2024
“What Remains is the Rest of Life”: On Jürgen Baldiga and the Danger of a Single Story of HIV/AIDS Art

Jürgen Baldiga, Self Portrait as Bacchus, 1991. Jürgen Baldiga; Schwules Museum Berlin – Leihgeber Aron Neubert.
There is a queer desire for history. Young queers are desperately seeking stories of their (I think I’ve passed the age where I can say our) ancestors. Given the unfolding global crises amidst which we live, it is unsurprising that many are particularly interested in the story of the HIV and AIDS epidemic and the wave of activism that, as Kay Gabriel has written, transformed the issue from one where “people with HIV/AIDS died of disease and neglect” as “reactionary politicians openly speculated about putting people with HIV/AIDS into camps” into a situation where “an HIV infection is highly manageable with access to the standard of care”.1 Gabriel, writing about Sarah Schulman’s magisterial history of ACT UP New York, Let The Record Show, neatly summarises Schulman’s point: “to force us to ask how this dramatic turn of events took place, and how comparatively few people had such an outsized effect on the distribution of power, resources, and access to life”.2
But many queers with a desire for history have missed this and many other points about the global wave of activism around HIV and AIDS among queer people. Overly simplistic narratives are legion. Fuelled by Larry Kramer’s self-mythologising and Randy Shilts’ abominable gutter journalism – Shilts, misreading a 1984 cluster study investigating how the disease spread, described an evil “Patient Zero” flight attendant-cum-sociopath who had knowingly infected hundreds of men with HIV – an easy and moralising narrative has developed: that queer people, as one, rose in their noble suffering to end promiscuity in response to HIV and AIDS and to refocus the movement around less frivolous things, and that the sex culture was only mourned by brainless party boys or malicious angels of death. One of the crucial truths about the activism and artistic production around the HIV/AIDS crisis has been its polyvalence: as is to be expected, queer people, even the subset of queer people with a radical political analysis, have had a variety of political and artistic strategies for dealing with the health threat and the mass death event. Some queers, like Shilts and Kramer, trumpeted the need to end gay male promiscuity in response to the crisis; others, like Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, offered techniques for safer sex; still others, like Douglas Crimp, offered paeans to the continued political and social necessity of gay male promiscuous sex. And here we are still stuck in a fugue of Manhattan-based white men! “In america”, the Black gay poet Essex Hemphill wrote in 1992, “I place my ring / on your cock / where it belongs”.3 Activists created posters declaring that “Women Don’t Get AIDS They Just Die From It”, protesting clinical definitions of AIDS that excluded opportunistic infections likelier to infect women.4 Abroad, debates raged between Didier Lestrade and Guillaume Dustan in Paris about the ethics of barebacking; in Berlin, the gay communist Ronald M. Schernikau, who would eventually die of AIDS-related illness just months after being the last person to defect from West to East Germany, wrote in 1984:

Gran Fury, Women Don’t Get AIDS They Just Die From It, 1991. Presented by Public Art Fund, 1/1/1991 – 30/4/1991. Photo by Tim Karr. Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY.
“put plainly: if you stop fucking now, stop smoking drinking eating working driving a car using spray cans paint plastic radios movie theatres people. start to finally think about yourself, and therefore about hunger and war and how you’re able to sleep at night, about a face, something open. and while you begin doing that, you should calmly keep fucking.”5
While activist and academic conversations are more nuanced, public conversations in English about AIDS and “AIDS art” and its strategies tend to begin and end with the collective “Gran Fury” and a group of artists working in and around New York City at the same time, including Félix González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, and Marlon Riggs, and to take extremely literal ideas about images, “representation”, and politics – ideas not all of those artists shared – as gospel. Suffering, resistance, and the didactic visual representation of political struggle are the end-all and be-all of this bad memory culture.

One of David McDiarmid’s Rainbow Aphorisms posters, 1993–95, amended by ACT UP, London, 2018.
