pamela Sneed
- Published 08/18 for LAMBDA LITERARY
”But exposure does not equal knowing. Sweet Dreams, Sneed’s recently released memoir from Belladonna, changes that. In the slim 48-page book, a reader has the chance to go from being able to pick Sneed out of a crowd to getting a sense of who she is and how, as a powerful, Black lesbian artist, writer, and mentor, she came to be.”

‘Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World: Portraits and Revelations’ by Joseph Keckler
- Published 12/17 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"When Keckler takes a reader through a day that begins with a shift selling audio guides at the Guggenheim and ends with turning down a bear’s sexual advances at a diplomat’s apartment on the Upper East Side, he is map-making, leaving markers of places and possibilities."

‘The Show House’ by Dan Lopez
-Published 12/16 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"Many of us are aware how, one day after years of not talking, a phone call or email will flip a switch and an abusive parent will be back in an adult child’s life. In cases such as these the homophobia is still operative, but it often takes a back seat to other dynamics. In The Show House, we see the reunion between Steven and his parents primarily through Thaddeus’ eyes. This perspective affords an opportunity to see inside the father/son homosocial rivalry from the point of view of the withering older man: his refusal to see his own role in what he lost and his hunger to take what he can before it is too late." 

‘You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death, and Transition’ by Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom
- Published 10/16 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"The book is a literary endeavor no doubt, and given its creators, I think it can also be seen as an artistic intervention into the public commons around trans and HIV narratives. It pushes back against heroic or role model clichés; Instead, we are given the gift of two men bearing witness to each other in all their shared platitudes, epiphanies, confessions, and love. Along the way, we get to experience their many lives." 

‘Christodora’ by Tim Murphy
- Published 07/16 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"While the Christodora, a historic building on Avenue B, anchors the book; what keeps the reader enraptured for over 428 pages are the characters that populate the building and their loved ones as they ride the currents of New York City in the 80s, 90s, and into the early 2000s and beyond. Epic in scope, the novel cannily grapples with many of the seminal touchstones of contemporary New York City life: AIDS, drugs, race, activism, gentrification, art, and ideas of progress."

‘Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How it Transformed The New York Times’ by Samuel G. Freedman with Kerry Donahue
- Published 03/16 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"AIDS, and the resistance and urgency that helped define an early understanding of it, is part of this textual move and one that Dying Words tracks. Be it a metaphorical flourish or not, nothing about AIDS is possible on the individual level. It is all relational."

‘The Rise and Fall of The Yellow House’ by John Whittier Treat 
- Published 11/15 for LAMBDA LITERARY 
"Treat could be seen as making the case that there is no way you can untangle the reality of AIDS, drug use, and the gay experience. They are mutually dependent. By the end of the book, the Yellow House is empty with no one escaping despair, recrimination, or loss. What is left are memories, the stories we tell, and the ongoing AIDS crisis. Treat has given the world a great story, and a time capsule of a history that needs to be told."

Hard Decisions: Interactive Storytelling and Complex Representations
-Published 11/15 for INDIEWIRE
"In her heart-bursting review of “All I Want Is For All My Friends To Become Insanely Powerful”, a video game from innovator Porpentine, writer Cara Ellison concludes that the game “needs you to realise that your life is changeable, and you can do it through text, subtext, the textual bonds we make between each other.” Rarey achieves similar same magic but with one important and glaring flaw. Through Hard Decisions he helps us see that change is possible. We are all works in progress, needing each other to make it through the day."

‘Johnny Would You Love Me…(If My Dick Were Bigger)’ by Brontez Purnell 
- Published 09/15 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"There are many good bloggers and essayists writing about HIV for the web, academic journals, and other platforms but most often they are written by people like me–well meaning HIV negative folks. As an HIV+, black, queer, creative, cis-man with hips and ass he loves to have loved, Purnell working out his relationship with the virus and the collateral experiences it brings, on the page, is of vital importance."

‘After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality & American Religion’ by Anthony M. Petro 
- Published 08/15 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"So while After the Wrath of God is a book about HIV/AIDS, it is also very much a cultural history of Christianity in the US through the lens of the beginning of the AIDS crisis, from a specific viewpoint. Petro does not, for example dive into the ongoing and heated discussions around the Black Church and the epidemic, maybe rightfully understanding others may best to tackle that important ongoing conversations. Instead, Petro tends to focus more broadly thinking about the relationship between the Church and AIDS for all Americans. Petro writes, 'The epidemic provided divine evidence for God’s sexual morality. Christian or not, and for better or for worse, we live with that morality today.'"

‘My Avant-Garde Education: A Memoir’ by Bernard Cooper
- Published 04/15 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"It is easy to assume that My Avant-Garde Education: A Memoir (W.W. Norton & Company) is Bernard Cooper’s autobiography through art. He is after all a critic, artist and educator. While not untrue, it is not the whole story."

‘Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill and the Battlefield of AIDS’ by Martin Duberman
-Published 03/14 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"There is no scarcity of stories when it comes to important and interesting lives related to the early days of the AIDS crisis in America. Duberman is intentional in his selection of Callen and Hemphill, both in what their legacies are able to tell us and not tell us. Hold Tight Gently is Duberman standing in the gap. Focusing on Callen and Hemphill he tells simultaneously occurring truths, exploring the impact sexuality, race, and the different ways people lived in the early days of the epidemic through activism and cultural production. Through Hemphill specifically Duberman is signaling to the incompleteness of history and corrupt ways it is manufactured. While he is specific in how systemic discrimination due to race and sexuality exasperates the ongoing AIDS crisis, he is never specific when it comes to the archival imbalance. Maybe he leaves this up to the reader to both think and act upon. There is much we don’t know because of the erasure of bodies, stories, and archives. This is but one of the fights on the ongoing battlefield of AIDS."

‘Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics’ by Urvashi Vaid
- Published 11/12 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"Irresistible Revolutions is a challenge to the present state of LGBT activism, and a rebel yell for the future. Readers who have a craving for plainspoken progressive politics will surely devour this book."

‘A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds’ by Martin Duberman 
- Published by 05/12 for LAMBDA LITERARY
"A Saving Remnant is at its most engaging when viewed through the lens of the present, easily done when Duberman puts flesh to history. In one of the most fascinating and underplayed moments of the book, Duberman recounts how McReynolds’ friend and legendary activist Bayard Rustin was blocked from leadership roles within the war resistance movement by A.J. Muste, famed pacifist and mentor to McReynolds and Deming. On the surface, the book is a portrait of two committed people, enmeshed in overlapping causes, entering each other’s lives through circumstance. In giving ink to what happened to Bayard, Duberman flexes his muscles as a writer and presents the theme of the book with a subtle but powerful punch: History is relation, these relations shape our present."