AIDS and video in Montreal (1984-1990): Stuart Marshall’s Journal of the Plague Year (After Daniel Defoe), 1984

Conal McStravick

Journal of the Plague Year (After Daniel Defoe) (1984) is one of a suite of highly influential AIDS activist video works made by the UK artist, activist, writer, educator, curator, and arts and AIDS community organizer Stuart Marshall. Born in Manchester, England, in 1949, Marshall died in London in 1993, of an AIDS-related illness.[1]

Journal was exhibited as part of Vidéo 84, in Montreal, at the artist-run centre Galerie Optica. Its exhibition trajectory continued over three decades, with the work being re-exhibited in Montreal, London, and New York in 1984–85, in Oxford in 1990, in Leeds in 1991 and at Ferme du Buisson, near Paris in 1993 and, finally, once more in London in 2016. Vidéo 84—also known as Rencontres Vidéo Internationales de Montréal—organized by Andrée Duchaîne, comprised an exhibition of eighteen international artists from eleven countries across eight Montreal galleries and arts venues. The exhibition included artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Mary Lucier, the Dutch artist Servaas, and General Idea. It was accompanied by a symposium organized by art historian René Payant.

Writing in AIDS TV, the key survey of US and, in particular, New York AIDS-activist video of the period, Alexandra Juhasz cites Marshall’s AIDS video oeuvre as foundational in establishing an “alternative AIDS media.”[2] More recently, Roger Hallas examines how Marshall and the AIDS moving image archive have the capacity to “bear witness” to the histories, cultures, and politics of AIDS, then and now.[3] Aimar Arriola suggests, further, that Marshall’s expanded “queer archive” reactivates past struggles in the present and for the future, and quotes Marshall as remarking that “AIDS offers the possibilities to build alliances that do not yet exist.”[4]

First, what was Journal of the Plague Year, and how did it come to appear in Montreal?

Journal of the Plague Year is a completely silent installation—a notable occlusion for Marshall, who was trained as a sound artist and musician. Marshall’s sound and video milieu emerged out of a transatlantic education, beginning at Hornsey College of Art, in London, where he took part in a 1968 student sit-in. Later, at the Newport College of Art, in Wales, and at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, Marshall came into the sphere of influence of certain vanguard musicians such as Gavin Bryars and, ultimately, would become a favoured student of Alvin Lucier, at Wesleyan. Marshall’s was a sound milieu in a post-Cageian mould, in which silence was both material and political.[5]

In Journal, on an imposing eight-metre wall, some partitions, which recall those that separate the urinals in public washrooms, frame several sunken video monitors. Within each partition, and surrounding each twelve-inch monitor screen, is the enlarged text of a quotation on the subject of AIDS and its wider context. Expanding from the earlier Kaposi’s Sarcoma: A Plague and Its Symptoms (1983), the various quotations are sourced from historical, medical, media, and graffiti sources, and reproduced in newspaper type fonts or as handwritten texts. Each was chosen to illuminate the content and context of the corresponding video.[6]

The work’s title is derived from author and journalist Daniel Defoe’s 1722 book of the same name, which Defoe styled as a first-person eyewitness account of the Great Plague of 1665–66, in London and its environs. Marshall would later explain:

The expression “The Gay Plague” was formulated during the first two waves of homophobic AIDS reporting in the English tabloid press in 1983 and 1984. As a response to this disgusting journalism I made a work which spoke about the experience of AIDS from within the gay community and in order to emphasize this insider’s view I titled the work after Daniel Defoe’s account of the Black Death.[7]

Surviving documentation of Marshall’s installation taken at Vidéo 84[8] offers a historical frame of reference for contextualizing the media representation of AIDS as a kind of “history of the present,”[9] to borrow Michel Foucault’s concept. The videos reveal three broadly contemporary and three historic settings: “Paris, 1979,” “London, 1984,” and “England, 1984” as well as “Flossenbürg, 1983,” “Nuremberg, 1983,” and “Berlin, 1933.”

