Silence = Death

One of the most detrimental epidemics to American society is poorly known because of the administration that ran behind it, but what can one do to make the difference? Keith Haring was an influential graphic artist that made brought the AIDS crisis to the forefront. His works are seen as fun and creative, with his signature tag as the Radiant Baby to his many AIDS activism fueled works such as Silence = Death. The AIDS crisis is still a controversial topic to be discussed, due to the homophobic underlying ruling of the then president Ronald Reagan. Even now when brought up, conservative individuals tend to showcase Reagan as a martyr, even though he didn’t help the people of his country until it was much later. 

The Reagan administration was the pinnacle of conservative america. Ronald Reagan was a confident and charismatic former actor, that made a lot of people hopeful. However his biggest flaw is the way that his administration handled the impending AIDS crisis in America. Due to past manuscripts, it has been proven that Reagan was fully aware of the crisis back in 1982, but chose not to speak on it until 1987, which at that point many people had been taken by the illness.  The factors of this decision could have been the homophobic tendencies of many Americans at the time, or the huge public interest surrounding the Cold War. America likes to hide that the crisis happened with the over capitalisation of LGBT+ based products and events, but that is a problem of the now.

Reagan had failed in AIDS crisis in the way he assigned roles in the CDC. It began with appointing Dr. James Manson, who was a biased public health physician. By doing that he was hiring a person who had no understanding in disease control, as well as a medical official that was partisan to a conservative majority. The Reagan administration was hell-bent on creating reforms for decreased government spending, so an idea like AIDS research was beyond them. The most telling quote on how the Reagan administration saw the crisis came from Patrick Buchanan, the White House director of communications at the time, when he said, “Poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution” . The public stayed in the dark about the crisis, with more than 500,000 people falling by the illness before Reagan decided to start shifting government funds for research in 1987.

Keith Haring comes into play because he decided that enough was enough and the people needed to be aware of what was happening. Haring grew up in a household that were followers in the United Church of God, in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, which his religious background came into play into a lot of his works and how he viewed life in his later years. He became involved in the Jesus Movement when he was a teenager and began to sell his works under the guise of band merchandise. In his journals he stated, “ The Dead were great. We saw people we met at the campsite, sold T-shirts, and got high” meaning quite literally he was a normal young adult despite what a lot of conservative outlets decided to paint him as. Keith Haring gained traction in the art world through his chalk drawings and murals he would create all throughout New York City. 

Keith Haring would formulate his early works on the basis of happiness. He stated in his writing, “By being negative, are you being positive? Is this the approach we should take? Do people see the absurdity, or will they accept it as the future, and will it defeat its purpose?”. He talks about how in life we always look at the “end” and how that doesn’t seem to make any sense. He liked to bring up that his art would help the human race realize its issues and he wanted to see how much of an influence he could hold. Haring constantly threw around the ideas that any mindset could form a history. We could sense that he wanted to make a difference in the art he saw. He wanted to be more positive while showing an important part of American history that is more than often overshadowed due to the conservative administration at the time.

His signature tag Radiant Baby showcases life in its purest form. Influenced by the Jesus Movement he found himself to be apart of in his young adult years, he created a form that was the most basic part of human life: being a baby. He was inspired by baby Jesus and the influence the figure brought, and he decided to honor him. He claimed that people are the most happiest when they are a baby, they are not affected by the world around them yet and they are able to be the most simple being there is. The church’s influence on his works was not limited to his signature tag, but he also had created a beautiful triptych as commissioned by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Haring’s Life of Christ was created in his later years, when he was ill with AIDS. His lesser known Life of Christ was created in the image of how he saw the world to be when he was afflicted with the AIDS virus. He claimed that doomsday was among us, especially in times where people were dropping dead and no one seemed to care. His fears in the world were greatly influenced by the Jesus Movement, as they believed that accepting Jesus was the only way they can avoid an apocalyptic doom. A majority of his earliest work revolved around the ideas of the church, with his more well known works were used in influencing the public outlook on the AIDS crisis. 

