David Gere – författare

Through Positive Eyes is a collaborative photo-storytelling project by 130 people living with HIV and AIDS around the world. This global photographic collaboration with Gideon Mendel and the UCLA Art & Global Health Center chronicles a very particular moment in the epidemic, when effective treatment is available but far from universal, and the enduring stigma associated with HIV and AIDS has become entrenched. Through Positive Eyes addresses this stigma, social inequality, and limited access to medication through the voices of those experiencing it. The participants in the project have volunteered to tell their stories and create their own artistic statements, empowering themselves in order to banish stigma.

David Gere, who came of age as a dance critic at the height of the AIDS epidemic, offers the first book to examine the interplay of AIDS and choreography in the United States, specifically in relation to gay men. The time he writes about is one of extremes. A life-threatening medical syndrome is spreading, its transmission linked to sex. Blame is settling on gay men. What is possible in such a highly charged moment, when art and politics coincide? Gere expands the definition of choreography to analyze not only theatrical dances but also ACT-UP protests and the unfurling of the Names Project AIDS quilt. These exist on a continuum in which dance, protest, and wrenching emotional expression have become essentially indistinguishable. Gere offers a gripping portrait of gay male choreographers struggling to cope with AIDS and its meanings.