Marshall’s spare, locked-off video shifts abruptly to a handheld camera roaming amidst a chic, empty apartment—no doubt Marshall’s own—figuring “Paris, 1979.” In “London, 1984,” viewed from both sides, we see a young, white, man sleeping. His appearance, , possesses the archetypal “clone” look of the London gay scene of the early to mid-1980s. The framing of the figure is intimate, and, in fact, the sleeping man is Marshall’s boyfriend Steve.[10]

In a review of the German New Wave classic Taxi Zum Klo (1980) by Frank Ripploh, which translates roughly as “Taxi to the Loos,” Marshall acknowledges the

different forms of non-monogamous emotional and sexual relationships gay men are attempting in order to best suit their needs, or of the complex and difficult political analyses they are attempting of those areas of experience that patriarchal heterosexism has termed “personal.”[11]

In clear contrast, on Marshall’s “England, 1984” video monitor is a montage of phobic tabloid headlines about AIDS—indications of an increasingly homophobic and punitive public sphere delineated by compulsory patriarchal heterosexuality. In 1990, as though to affirm this, Marshall described the work as counterposing “representations derived from both the public and private sphere to demonstrate the struggle to determine the meanings of homosexuality.”[12]

As such, Marshall’s analysis hovers over the contradiction embedded in the decriminalization of sex between men in England and Canada enshrined, in the former case, in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act,[13] and similarly, in the latter, in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1969.[14] At the time, these legislations ruled that sex was only legal if it happened in private and between two individuals over the age of 21. Marshall’s washroom architecture points to other arenas and battlegrounds of gay male sexuality and MSM sex: places and people supposedly liberated, yet noticeably vulnerable to police surveillance, entrapment, and criminalization.

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For Journal of the Plague Year, Marshall juxtaposed the formal innovations of video installation works—such as Beryl Korot’s four-channel video installation Dachau, 1974,[15] a multi-screen presentation that Korot herself filmed at the former German concentration camp—with his own collage of found texts and original films and videos.

Three further, historical settings—“Flossenbürg, 1983,” “Nuremberg, 1983,” and “Berlin, 1933,” all of them shot, in the present, on Super-8 film—relate directly to Germany in 1933, the year in which the Nazis came to power. These settings include images of the quarries at the former Flossenbürg concentration camp and the ruins of the Nazi parade ground at Nuremberg—the latter built of granite quarried at Flossenbürg using forced labour, including that of “pink triangle” homosexual prisoners.

In the final screen, titled “Berlin, 1933,” a burning pyre of books, images, and photos represents the research library and archives of the German sexologist and sexual reform campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld, destroyed in a night-time raid on Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexology followed by a Nazi book-burning spectacle in the Berlin Opera Square. Against the contemporary context of calls to censor AIDS literature, or, worse still, threats of quarantine or imprisonment for PWAs (people with AIDS), Marshall’s diegesis establishes a link between the destruction of Hirschfeld’s sexology archive and library, and the imprisonment and forced labour suffered by homosexuals in Nazi Germany.

In 1984–85, 1990-1991, 1994, and 2016, Journal of the Plague Year was exhibited in the UK, France, and North America. In its first year, it was exhibited, in quick succession, at Vidéo 84 in Montreal; at Cross Currents, Royal College of Art, London; and in single-screen format as part of the exhibition Difference: On Representation & Sexuality, New Museum, New York.

Meanwhile, Marshall continued to adapt the textual content. In the 1984 version, a graffiti text framing the “London, 1984” sleeping-man monitor reads “AIDS KILLS QUEERS.” In the 1990 and subsequent versions—leaving little to the imagination—this became: “AIDS: ARSE INJECTED DEATH SENTENCE.”

A more ambiguous text frames the “Paris, 1979” vignette: “It has now been two weeks and three days. His mother continues to try to enter the apartment. She threatens to call the police.” The “England, 1984” tabloid headlines are contrasted with a medical report: “Kaposi’s Sarcoma: an oncologic looking glass.”

