YouTube Typography
Scrubbing is a kind of reading
Not sure when I first saw this photo, but it was probably online in the early 2010s. So that’s maybe 25 years after it was taken. I wasn’t aware of its history, who wore the jacket, or anything at all about its context. I wasn’t paying attention. When I finally understood what I was seeing—a photograph of a jacket worn by the artist David Wojnarowicz at an ACT UP action at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Rockville, MD on October 11, 1988—the message clicked into place.
“IF I DIE OF AIDS - FORGET BURIAL - JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.”
In the photo, the message is clearly visible on the artist’s back. I’ve seen it identified as a black leather jacket, but zooming in, it’s more of a dark grey or black denim, a jeans jacket. The white letters are so bright they seem to pop off the fabric. They might be iron-on, or stickers. Under the letters, centered on the back of the jacket, is a pink triangle, exactly like the pink triangle at the center of the SILENCE = DEATH poster that was first posted all over the streets of NYC the year before (1987), just as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was forming. The apex points up, both recalling and in defiance of the Nazi pink triangle used to mark people identified as homosexual men or trans women during the Holocaust, apex oriented down. The photograph was taken by Bill Dobbs, an activist lawyer in ACT UP who participated in the “SEIZE CONTROL OF THE FDA” action, ACT UP’s first national protest and seen by many as the start of the nationwide AIDS movement. The action focused specifically on timing and access to drugs; one of the messages on signs used at the action said “TIME ISN’T THE ONLY THING THE FDA IS KILLING.” ACT UP’s demands included shortening the drug approval process, discontinuing placebo trials, free access to medication, and insurance company accountability. The action was effective; one year later, some of these demands were realized.
I’ve been looking at the famous photo of Wojnarowicz for years, thinking about its significance—as documentation, as performance, as a work of art that no longer exists (the jacket was never seen again), and the photograph itself as a powerful media artifact that survives and circulates now, in place of the jacket and the body on which it was worn. Wearing the jacket was an act of protest, a graphic work of art, a kind of publishing, and a plea for care by a political subject struggling against state negligence. The plain, bold, all-cap sans serif letterforms were meant to grab attention, shouting the message out in public, much like the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel sewn by student activist Duane Kearns Puryear later that year. Discrimination, bias, dismissal, neglect, hatred, and shame were prevalent and fueled the crisis during the late 1980s and early 1990s. HIV/AIDS activism pushed back against silence and neglect using an easy-to-understand “amplified” typographic voice to convey the urgency.
Wojnarowicz found out he was HIV positive earlier that year, so he was fighting for his own life as well as those around him. Everyone was on an expedited life-and-death timeline, and his prescient message spoke to this urgency. His instruction (a demand, really), about the profound neglect that would eventually lead to his own death, was worn on the same body it referenced. FORGET BURIAL, JUST DROP MY BODY. Wojnarowicz died from HIV/AIDS four years later, on July 22, 1992.
Can the jacket be explored as a typographic work? Not really; it feels almost ridiculous to refer to it this way. But also—yes, absolutely. I think about how language is used in the most powerful acts of protest and liberation and I see this photograph. I see how a message was shaped, crafted, designed—yes, visually, precisely—at a moment when the performance of language in public space was one of the best ways to move collectively towards change. The FDA protest was a massive action that depended on amplified displays of typography, design, lettering, and writing; the design of graphic material at this ACT UP action and others like it went on to influence and inspire entire generations of activism. I’m not sure how we cannot see the jacket as a typographic work, embedded within a context of design and intention, an incredible collective moment of urgent artifact-making. Jack Lowery provides a comprehensive history of the art and design of this time in It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (2022), with several pages devoted to the FDA action.
I’m trying to be careful not to fetishize the photograph. As a missing object, the jacket lends itself to a kind of mythologizing, and there’s really no need for that. I want to hold onto all of these ideas through the framing of the action itself, rather than zooming in too closely on David’s jacket. So I start looking for other perspectives, other views from that day, other images that might show Wojnarowicz there, to break out of the spell of this singular image. Surely there had to have been other moments in the documentation of this event when it was visible.
