January marks the beginning of making new vows, sustaining old friendships, and reviving interests that we once thought we’d laid to bed. Take, for example, my own desire to go back to school and finish up a graduate fine arts degree. In 1989, my progress toward its completion was halted because I was laying the groundwork for this publication. While I am tinkering with the thought of returning to school, I realize now that my interest in creating art was not so much interrupted as it was rerouted into A&U. After officially launching A&U in 1991, and seeing it succeed at so many levels—artistically, politically, and professionally—over the years, I am sustaining one of the goals I set as an artist: Speaking truth and hearing truth is also one of the goals of this magazine.

It would follow that Gallery—the section of this magazine that features interviews with artists—has often been one of my favorite sections to envision, edit, and sometimes fuss over. And part of that fussing involves capturing accurately an artist’s true intentions, both visual and verbal. What has detracted so much from today’s AIDS/arts journalism is this overarching desire to reduce HIV-positive artists to a sort of tragic and mythic status. Witness the canonization of David Wojnarowicz, Frank Moore, Keith Haring, and Robert Mapplethorpe. All four of them are dead, as if their early deaths from AIDS were what made them better artists. The James Dean School of Art doesn’t make much sense to me. What made them true to their art had nothing to do with their premature passing.

There are plenty of artists and critics, both positive and negative, who are living and working today to end AIDS. Although their visions are varied, they all share in the same goal: Create understanding. Lester Strong does just that with this month’s interview with one of the world’s leading feminist artists, Harmony Hammond, whose ex-husband died of AIDS in the eighties. Hammond’s unique use of materials makes evident the possibility that art can be about healing, touching, seeing, and feeling. Hammond’s exquisite employment of sensuous colors and fugitive materials in the service of a worldly vision is underscored by her use of old rags made from friends’ clothing, discarded sheets, and even such innately intimate materials as hair, blood, and latex rubber. Hers is an art that speaks for the need for comfort, as well as discomfort, in the HIV/AIDS community. Those two sides of Hammond’s art is what makes her voice ring so true.

Perhaps that’s why it’s so refreshing to feature someone else who is so brutally honest and off-the-cuff as British actor and all-around-nice-guy, Alan Cumming. His acting abilities translate well into the field of AIDS activism, as you’ll find out in this month’s cover story interview. Cumming is not one to be shut up, or mouth the politically correct mode of thought, or gloss over things that need to be said in person (at benefits and fundraisers) as well as in print. In fact, Chael Needle’s interview with Cumming is one of the most enlightening interviews with a Hollywood celebrity that I’ve read in some time. While some of the entertainment industry’s so-called elite think that wearing an AIDS ribbon every year at the Academy Awards is significant in and of itself, Cumming creates understanding all year long.

Perhaps as we make new vows this January, we can remember how these artists—painters, writers, and actors, alike—are helping to create understanding about HIV/AIDS by trying to be as truthful as possible. Telling all of our stories, with honesty and a lot of heart, helps destroy the silence that spreads those pernicious lies—that HIV/AIDS is no longer a concern, that stigma and discrimination are not still happening. Just speaking out makes a difference in this regard. Truth, after all, has consequences. And the best consequence of all would be the end of AIDS. I can’t think of a better thought than that by which to start 2004.

David Waggoner is Editor-in-Chief & Publisher of A&U.

January 2004