The text for the “Berlin, 1933” monitor states: “This evening, stormtroopers took the contents of the Institute for Sexual Science to the Opera Square and with much celebration they set them alight.” Recalling the history of “pink triangle” homosexuals, the “Flossenbürg, 1983” and “Nuremberg, 1983” monitor texts read:

Eventually, I was taken to Flossenbürg. This is where the stones were dug and prepared for all of Hitler’s major building work. The work of quarrying, dynamiting, hewing and dressing, was extremely dangerous and arduous, and only Jews and homosexuals were assigned to it.

An exhibition text, clearly written by Marshall states: “It has taken over a hundred years for gay men to wrest away from the medical profession the right to define their sexuality. As a result of this most recent ideological articulation of disease and sexuality gay men are losing back to the medical profession the hard-won right to define their own sexuality.”[16]

Notwithstanding the clear and present media homophobia, a claustrophobic sense of growing surveillance and loss of autonomy within the gay community and, worse, the palpable threat of quarantine during the early days of the AIDS crisis, an intense medical gaze pervades the installation, evoking the weight of history and the suppression of past attempts at liberation. And yet, in and of itself, Marshall’s intervention, in its many versions and its forbidding, tactical silence, represents a site of activist cultural resistance against the oppression experienced by all communities impacted by AIDS and the stigma suffered by PWAs.

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Journal of the Plague Year (After Daniel Defoe) was preceded by what was perhaps the first AIDS activist video in the global AIDS video archive: Marshall’s Kaposi’s Sarcoma: A Plague and Its Symptoms, which toured Canada in 1983 as part of a program of independent UK artists’ videos. This was followed by Stuart Marshall’s celebrated television documentary Bright Eyes, broadcast on Channel 4 television in the UK in late 1984, shaping a new kind of AIDS video activism—a signal work in the corpus of international AIDS video.

Journal and Kaposi’s Sarcoma deserve their places as part and parcel of Stuart Marshall’s media interventions during the earliest phase of the AIDS epidemic—at art galleries and in academia, through video art and community video networks, and in interviews on public access and network television. And, last but not least, these works speak to the story, one that is insufficiently told, of how Marshall moved through LGBTQ+ and AIDS art and activist networks in Canada and North America in the period 1983–84, and then continuously, through the 1980s and early 1990s, to become a noted figure in the world of LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS cultural activism in Canada, the UK, and internationally.

In a June 1983 televised interview recorded for Gayblevision, the Vancouver gay-and-lesbian cable television show,[17] we see Marshall filmed at the Video Inn, an artist-run centre in Vancouver. Here the artist is introduced as, “an independent video producer and writer based in London, who is involved in gay politics.”[18] He also discusses his new AIDS-related videotape, Kaposi’s Sarcoma.

On paper, Marshall was the official British representative for the touring program of workshops and screenings of UK artists’ videos mentioned earlier, an initiative funded by the British Council. In the interview, he discusses independent video production in the UK, the limited scope for video and LGBTQ+ content in the UK media, and the early response of the UK gay community to AIDS. Here, the latter part of the title of Kaposi’s Sarcoma is revealed as: A Plague and Its Symptoms. This, as Marshall—usually an unembarrassed Francophile—modestly notes, is “a quote from Artaud.”[19]

This statement is significant, as Marshall was an ardent French Theory-quoting art critic and video theorist, whose practice was embedded in recent UK and North American queer and feminist video. Prior to Journal, Marshall’s video works expanded from performance-to-camera, single-monitor works that referenced recent histories of conceptual and feminist video to works more experimental in form, with professional actors using televisual and agitprop theatre methods. These later works also saw the addition of direct quotations and hybrid scripts, with theoretical texts by Louis Althusser, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Guy Hocquenghem.[20]

As such, Marshall’s theory of video as a “signifying” and “oppositional” medium was founded on a combination of Anglophone—particularly British—left-critical thought and queer media activist intentions, with Francophone cultural theory and criticism. The former catalyzed a demand for an alternative media at the heart of the UK Gay Liberation Manifesto, written in 1971, which identified the media as one of the shibboleths of straight society used to oppress gay people.[21] Marshall cited left-critical British media theory like that of Raymond Williams,[22] Stuart Hall,[23] and the Glasgow Media Group,[24] combining this with Francophone post-structural cultural theory such as Julia Kristeva’s so-called “semanalysis,”[25] which formulated culture at large as a field of semiotic, “signifying,” and psychoanalytically literate interpretation, in a manner that appealed to Marshall’s intellectual and practical methods.

