Giddyup, artists, there's no time to waste

In Tucson, the last part of Mexico to become part of the US, the University of Arizona invited Andy to give last night’s Arts graduation speech. His Spanish is halfway decent.

Andiliano Bichlbauma claims the throne while Dean Hasan Elahi looks on

¡Felicidades, amigues!

Congratulations on your diplomas… but yikes, que mierda de tiempo para graduar.

Or, for us latecomers, “Oh fuck.”

You’re entering a national Jenga game where bigger and bigger blocks are being removed, and no one knows what’ll happen. That’s not to mention this whole fascism thing, which never works out well for anyone.

But hey, at least you’re graduating in the Arts. If you were in a more “sensible” field, you might be expecting stability!

And you’re actually lucky to be in the Arts, because you have something that other fields don’t: a tried and true way to plug into our culture and change it. And that’s the absolute best thing you can do right now — not only for the world, but for you.

When I was growing up in San Francisco, a tender thirty-year-old with a fresh diploma in the lucrative art of experimental fiction, a couple big new things shaped my life.

One was the trade I picked up — er, the skills — because I did after all have to make money. Learning how to program computers, still a valuable skill at that time, had a huge effect on my “practice” and life.

Even more important was the movement, in full swing by the time I got to SF, that ended up saving millions of lives, and shaping mine.

When I got to SF, AIDS had been rampaging through my community for over a decade. I personally met dozens of people around my age who one day were with us, and then one day not. You’d start getting to know someone… and then one day you couldn’t.

I don’t know how those of us who didn’t get sick made it through without going crazy.

Researchers were trying to find some kind of treatment, but government funding was slow. Even a quarter century after gay lib, many powerful people were only too happy to see gay men die.

The first response of gay activists was to appeal to human decency. That didn’t work in the slightest. Then artists got into the game. ACT-UP, which was started and led by artists and writers, shut down the New York stock exchange, interrupted live national broadcasts, stopped cities and churches with die-ins, carried coffins through the streets of New York, and threw human ashes onto the White House lawn. Several times they occupied the FDA and CDC for failing to do their jobs. Once, they enveloped a senator’s house with a condom!

ACT-UP’s hundreds of protests were well designed to spread rage, and they did. Many thousands joined up with the radical, no-holds-barred tactics. And then, by adapting as only artists know how, ACT-UP members were soon working inside government agencies to help them to do things right. Within a few years, triple combination therapy was developed and made available quickly, first to the people who needed it most, and then to everyone. Today we call it PrEP, or Truvada.

Besides saving millions of lives, ACT-UP also shaped me and my life’s work, though it took me a while to realize how deeply. Among other things, it showed me that art can make a huge difference when it’s part of a movement, not just an individual thing. I doubt I’ve saved any lives, but I’ve tried my damnedest to work closely with activist groups in order to have an effect.

Today, just like back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, our friends and neighbors are dying. By the thousands they’re being abducted and disappeared, and the government’s utter criminality is every bit as horrifying as the government’s indifference was back then. For many of us today as back then, there’s an almost unthinkable threat to everything earlier generations fought for and won, and that we all have taken for granted.

But the “we” is bigger this time, and the stakes are as well. This time, there’s a chance for artists to not only save lives, but to change everything.

Thirty-two years ago, in southern Mexico, a group of Mayans called Zapatistas used a whole slew of creative performances to launch what became a global revolt against neoliberalism, the ideology that corporations should be allowed to do pretty much whatever they like.

That awful idea eventually led to a political horror show we could call The Orange Pandemic. When that show was in its first season, around 2018, I heard a great writer/activist named George Lakey describe the times we were in as a forge getting hotter and hotter. While others decried the country’s rapidly growing polarization, he saw it as an opportunity — because polarization is heat, and as those of you who do metalworking might know, in a red-hot forge you can rework metal that’s otherwise solid, and turn it into nice things.

Today, the neoliberalism that the Zapatistas rose up against, and that has brought us to fascism, is at long last melting, and in this furnace we’re starting to see new things being forged… like in New York City, where a brilliant musician and organizer is taking charge of a city led for decades by spineless bureaucrats.

In fact there’s so much going on locally everywhere, that wherever you’re headed next, you’ll be able to find exciting political work to plug into. If you’re staying in Tucson, I can get you involved in one project — and there are at least fifty more here that are equally cool.

Creative work is critically important in times like these — at least when it’s part of a movement, since it’s only in movements that real change happens.

But there’s another compelling reason to apply your talents to political change. It’s not just that the movement needs you; you need the movement.

As the great Francis Fox Piven has said, activist work “has everything to do with comradeship and friendship…” and she talks about how profoundly satisfying it is to “be part of the social world in which you live and try to make some imprint on it…”

And concretely, Alex Chee, a wonderful writer who was also forged by ACT-UP in early ‘90s SF, recently wrote:

If you’re just now graduating into this hellish new world, and you don’t yet have a network, then finding your way into political activism, or working for a campaign, can give you one. You’ll make friends who will see your value in real time; that sort of community offers what the status quo can never provide.

He goes on to note that the jobs he got out of college were through the activist networks he was part of — and I’m sure those jobs were more interesting than the ones he’d have found through conventional means.

Figuring out how to join up with others to make needed change will put you in truly excellent company, and will help you to find lifelong community, artistic and otherwise.

It’s going to be a very interesting few years, during which huge changes will happen, and it’s going to be a great privilege to be part of making those changes a good thing.

All of you have evident and recognized talent, and a great education under your belt. Right now — I mean this minute — is the time to zoom in as deeply as you can to your passion, and to think and feel through what you want… for the world and for yourself.

When a Jenga tower collapses, the blocks are there for the artists to play with — and that’s what we do best. I’m really convinced that we’re more likely now than ever before, in any of our lifetimes at least, to effect real change in the world. It’ll take a shit-ton of work, but it’ll be the joyous shit-ton that all of us dream of doing.

So ¡adelante, amigues! For us latecomers, that means “giddyup.” The timer has started.