Julie Tolentino

A gay man living through the HIV/AIDS crisis reflects upon his recent history of loss with the help of his grandmother, who tells him a story of her own trauma and loss during the Jim Crow-era South.

Documentary exploring Ron Athey’s life and career as a queer HIV-positive body modification and performance artist, including several of Athey’s internationally staged works from the late 1990s.

In evidence, Julie Tolentino’s naked, moving body articulates backward on her hands and knees, balancing a cluster of Asian medicine cups. The piece, originally made in 2010 in collaboration with Abigail Severance, was remixed for Visual AIDS in 2014. Tolentino's self-made sound piece was added and initiates the video with a queer list of loved ones living and lost, recognizable or not, as both invocation and provocation of individuals who deeply shifted her perspective. As the listed names blur and are archived in Tolentino's body, evidence opens up to the list's potency through a female, brown, artist/activist body in the unseen yet held spaces of relationship, memory, sex and loss. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2014 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, a program of seven videos that bring together charged moments and personal memories amidst the public history of HIV/AIDS.

A few tips on how to pick up girls at The Clit Club in New York City.

The narrator holds on to each of the 191 loved ones he has lost to AIDS.