Kate Barnhart of New Alternatives and artist Jonathan Berger talk New Alternatives’ work with homeless LGBTQ youth, their t-shirt designed by Carol Bove for Everybody.World, and how ACT UP inspired generations of activism on the body.
Shirts, like the one you see on Peaches behind this text as you read it, are available to pre-order here until June 21st. All proceeds go to New Alternatives in support of its mission. Shop till you drop (I’m talking to you rich Brooklyn gays...)!
Jonathan Berger: When did we meet? 1993?
Kate Barnhart: Yeah. ‘93.
PISS: Well, let's start there then!
KB: We were part of the youth committee of ACT UP. And so we were the teenagers in ACT UP.
P: When you came to ACT UP, you'd been involved, you know, sort of in activism in different ways. I was reading, Kate, that you were sort of working in environmental stuff and writing to senators when you were seven years old.
KB: Right, right. I was part of Pete Seeger's crew.
P: So was it sort of like a natural transition, do you think, for the both of you into ACT UP, given what was happening at the time with the AIDS crisis from what else you were doing?
KB: I went to Little Red School House, which was in the West Village. And my dad had a lot of queer friends, a lot of actors, and also some of the other teachers. So I saw AIDS sort of hit from the beginning. I was also part of a group called Students Against War. And when the war ended (that is the Persian Gulf War), we were like, "Okay, what do we wanna do?"
'Cause it was a coalition of different high schools. And we decided that we wanted to work on AIDS as one of the issues. Actually, one of the guys in Students Against War was already involved in ACT UP, and brought the rest of us to ACT UP. We didn't even start out at a meeting. They were planning this action against the Brooklyn Borough president. Their appointee to the Board of Ed hadn't taken a stance on AIDS education yet.
They needed a bunch of young people to pretend to be students, and then a few of the adults pretended to be teachers. We went on a tour of Brooklyn Borough Hall, but we took a wrong turn and wound up in the office of the borough president. And we took over the office and we dropped a banner out that said, [Howard] “Golden is silent.” We filled those files with condoms and whatnot, and we all got arrested. And then it was after the arrest that we went to our first ACT UP meeting at Cooper Union.
It was hundreds of people, and they just gave us a microphone and told us to tell them what had happened. And we did, and it was just such a supportive room that was so excited about what we wanted to do. And we never left.
P: And Jonathan, were you part of this particular action as well?
JB: Kate was involved in ACT UP for a few years before me. I'm forty-six, and Kate, you're fifty. I had a similar thing of being involved in other actions, and I also grew up going to Pete Seeger. I don't think we figured that out until we were at that party. I was involved in women's rights stuff, liberation theology, and I grew up around activism; my dad also was involved in the nonprofit arts sector, and he was really in it with people dying.
But I also went to a demonstration before a meeting. I remember the one I went to was targeting [President] Clinton at Lincoln Center and pushing him to shut down Guantanamo Bay.
KB to P: Do you know that whole story about how they were imprisoning HIV-positive people entering the country, especially from Haiti at Guantanamo Bay in really bad conditions?
P: Really? Wow.
KB: ACT UP fought that hardcore. We won eventually. It took a while.
JB: That was a big thing that was happening when I joined. But Kate, I remember vividly going to my first ACT UP meeting, which was a Youth Education Lifeline meeting. It wasn't one of the big four meetings.
KB: And you showed up with your school librarian—
JB: Was she? I don't remember Arla being there, but maybe she—I do. Wow, that's so crazy. ACT UP had this, which a lot of people don't know, what was referred to as the Workspace which is this super interesting.
KB: It was a loft.
JB: I think for people who've gotten into ACT UP who are younger sort of, it's a missing link in the whole history. It was this really kind of unusual loft where it wasn't big enough to hold the big meetings, so there were all these affinity group meetings there—committees and things would get planned. It was kind of a magical place in its own way. Like it, you know, had all this stuff happening and so I remember—
KB: And one of the saddest things though was that the phone line never stopped ringing, and a lot of it was people with AIDS who were in bad situations calling, wanting help. So people took turns answering that.