His most notable works for the AIDS crisis surround the ideas of repurposing what is old and controversial for the new. In his painting Silence = Death, he has a pink triangle in the style of how Nazi Germany had identify homosexual individuals when sending them to concentration camps. By doing this he pulls up a painful imagery of the past to showcase what is painful for the now. According to his journals, he viewed the way the Reagan Administration was treating victims of the crisis as if they were subhuman and irrelevant. He wanted to equate the crisis to the nazi regime because he wanted to see if that would spark a public outrage.  Some may say that him equating such a tragic story of the past to this is heartless, but as a queer person he had a different perspective.

 He saw the conservative ruling of the Reagan administration as an evil corporation that didn’t care about the gay people of America and he may have been right about that. According to a press conference in 1982 Reagan stated that the AIDS crisis wasn’t a problem, and how they needed to focus on other things. He brought up the AIDS crisis being an actual problem in 1987, when it was much too late. His actions of this time gave him the most criticism, because at this point he had allowed about 500,000+ people to die under his administration. At this point funding for research and affordable treatment was still scarce, with even more privileged and wealthy individuals like Keith Haring falling to the illness. 

It proved that they truly did not want to help with this issue, with the overall conservative senate at the time as well. Keith Haring decided to take matters into his own hands when he created the Keith Haring foundation. He made the foundation in hopes educating the masses on the illness, and started with the people he believed where the most simple and easily shaped: kids. He decided that he wanted to be the catalyst for change rather than have a unsupportive ruling give out biased information. His works reflected his hunger for activism and as he began to gain more traction in the art world, he would create mass murals in hospitals and youth spaces, and even famously decorated the Necker Hospital in Paris. He powered through his diagnosis and created commercial art for smirnoff and created childrens toys. He wanted to spread his art throughout the world and he wanted it to be known that the people were suffering. While looking at his art, I feel as if his softer approach and carefree designs were reflectant on how he wanted more people to enjoy his works. If something is easily palatable, then it is more likely to be consumed by the masses and it is able to push a message across, rather than it being a deep and sadening painting that will not compel one to look at it any longer. 

An example of his mural work is Once Upon a Time, situated in a mural in New York City, the mural depicts deformed characters engaging in sexual acts, which was a difference from what is typically expected of Haring. His prior work depicted notions of safe sex, something he tended to promote and preach from early on, however in this piece it almost sarcastic upon viewing. I believe he created the mural in contrast to his others because at this point he was so fed up with the way that the government saw gay people, he just decided to draw a lewd mural on the walls of an LGBTQ+ center. He doesn’t specifically write about this piece in his journal, but his sarcastic nature in a lot of his entries make it seem as if he had a sense of humor, even in horrifying times. He tried to look at a lot of positivity and humor in his life, even though he knew it wasn’t going to end the way he wanted it to.

Another important piece that highlights how Haring viewed public perception on the AIDS crisis was Ignorance = Fear, Silence = Death. The work he created was in collaboration with the AIDS action advocacy group Act Up, which was the basis for him wanting to start his own foundation. The piece depicts his famous figures and instead of them dancing and having fun, he has them covering their eyes, mouth, and ears. By doing this he is truly exemplifying the fact that people did not want to know what was happening. They wanted to live in the avoidance of knowing such a horrifying virus was going around, and how they believed it didn’t concern them because they aren’t gay. By being complicit in ignorance, people lost their lives and loved one's to the illness. The “Ignorance = Fear” aspect in in the work was signifying that the less people educated themselves on it, the more they were able to judge those who were afflicted. The judgement of others does not lead to cures, but leads to greater ignorance and lives lost. Alongside that “Silence = Death” was important to note that the fear from other lead to death. The homophobic acts of many Americans was integral to the mistreatment of AIDS victims, and the Reagan Administration is rightfully to blame.

The mistreatment of minorities due to bad illness control is something to only blame the government for not helping. AIDS is still something that has a lack of cure, with only HIV “mini-cures” being available to some. A personal experience I have, was one of my frequent visits to the Castro District in San Francisco and noticing that majority of the district is populated with clinics and doctors offices. One of the most surprising things I had noticed, was when I was in a coffee shop the community board had about 50 fliers advertising different clinics that offered HIV cures, if and only if you came within the time frame of 72 hours within you were afflicted with the virus. Just seeing this set my mind at ease the smallest amount, but it just proves that there is still no wider cure for this illness. 72 hours is still a very short period of time in which a person is afflicted, one that makes it very hard for someone who doesn’t find out they have the virus until late. It makes me wonder if the small progression I see now could have been different if the government funding was granted a the beginning of the crisis.

