Alexis Danzig

45 Pages·2013·0.21 MB·English

by  Deborah Chow

A PROGRAM OF
MIX – THE NEW YORK LESBIAN &
GAY EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL
Interviewee: Alexis Danzig

Interview Number: 117

Interviewer: Sarah Schulman

Date of Interview: May 1, 2010
© 2013 The New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival, Inc.
ACT UP Oral History Project 1
Interview of Alexis Danzig
May 1, 2010

SARAH SCHULMAN: So we start out, you say your name, your
age, today’s date, and where we are.
ALEXIS DANZIG: You think I can remember this?
SS: Yes.
AD: Okay. I’m Alexis Danzig. I’m 49. It’s May 1st, 2010. And
where are we?
SS: We’re in your brand-new apartment –
AD: Yes we are.
SS: – in Harlem.
AD: Yes. Four Mount Morris Park West.
SS: Okay. Great. And so Alexis, you are a native New Yorker.
AD: I am – despite the fact that I was born in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, I claim to be a native New Yorker.
SS: Okay, but you were educated here.
AD: Oh yes.
SS: And what schools did you go to?
AD: I went to P.S. 75, on the Upper West Side; I went to I.S. 70, in
Chelsea, because they needed white middle-class kids down there; I went to
Music and Art High School; and then I dropped out, and I went to City College
for a year before going back to the university town of my birth, Ann Arbor,
Michigan.
Alexis Danzig Interview 2
May 1, 2010
SS: So you’re like a true New Yorker; total product of the
public school system.
AD: Absolutely. And I went to CUNY Law School, which is also
part of the City College system.
SS: And your son is now going to the same school that you
went to –
AD: Yes.
SS: – 75.
AD: God forbid he also goes to law school, but yes.
SS: Okay. And your parents; were they politically active, in
your youth?
AD: Yes, I would say that they were more – active through the
Zeitgeist. They were not, I was not a red-diaper baby, contrary to popular
opinion. My parents belonged to food co-ops and babysitting co-ops, and they
went out with garbage bags and they cleaned up Riverside Park. My dad was in
ROTC — and he was a dove — but he showed up, he shaved off his beard every
year, so that he could take part in Air Force exercises with ROTC. But my mom
was very politically active, in terms of peace marches on the Upper West Side,
and being involved as a mom and a parent in New York City.
SS: Now was your father in the military?
Alexis Danzig Interview 3
May 1, 2010
AD: My father was a New York City college teacher, but he was in
the Air Force. He remained in the Air Force. He had taught geography to French
cadets during the Korean conflict, and found homes for them during Christmas,
the Christmas that they were stationed in Texas. And they all died. And that was
pretty much his only foray – that was as close as he got to the military, in terms
of, he never saw any active duty.
SS: Now where were they both born, your parents?
AD: My dad was born in Brooklyn; my mom was born in
Liverpool, England, at home. They feared for her life. They need not have, but
they did, at the time. My dad was born in ’31, and my mom was born in ’34.
SS: And how did they meet?
AD: They met in Paris. My dad was studying on the GI Bill, and
my mom was in a year at the Sorbonne. She had a scholarship there. And they
were both having a great time – Paris in the ’50s – nothing to do, nothing to eat,
but they had a lot of fun.
SS: So they were both intellectuals.
AD: We didn’t get The New Yorker at home. I – on the cusp of, I
would say. I don’t – they read a lot. Our house was filled with books. But they
weren’t – they were liberals, they weren’t progressives.
SS: What would you say were the values that you were raised
with about community and social justice?
Alexis Danzig Interview 4
May 1, 2010
AD: Participation. My mom moved to the United States to get
Tape I
away from being modern Orthodox, in England. And she never lost the sense that
00:05:00
you belong to a community. She didn’t like tribal Jewish politics. She didn’t like
belonging to a community that was hallmarked by hypocrisy. But she was
delighted to move to New York, and become a New Yorker, and participate in
local-level politics. She had already done politically active work in London; she
had demonstrated against apartheid, and done a lot of different things around
conscience in London.
My father was not the same way. He was, he was more
underground. He was queer, he was gay. So his politics were something that he
lived, but couldn’t really express.
SS: Now was he openly gay in your family, or did he have a
secret gay life?
AD: He had a secret gay life.
SS: Okay.
AD: He came out, and moved out, when I was 13 – 12½, 13. It
was about 1974, so gay liberation had just happened, and he was riding that. And
it was very good for him. It was wonderful.
SS: But he stayed in New York?
AD: He stayed in New York. He moved in with his lover, who had
been his best friend, who he’d been seeing while my parents were married. My
Alexis Danzig Interview 5
May 1, 2010
father had a very busy sex life. And they lived just a couple blocks down from us.
So my brother and I would go over there for dinner, and see them on the
weekends.
SS: And do you feel that you had a comfortable relationship
with them, at that point?
AD: Yeah, I would have said I had a very comfortable relationship,
when he came out. As I got older, I began to have more questions about the way
that he lived his life and his choices and – I also had a lot of comparisons to make
with my own life. And like a lot of parents, he came up short when I was 18.
SS: Do you want to say anything about that?
AD: My dad, I think, was very comfortable being gay in private,