A recent story of misguided resistance helps clarify the political stakes of this problem. In the early 1990s, before his death from AIDS-related illnesses, the Australian artist and activist David McDiarmid created a series of colourful posters bearing sassy slogans entitled Rainbow Aphorisms. The works express the camp complexity of gay emotional life amidst the crisis; among the slogans is the tongue-in-cheek, funny but also devastating sentence “I’m Too Sexy To Have AIDS”. In 2018, when Studio Voltaire, a project space and gallery in London, posted these around the city as part of an exhibition of McDiarmid’s works, ACT UP London activists spray-painted them over with the message “I’m Too Sexy And I Have HIV”. They defended their decision by declaring the messaging “deeply distressing” and “misinformation” that “takes us backwards” and “has the potential to be traumatic”, concluding that “not everyone viewing the poster has the level of art education or interest necessary” to deduce the poster’s origin or meaning as part of a broad artistic protest culture against HIV and AIDS.6 As Paul Clinton pointed out at the time in Frieze magazine, this reaction evinces an ignorant misunderstanding of the history of visual activism around HIV and AIDS by declaring only certain obviously didactic approaches to be acceptable.7 Andrea Long Chu and Emmet Harsin Drager propose satire and humour as alternative narratives to the endless and deadly “victimhood (tragedy) or […] resistance (romance)” offered by most queer and trans studies.8 McDiarmid’s posters offer visual evidence of satire and humour in the recent queer past, evidence ACT UP London sought not only to counter but to censor. By painting over the posters, ACT UP London declared the artistic output of a man who died of AIDS-related illness and can no longer speak for himself an unacceptable and inappropriate public intervention. These are the stakes of a bad memory culture: the silencing of the living and the dead.
In this essay, my goal is to – briefly – present the visual and textual output of the photographer and diarist Jürgen Baldiga, who was born in Essen, West Germany, in 1959 and died in unified Berlin in 1993 of AIDS-related illness, as an artistic strategy and response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Baldiga, referred to recently as “the great chronicler of the HIV crisis in Berlin”, has been almost entirely overlooked in English-speaking discourse on HIV and AIDS art.9 I am not a Baldiga expert, but I am, as a Member of the Board of the Schwules Museum in Berlin, responsible for his personal papers and photographic estate, which were recently donated to us after years of long-term loan from his surviving partner, Aron Neubert. Baldiga’s works of self-documentation explode with lust and love for gay life; they celebrate glitter and drag and hard sex and big dicks and the glory of being alive in the queer community, amongst queens and performers and lovers and friends. He once wrote in his diary that he had experienced “while photographing a visual orgasm […] i want to have exactly this feeling. it’s the loveliest thing about photographing.”10
Baldiga’s photographs are queer not as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live (though that is a part of it), but queer as in unapologetic celebrations of the sex and gender deviance that has, past and present, gotten us persecuted, jailed, and murdered. When asked in 1992 to write his own biography, Baldiga offered the following:
1959 born a strong eight-pounder
A miner’s son
Moved to Berlin in 1979 – jobs as chef / barkeeper / lover / prostitute / occasional worker
Since 1980 first steps towards the beaux-arts poetry / music / film / performance
1984 sensual acquisition of an immune deficiency
Since 1985 self-taught photographic artist
Since 1989 full (clinical) picture, or rather: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.11
As indicated in the biography, Baldiga was diagnosed with HIV in 1984, and that year began his photographic practice, which included a series of portraits that documented Berlin “tunte” performer legends, many of whom were his friends. Tunte is a difficult-to-translate subjectivity specific to West German gay liberation, implying a combination of political radicalism and trash drag. It was an alternative to more conventional “female impersonation” performances in the West German drag scene. In some of the photographs, like a portrait of the tunte Melitta Sündstrom, the queens are posed for laughs; in many others, like a gravely beautiful portrait of Baldiga’s close friend Melitta Poppe, the portraits are framed with the grave, diva dignity of a Blackglama cover shoot.

Jürgen Baldiga, Frau Poppe, 1988. Jürgen Baldiga; Schwules Museum Berlin – Leihgeber Aron Neubert.
Baldiga’s compulsion to document scenes moved well beyond drag and performance; another important body of his work documented sex between men in all its possible danger, hardness, and spectacle. As Stefan Hochgesand has written, “Baldiga’s real coup is that he understood that the taboo about dying, about the dead, was actually a taboo about life, love, the lust of queers: men who have sex with men”.12 The subject of his photographic practice, a puckish raging against the dying of the light, is mirrored in the nature of the practice himself: he took up the camera late in life and taught himself all the different ways he could give himself an orgasm by taking pictures.