It’s silly to think about YouTube as a place to go searching for typography. There’s so much about the environment of that platform that isn’t stable; resolution issues alone make it a terrible space for examining letterforms and written language. Traditionally, we learn that type needs to be reproduced perfectly, with legibility and precision as the highest priorities. There’s an entire history of type specimens that parallels a history of fine printing as well, as master printers used the demands of typographic reproduction to demonstrate their capabilities. These demands perpetuate values of exceptionalism that shape many print-based disciplines, like design, fine art printmaking, literature, advertising, even journalism—arenas where clarity and precision are the baseline for excellence.
So what would it mean to go looking for typography in a place that isn’t suited, maybe even hostile towards those same values? YouTube might not be great for examining type, but it’s a treasure chest of liberated language. I’m not talking about the comments and the ways social media platforms can be a breeding ground for hate speech and violence, because that’s also a part of what it is. But the content itself. More than 14 billion video files have been posted to YouTube, making it a remarkable site of potentiality and one of the most satisfying archives ever created.
Instead of zooming, I’ll scrub.
I’m scrubbing through a video titled ACT UP & ACT NOW Seize Control Of The FDA, posted to a channel maintained by user SuchIsLifeVideos. I don’t know anything about this user, but the half-hour video documentary of the ACT UP action at the FDA conveys the chaotic energy of the unfolding event. I’d read that Wojnarowicz traveled to Maryland with an ACT UP affinity group, and that each group was responsible for their own themes and messages. David’s group carried hand-cut signs that were shaped to look like tombstones, with messages like “FDA KILLED ME” and “1987–1988 NEVER HAD A CHANCE,” so I look for the tombstones. There they are. At 25:17 I see David walking backwards as firefighters carry a ladder, maybe to get protesters down from atop the building’s awning, where they hung banners. I hear them shout “you’re killing us” over and over. The video is very blurry and feels like a copy of a copy, but I’m going frame by frame, and I see him suddenly turn, with his back going by in a flash. The message isn’t legible, but I make out the word “AIDS.” I feel something new here. Now it’s David Wojnarowicz the protestor, one of many, moving with the group, a molecule in the cloud of ACT UP energy and collective action. The jacket played a small but significant role; in the video, the activity of the sub-groups moving around the site feels cacophonous, like a multi-staged theater, with simultaneous scenes playing out all at once. I’m stunned that the jacket, which looms large in my memory as a still image on the queer timeline, feels so small now, in action. Here it is on YouTube, illegible, luminous.
Later, after posting a link to the video online, someone responds that they see David appearing to remember to roll over so that his back would be visible, at 21:20. I’d missed this in my initial viewing. This was one of the moments when the group was laying on the ground in a die-in, each protestor holding a tombstone at their head. This action was about bodies, death, and dying, all on display on the very FDA steps that the jacket references. I go to the timestamp; in the bottom-left corner of the frame I can barely make out David’s face as he briefly turns his body over from front to back. I catch a glimpse of the soft fuzz of the white letters, which I only recognize because I know they’re there. Then, he gets up.
To scrub is to search, to clean; scrubbing is movement back and forth on the timeline, and I imagine a kind of literal cleansing action, scrubbing each frame of video with a small brush. In the search to uncover clarity, evidence, clues, truth, we briefly suspend the narrative, slowing down to the scale of the frame-by-frame, the grain, the frozen blur of movement taken out of flow. In the slowing down we exchange one form of precision for another, pausing the normative conventions of historical narrative in order to catch other kinds of relationships, barely perceptible, invisible: there he is, a tall man in shadow, viewed by others in public space, a head turning, a body on the ground, a ladder goes by, a jacket altered by an artist, white letterforms barely visible in the chaos.