and having a public life which was about being publicly recognized, having a kind
of semi-public persona as a college professor; and he was very conservative, in
fact, for a gay person. And I was not. I was much more questioning. And we
had some interesting dinnertime conversations.
SS: But when did you first come into the queer community?
AD: I came out into the queer community when I was 21, in
Alaska.
SS: As far away from your father as possible.
AD: Exactly! Exactly. I dropped out of school in my, what would
have been about my junior year. And I left, and went to – I already had a summer
Alexis Danzig Interview 6
May 1, 2010
job outside of Anchorage, working for the National Outdoor Leadership School.
And I just moved into Anchorage. And I had always been really, really curious,
and knew that I liked girls.
So I took myself off to the gay and lesbian community center in
Anchorage, Alaska, and I made myself go to every support group. If there was a
support group, and it was about alcohol, I went to it. If it was a support group
about bread-baking, I went to it, just to find community. And I found a wonderful
community. It was a strange community, in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1983; but it
was a wonderful community.
SS: So what made you come back to New York?
AD: I decided that I wanted to go to art school, and I decided that
Anchorage, Alaska was not the right place to go to art school, if one came from
New York City. So I was – very opinionated about where I should go, as a
dropout. And I came back to New York, and I started working in a bookstore and
going to school at night. And my father, who I had stopped talking to, said, if you
want to go back to school full-time, I’ll send you. And that began a long career.
It took me about 10 years to get my BFA.
SS: So that’s when you went back to Ann Arbor?
AD: No; that’s when I went to school at School of Visual Arts.
SS: Oh, okay.
Alexis Danzig Interview 7
May 1, 2010
AD: And it was during that period that my dad and I lived in Paris;
Tape I
but not together. He was there for a year. And that was when – I found out that
00:10:00
he had HIV, that he had AIDS.
SS: So that was 1984.
AD: That was ’87.
SS: Eighty-seven.
AD: Yes.
SS: Okay, so you came out in a community — Alaska — very
far away from the AIDS crisis, at that time.
AD: Yes, exactly.
SS: And then you came back to New York; it was the height of
the AIDS crisis.
AD: Yes.
SS: Now, did you know other people who were HIV-positive,
before your father came out to you?
AD: No.
SS: And were you concerned about him, on those terms? Were
you wondering?
AD: I was really compartmentalized. I had a very contentious
intellectual relationship with my father at that point. And we did a lot of arguing
about a lot of things, that were, at the time, were very valuable to me.
Alexis Danzig Interview 8
May 1, 2010
I’ll try to put it in some perspective. I was so angry about
museums and imperialism that I never went to the Louvre the entire year that I
lived in Paris. I was pretty set in my ways. And this is very much in opposition
to my dad, who was equally set in his own ways.
And I remember the first indication, really, that HIV had, the AIDS
crisis had in my own consciousness was reading a very careful list that had been
written in pencil, in my father’s handwriting, on an index card, on his mantelpiece
in his apartment in Paris, in the Marais, which was — in retrospect, I realized — a
list of his symptoms. And that was – it still didn’t really penetrate my
consciousness, I think mostly because I didn’t want it to.
SS: Now was he in France for treatment? Because I think this
was the era where people were running to France, right?
AD: No.
SS: No?
AD: He was in France – because he knew he was dying. And he
wanted — but he didn’t know how quickly — and he wanted to have the
experience of living in France. And he organized, with a friend of his who was on
the faculty of the Sorbonne, at Paris Huit, to have an exchange professorship.
And so my dad, who was an English professor, who taught mostly, “Help! Help! I
can’t write a thesis,” was in Paris to teach American history, which he could also
teach, which was great. And I lived about as far away from him as possible, and
Alexis Danzig Interview 9
May 1, 2010
we saw each other occasionally. And it was great. I’m glad that we had even that
contact. Because as soon as he was public about having AIDS, within the family,
things got much more tenuous and much more complicated between he and I.
SS: Now were you involved, did you start to become involved
in the AIDS world through your father? Were you following what kind of
treatments he was getting, or –
AD: My stepfather — the man who my father was partnered with
— and my father were very scared and reluctant to keep the rest of the family
informed. I think there were a lot of dinnertime conversations with their friends,
many of whom were already diagnosed and dying. But I got very little
information. I was really treated like someone who was outside the inner circle.
And it set the tenor for the relationship for the next two years. And it also
distorted my relationship to information. I, in the way that my father was
rejecting me, I didn’t want to know about it.
And as my father got more and more ill, I took on a role of
managing this information for myself, and for my own community, which was not
a queer community, but which was a community of art students. And very
slowly, I began to be the person that people came to — mostly straight people,
mostly art students — to talk to about HIV and safer sex. And that was, I
remember that being the hallmark of my senior year. Getting my projects done,
and talking to people about condoms.