On Memory, Process, & Extending the Timeline: A Conversation with Theodore (Ted) Kerr
Interview by Zachary Lynn
Many people may think of time as absolute—a clear-cut outline of history suggesting a single, direct path of movement, a lineage of events acting as catalysts that propel us towards an immeasurable end. Through his life’s work as a social justice organizer and archivist, Ted Kerr encourages us to instead think in multiple timelines and ever-expansive networks of memory, particularly as it relates to the world of HIV/AIDS. Already familiar with his work in New York City, I was thrilled to learn of Kerr’s additional role as a teacher here at The New School, and that he had graduated from the same creative writing honors program I’m currently a part of as an adult undergraduate student. Earlier this spring over coffee, we discussed his experience as both a student and professor of The New School, his process as a writer, as well as recent and ongoing projects outside of academia. Some of these include the book he co-wrote with Alexandra Juhasz, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, and a new zine, We Remind You: HIV and Palestine, published by the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?, for which he is a founding member.
ZACHARY LYNN: Can you tell me about how you came to discover The New School’s honors writing program, and how that helped shape your life as an artist, writer, educator, and organizer?
TED KERR: When I applied, an advisor—back when advising was a little bit more robust—suggested it to me, and I was really excited for two reasons. It meant a little bit of help financially, and it also meant some help deciding what courses to take—looking at The New School catalogue can be overwhelming. So it was like, here’s a path. But I would say the most meaningful and long lasting impact–it sounds so cheesy, I feel like an Ed Sheeran song–has been the friendships I’ve made. I have a group of friends called “The New School Five,” who were all in the honors writing program, and it was really helpful. I felt like I was a part of a community of people who were making specific choices, and part of that was a commitment to writing.
LYNN: That’s so special. Who were your mentors during that time, and who was inspiring you?
KERR: I have to say, at The New School, Tracyann Williams and Laura Cronk, who are the most helpful, inspiring, sweet people, specifically when it comes to Laura. I did an independent study with her looking at the writing that gets produced within activism. Not writing about activism, but writing that activists produced. This was during the Occupy movement, so it was looking at lots of the amazing work that was being done. Together we hosted a panel with at least three different writers who could speak about that. But we were really interested in what writing gets produced out of second wave feminism, what writing gets produced within Occupy, within HIV/AIDS. It was a beautiful semester.
LYNN: Was that a part of the self-directed learning program?
KERR: Yes. And then in terms of outside [The New School], I had just moved to New York. So literally just, like, leaving my bedroom was inspiring. I was working, at the time, for an artist named AA Bronson, so that was a really moving experience. I was volunteering at Visual Aids, which was really informative. And then in terms of what I was reading— [during] the rise of a certain generation of literary magazines, N+1 was fresh and new, and really meaningful to read.
LYNN: You have a new class coming up this fall, “Social Justice in the Everyday.” What are you most looking forward to in teaching this course?
KERR: The course is born out of this frustration I have within college and university where we bring in amazing people and sometimes as facilitators, sometimes as teachers, sometimes as students, we try to apply their exact situation to us and that doesn’t always work. Right? I think a lot of us struggle with how to balance ethics, meaning-making, and the realities of living in capitalism. I see a lot of people, especially students, be really hard on themselves as they’re thinking about graduating and how they’re going to balance these three things. What I hope the course does is remind people that surviving and thriving under any condition is really amazing. That social justice isn’t a job. It is a daily practice. It is a way of being. So if we can kind of remove ourselves from this idea that our ticket to survival also has to be ethical, or infused with purity, or be righteous, then we can have a more balanced kind of loving kindness to ourselves that will extend towards other people. Especially a lot of us coming from middle to lower class backgrounds who are job focused, but also rights focused. We’re at this place like The New School for the first time where we’re meeting rich people. We’re meeting, you know, comfortably middle-class people. And we think that we can get a job like a lot of them can—that is ethical, gives us money, and gives us purpose—and I just don’t think that’s in the cards for most of us. I think most of us have to scrape by, figuring out how to live a life while figuring out our ethics every day. That’s a winding answer.
