Table of Contents

Abbreviations  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
The Time of AIDS. Timeline 1  xiii
Introduction. We Are Starting This Conversation, Again  1
Section One. Trigger
Trigger 1. What We See  19
Trigger 2. Seeing Tape in Time   30
Trigger 3. Being Triggered Together  49
Trigger 4. Being Triggered in Times  59
Trigger 5. Being Triggered by Absence  73
Trigger 6. How to Have an AIDS Memorial in an Epidemic  83
An AIDS Conversation Script to be Read Aloud. Timeline 2  95
Section Two. Silence
7. Silence + Object  101
8. Silence + Art  121
9. Silence + Video  139
10. Silence + Undetectability  159
11. Silence + Conversation  169
12. Silence + Interaction  183
13. Silence + Transformation  197
Conclusion. We Are Beginning This Conversation, Again  217
Sources and Influences. Timeline 3  227
Notes  251
Index  257

About the Author

Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, and coeditor of AIDS and the Distribution of Crises and Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making, all also published by Duke University Press.

Theodore Kerr is a writer, organizer, artist, and Lecturer of Interdisciplinary Arts at The New School as well as a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?

Reviews

“[Juhasz’s and Kerr’s] conversational model-by definition friendly, curious, and inviting, with an interest in accessibility and transparency-distinguishes [We Are Having This Conversation Now] from traditional academic writing and media criticism. Here, history-teaching and -learning is rooted in an oral history framework: that we learn what happened to communities from the people who constitute them.” - Svetlana Kitto (Bomb) “We Are Having This Conversation Now carves a terrain of multimedia and citations. . . . [Juhasz and Kerr’s] push to talk about AIDS across temporalities is an effort to drag conversations around AIDS and AIDS cultural production into a public present and keep them there." - Mackenzie Lukenbill (The Baffler) "We Are Having This Conversation Now is suffused with an awareness that the dominant narratives of AIDS in the United States have traditionally centered the lives of gay white men." - Alex Valenti (The Body)