Baldiga was not the only queer person pushed by the epidemic to document various forms of activism and experience that liberation movements had, until that point, been content to experience more ephemerally. The Schwules Museum itself was, as my colleague Heiner Schulze notes, founded contemporaneously with the emergence of HIV and AIDS in West Germany and was part of a broader focus on community archiving and collecting that emerged simultaneously with the pandemic.13 Its history of emergence in activist struggle and conversion to a more institutionalised, state-funded organisation mirrors the path of gay men’s movements in West Germany and later unified Germany throughout the 1980s and 1990s: “in comparison to many other countries in the ‘West’”, Schulze writes, “Germany had a comparatively low rate of infections and deaths […] the German federal government from relatively early on embraced and funded prevention strategies and community-based organisations, mostly by gay activists. This led to a de-politicisation and institutionalisation of AIDS activism in Germany.”14 It also contributed to a broader cathection towards the state among West German gay men: in an important diversion from the standard Anglophone narrative in which the separatist politics of gay and lesbian liberation were melted into “queer” in the crucible of AIDS activism and on the street, in Germany, federal government responses largely convinced gay men that the state understood its responsibility to them as a minority group. “Queer” remains a term imported from Anglophone contexts, separatist gay and lesbian liberation politics remain very much alive, and gay male homonationalism began in Germany even earlier than in Anglophone contexts.
But Baldiga was certainly no homonationalist-in-waiting. Indeed, his work constantly pushed back against state-aligned respectability politics strategies that de-emphasised lust, love, partying, and the crazed camp eye of the faggot visual imagination. A self-portrait as Bacchus, taken in 1991, depicts the artist, who had at this point been living with AIDS for a year, posing among voluptuous piles of fruit and flowers, the picture of sensuality.

Jürgen Baldiga, Self-Portrait, 1991, Jürgen Baldiga. Schwules Museum Berlin – Leihgeber Aron Neubert.
A 1991 nude self-portrait features Baldiga’s frankly enormous cock, either on its way up to or down from full arousal. This was not a portrayal of someone living with AIDS as a victim or as a defiant political fighter, but instead as something potentially even more radical: a sexual subject, facing the viewer’s gaze head-on, making eye contact.
When he had a Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesion removed from his skin, he encased it in resin and created a fabulous, pink, glittery shrine to display it. His diaries – which have been curated online by Aron Neubert – speak to the lust for life that characterised his entire period of illness and artistic output. “what could be more beautiful than dying from a love of men”, he wrote in 1993. “the main thing is you’re happy about it.”15 This somehow romantic ideal of physical love and death did not preclude rage at state inaction. “aids conference in berlin”, he once wrote in his diaries. “the people die / the dogs bark.”16 Always, Baldiga was focused on the physical realities of death and sex, on the body and its fluids, which could bear the virus that was killing him. “the sheet of lost innocence”, he wrote, describing an art project he later realised for a 1992 exhibition. “materials: hospital bedsheet/ sperm/ sweat/ mucus/ urine/ vomit/ poppers/ crisco/ southern comfort.”17 A photograph taken in 1991 called “after sex” shows his sweaty face and the stains on the sheets on the bed behind and under him, emphasising the physical nature of the act.
