A few months ago I wrote a lengthy piece about Visual AIDS’s latest broadside PLAY SMART. After some feedback from a friend I edited it down to be a more suitable, shorter, blog length. What was published was a focused critique regarding issues of representation within PLAY SMART. What I edited out was nuances, and questions about context, the complexity of creating a campaign for unknown audiences and praise for past Visual AIDS broadsides which I compared to PLAY SMART.
I made a mistake in editing the piece. Too much was lost, the piece came across as confrontational rather than promoting conversation, gone was the opportunity to discuss the difficulty in making and disseminating gay men’s health promotion to an interested and under-served global audience and missing was a chance to consider the need for context when judging a campaign.
Upon reading the first draft I realize I edited out an important section where Amy Sadao, Executive Director of Visual AIDS speaks at greater length about the impetus of the PLAY SAFE campaign beyond what I included in the shorter piece. She mentions the impact of eight years of Bush and states that PLAY SAFE was one of Visual AIDS’ first explicitly sexy campaigns – a point I failed to fully grasp. What does it mean to be able to do a sexy campaign after years of feeling oppressed?
Related, Nelson Santos in a conversation I had with him regarding PLAY SAFE, felt as though it was also the first campaign in a long time to target gay men that may have been left out in the past decade due to the need to focus on specific under-served communities. For me I take this now to mean – what about the Chelsea boys? The gym bunnies and middle class gay men well served by the market place and culture in general but perhaps because of their privilege are forgotten by health and real wellness providers. What about the gay men who are now entering a new stage of life and maybe need to be reminded of safer sex messages and learn about new developments? What about the gay men who have left the AIDS community because a place they once felt so at home at – now seems to have no room for them? PLAY SMART falls in the tradition of Visual AIDS reaching out, commissioning and creating work to speak to a specific community. It just so happens that the community is one that is very dominate, often at the cost of other communities. One of the obstacles in all community work is to remember the diversity within diversity.
By not fully including Sadao and Santos’ points I replicated the problem of the Internet – removing context. It is impossible to think that Visual AIDS should be able to create a broadside that responds to all the diverse and possibly conflicting needs of gay men everywhere. Nor were they trying to. The Internet , and maybe even Visual AIDS’s warranted excitement, made what I can now see as a community specific broadside into a campaign with international reach, stretched beyond the broadside’s capabilities. I did the campaign no favours by failing to see the scope while focusing on only one important- yet ultimately singular- aspect of the campaign.
Issues of representation are important. The tyranny of the white fit body in gay male culture is a real factor in gay men’s health and undermines a lot of the good we may be trying to do. It is something that should be discussed and considered in our work. I did not fail by bringing up the subject. I failed when I did not include as much context to the PLAY SMART broadside as I could have. Visual AIDS is a small, hard working arts organization that is committed to using art to create awareness and opportunities around HIV and AIDS. While we should hold people and organizations within our communities responsible for their actions – and I say this to myself – it is also wise to view their choices within larger contexts and provide those bigger pictures to each other so that we can grow and evaluate and grow some more together.
What do you think of the PLAY SMART campaign?
Does it work for you?
Where do you think I missed the point? Or have I still?
To read the original unedited draft of the piece, please click here.
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