We Are Having This Conversation Now

“Researching the vast body of documentation devoted to HIV and AIDS leads to a network of colliding narratives. Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr help dismantle this web by reframing it as a series of triggers and silences and offering a strategic toolbox to help grapple with the persistent dilemmas of articulating individual agency, cultural memory, and political will in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.” - Avram Finkelstein, author of After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images

“This book is an intensely moving, deeply experiential, and sharply analytic dialogue on the cultural production of AIDS. Centering their conversation around the ‘Bebashi video tape’ that documented African American women’s experiences in early 1980s Philadelphia, authors Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr attempt to trigger conversations on the nonlinear ‘times’ of the AIDS crisis and the timeliness of speaking/acting about it. As readers join the dialogic flow, they are folded into a luminous reanimation of lovingly preserved bibliographic and media archives that are collective resources for ongoing survival and the politics of care.” - Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor of Global Studies and English, University of California, Santa Barbara

“[Juhasz’s and Kerr’s] conversational model—by definition friendly, curious, and inviting, with an interest in accessibility and transparency—distinguishes [We Are Having This Conversation Now] from traditional academic writing and media criticism. Here, history-teaching and -learning is rooted in an oral history framework: that we learn what happened to communities from the people who constitute them.”

“We Are Having This Conversation Now carves a terrain of multimedia and citations. . . . [Juhasz and Kerr’s] push to talk about AIDS across temporalities is an effort to drag conversations around AIDS and AIDS cultural production into a public present and keep them there."

"We Are Having This Conversation Now is suffused with an awareness that the dominant narratives of AIDS in the United States have traditionally centered the lives of gay white men." - Alex Valenti, The Body

"We Are Having This Conversation Now is a series of conversations between HIV activist artists and friends, Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr [and] their dialogue is deliberate, thoughtful, and well-edited. ... The clarity of early HIV organizing is an attractive nostalgia. Juhasz and Kerr resist this nostalgia in their conversation. They deliberately look at the past, the present, and the future with painstaking clarity." - Andrew Spieldenner, Anarchist Review of Books