PP2 – Straight Talk

For pressure project 2, we were challenged to use audio to tell a narrative in one minute. My project attempted to tell the story of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s, specifically the relationship that straight anxiety about AIDS (or lack of anxiety in the case of the Reagan administration) related to the death-toll the crisis had on the lgbtq+ community. The main idea was to use entirely straight voices (other than my own) to show the way straight society looked at AIDS during the crisis.

The tone I took was largely critical as I selected news clips that highlighted some of the ridiculous fears that straight people had about the disease (“can my dog catch AIDS from a bone my neighbor handled?”). These sound clips were then edited together and played over a fairly unsettling atmospheric track in order to create a feeling of tension.

The next component consisted of me reading yearly AIDS death tolls in the U.S. during the 1980s and early 1990s. This was done simultaneously with the playing of the audio in a droning, mechanical fashion. Initially, this reading was going to be recorded and edited with the audio clips, but upon listening to my recording (which took over an hour of my 5 hour time constraint), I opted to read it live. I honestly didn’t have a plan as to how I would read it due to how last-minute this decision was, so I largely improvised. As such, the live performance portion could definitely be polished and refined into something more formal than someone sitting behind a computer screen.

The final component was a closing critique of the Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS. At the end of the performance, I stopped reading the death totals and an audio clip played of reporter Lester Kinsolving asking Press Secretary Larry Speakes what the president was doing about the AIDS crisis. Mr. Speakes responds with a number of jokes which the other reports can be heard laughing at, and the clip ends with the Mr. Kinsolving asking if “the White House looks at this as a great joke?”

Overall I think the project was successful in eliciting an emotional response from its listeners. There was a moment of emotional silence after the first run-through that I didn’t expect. Perhaps this silence was reverence for those that died or everyone processing all the sound I had just thrown at them, but those few seconds made me proud that I could tell this tragic story and honor those that suffered through it.