 A lot of the issue on how HIV became a full blown AIDS crisis stems from the neglect from the government and the carelessness of the CDC of the time. In the early stages of diagnoses for the illness, the CDC had one patient by the name of Gaetan Dugas mislabeled as “patient zero”. The mislabeling proved to be problematic because it led to researchers believing that Dugas was the first ever case of AIDS, when in reality later on they deduced it may have been an individual from Africa. The CDC also chose to withhold information from Canadian officials, which is questionable because Dugas was a flight attendant from Canada. The problematic and messy nature of the CDC and the government trying to deal with the AIDS crisis had proven to be harmful because of the overall outcome. 

Another work that signifies Haring and his fight to end the crisis was Stop AIDS. In this creation, he paints a cartoonish snake losing a battle to a green pair of scissors. It seems as if he is comparing the virus to a venomous snake, slithering about and biting those that come near it. The scissors in the print, may signify the end of the battle, the cure to the illness. This work seems sort of like a commemorative piece, what could have happened if the crisis ended. Unfortunately he did not live to see the cure, and it isn’t certain if we will too. The virus was a fast spreading one, similar to the imagery of a slithering snake. By using a snake, he is also able to show that an animal that is apart of a lot of people’s phobias as the illness that he is afraid of. He often wrote about how he was terrifying of being afflicted, and justifiably so. The illness seems so small when one doesn’t have any formal exposure or knowledge to it. Many of us have the privilege of treating it as an afterthought, when it was a reality for a larger amount of people than thought of. 

Harings fears on the AIDS crisis had a more direct representation in his untitled work in his Apocalypse series. The screenprint has two of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa spaced evenly from each other, with a phallic shaped explosion with “devil sperm” (as he called it) were shooting out the sides on a screaming cartoon crowd. He thought that God was punishing homosexuals for sinning, which is why the AIDS crisis even existed within the LGBTQ+ community rather than a heterosexual one. His thoughts were influenced by the neglect of the government in the time of dire need. His advocacy for the crisis is what made him so important to a lot of people who were concerned for the outcome of this epidemic.

His involvement in the advocacy of education for the AIDS crisis was one that held a lot of cultural significance because of his status as a celebrity at the time. He was well known in the New York art scene, and became well loved amongst the pop stars of the time such as Madonna and Grace Jones. He believed it all attributed to his incredible luck and faith, he seemed to believe in the law of attraction in the basis of how he met the celebrities. He stated in his book, “This incredible “coincidence” made me aware that I was, again in tune with the universe and whatever “destiny” that collides people’s lives together was still at work and I am still “on target”’, which further highlights his belief that he was placed on this earth for a reason. His religion comes into play again, because he believed that his belief in God reprogrammed himself to become “somebody”, to be a famous and influential person.

The AIDS crisis was a long and messy ordeal, with the lack of government funding essentially creating a contemporary era genocide on American soil. The ill known crisis furthers the point that Keith Haring was attempting to illustrate in his AIDS advocacy works: Silence = Death. His efforts in creating a foundation that educates the masses on the illness as well as funds research, is one that is still in function today and one that makes significant difference. Keith Haring’s legacy will not be forgotten, as his works have assimilated into contemporary culture a whole, signifying that he is here to stay. The appropriation of his works into shirts, posters, mugs, hats, etc. always have the catch that a portion of the proceeds of the item sold will go to his foundation, signifying that his estate isn’t advocating for the progression of their wealth but of one that will benefit the masses. Haring spent his career being as selfless as one could be in a time of dismay. His bright colored works and cheery characters will be one's that are visually appealing to a person's eye, yet completely appealing to the advocacy for AIDS he spend his career doing. It is unfortunate to read about a crisis that destroyed many people's lives, those directly affected by it and not, it is undeniable to see what kind of impact it brought to contemporary American culture. Keith Haring powerful stance against the crisis in a time where no one wanted to listen, is one that will never be forgotten and will be cherished by he many people he had helped in his time on earth.