LYNN: It was a big question. You recently posted online that maintaining faith amid crisis is the foundation of your beliefs in life, activism, and art. What is bringing you faith right now?
KERR: Being in community is always helpful. Yesterday, as part of the CESJ Freedom Scholars cohort, we watched three short videos. One by a faculty member named Alexandra Délano Alonso and another by this person named Milton Trujillo. They were about mourning, surviving, and public health in the face of the ongoing COVID crisis. Sitting in Wollman Hall with these amazing videos, with these artists, with a bunch of students thinking about this together is what brings me faith. Many people are trying to move past COVID as if it’s over. So being engaged with scholars and artists that understand that crises don’t end just because governments tell us so is moving. That’s one thing. Seeing so many people on their ballots not vote for Biden or Trump in the primaries has been really meaningful. To be sending a message that even if we don’t like or believe in the two-party system or in representational democracy, we are engaging in a harm reduction model. So we’re gonna be doing this while we’re engaging in activism on the streets, while we’re going to be talking to our friends and families about what needs to change. People doing a variety of things to make social change happen also gives me hope, or faith.
LYNN: Your work relies heavily on community building. What has “community” come to mean to you?
KERR: After The New School, I went to seminary, and I’m not a religious person. But one of the things I learned was this idea of “god” as being the stickiness between all of us, regardless of our energy towards each other. Like, there’s a stickiness between us if we like each other, if we don’t like each other, if we know each other, if we don’t know each other. Community, to me, is kind of like intentionally naming and thinking about that stickiness and how it can be productive, or made stronger in some cases. I always think about how you don’t have to like everyone in your community, and how we all have a duty to make sure that everyone feels reasonably safe enough in the community so we can actually engage with each other. So, “community” is a bunch of people that I feel super sticky with that I’m excited, willing and able to do easy, hard, fun, and lovely things together with.
LYNN: I love that. You talk about this in your book with Alexandra, but if silence is caused by a lack of connection, can it then only be broken through community building?
KERR: (brief pause) It can only be broken if there is an audience, or a witness. The reason why I’m pausing is because your question respects our definition of silence. Which is: silence isn’t the lack of sound, it’s the absence of connection between sounds. If that’s what we’re saying, then what you said is exactly right. Silence can only be broken through community building. It’s not about just having one witness, it’s about having a community of witnesses. I’m teaching a course at The New School right now that’s looking at audio culture in social justice and this idea of these kind of ableist words like “hearing” or “voice” which are so woven into the story of social justice and have such broad meanings if you actually talk to people. If I said, “Zach, I see you.” You know on some level that I don’t just mean…
LYNN: Visually.
KERR: Visually. You know that there’s a broader implication there. I think that’s true with “I hear you,” or “I will use my voice.” I think that silence can also be broken when people are witnessed beyond these kind of ableist notions of seeing and hearing. To be witnessed for someone’s full personhood. Everybody in this cafe knows that when you walk down the street, there’s different feelings– feeling invisible, feeling objectified or threatened. And then actually just feeling alone with everybody in a good way. Feeling at peace. No one’s clocking us, no one’s out to get us, no one’s trying to sell us anything. We’re just alive on the street with other people. And I think that can also break silence—just feeling at one with everybody.
LYNN: And how do you want to be witnessed by your community?
KERR: I feel like my identity changes overtime. Some things are stable, you know. I’m white, I’m cis male—those things have stayed stable. I guess my real answer is how I want to be witnessed isn’t just up to me because of how identities work. For me, it is a relationship. I want to be witnessed in the ways that people can “afford” to witness me. With that said, if everyone had all the capacity in the world, I want to be witnessed with as much generosity as I try to witness other people. That means trying to see the intimate, unnameable parts of each other while also respecting the things that are true about us.
LYNN: What can you learn from your students?