JB: I remember the first meeting... God, I don't remember the thing about Arla. Well, it shows you I'm losing my mind. What I do remember was being in a meeting with Kate, and Kate was very much like already deeply entrenched and at the helm of everything in an amazing way. And I remember that the action that was being planned was targeting the head of the Board of Education, the chancellor. And he was speaking at the Natural History Museum. I was like 13 and I was like, these people are cooler than anything I could ever imagine. It was grunge and Nirvana. Everybody there was like Esther, our friend Esther Kaplan, who's an amazing journalist. She was in her 20s at that time and I'll never forget it: She had a mohair sweater on and like silk pajamas and combat boots, and I remember thinking, these people are like who I'm posing as.
KB: Or like Ken Kid. Remember Ken Kid? Who's still a fashion icon and he just retired. He's like 65 at least, but when he donates his clothes here, they get snapped up by the clients because he's so fashionable—even now, you know?
JB: ACT UP was this incredibly amazing eclectic resource pool of people that did everything you could ever think of. And of course there were a lot of artists, but there were also a lot of other kinds of amazing journalists and science people. I remember sitting there and it's like you go to the meeting, you sit down. There was a moment where everybody pulled out their date books because people were trying to figure out who could get arrested and when. And I just remember being like, oh wow, now you're in it. And people were like, “Oh, no, I have to work the next morning, I can't…” And then somebody would be like, “Oh, I can do it.” And then it was like, “How are we gonna dress up? You know, kind of what Kate was saying. There were like all these strategies for—
KB: Infiltrating spaces. You know? And being young I think helped because the image of who ACT UP was was not young people. Or old. Even now, because I've never had piercings or tattoos or anything, I can still help infiltrate people just by being like a femme person. You know, I can go girly. Like, I fell down on purpose in front of the security guard at the US Trade Rep's office. So while they were picking me up and gathering all the papers I had dropped everywhere, ACT UP people just ran in the front door, up the stairs, and into the Trade Rep's office and took it over. So it was that kind of thing.
P: When I was reading Kate’s ACT UP Oral History Project interview from 2004 she mentioned you made “fabulous drug company fat cat executive puppets.”
KB: Yeah, the cats. The cats. The fat cats. And the giant pills. That was the 10th anniversary, Jonathan, on Wall Street.
P: And I was putting together just how much clothing and adornment was a part of ACT UP, alongside the body.
JB: I would say the most extreme example of that, that it is also not talked about so much, but I think was one of the most amazing things that happened, as an artist—And it happened while Kate and I were... 'Cause we both came in right after the real first wave.
And at that time, there were a bunch of things that happened; David Wojnarowicz died. There was this sort of mass fatigue because so many... The organization was huge and had this energy in the beginning; and then it was depleted in a way, both in terms of membership and in terms of energy.
KB: I mean, just so you know what he's talking about, in the agenda every week was a section just for remembering the members who had died in the previous week. Not even long-term, just in the previous week.
JB: I think I have two things to say. I was gonna mention the whole political funeral thing, which started with David Wojnarowicz, the artist. He wrote this text sort of envisioning his body—
KB: “Bury me furiously.”
JB:—being thrown over the White House fence when he died. And then there was a sort of a group within ACT UP called the Marys that formed and they started actually conducting political funerals with bodies and ashes.
KB: I was at almost all of those. No, I'm sure you were.
JB: But I think the thing about that in relation to performance, was that nobody had done that or seen that in that way.
KB: We marched with people's bodies through the streets of New York.