As the 1990s wore on, Baldiga’s diaries display more and more fear and tiredness. “gather strength again / and then try / to have fun again. / nothing but a fulfilment of duty”, he wrote in 1992.18 His photographic practice and the joy he took in it helped keep him going; he photographed until the end and continued, until the end, contrasting shoots that featured his own body, ever thinner and more fragile but always with the same throbbing, intense eyes, and the bodies of friends and lovers who were sometimes ill, sometimes the picture of health. “death is waiting”, he wrote in 1993. “the cells are filled with hiv. tomorrow berta will be photographed.”19 In the last year of his life, he became more focused on his relationship with a man named Ulf, whom he repeatedly, in his diaries, cursed having met as he was losing power. “Nailed down to the bed and the infusion stand / and the most beautiful and coolest man / that i know at the moment, lies next to me. / must take photos of him again / maybe i should only photograph him.”20 At least Baldiga was able to derive some sensual pleasure from pain medications and morphine; he would often enjoy the high and ask for more than he strictly needed; although at least once he took too much: “3x dipi 4x dolantine / is toο much honey.”21
Baldiga decided to die at the beginning of December 1993. After nine years of living with HIV and four with AIDS, he was thin and gaunt and did not want to suffer any more. He collected a vast array of different pills and, after taking them, was sung to sleep by Ulf, who watched him continue to gasp for breath and hoped he wouldn’t somehow survive. He didn’t, and his death was announced with a postcard bearing a self-portrait Baldiga had chosen for the occasion: a 1992 image of the artist in his home, in a white T-shirt, his cheeks sunken and eyes faintly bulging, a large hoop earring in his left ear, and a red clown nose tied around his face. At the bottom, white text read: “I am dead. Jürgen Baldiga, December, 1993.” 22 Baldiga went out on his own terms, and those terms were those of the clown, the satirist. This was, after all, as Micha Schulze has written, the man “who accompanied his morphine injection in the hospital with a blowjob, an ice cream sundae, and a joint. Who wanted Liz Taylor perfume to be sprayed at his funeral. Who had his headstone posed as a cover model. And who wore a clown nose in his prepared obituary.”23

Jürgen Baldiga, Self Portrait as Clown, 1988. Jürgen Baldiga; Schwules Museum Berlin – Leihgeber Aron Neubert.
The lusty clown taking morphine with a blowjob, an ice cream, and a joint is hardly the perfect political figure of romance or tragedy waiting to be reintegrated into a didactic memory culture of HIV and AIDS. But as Kay Gabriel once wrote of Sarah Schulman’s book about a very different group of activists, “politically effective people are not always as we imagine them”.24 The refusal, as much as possible, to allow the disease to temper his queer joy – his lust for bodies, for sex, for physical and earthly joy – was in itself a political act of resistance to the disease, to global inaction around it that cost thousands of lives, and to the integration of German male homosexuality into the more sombre and statist movements of the 1990s. Baldiga’s artistic, visual, and personal strategies –technologies not to survive but to thrive and to make his exit from this world as much on his own terms as he could manage – can teach those of us anticipating and experiencing profound crises about how to live and die, queerly, irreverently, and with joy.
Ibid.
Ronald M. Schernikau, “Keep Fucking”, trans. Ben Miller. Originally published as “fickt weiter!” in Siegessäule, November 1984; reprinted in Ronald M. Schernikau, Königin Im Dreck (ed. Thomas Keck), Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2009, pp. 159–163.
Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager, “After Trans Studies”, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 6, no. 1 (February 1, 2019): 103–116, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7253524, accessed November 2024.
Two recent exceptions to this rule include my colleague Heiner Schulze’s essay about HIV/AIDS and archival practice at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, where we are both members of the Board of Directors (Heiner Schulze, “HIV/AIDS in the Context of a Queer Institution: The Schwules Museum, Berlin”, Memory Studies, 16, no. 1 [February 1, 2023]: 146–153), and the introduction of Jennifer Evans’ recent monograph, The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship after Fascism. In German (available with English subtitles), Jasco Viefhues’ 2019 documentary Rettet das Feuer (“Save the Fire”) is an invaluable guide to Baldiga’s life and work and a moving film in its own right: https://salzgeber.de/rettetdasfeuer. Dr. Cole Collins of the University of Edinburgh has begun working and lecturing on Baldiga (https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-cole-collins), and a recent exhibit at the Cordova gallery in Barcelona presented ten of Baldiga’s diptychs.
Schulze, “HIV/AIDS in the Context of a Queer Institution”, op. cit., 146.
Ibid, 147–148.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Miller is a writer and researcher living in Berlin. Born in Boston, in the United States, he studied history and writing at New York University before moving to Berlin as a visiting scholar at the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft with grant support from the DAAD. As a researcher, he has collaborated with AA Bronson on “A Public Apology to Siksika Nation”, an artistic research project towards indigenous reconciliation in Canada that debuted at the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art. His essays, fiction, and criticism have been published in The New York Times, Slate, Jacobin, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Apogee Journal, Literary Hub, and Tin House. He co-hosts the podcast Bad Gays, about evil and complicated gays in history, and is a member of the board of the Schwules Museum Berlin, one of the world’s leading institutions devoted to archiving and exhibiting LGBTQ history and visual culture.