In fact, tellingly, Marshall’s reference to Artaud comes directly from Guy Hocquenghem’s 1972 book Homosexual Desire, in which, speaking of syphilis, Hocquenghem observes:

Syphilis is not just a virus but an ideology too; it forms a fantasy whole, like the plague and its symptoms as Antonin Artaud analyzed them. The basis of syphilis is the phantasy fear of contamination, of a secret parallel advance both by the virus and the libido’s unconscious forces; the homosexual transmits syphilis as he transmits homosexuality.[26]

As Marshall goes on to explain in the interview, these phobic associations were clearly observable in the initial media response to AIDS, setting the stage for a similar but even more morbid signifying chain all too evident in international AIDS coverage. This moral equivalence between gay male promiscuity and death or disease, augmented by an association between gay male promiscuity and AIDS, was later represented by Marshall in his documentary Bright Eyes, through an exacting visual analysis of the homophobic tabloid media coverage of PWAs and AIDS. The repression encountered in this media precedent is mirrored in the medical, sexology-related, and criminal archives—a formula which Cindy Patton later summarized as “homosexuals=AIDS=death.”[27]

Marshall’s developing AIDS activist video project, its archival emphasis, and his conception of video as a signifying medium and, therefore, as a re-signifying practice, presaged Paula Treichler’s incipient conception of AIDS as an “epidemic of signification.”[28]

Although it appears, regrettably, that Kaposi’s Sarcoma is now lost, we may surmise from the precious Gayblevision footage that media analysis in this piece carried over into Marshall’s subsequent works: Journal of the Plague Year and Bright Eyes. With stills of newspaper headlines such as “Cancer, Poppers and Gay Men” and “Are Homosexuals Killing Themselves?” it is easy to concur with Marshall that, “the way that AIDS has been represented by the media is nothing more than a sophisticated form of queer bashing.”[29]

If we look to another parallel text in the Canadian AIDS archive, Marshall’s analysis in his early suite of AIDS works likely owes something to AIDS activist and PWA Michael Lynch’s article “Living with Kaposi’s Sarcoma,” published in 1982 in The Body Politic.[30] Here, Lynch’s portrait of Fred, a man living with AIDS in the form of Kaposi’s sarcoma, combines a historical, critical, and literary analysis, leading Lynch to identify AIDS as “a major setback to what we used to call gay liberation.”[31]

Like Hocquenghem’s texts, this article by Lynch grounds its analysis in the image of the homosexual as seen through an anti-homosexual criminal code, the medical model of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century psychology and sexology, and a countervailing, post-gay-liberation resistance to this pathologization—all themes that Marshall expanded upon in his AIDS activist works through the use of video, within an intertextual framework, to expose these histories and their resonance in the context of AIDS.[32]

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Together with Vincent Bonin, I have reflected on the palpable silence of Montreal art critic and art historian René Payant (1949–1987), who was a contemporary of Stuart Marshall’s. Payant edited the exhibition catalogue for Vidéo 84, published in 1986. Payant was openly gay, and positive, at a time when institutions were still homophobic. Despite writing on Marshall’s exhibition for the catalogue, Payant said but little about its contents. Perhaps this silence—which resonates both throughout Marshall’s silent installation and Payant’s text—acknowledges a space between the naming of a new virus (which we now call HIV) and the articulation of new forms of AIDS activism. Other things were felt, other things were lived in that time—those first years of the AIDS crisis—that remained, and perhaps still remain, unnamable.

