The Brooklyn Rail

The HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to be a lesson in power. Disease as identity is a fiction of the state, an instrument of moral authority that can decide who lives and who perishes. Make the outsider a symbol of degeneracy and then grind them down through laws which marginalize to the point of extinction. Such remains the fate of gay men and disenfranchised communities of color, both in the United States and abroad. Let’s be clear on that point: HIV/AIDS has never been the exclusive domain of gay men. However, the epidemic’s early years saw the conflation of the medical with the political, and, as Paula Treichler notes in How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, “the widespread construction of AIDS as a ‘gay disease’ … invested both AIDS and homosexuality with meaning neither had alone.”

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And what is the meaning of HIV/AIDS? For Jerry Fallwell’s Moral Majority and its ilk, the epidemic was providential punishment for a life of debasement. Trade the scarlet letter for the Kaposi sarcoma. Sin on your skin, in your bones, your blood. Religion, of course, has a habit of finding virtue’s lack wherever illness arises. Syphilis was a divine punishment for promiscuity, cholera the affliction of those predisposed to intemperance and licentiousness. For the American right of the eighties and nineties, bound as it was to conservative family values and evangelical ideology, the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were proof positive that a “gay lifestyle” brought with it depravity and death. In short, HIV/AIDS was a disease of “the Other,” a problem for “them,” not “us,” and for those in power—President Ronald Reagan the chief culprit among them—the impetus to show not just mercy, but urgency, went against the ideological worldview which had secured them power. And why should they care? As Leo Bersani noted in his essay collection, Homos, a 1993 study by the National Research Council summed it up: with AIDS cases “concentrated in zones of urban poverty, poor health care, drug addiction, and social disintegration,” prevalent amidst marginalized groups possessed of “little economic, political, and social power,” its effects upon the majority of America’s social institutions would be minimal. Their problem, not ours.

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When he died at the age of thirty-two in 1995 from AIDS-related complications, Hugh Steers left behind a body of work that is at once a chronicle of the artist’s own confrontation with death’s imminence, and a surreal, at times mordant, evocation of the epidemic’s specter. In a loose style of realist painting—oils were his favored medium—Steers balanced a virtuosic play of light with an eye for color and composition that drew references from classical and modern painters alike: see glimmers of Diego Velázquez in a subject’s pose, Pierre Bonnard’s bathtub in another. Steers was particularly fond of Edward Hopper’s emptied landscapes, magical and modern as they were. Hopper understood the soft glow of loneliness like no other, and in him Steers found a kindred spirit. “It’s impossible to escape isolation,” Steers remarked in an interview from 1992, “there’s only so far you can go with another person.” One can sense the import of Hopper’s influence in the arid domestic spaces Steers would often return to as the settings for his own paintings, populated by few subjects—often just two figures were depicted, one a witness to the other’s affliction. For Steers, quotidian settings became allegories for death’s banality; unfathomably important events in someone’s life play out in the most commonplace of settings.

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Flag Pillow (1989) is one of Steers’s most stridently political works. A small oil sketch on paper, the work’s central focus is a figure laying on a wooden floor, naked body exposed save for a pillow patterned with the US flag, draped over the subject’s face as would a death shroud. Alongside the body, a kneeling figure holds the hand of the departed—a comforting clasp, the way a mother assures a child. In the background, two suited figures loom over the scene, hands in pockets. Steers portray the “suits” from the neck down—the pair survey the scene from beyond our vantage, all-seeing but unmoved to act. One could imagine the look shared between them, apathy bound with resignation: What could we do about it?

Painted within two years of his positive HIV diagnosis, Flag Pillow is nothing short of an indictment, an allegory for the US government’s inaction toward—even denial of—the epidemic and the unfathomable misery it wrought. Steers’s imagery often eschewed the overtly political—his paintings were political statements in their own right—but in Flag Pillow, we see the anger and frustration of an artist who once attended ACT UP meetings and demonstrations at the National Institutes of Health. Steers would undoubtedly have seen Gran Fury’s graphic emblem of protest—pink triangle, black background, “Silence = Death”—wheat-pasted on the walls of New York’s subway platforms and city streets. Flash to the headless, faceless “suits” in Flag Pillow. The “suits” can’t—or won’t—speak.

While speech may be absent from Flag Pillow, the gaze—that very act of beholding others—is central. Steers conjures a setting of purposeful intimacy, bordering on the cramped—cropped heads, tight framing, little room for the image to breathe. But make no mistake: this is not voyeurism, an invitation from Steers to observe for pleasure, however perverse the circumstance. No, this is an invitation to bear witness, a call to look upon death’s agency and hold its accomplices accountable. That flag, those suits, you the viewer.

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Earlier this year, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in conjunction with the Trump administration, enacted sweeping cuts to the government’s funding of HIV/AIDS research while at the same time drastically diminishing support for PEPFAR, a global program spearheaded by the US to support global initiatives providing treatment and education about the virus. Kennedy, for his part, has often cited AIDS denialists, going so far as to make the scientifically debunked claim that, “there are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS.” By some estimates, the Trump administration’s cuts to PEPFAR and HIV/AIDS research funding could result in an additional 16 million deaths and 26 million new HIV infections by 2040. Pause on that number.

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Time and fate and coincidence are a tightly wound web. From time to time, we can pull at its loose threads and, in the unspooling, glimpse the ineffable mechanics of it all. Through a complex network of marriages and divorces and remarriages, Hugh Auchincloss Steers and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are related. Hugh’s uncle was Gore Vidal, and Jackie Onassis was his mother’s stepsister. Jackie Kennedy, in other words, was his aunt. Why is all of this germane? Power is always abstract until it isn’t, until you’re the one on the floor, boot to neck, or isolated in your ward, hidden away from public view. Misery, pain, hurt is never just the problem of someone else, to skim over in the course of a day’s newsfeed or on the sidewalk during a commute. Hugh Steers was a child of privilege, of opportunity, of wealth—until he wasn’t any of those things. That is the lesson. If it could happen to someone from the world Hugh Steers hailed from, it could happen to anyone.