KERR: Everything. I learn so much from my students. I teach at two different schools. Manhattan College, which is a conservative Catholic, liberal arts school on 242nd Street. And The New School, which I would call a lefty, liberal arts college. So, I learn very different things from both communities. When it comes to what I learn from The New School students, it’s immeasurable. Because of the way I teach, I’m always updating and being reminded how power can work in a classroom. The thing that I like to think about when I’m teaching is that I’m not the smartest in the room, but I’m the person in the room that’s getting paid to steer the ship. As much as I want to impart knowledge, I also want to facilitate cross-learning. So I learn how to do that from students, from what students need and want—who feels comfortable stepping up in obvious ways, who feels comfortable stepping up in less obvious ways, who needs to step down, and how to manage that. I learn how people want to be treated in an academic experience. I also learn literal information from students. Everybody is coming from specific and unique places where there’s geography, identity, economics, human experiences. And if we’re lucky, a classroom allows people to bring that in. What’s good about The New School is that you can never guarantee the age of your students. So what’s interesting is you can witness all the different ways that we are living at this intense moment with Palestine, with COVID, with the looming election, with climate change, and just figuring out how people are making that work for themselves–or not. Like, also making space for how people are actually at wit’s end.
LYNN: This is a big question, but, why HIV/AIDS? Was there a particular moment you realized, “this is the work I need to be doing in my community?”
KERR: When I was a young person working at a clothing store in Canada, the AIDS Walk was something that a lot of people did and our workplace encouraged us to do. [The AIDS Walk] is a type of charity where you get pledges for every mile that you walk, and it goes towards HIV/AIDS. I remember doing it because I wanted to make friends with the cool people at work, and then going to the AIDS Walk and just being surrounded by people in their twenties and thirties who gave me a sense of like, “oh, you can be cool and social justice minded[…] these are my people.” The fact that they were rallying around an illness that is highly stigmatized, and about drugs, and sex and death—of course I wanted to be involved. I just saw a bunch of people I wanted to be like and they created a template, so I just stayed involved. I think if you stay in any movement long enough, what happens is you connect with people, and it just becomes your world. It becomes your friends, the people that you’re dating, the people that you want to get to know, your frenemies.
LYNN: Your frenemies! Do you have frenemies?
KERR: Of course! Less now, but I definitely had frenemies in my thirties. And with someone who’s not living with HIV, what happens is lots of people ask you, “why are you involved with this?” and it can be curious, and it can also be accusatory. I come from a specific point in history where people weren’t talking about HIV, when I was young, in meaningful ways. The friendships that I made connected to the virus are some of the deepest friendships I have. Even if we live in different cities and things have changed between us, the fact that we bonded around the virus at a time where nobody wanted to talk about the virus means that we have life bonds. Also, being in a community where you maybe don’t hold the same identity as the people most impacted in the community is a constant reevaluation, a reintroduction. A reoffering to stay. As somebody who’s been in this world for a long time, I’ve seen a lot of people who are HIV-negative be able to—and want to—walk away, and I understand that. But I see the impact that has on people that can’t and won’t walk away. I’m one of the people that could walk away. But I won’t.
LYNN: In the book you co-wrote with Alexandra Juhasz, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times and Cultural Production of AIDS, you encourage the reader to engage in conversation with the book by interacting with literature and media referenced between chapters. There’s an emphasis on the nonlinearity of AIDS cultural production, hence the different timelines presented in the book. How can this practice change the way readers understand the narrative of “The Times,” as well as its nonlinearity?
