Acting up, Talking Back: TITA, TIARA, and the Value of Gossip

Abstract

can survive, no people can be united without some kind of journal, a newsletter, a TIARA!!'" (TIARA, April 9, 1992). TIARA, the "paper that prints it all!" (TIARA, n.d.) was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) Los Angeles' unofficial internal paper. Like its sister publication, ACT UP New York's Tell It To ACT UP (TITA), it published in a weekly broadsheet news, suggestions, commentary, complaints, and gossip. Each issue's contents are a bountiful mixture of the "sublime," the "smart," and the "petty" (Dobbs, 2006, p. 38). Through direct action activism ACT UP fought powerfully for legislation, treatment, research, and media attention to challenge the status quo, improve the lives of HIV/AIDS affected persons, and to defeat the virus. TITA and TIARA disseminated information, provided a forum to those who were unable or unwilling to speak in meetings, and acted as "steam valve[s]" (Ibid., p. 39) for the high-intensity affects of direct action AIDS activism. For their short lives, from 1990 to 1992, the papers were powerful information systems, both producing and reproducing the political and social system in which they were embedded (Fine, 2007, p. 14). Growing archival studies literature on contending with human experiences including affects, sex, and bodily experiences that challenge, defy, and problematize archival capture, theory, and practice opens the possibility for acknowledging and examining gossip. Through a close examination of TITA and TIARA's form, contents, and tone I argue that gossip provides unique evidence of affect, sex and sexuality, and the individual and group dynamics that make and unmake social movements.Gossip presents a challenge to traditional archival conceptions of reliability. However it is a practice worthy of serious consideration in the archival field as scholars and practitioners become increasingly concerned with locating new structures of knowing and alternative practices and epistemologies that take into better account diverse knowledges and subjectivities. Gossip makes overt and external its relations to "subjectivity, voyeuristic pleasure, and the communicative circulation of story-telling" (Rogoff, 1996, p. 58). As a feminized form of knowledge and way of knowing gossip has been ignored as a less-or un-reliable source. TITA and TIARA offer vital evidence about ACT UP. The exchange of gossip in the papers provides more than its informational content, showcasing the affective as well as subjective and divergent points of view. This article contributes to the study of gossip and rumor, examinations of ACT UP and related social movements, and to archival discourses on reliability. First, I briefly explore the intertwined and gendered constructions of gossip and affect. In the second section I build on studies of gossip to explore the papers in relation to the core archival concept of reliability. Then in the first of two case based sections I analyze TITA for evidence of conflict, discord, and their affective import in constructing and deconstructing ACT UP/NY. Finally,...