In a January 1987 Artforum editorial titled “Esthetics and Loss,” which featured Marshall’s Bright Eyes, Edmund White stated as much:

If art is to confront AIDS more honestly than the media have done, it must begin in tact, avoid humor, and end in anger…. Avoid humor, because humor seems grotesquely inappropriate to the occasion. Humor puts the public (indifferent when not uneasy) on cosy terms with what is an unspeakable scandal: death.[33]

Although White’s pronouncements regarding the affect of AIDS activism were swiftly rebutted by Douglas Crimp, John Greyson, and others, Marshall presented a perhaps more nuanced ethos of silence two years later at the How Do I Look? conference, held at the Anthology Film Archives in New York.[34] There, Marshall delivered a paper, “The Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich,” in which he charted the appropriation, by the modern-day gay movement, of the pink-triangle symbol used to identify homosexual prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.[35]

For Marshall, the then-recent juxtaposition of an inverted pink triangle with the words “Silence=Death” in the Silence=Death/ACT UP poster campaign, although rightly to be lauded for its politics, ran the risk of overwhelming the emerging histories and testimonies of gays and lesbians who had survived the Nazi persecutions[36] and for whom the very opposite proposition—“Silence=Survival”—had arguably been the only means of survival.”[37] Writing more recently, Jack Halberstam has reframed Marshall’s critique of the pink triangle to recontextualize the figure of the gay fascist and other “silences” in queer epistemologies and praxis.[38]

At the time, in the UK and Quebec press, Jez Welsh and Christine Ross, respectively, captured the unique capacity of Journal of the Plague Year to bring together personal and polemical reactions from within the gay community in opposition to the media’s response to AIDS. In Parachute, Ross stated that “the artist’s activity is located between appropriation and architecture…. The installation adopts the form of a newspaper to unveil the anti-homosexual ideology conveyed through the media; and that it does so to challenge the viewer’s habitual media passivity.”[39] Writing for Performance, Welsh described a homophobic media using “disease or fear of disease as social control.”[40]

In his essay for the publication that accompanied the How Do I Look? conference, Marshall reveals his intention for his early AIDS activist video works:

This took the form of a collage of different historical discourses, images and meanings about homosexuality, taxonomy and disease…. A kind of collage, a series of temporal juxtapositions of textual units…. I chose this form because it allowed me to collide different historical episodes in such a way that the viewer would be presented with the problems of assembling their mutual relationships.[41]

Marshall concluded that although he did not intend “to draw a parallel between the AIDS epidemic and the Holocaust,” he nonetheless acknowledged “fears that the international lesbian and gay rights movement might suffer a fate in the 1980s similar to the eventual demise of the German movement in the 1930s, when it was completely destroyed by the Nazis.”[42]

After Journal of the Plague Year, Marshall’s television documentary Bright Eyes assumed greater cultural capital within Marshall’s body of work. It came to be included in major AIDS cultural activist surveys and AIDS video activist compilations, and was re-broadcast on cable television.[43]

In “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” the genre-defining 1987 special issue of the arts journal October, queer art historian and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp designated Bright Eyes as a work at the nexus of “a critical, theoretical and activist alternative to the personal, elegiac expressions that appeared to dominate the art world response to AIDS.” Prompted by Marshall, Crimp affirms that, “AIDS intersects with and requires a critical rethinking of all culture: of language and representation, of science and medicine, of health and illness, of sex and death, of the public and private realms.”[44]

Like Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Journal, Bright Eyes, Marshall’s essayistic, three-part, experimental documentary on the homophobic representation of AIDS in the media (broadcast on December 17^th 1984 on the UK’s Channel 4), exposed the moralizing, pathologizing, and criminalizing subtexts of media images of people with AIDS. In the first two parts, Marshall weaved scenarios pulled from medical dramas, or real-life chat shows and re-enacted these with a small cast of agit-prop theatre and TV actors, expanding the whole into a historical and critical analysis on queerness, taxonomoy and disease. Inspired by both recent queer and feminist film and video methods, gay and lesbian theatre and a forms of critical fabulation increasingly common on British TV throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bright Eyes staged a new kind of AIDS activist intervention within the overall media response.[45] This dramatized sensationalist reports drawn from the recent tabloid press and historical medical journals alike, and juxtaposed these with re-enactments of queer histories relating to the German sexual reform movement, pink-triangle prisoners and police entrapment of gay men in contemporary London. This drew lines of comparison between queer lives past and present and the societal and institutional repression of queer desire in particular. Marshall employed actors in dual or multiple roles and Brechtian distancing techniques to explore AIDS in the context of a “history of the present.” This revealed deeper social prejudices, namely homophobia, misogyny, and coloniality within the institutions at the heart of Enlightenment, and current, thought. In light of the moral panic, then in the public mind, surrounding AIDS reporting, police, customs, and excise raids on lesbian and gay bookshops, and police entrapment in cruising areas, in the third part of the documentary leaders from the HIV/AIDS community, including medics and campaigners, set the record straight on AIDS, the rights of gay men, lesbians, and PWAs, and censorship laws.