Scrubbing is a kind of reading. It’s a close reading, a precise, closer view that reveals other relationships, between the visible and the unseen, the legible and the unreadable. I’m scrubbing the archive, looking, searching, cleaning. Here it is, I found it. The letterforms on David’s jacket are both totally understood (completely readable) and impossible to know. How can they be both? In the legibility, in the close reading, we see someone struggling with his own mortality, a body making a desperate attempt to be seen, acknowledged, to be read clearly on the timeline, in public space. To be read by his peers, by the media, by the state. And then, the impossible truth, as the reader is exposed: You will survive me. I will die from this disease (I am dying) and you will have to deal with it.
Unsaid, but understood.
David wished for this kind of marking, a public dumping of bodies, the gross act of depositing the dead on the doorsteps of those responsible. A year before his death, David published this passage in his memoir Close to the Knives (1991). It continues where the jacket left off:
“I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.”
It’s an unthinkable act, to drop a body anywhere. Not as unthinkable as knowingly letting a body die from neglect. As a reader who is alive to read his messages, I participate in the exposure, and I am implicated, even now, far off in time and space. That’s the shocking clarity here, stated in the instructions, on display.
The type spells it out; the body holds the message.
When David died in 1992, ACT UP held its first political funeral, marching through the East Village with a banner boldly announcing that David Wojnarowicz “DIED OF AIDS DUE TO GOVERNMENT NEGLECT.” Like his jacket, the funerary banner uses direct language to point and implicate. David’s conditional “IF I DIE OF AIDS” was transformed in public space into the memorialized “DIED OF AIDS,” a terrible narrative that declares its own tragic ending. The jacket and the funerary banner use the individual body to draw attention to collective action, accountability, and responsibility, and the language spells it out. The impossible message of David’s jacket eventually became a reality; inspired by his writing in Close to the Knives, ACT UP began doing “ashes actions,” and David’s ashes were eventually scattered on the White House lawn in 1996.
To read David’s language displayed on his back is to become entangled in the political warfare of necropolitics. 37 years out, the reader is still implicated, still alive, still responsible for the collective failure to prevent these deaths. The film Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker (Chris McKim, dir., 2020) contains a clip of a newscaster reporting on the ACT UP action at the FDA. While others face us with their signs, David stands with his back to the camera, just to the right of the reporter, and the message is clearly visible, now from a different angle. For the first time, I notice that the line “AIDS - FORGET” is indented to the right, the only line that isn’t justified left. Why? I go back to the Dobbs photograph and visually slide the line to the left to see that the apex of the pink triangle would have been covered up, hidden behind the top of the “F” in FORGET. In designing the message, however crudely, however urgently, it was the legibility of the triangle that David prioritized over typographic convention. Somehow, the story is here too, even in the indent: don’t let forgetting get in the way.
This image depicts the media space of the TV broadcast, and we see David’s back adjusted to face the camera like a sign. His body is a billboard projecting language out onto the networks, ready to be found by future television screens, archives, documentary films, iPhones. I stop the clip, scrub back and forth, grab the image, and post it. This trajectory of the message on the jacket happens again and again, an elaborate performance of typographic movement and circulation, pushing designed letterforms and a surplus of meaning out onto multiple timelines. It’s still happening, as you read the message now. David had to have been aware of this power. These were the media-savvy tactics of ACT UP, designed to mirror the basic principles of public relations, viral marketing, and advertising, applied to bodies in crisis. Today, I am alive. I am a reader who survived the HIV/AIDS crisis. I’m accountable, claiming my responsibility for understanding what happened, for not forgetting, for scrubbing. What was ACT UP? Who was David? Why did he die? I sense the danger of letting go, of giving up, of by-passing the labor of all of this for the ease of a simple story on Wikipedia. Even easier: no story at all. But I refuse.
Powerful and beautiful writing Paul ❤️✊🏽. (Thea)