KERR: I think if you’re not immersed in the world of HIV/AIDS, it comes at you as a clump–a knot of knowledge. It can be hard to parse out the timeframe of how things unfolded. Something uttered or made in 1985 can seem the same or similar, or undifferentiated from something made in ‘97, or something made in 2002. And yet, those are such radically different times, but that doesn’t mean that someone who’s wading through all of that confusion is failing; It just means that HIV is underdiscussed, and the cultural production around it is under appreciated and understudied. What [Alexandra and I] aim to do—it’s like a harm reduction model. Come to the HIV conversation however you’re able, and through a nonlinear timeline you will have a chance to understand who you are as you’re coming into consciousness with HIV/AIDS, which is such a huge part of any archival practice. You have to realize that good archival practice is understanding that you are receiving the information with a certain lens in a certain moment of history, and so you have to be aware of how you’re receiving the information. That’s part one of thinking about HIV out of time. Number two is you have to look at the object and appreciate it for however you’re understanding it at the time. And then third is you have to think, “what was the context under which it was made?” An object made in 1983 around HIV/AIDS is before there was testing, and it’s two years into the response. Something made in ‘96 is right after life-saving medication is starting to get rolled out, and there’s been 10 to 15 years of intense cultural saturation around HIV/AIDS, so that’s going to read differently. Something made in 2002 is during a kind of new silence, and so it’s going to read differently as well. We put it in nonlinear fashion because most people from ‘96 forward receive HIV/AIDS information in a nonlinear way, and so we try to illustrate a practice that allows people to put themselves in context to receiving, and then understanding, the context of an object that was made at that time.
LYNN: Do you feel like HIV/AIDS is something that is still severely under discussed?
KERR: I do teach a class about HIV at The New School and almost everybody who comes to the class has a little bit of knowledge about HIV either through some education format, or from family experience, or lived experience. One thing that becomes clear to me by the end of this semester is that maybe one or two people in that class will become lifelong AIDS activists. Or through their own circumstance, [they] are connected to HIV for the rest of their lives—but most people aren’t. Most people will just take the information and hopefully apply it to the rest of their lives and, to me, that’s an OK outcome. I don’t care if you are knowledgeable or not about HIV. I do care if you are actively working to eliminate the factors that exasperate the HIV/AIDS crisis. If you’re somebody who cares about eradicating racism, then, to me, even if you don’t know it, you’re working to make life with HIV better. If you’re someone who’s working to eradicate homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, then you’re working to end the harms of HIV. If you’re working to eradicate poverty… you know what I mean?
LYNN: Yeah, they’re interwoven.
KERR: They’re interwoven. Do I think that HIV/AIDS is not discussed enough? Sure. But if you’re looking for a topic, HIV can be one of them. It can also be any other social issue that I think connects to HIV—including war. [The collective and I] just put out a zine around Palestine and HIV. You know, there are Palestinian people living with HIV who can’t get their medication, who died living with HIV—but they didn’t die of HIV. They died of wounds sustained because of a bombing.
LYNN: In a conversation published on IndieWire in 2014 on the media ecology of HIV/AIDS, you said, “When we conflate and erase histories, we lose the truth of nuance, the order of things, the ability to go back and trace steps, and make sense of why something had to happen.” How has the interaction with and preservation of memory and narrative impacted you today? How has it affected your own art and writing practices?
KERR: Right now, for Visual Aids, I’m working on putting together a portfolio based on three events that I was a part of last winter of 2023. They’re all events that happened in the present, because that’s how time works. But they are all looking at different times, whether it’s a New School graduate, Anthony Pellino, who made—as far as I can tell—one of the earliest plans for an AIDS memorial in 1983, or a forgotten artwork from 1987, or books about HIV that were published in the early days of COVID. The thing that I’m struggling to write about is—beyond HIV and beyond being these archival moments—what do these three objects do for people? I think right now—and your question is helping me think this through—if we’re lucky, there’s a bit of an outline. We know that in 1981 the HIV response began. We know between ‘85 and ‘87, testing started to roll out. We know that in ‘95 and ‘96, lifesaving medication became available. We know that around 2012, PREP became available. So, with a little bit of study you get the outline. What I think narratives and this nonlinear approach does, is overtime it helps us color in that outline so that we have a deeper understanding of the thing that we’re dealing with. The thing that Alex taught me with this idea of media ecology—there’s not just mainstream or not mainstream—is that there’s all these different size networked communities around HIV. The more we can dip in and think about these things, the more we can get depth and shade and variation of stories so we can get a fuller picture. And how has it impacted me? It’s made me someone who engages with more nuance and patience. Nothing is ever the final word; everything is one piece to the puzzle. In this age where social media takes up so much of my time, it helps me understand that every online utterance is part of a larger web. It’s made me a better reader, a kinder reader, and a reader that is more willing and able to connect the dots.