JB: And using a corpse as a performance object kind. Even in relation to current ways of thinking or activism—What I remember being so struck by with ACT UP was it was inventing ways to do things. It wasn't like you have the sign, you show up, you do the walk and shout. It was asking, “How can we invent forms of protests that are so unprecedented or push past, while maintaining nonviolence, push into a kind of militancy that has an effect that somehow is legitimately transgressive and really jarring?” And sometimes that was humor. But a lot of the time it was making people feel rage in a way that's actually disruptive so people kind of understand the severity of the situation in some way.
KB: Beyond just the bodies, there was also this use of blood, both as a metaphor and an image, but also, you know, that was around the same time that Ron Athey was doing art with his own blood. It was all kind of tied together, the activism and the art.
JB: I think the other thing, Kate, that I was thinking about when we did that event ‘cause there were so many young people, was there was such a vibrant culture of youth activism in New York at that time. So you had radical feminist stuff and anti-racist stuff and AIDS all linked to each other. I said to somebody the other day, in this period of time that we were doing that stuff, it actually did matter that Kurt Cobain was the most famous person alive.
He was a queer positive, not cool kid in high school that got beat up. That's who that person was. I think culturally, to have somebody that came out of Riot Grrrl and a feminist, queer, POC, subcultural-aligned person being at the top of pop culture made being a young progressive political person something that had a kind of traction.
P: That's a really interesting point given how dematerialized activism has become as subsequent generations have sort of been corralled into an online area to express their views. People, yes, go into the streets, but these things can’t seem to stand the test of time when the online news cycle moves on. But in conjunction with what we’ve been talking about with their public performance of activism during the AIDs crisis and beyond, I’m wondering how you see a t-shirt project like this in conjunction with Everybody.World in relation to New Alternatives and its legacy?
KB: I mean, New Alternatives itself is kind of a branch off ACT UP. Mm-hmm. There were so many nonprofits in the city that actually have their roots in ACT UP, like Housing Works. They were the ACT UP Housing Committee. Charles King's still the ED. We're actually one of the later ones. The vibe of New Alternatives is already much more of a grassroots and kind of activist orientation to doing the work.
JB: Kate has had such an amazing career. From ACT UP, she ran this amazing place, CASES, for a while, the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services. It was like an alternative sentencing program, right?
KB: Young people who were facing felonies could spend a year in our program, and then the cases would get dropped. Otherwise, they'd be in Rikers. I went to The Neutral Zone and then Sylvia's Place.
JB: I look at New Alternatives and I'm like, “Oh, it really is this incredible product of a grassroots radical left ethos that's like, ultimately punk rock in the way that ACT UP was, and doesn't really believe in a kind of institutional model.” As I watched it grow, I saw how important what Kate was doing was, and how from my view, there's a real disconnect between people that are in a pop cultural sphere or people who are just capable of, frankly, raising money or bringing attention at a large level that does not involve foundations or structures that exist to generate money.
KB: Giant city contracts that take you, you know, a million years to even fill out the forms.
JB: There's a big space between that and people who've stepped in graciously to model Carol Bove’s t-shirt design for Everybody.World like Kim Cattrall, Luke Evans, or Norman Reedus or Michael Stipe. Although Michael is my connection to those people. I think there's a lot of people who care and don't know what to do, and who actually are more interested in models like Kate’s at New Alternatives than they are in more institutionalized or more mainstream or conventionally—
KB: The places with the fancy carpets. They kinda get fossilized. Mm. Yeah. They get to the point where they don't change. We're small and grassroots, we can pivot. So when COVID happened most of the other organizations were just shut down, but we started churning out food from our kitchen, and we had a bunch of volunteers with cars and bikes. Clients would tell us where they were staying, and we would just send the food out all over the city. So because we weren't beholden to any kind of contract, we could just figure out what people needed and do it.
JB: And from my view, I just thought it would be amazing if there was a way to create a project that—which ACT UP was so good at—independently created a way to rebuild infrastructure that was taken away from like the most vulnerable people in society and bypass traditional systems of doing that and just be like, “Fuck it, we're gonna do it ourselves.”
