TMQH: Kissing Doesn't Kill (1989)

In 1989, the artist activist collective Gran Fury unveiled their biggest project yet: "Kissing Doesn't Kill," a poster series that was plastered across buses in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, and New York City. While far from their only project, Kissing Doesn't Kill was their most prolific and most controversial campaign to date. 

Photo credit in the episode cover: Creative Time (1989). View the full image here: https://creativetime.org/projects/kissing-doesnt-kill-greed-and-indifference-do/

Show Notes/Works Cited:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QzT_AgMU1Up4yERzuXZHHkDXi-jODPJfCChZo-90ov8/edit?usp=sharing

Follow CAMP Rehoboth:
fb.com/camprehobothcommunitycenter
camprehoboth.org
instagram.com/camprehoboth

Transcript

In 1989, the artist activist collective Gran Fury unveiled their biggest project yet: "Kissing Doesn't Kill," a poster series that was a part of “Art Against AIDS on the Road”. Plastered across buses in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, and New York City were the faces of three racially diverse couples: a straight couple, a gay male couple, and a lesbian couple, kissing below the words, "Kissing Doesn't Kill, Greed and Indifference Do." While far from their only project, Kissing Doesn't Kill was their most prolific and most controversial campaign to date. For Gran Fury, the controversy only fueled their dedication to raising public awareness about AIDS. 

Gran Fury thought of themselves as an "unofficial propaganda ministry," creating graphic design agitprop campaigns aimed at inciting political change. In their own words, they “produced work[s] ranging from flyers announcing AIDS activist demonstrations to billboards, bus sides and bus shelters that challenged medical facts, public perceptions, and political realities.” The name was a reference to the car brand of the same name, which at the time was being used as undercover police cars by the NYPD. It also represented their intense rage towards public and governmental indifference towards AIDS. Their eleven founding members came from the activist                                          group ACT-UP, a large political action group founded by gay activist Larry Kramer in 1987. In the same way that ACT-UP held public demonstrations, taking over public spaces such that people couldn't ignore the AIDS crisis, Gran Fury's visual campaigns infiltrated the public spaces usually taken up by traditional visual advertising, a tactic used by other guerilla artists. Their works spoke the same visual language as advertisements for mundane commodities like clothes or sports equipment, but paired with incendiary messages and images that would catch onlookers off guard - messages like: "Women Don't Get AIDS: They Just Die From It," "Men: Wear Condoms or Beat It!," and “The Government Has Blood On Its Hands: One AIDS Death Every Half Hour.”

For the Kissing Doesn't Kill campaign, they borrowed the advertisement style of the preppy clothing brand Benetton, with members of ACT-UP, Gran Fury, and other queer collectives posing as models. Most of the works by Gran Fury were self-funded and self-promoted, but Kissing Doesn't Kill was actually a commissioned work. Ann Philbin approached Gran Fury about making a piece for “Art Against AIDS on the Road," paid for by The American Foundation for AIDS Research. The visual campaign would be put on the sides of buses, a popular advertising space. The group was enthused about the opportunity, but the commissioning of the work was not without its hurdles. 

The visual initially included a rejoinder underneath the couples which said, "Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, And Public Indifference Make AIDS a Political Crisis." This was removed at the behest of Livet Reichard, an art funding adjunct set up by the American Foundation for AIDS Research, who believed that the “Corporate Greed” part of the rejoinder would prevent the project from requisitioning funding from corporate sources. Later runs of the visuals in New York City in the form of busboards, posters, postcards, and public service announcements included the rejoinder, but the original run with the “Art Against AIDS on the Road” project did not. On the original busboards, the text above the couples simply read, "Kissing Doesn't Kill, Greed And Indifference Do." This messaging didn't make explicit reference to AIDS, something which infuriated the members of Gran Fury. One of the points of saying Kissing Doesn't Kill was to fight against a common misconception about AIDS, which was that AIDS could be contracted through kissing. Even at the time, it was known medically that you could not contract AIDS from kissing. Even more than that, the entire point of the project was AIDS awareness - without mentioning AIDS, how could the busboards make the public more conscious of the crisis?

And, in fact, the ambiguity created by removing AIDS from the text ended up contributing to the controversy around the campaign. When it debuted in Chicago, local alderman Robert Shaw tried to organize an intervention to paint the images black, and the images were later vandalized by unknown perpetrators. The mayor of Chicago also requested the replacement of the images, but since they were not obscene from a legal standpoint, the images stayed up. Part of the censorship was the perceived lack of connection to AIDS. Members of the public like Robert Shaw saw the project not as fighting against in action towards AIDS, but rather as a form of recruitment for the quote, "homosexual lifestyle." In June 1990, the Illinois Senate tried to pass a bill preventing the display of any poster showing a “physical embrace in a homosexual context where persons under twenty one could view it.”

This was not the first nor the last time that work by Gran Fury incited this kind of controversy, and some members of the group actually saw that controversy as a net positive. Even if newspapers were reprinting their words and images to smear them, that was still more people who were seeing their messaging. Even beyond the images' potential for creating public fervor and political action, members of Gran Fury recognized that there were people who would, for the first time, be seeing a queer kiss or embrace. 

I'll leave you with the words of Gran Fury from a later work of theirs, created before they disbanded in 1993. The work is called "Four Questions." 

"Do you resent people with AIDS?

Do you trust HIV-negatives? 

Have you given up hope for a cure? 

When was the last time you cried?"

Thank you for joining us for the eighth episode of This Month in Queer History. Take care, and join us next month for our ninth episode, about the drag group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.