By Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr
From Mykki Blanco and Oliver Sim´s 2022 songs about living with HIV to the CDC´s 1981 report about Pneumocystis Pneumonia and everything both in between and since, there is an inescapable relationship between HIV/AIDS and the written word. Last year we added our voice—or rather, voices—into the mix with the publication of a new co-authored book, We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke 2022).
The ”we” is activist videomaker and distinguished professor Alexandra Juhasz and writer and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr. We have been writing about AIDS together since 2013, publishing anthology chapters, online articles, and scholarly and activist criticism. Our book comprises thirteen short conversations about HIV, history, media, and community, as rooted in objects of cultural production and our own changing experiences.
In the book, we share many things: three separate yet connected timelines of AIDS that provide perspectives and orientations to cultural histories of the crisis; insight into the word trigger, especially how it was connected to early activist video, and how this compares to its use now in academic and internet settings; and the pervasive and complex role that silence plays throughout the epidemic.
But one thing that the published version of the book doesn’t include is a close look into our process of writing together. Below, shared for the first time in print, we attempt to explain how we co-wrote hundreds of pages—a whole book—and stayed friends! We offer tips for writing with a partner by sharing some of our experiences in collaboration and conversation.
SOMETHING HAS TO SPARK/SOMEONE HAS TO START
The first section of the book is grounded by a late 1980s/early 1990s videotape made by women in the Philadelphia-based organization Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues, now known as BEBASHI. To write about the tape, we watched it together and individually multiple times, and then, before we wrote a single word, we talked. We shared our thoughts, knowledge, and reactions to the tape in person. We did not record this. Instead, afterwards, Ted took to his laptop and wrote one version of that conversation—writing dialogue for both Alex and Ted—from memory, yes, but also launching forward, working through what he had not yet been able to articulate, what he might not have known, in response to what we had already processed together. He would then send this draft to Alex, who would dive in, deleting and editing the words attributed to her, giving new words to Ted, or sometimes leaving blanks where she couldn’t imagine what the real Ted would say to her. She would also add ideas and insights that had come to her through the process (from the conversation and then drafts of the writing of that encounter). They would volley the draft back and forth a few times until it felt right to move on to the next chapter. Rigorous editing would come later.
Before we could make any grand point about AIDS or related culture, we needed to share in the experience of witness and absorption, learning and thinking alongside one another. Conversation.
This method was never meant to fully capture the first conversation. Nor did we think that by one person doing the first draft, the other would be spared any heavy lifting. Instead, it was our way of writing that emerged organically and felt good. We Are Having this Conversation Now suggests that conversation is one critical feminist tool for AIDS activism, memorial, and building knowledge and power across time and difference. We learned this theoretical insight through our process: what we needed to learn, be seen, and engage ethically with objects that we encountered from different perspectives in time, place, or community. Before we could make any grand point about AIDS or related culture, we needed to share in the experience of witness and absorption, learning and thinking alongside one another. Conversation. We wanted to hear the other’s perspectives, what our friend saw, felt, and thought about when engaged with AIDS cultural consumption and production. That allowed for a building analysis that started with our co-authorship but opened up into the world.
EDITING IS A LOVE LANGUAGE
Ted can’t spell. Alex loves multi-clause sentences. Together we edited, suggested, and pushed back. Critically. With love. Throughout the process. It made the book better.
PROCESS YOUR PROCESS
The chapter, “Silence+Object,” lays the groundwork for our thinking on the vast complexity and definitive unknowability of silence. We reworked and rewrote that chapter countless times. The final version that appears in the book was the result of our most charged period of writing together. We fought. For real.
Why did we fight? Ted had rewritten an already agreed upon and edited version of “Silence+Object.” Alex let out a whoop of dissatisfaction when she began her task, to refine and finish that chapter. Where had the previous version gone?! Ted denied rewriting, having convinced himself it was just a major edit. But we learned that all this was more than that.
We are not sure how other writing duos would have handled this. We processed. Alex vented. Ted listened. Ted came to see what he did wrong and explained how important the section was to him, and how he disassociated when he rewrote it. Alex listened. Together, now, we can see that the tensions we were having interpersonally about the chapter echo many things we were writing about: aspects of the generational rift represented more broadly in the story of AIDS; the differences in our personalities, and even histories. Both of us felt unheard, unseen, even as we were writing ourselves on the page and talking all the time! Alex was tired of telling her story and feeling alone in her vulnerability, and she thought maybe Ted was afraid to let the book go. Meanwhile, Ted was unsure of what power or right he had to work out his thoughts and frustrations and thought Alex worked too fast.
We learned that when you write with someone you have to process your process along the way, or run the risk of finishing not only your book, but your friendship.