We both saw that happen in incredible ways with medicine, law, and money and all these different structures. It wasn't like we we're gonna wait for the government or gonna wait for funding to come out.
KB: Remember when people were mixing up experimental AIDS drugs in the bathtub? In the tub? Do you remember people doing that?
JB: Yeah. And what Kate is doing is so vital and driven by this harm reduction mentality, which is like so people first instead of like organization first or rules first or whatever.
KB: It's kind of come as you are. Fuck the rest of it, you know?
JB: It’s kind of a no-brainer. People contributed what they're able to in the way of like skills or, in the case of Carol, her work; in the case of the people that are modeling, you know, their visibility. There are a lot of other kinds of people like Johanna Fateman who's known for being one of the members of the band Le Tigre, but she's also now predominantly an art critic and helped with the press release.
It was really like what ACT UP was, it was like a barn raising. Everyone pitched in. And I think the more opportunities there are to bring people together in a really like grassroots immediate direct way to support initiatives like New Alternatives that have a track record the better. NA is not interested in getting more and more monolith- monolithic. You're interested in the clients’ needs.
KB: We've always had a few migrant clients from countries where you can't be queer. But when the migrants started getting bused into New York, all of a sudden there was a flood of young queer migrants who were homeless. And we're only half a block from the bus station. So pretty quickly the volunteers at the bus station realized we were here and started pointing to us. Then, we had just waves of people. I think we've had people from 81 different countries. Some of whom, transgender women from Iran. I had a client who was a political prisoner in Nicaragua and was tortured. We really had to adjust to accommodate that and to get used to working in multiple languages; and listening to people who've been tortured is ... It requires a different kind of presence.
You know, like, what can help? I will testify at immigration hearings, asylum hearings, because this is the stupidest rule ever. Not that anybody's getting hearings anymore, but when they were, the rule was that people had to prove that they were queer. Well, how the fuck do you do that, right? So I would come in and I would say, “Look, you know, I observed this person at our pride party, and they were dancing with other guys,” and just I'd have to give a lot of examples like that, which was just bullshit, ridiculous stuff, but it got them what they needed.
P: It seems like the nimbleness of this t-shirt campaign with New Alternatives and Everybody.World really comes out of the spirit of the organization's own ability to serve its clients and meet the moment. These places are very important to the fabric of the city. I use healthcare services at Sylvia’s with Q Clinic myself, and more broadly these spaces feel like a physical nexus in Midtown. A place that people associate with feeling protected across all levels of privilege in the queer community. But this project also fits into a cultural nexus with similar initiatives like the Protect the Dolls shirts, which were met with their own let’s say calls for more expansive thinking, the wonderful Mother Daughter Holy Spirit initiative last year, with great plasticity.
JB: It's so quick people start making things complicated. And I'm like, it's not complicated.
KB: Even my own board started having a conniption about how the taxes on the T-shirts were gonna happen. And I was just like, “Guys, chill out. Like it'll work out.”
JB: But at Everybody.World, their attitude is very much aligned with us in that way. They're like, "Yeah, you just do it." What's been reassuring is how no one in this entire process has been a roadblock. I remember, Kate,I went to visit you three years ago now, and I just remember thinking, “You don't need to be fucking spending your time raising money. That's bullshit.” You know? You just need to be doing what you do, and people, whether it's me or somebody else, can and should come in and give you the gasoline for the car, unregulated the way that we're talking about.
KB: 'Cause you can get funding, but oftentimes it's restricted funding and they tell you what you have to do with it. Even private funders, but certainly this is the first year in a long time we've got a city contract which I don't normally do. Individual giving is very down last year and this year because of the economy, right? People are holding onto their money which is sensible. But that was a big way that we raised our money. I mean, we don't have a huge budget. We're like, you know, we get things done, but our budget is half a million dollars a year which is nothing in the scope of things.