In many respects, Marshall’s early trio of AIDS activist video works became a palimpsest for subsequent, more widely viewed LGBTQ+ and AIDS-related television documentary works by Marshall, broadcast as part of Channel 4’s “OUT” series, between 1989 and 1992. These included: Desire: Sexuality in Germany 1910–1945 (1989), Comrades in Arms (1990), Over Our Dead Bodies (1991), and Blue Boys (1992).

Writing in 1989, Marshall stated that his intent for works like Desire and Comrades in Arms, which explored same-sex desire and historic LGBTQ+ oppression, revealed itself to him as a “pressing need to discover for myself, in the context of the AIDS crisis, what it was like to survive that limit point, that inconceivable experience of terrifying persecution … the strategies of survival.”[46]

For the third series, in 1991, Over Our Dead Bodies was a snapshot of the new transatlantic, direct-action, social-justice-oriented AIDS- and queer-related activisms of ACT UP, OutRage!, and Queer Nation. For each case, Marshall produced a feature-length version to tour among the international gay-and-lesbian film festivals, winning plaudits at San Francisco, Berlin, and many leading festivals. At the Image + Nation festival, in Montreal, Bright Eyes was screened in 1988, Desire in 1989, and Comrades in Arms in 1990.

Bright Eyes also opened the film and video program of the 5th International AIDS Conference, held at Montreal’s Palais des Congrès in June 1989. SIDART a ground-breaking side event coordinated by local AIDS advocate Ken Morrison, formed the cultural component of that year’s conference. The 5th International was the first conference to include an integrated cultural program featuring an international representation of cultural AIDS activism in film, video, theatre, and the visual arts, across several cultural venues in the city as well as within the conference premises.

The 5th International AIDS Conference is now chiefly remembered for the takeover of its opening ceremony by AIDS activists, including members of Réaction SIDA (Montreal), AIDS Action NOW (Toronto), and ACT UP (New York), on behalf of other PWAs around the world. Amidst this new wave of viral media, direct-action AIDS activists made use of the international media presence to launch “Le Manifeste de Montréal,” which, building upon earlier declarations by people living with AIDS, demanded that PWAs be included in clinical trials and research protocols. In the 1992 follow-up publication A Leap in the Dark: AIDS, Art and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Allan Klusaček and Ken Morrison,[47] various contributors cited Marshall as an influencer in the AIDS cultural activist debate, including Douglas Crimp, Pratibha Parmar, and Simon Watney.

In 1990 and 1991, Marshall’s Journal was featured in Sign of the Times, a survey of the previous decade of video, film and slide-tape installations exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, in Oxford and Leeds Art Gallery and the Leeds Polytechnic Gallery. In a pessimistic tone, Marshall expressed the view that “little has changed.” As he explained:

Right wing politicians and moralists and the national press continue to air their hatred for the dead and dying and to disparage the work that the community had done to care for itself and educate the public at large about the need for new safer sex practices.[48]

Marshall rededicated the work to: “all those men I have worked with, admired and loved who are now dead.”[49]

Sadly, at the next outing of his work a little over three years later—the exhibition Signes des Temps, at La Ferme du Buisson, near Paris—the catalogue records that: “Stuart Marshall died on May 31, 1993.”[50] The 1993 Image + Nation festival featured an “Hommages” section dedicated to Marshall, including screenings of Bright Eyes, Desire, and Robert Marshall (1991). As the catalogue states:

The death of Stuart Marshall has deprived us of a radically independent spirit. Probably best known as the director of some of the most innovative and challenging films about sexuality and AIDS to emerge from the 1980s and early 1990s (which won awards world-wide), Stuart was also much more than that. He was an inspirer, an artist in the wider sense of the word, a person whose love and humour were brought into the lives of countless people.[51]

Following Stuart Marshall’s death, his partner, Royston Edwards, donated Marshall’s research papers to his television production company, Mayavision, with a view toward a fuller archiving of his work. Rebecca Dobbs, Marshall’s friend and a producer at Mayavision, would later donate these papers to the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, where they remain today.

