Reflecting on “Listening on the Edge”
As Mark Cave discusses in Listening on The Edge: Oral History In the Aftermath of Crisis, crisis can take on many forms but one of its constants is the ability to disrupt lives and reorient people. In the ‘Toronto Interviews’ of the AIDS Activist History Project, I really gravitated towards the style and format of the interview between narrator Anthony Mohamed and interviewers Alexis Shotwell and Gary Kinsman. While the clips of each interview on the site lasted around 1-3 minutes each, I liked how the full transcript expanded on the snapshot of the interviews that the audience sees (plus how accessible the video with captioning and PDF version of the transcript was). Anthony’s interview snapshot stuck out to me the most because he led with discussing the importance of diverse representation and community during the height of AIDS. Representation was a huge part of Anthony’s story and he mentioned how when he was younger, he never saw gay characters on television and it left him feeling like there wasn’t a role model he could turn towards.
The lack of role models coupled with the new “rare cancer” that seemingly only affected gay men left, and the anti-gay rhetoric he saw across articles claiming that his identity was a “sin against God,” left him feeling like he couldn’t digest everything. Anthony mentions, “So again, I just wasn’t sure how to digest that at that time. I’d say that those were my memories of the first time I heard about HIV and AIDS. Well, AIDS, and what became HIV and AIDS” (3). I think this opening piece where we're introduced to Anthony’s earliest memories shows just how traumatic this event was for him, especially as a child. As Clark mentions in her article “Fieldnotes on Catastrophe…,” trauma and traumatic events can “overwhelm, disrupt, distort our storytelling capacities, which is an essential part of our humaneness, and a necessary element in engaging history's nightmares” (256). Anthony’s interview also echoes how contributions of oral history can illuminate the many complicated and layered feelings associated with activism, injustice, and oppression.
As he mentioned earlier in his childhood, Anthony had many complicated feelings associated with the church. From anti-gay rhetoric he witnessed that weaponized religion to his pastor slowly severing from the church he was involved in, Anthony’s story complicates how we might perceive the history of religion and the LGBT+ community during this time because Anthony himself still found that his motivations for being an activist were rooted in his religious background, specifically “love your neighbor as yourself” (13). This narrative itself works to disrupt our expectations surrounding religion and the LGBT+ community during this time period and offers a new perspective. In attempting to recover conversations from the vantage point of memory of someone within the gay community, this oral history project shows how Anthony’s account highlights which memories were the most influential pieces in his upbringing that left a lasting impression on how he saw the beginning of AIDS, before coming out and after, and how they influenced his activism and the love he showed to others in the community.
We also see a larger scope in Anthony’s story that is unique to the experiences he had and what he witnessed because of his Trinidadian identity. Being a part of groups such as “Zami,” left him feeling like he could be a part of a community that accepted both his cultural and sexual identity. In a time when there was already an abundance of anti-gay rhetoric, there was also “racism and sexism were very much on the books and very much recorded during those times; and were quite blatant, and acceptably so, by many quarters of society. As a result … It was going to be a big struggle to get any kinds of protection or rights” (1).
Anthony’s retelling of these earlier years shows the beginning of a crisis, one that began with him noticing these conversations during his childhood, to then actively seeing injustice occur when AIDS really began to start affecting the community in Toronto. Anthony states:
I know that we use the term “people living with HIV or AIDS” now, but at that time it was people who were dying of AIDS. There were no medications; there were no medical advances in this area. But, the thing that I found interesting in terms of when it became more than just a medical concern was the response from the medical community in terms of how people were being treated. Partners weren’t able to see their partners. Family members were saying, “No, this person is not part of our family,” in regards to the partner. So, it became a rights issue in that respect. You know, Ronald Reagan took so long to even mention AIDS. And the reality is, I know that we’re in Canada, but the US is such a leader in so many areas, including medical research, and for the president to take so long to say something, it impacted not just the United States but also the entire world. (3)
From watching the beginning of this crisis to the turn of AIDS into a political issue, Anthony’s interview shows the frustrations of the gay and lesbian community during this time who had witnessed so much death related to AIDS and saw how health and medical professionals weren’t providing information regarding AIDS to the public that made sense. Questions like, “How transmissible is this? We don’t know. You know, should we wear gloves? Should we not wear gloves?” did come up, but at the same time people in the community were coming into physical contact with other people who had AIDS and it was not being transmitted. So, when people began to refuse even touch others with AIDS and doctors wouldn’t allow partners to see their loved ones in the hospital, these injustices sparked activist groups such as ASAAP and AIDS ACTION NOW! to begin advocating for the rights of people with AIDS through organized protests and combining efforts with other diverse activist groups such as Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention, Gay Asians Toronto, and many others. Historically, we often may not see the impact or work of these groups highlighted/know, which leads to us not realizing just how large of a part they played in the history of LGBT activism. It is because of oral history interviews from people like Anthony that we can begin seeing these parts of history manifest and recognize how cross-movement solidarity was utilized as a tool for activism in response to injustice.
Anthony’s story not only illuminates the contributions of oral history as a response to crisis, injustice, and oppression but works to show some of the challenges that come with retelling traumatic events—especially those that occur when we’re young. While we see the interviewers really delving into the history of activism that Anthony participated in, we also see how this oral history interview documented a portion of this crisis “from the bottom up” and shows accounts of where Anthony witnessed and experienced injustice himself, and how “crisis is a historical constant” as we continue to see the fight for LGBT+ rights today as well.
