Mission Possible

Frontdesk by David Waggoner

Michael Irby might not be your typical aspiring AIDS activist. A costar of one of the few bona fide hits that’s a dramatic action series and not just another slice of reality television, Irby’s rugged good looks and gentle nature bring a winning combination to The Unit, one that attracts both new viewers and young-thinking minds alike. For Irby, diversity of opinion in our daily conversations will keep HIV/AIDS in the spotlight.

But he also knows that diversity of expression is also needed. Irby enjoys his red-hot television and film career but also likes to take his passion to smaller venues—poetry readings—where his verse (see a sample of it in these pages) is like his edgy acting, filled with honesty and a no-holds-barred emotional interpretation of his world. And he also proposes shifting among the diverse areas of our lives to keep ourselves energized and not be drawn into a compartmentalized approach: “My idea is that you first take care of yourself, then your family, then your community, then the world.” Right now, Irby’s focus is, as Dann Dulin’s exclusive interview reveals, on the world outside and that includes the pandemic. Cutting to the chase, Irby admonishes Americans for the hush-hush nature of the AIDS crisis: “In America we try to keep everything a little bit removed. We still whisper about it, ‘Oh, he’s got AIDS,’ rather than, ‘Let’s talk about this.’”

For Michael Irby what keeps AIDS in the national consciousness is oftentimes when a sports hero or someone famous comes out of the HIV closet. “When Magic Johnson said he had AIDS, it was huge! Everybody was aware because Magic Johnson said he had AIDS….That was the last media impact. There is so much less coverage now.” The idea that culture can act as a prompt for keeping AIDS in the foreground is a popular one. In the pages of this issue, for instance, cultural responses to the crisis provide a way to talk about AIDS, a way to educate, and a way to move us into action, as The Scene’s spotlight on the twentieth anniversary of ACT UP reminds.

For example, The Hollywood Graffiti Gown, created by two industry insiders out of the signatures of female celebrities, is an archive of awareness—they have sewn in the names they have collected for over twenty-five years, from Katharine Hepburn to Marcia Cross, and fashioned a sort of wearable petition for awareness, education, and prevention. In a sense, the gown departs from fashion sense: It is not timeless—rather it evokes the constant march of time, diverse moments that have accumulated into decades of living with and dying from HIV/AIDS.

A recent photo contest, sponsored by a major pharmaceutical company, also collected these diverse moments, asking those living with HIV/AIDS or affected by the disease to submit visual representations of their feelings and thoughts about fighting HIV/AIDS. The wide array of intrepretations by the contest entrants may surprise you. Or not. They may resonate with something we’ve known all along but rarely articulate—we all have unique ways of fighting HIV but at the end of the day there are ways to unify our efforts across cultural, ethnic, geographic, economic, and political differences.

Striving for and often achieving this sense of unity without flattening out our differences is something that AIDS, Medicine & Miracles is good at. Now in its nineteenth year, the retreat conference has excelled at bringing together diverse populations in a sensitive and healing way. Creating this space was not automatic, however. No presto-chango here. Rather, strengthening our community is an ongoing process of learning from heterogeneous perspectives and addressing a myriad of needs because, as A&U’s managing editor Chael Needle said to me the other day, sameness = death.

May 2007