In 1987, the ACT UP’s affinity group Gran Fury created an installation in the window of the New Museum. It may have been the first work about AIDS in a major art institution. The installation was called Let The Record Show. Employing the politics of accountability at the root of ACT UP’s ethos, the show featured photographs of real-life individuals who were causing the deaths of our friends. People like North Carolina senator Jesse Helms who had just said the government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as the result of “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”
In the background was a photo of the Nuremberg trisld. The implication was that the specific people who caused our friends to die would one day be made accountable. They would be reduced from their undeserved grandeur into wilted hovering little men like Rudolph Hess.
However in the end, our public enemies all got away with it. No one was ever made accountable. Our friend Sal Licata spend nine days on a gurney iin a hallway of a New York City hospital. He never got a hospital room. And then he died. No one has ever had to account for this. When Jesse Helms died his crimes against humanity were barely mentioned. The names of our friends whom Ronald Reagan murdered are not engraved in a tower of black marble. There has never been a government inquiry into the fifteen years of official neglect that permitted AIDS to become a world-wide disaster.