Tragically, in the early 2000s, Edwards himself died suddenly. In the aftermath, his family remained unsympathetic to his relationship with Marshall owing to their shared HIV status. All the surviving videotapes, including Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Marshall’s earlier sound and video works, including scores, were destroyed, along with Marshall’s research library.

Valiquette’s documentary Le Récit d’A, and her body of work as a whole—two videos and one film—present their own critical, political, and epistemological pretexts and limitations. Vincent Bonin has outlined the manner in which Esther, despite breaking the silence on AIDS in the Quebec film world, found little activist uptake for her work in a context when AIDS activism meant safe-sex messaging and hard-hitting humour and polemic. In contrast to Marshall, Valiquette’s work, following her death in 1994, remained less known until its reappraisal by gender and women’s studies scholar Chantal Nadeau. Her work has since been also acknowledged in AIDS activist research projects by Jordan Arsenault, Maria Nengeh Mensah, Thomas Waugh, and others whose thinking helped shape an event which I co-curated, together with Vincent, at Vidéographe in 2022: a program of video works by artists living with AIDS, from Vidéographe’s collection.

I see strong parallels between Le Récit d’A and the work of UK feminist filmmakers such as Tina Keane, especially In Our Hands, Greenham (1984). Keane’s experimental documentary film on the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp[52] toured with the exhibition British/Canadian Video Exchange ’84, the same year that Bright Eyes and Journal debuted. Parallels may also be drawn with Pratibha Parmar’s poetic, anti-racist polemic Sari Red (1986) or Sandra Lahire’s meditation on extractive capitalism, Serpent River (1989). Like Valiquette, UK second-wave feminist films of the 1980s introduced transnational, eco-, and intersectional feminist perspectives into experimental narrative form; alongside the periodization established by Marshall’s Journal and Valiquette’s Le Récit d’A, these works comprise another historical and activist parallel for further exploration.

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In summary, in the age of PrEP and other effective treatments for AIDS, the continued appearances of Journal of the Plague Year across the 1980s and ’90s, and, more recently, in the 2010s,[53] have lent it renewed impetus—especially in the context of Marshall’s reappraisal, recent AIDS activist surveys, and successive waves of LGBTQ+ artists and AIDS activists for whom Marshall paved the way. This context includes my own research project, Learning in a Public Medium, as well as the more recent Picturing a Pandemic project, which brought Marshall’s Bright Eyes and Over Our Dead Bodies to an online audience during the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown, alongside filmmakers Richard Fung, Zachery Longboy, and Vincent Chevalier.[54]

At first appearance, Marshall’s AIDS activist works Kaposi’s Sarcoma, Journal of the Plague Year, and Bright Eyes represented a new horizon in video activism and AIDS cultural activism by incorporating new ways of bridging Anglophone and Francophone LGBTQ+ theory and practice—a new horizon, allied with activist efforts in Canada and North America, that represented a burgeoning, transnational AIDS activist momentum. In other ways, arguably, it is taken for granted, or under-acknowledged, the extent to which these media interventions, as demonstrations and new forms of protest, reconnected with pre-existing cultural and activist strategies to remap how we interact with media, within our digital Web 2.0 culture, to critique other histories, crises, and pandemics.

The reactivation of these works in a Web 2.0 framework therefore illustrates the potential and the need to continue to engage with these works, and with the new audiences that these works have found, as part and parcel of the long durée of their cultural and historical import. It also begs the question of when, or how, Journal of the Plague Year will be seen next—or, indeed, if ever it will return to Montreal. And if it did, what might it say, and how? What silence may be broken, or weaponized? How will it speak to the current moment, or future moments, to “build alliances that do not yet exist”?