JB: To that point, I think the thing that's great about the internet—which I'm terrified of and have so many issues with—is in my mind, Norman Reedus has like 8 million followers. If you have a T-shirt that costs 100 bucks and we get 5,000 people all over the world from all these like people that, and thank you to them, are modeling this thing, are bringing in numbers, that's not crazy. If 5,000 people each buy one T-shirt, we've raised the money for one year of operating for New Alternatives.
That's so hopeful that if somebody can just be like- Yeah ... “Oh, I have this level of reach. I care about this thing. I didn't know about it. This is awesome. I get to wear this cool T-shirt. I open the door to my people.” So I'm a believer in that.
P: I definitely agree. I had this really fabulous, um, Brazilian communist history teacher in middle school who sat us down one day and she said, “You, the only way you can get something is how somebody else wants to give it to you.” Know your leverage and use it!
KB: And that was something we did in ACT UP too. I mean, remember Grace Paley and Keith Haring and Wojnarowicz, et cetera. I mean, ACT UP had a lot of fundraisers and the Art Boxes.
JB: I mean, Keith Haring would be a great example because he was even so commercially successful. Did you know he had this thing called the Pop Shop?
He had his own store. He made buttons and T-shirts and posters and tchotchkes, like all this. And I remember you probably went too, Kate, shopping there, and he painted the inside of the store and stuff. That was a moment where this sort of radical militant organization existed in popular culture through the lens of this very palatable thing.
KB: I mean, ACT UP was a T-shirt powerhouse too. (Some sell for over $200 today)
JB: There's a whole amazing history there too. The intent is that this project will continue and in a perfect world we'd be doing like three a year.I think I can say because it's signed off on all fronts that like Michael Stipe is gonna do one. In my mind it's just like making a model and have the model be something that continues, that can sustain, you know?
P: And Kate, what will these funds go towards for New Alternatives?
KB: We have all these anti-LGBT laws getting passed across the country and we've got just a flood of people bailing out of those states to New York. A lot of them have no idea what the cost of living here is like, and they also have no idea how tight the job market is. I think we've had 55 new intakes in three months, something like that. The other thing happening is that all of this hateful rhetoric and all the rest is having a really bad effect on LGBT mental health, and especially young people. So not only do we have to accommodate extra people in all of our services, food, clothes, everything, but then we also have to keep in mind that there's gonna be increased mental health needs.So anyway, clearly that's a huge and growing need. So we have our own psych nurse practitioner, and I just hired a full-time social worker. We are kind of in a position where we could start to think about a building. 'Cause we have clients who will not stay indoors unless it's us. They don't trust anyone else, mostly trans people. We try to keep them from freezing to death. But then, you know, we really need some place where people can just be and where they can shower and where they can keep their stuff safe, and we can't do that in this building for a variety of reasons. So that’s the hope.
P: And for our readers that the shirt is out of their price range, how can they support New Alternatives?
KB: You can make a contribution of any amount on our website. I mean, the other thing people can do is contribute whatever it is they can bring to the table. I have one volunteer who's a notary, and that's all he does for us. When we have a client's name change paperwork, I call him. I say, “David, come over and do your thing,” you know? Mm-hmm. And so that's what he does. Or, we have another person who's a flute teacher, and we had a client who wanted to learn the flute, and she gives him lessons. So, you know, pretty much whatever your skill set is, there's a way to bring it to bear. Sometimes it takes some creativity.
ACT UP New York demonstration to free Haitian refugees from Guantánamo Bay in 1992. ACT UP New York records, Box 89, Folder 3, New York Public Library.
Village Voice, March 25, 1997 AD for ACT UP on Wall Street.
Memorial March for David Wojnarowicz, July 29, 1992. Photo © Brian Palmer.
Nancy Spero (American, 1926–2009). ACT UP Art Box: To the Revolution, 1994.
Members of Act Up during the Pride march in New York City on 26 June 1988. Photograph: The New York Historical Society.