After a healing ritual, we brought these truths to the page, as well as evidence of the fight itself (in words and an image). And then we edited, again, the chapter that Ted rewrote. We learned that when you write with someone you have to process your process along the way, or run the risk of finishing not only your book, but your friendship.
IT’S OK IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY
In the chapter described above, there were moments when no words could stand in for the emotions or space between us. In those cases, we simply wrote out: “pause.”
TAKE FEEDBACK, BUT NOT ALL OF IT
Readers have told us that they love that “pause.” This feedback has felt really good. We found a writerly method that somehow worked to say what might have been unclear until then: our process of cross-generational interaction, years of working together, and our two strong personalities, created moments rife with affect— love, anger, hope, fear, care—hard to verbalize, and even harder to share beyond the two of us.
Of course, we always knew we were writing in these new and inventive ways for an academic press. We hoped for readers from the broadest AIDS communities, but during the “peer review” phase, it is people from your field(s) who are tasked with offering their opinions on whether your book should be published. As part of this process, feedback is offered about how to improve your book. Peer review is amazing. Smart and intellectually aligned anonymous professionals offer you advice. And yes, okay, sometimes the feedback can be petty, confusing, or misinformed. Other times, it’s brilliant and generous. For us, the feedback was always illuminating, letting us know how these readers were perceiving and positioning our work.
But to be clear, it sometimes took many conversations to move from being hurt or annoyed to being illuminated. Some of the feedback to our book seemed to draw out the monograph our reader would have wanted to write; other times we got drawn into the necessary yet frustrating dramas around current cultural and academic sensitivities around language.
But sometimes having to explain why you are not doing something helps you see more clearly why you have done another thing that you need. In this back and forth we learned to name our core commitments.
After talking it through, not all feedback was incorporated in the final draft of the book. Sometimes we learned the most from hurt feelings or moments of “what the fuck!” There were times when we had to decide not to accept suggestions, and then carefully communicate this choice back to the press. This cycle went on for a few years! But sometimes having to explain why you are not doing something helps you see more clearly why you have done another thing that you need. In this back and forth we learned to name our core commitments.
KNOW WHEN TO STOP
The conclusion of the book includes the term AIDS [crisis] NORMALIZATION which itself was a function of a new pandemic that interlaced with the one we know best. As we were writing the last chapter, we realized that we could spend another year (or lifetime) thinking and writing about what was happening to AIDS inside and alongside COVID, and how this is part of what creates the new time of AIDS cultural production we are living in. But we also knew that for the sake of other work commitments, and our own wellness and friendship, we had to wrap it up. So, instead of trying to conquer the idea, our conclusion lets our reader know that we are still thinking about what NORMALIZATION means, now.
Making this decision was easier together than it might have been alone. One thing that Alex was good at saying throughout the process: we can always write another book. And, as Ted learned, it was okay to be less precious and concerned with trying to get all of our thoughts into any one conversation. Because look: we are having another one already here, and it reflects new understandings of what we published only last year.
WRITING IS ALWAYS COLLECTIVE
At the end of the book, we offer one last timeline: a chronological list of AIDS-related media that we feel had crossed the transom of our lived and minds, creating the deep and communal context of AIDS work in which our own is situated. It serves as our bibliography and mediagraphy, responding in a form of our invention to address our shared anxiety around citation in work done in conversation and community: Where to start a list of references, where to stop? What if we miss someone or something? Can’t any idea we’ve ever had be traced back to something we’ve read, seen, or heard? How do we account for that?
The timeline is indicative of our belief that whether you are writing by yourself, with one other person, or a team, you are never writing alone.
The timeline is indicative of our belief that whether you are writing by yourself, with one other person, or a team, you are never writing alone. You are always in conversation: with all that you have read, seen, heard, felt, or watched, and with those with whom you have so engaged. Since we know we can’t collect, remember, or put into print all of that, we invite readers to think about the titles of their own beloved AIDS work and to know that their knowledge is part of the context in which we write.
BE GENEROUS
Both of us are nice; we want to be liked, and we like people. So, that made writing together easy. We allowed the other to blow past self-imposed deadlines, fail to use spell check, or sit out a writing session. We were clear and effusive with our praise.
But also, and maybe most importantly, our process involved being generous with the reader by inviting your inclusion in the conversation. We know the thrill of thinking and writing together because we did it. We want you to understand some aspects of the complexity and beauty of thinking with others. So, at the end of each chapter (and in the third timeline) we provide resources and prompts to the reader, in the hopes that at the very least, they feel in conversation with us, and—ideally—they use these prompts to engage with them.
When it comes to writing, we lose nothing when we are generous with our ideas. And we hope that readers and fellow writers and thinkers will be generous with others in return.