LYNN: In the age where, now, information is produced and disseminated on a massive scale at such rapid paces online, how do you feel about using social media as a tool to preserve memory, especially during wartime and public health crises?
KERR: The playwright and musician Dan Fishback just released a really beautiful message on Instagram about this moment when it comes to the genocide happening in Palestine, reminding everybody to be keeping paper copies of their feelings and all of the knowledge they’re accruing because they don’t trust that in the future, social media—or media in general—will tell the story as it actually was. And that is true. That is correct. I remember early in the COVID lockdowns within the collective, I reminded and asked everybody the same four questions: What have you done? Why did you do it? What did you do differently? And what would you do again? [I asked them] to keep journaling about those things to keep a log of the historic and intense times we were in. We know that’s important.
LYNN: How has your work as an oral historian affected you personally? Where do these narratives live after the interview?
KERR: I have a practice now. In 2017, after I did the Smithsonian Oral Histories around HIV and visual art, I had to figure out what I was going to do to not lose my mind. And this actually comes from my life in hook-up culture. At certain times in my life when I was more active on the apps, I would meet somebody and I would have to do a check-in after I left their house. I’d have to say, “What just happened? How do you feel about it? And what do you need?” Most of the time it was like, I feel “meh,” that was fine, and I need water and a sandwich. But it was a way of not disassociating with what just happened, and either treasuring what just happened if it was good, or starting to heal if something uncomfortable had happened. I brought [this practice] into my oral history work. With the Smithsonian Oral Histories—they were always in two parts or more—after each session I would just check in with myself. Your question is very correct in the assumption that I needed stuff. I needed to remember that, actually, the stories don’t stay with me. They are not mine; I’m a temporary conduit through which they’ll flow. They exist on a memory card that’s now in the Smithsonian. They exist within the person that told them. I can keep what I want, but I can also let go of all of it if I want to. With that said, of course, some things stayed that I wish didn’t. Some people’s stories that are the closest to my fears, or joys, have stayed with me. And I just name them and let them flow through. But I really made a vow in this experience to not be a martyr as an oral historian. Too many people in “caring” professions have so much unresolved pain and trauma. They put themselves in situations where they can help others when really they need the help themselves. And so they just keep on accruing trauma, and that becomes a battle scar that they’re proud of. I just want to be someone that understands that life is flowing through us, and I can’t be of service to anyone if I’m weighed down with my own unresolved unhealthiness and with other people’s unresolved unhealthiness.
LYNN: I could probably sit here and pick your brain for hours. Do you have any upcoming projects, collaborations, or events you’re looking forward to?
KERR: I’m going to be working with the New York Public Library on an exhibition that they’re doing on queer picture books for kids, and I did the HIV/AIDS section, so I’m excited about that. One of my long term projects is writing about Robert Rayford—he was a sixteen year old teenager in St. Louis who died of HIV in 1969. There’s such a rush to apply labels and identities to him because of his unique place in history, and so my book is really trying to dislodge him from narratives that aren’t his. Like, really asking questions like, “what do the dead owe us, if anything?” and “what do we owe the dead?” especially as it relates to HIV and archives.
LYNN: What do you want to be writing tomorrow?
KERR: A rent check! [laughs] Natasha Bedingfield’s song “Unwritten” is stuck in my head 24/7, so I feel like there’s a joke there. The number one thing I need to do is sit my butt down and actually start writing about Robert Rayford. I need to be thinking about writing for an audience that is waiting in the faraway future rather than the future of two to three months. I’m someone who likes to publish soon after I write.
LYNN: Do you consider writing to be a process, or does it feel like a way of responding?
KERR: I’ll begin by saying Ricky Tucker, who is a New School graduate and professor, just last night was talking about the sacredness connected to his writing practice. And I really feel that—that writing is sacred and should be treated, honored and respected as such. I also think that it’s a craft you have to work at. The way I respect it is by treating it like I would treat anything that I respect—and that is, to honor it with time, to hopefully get better at it.I think especially in the early days of my relationship with social media, I used writing almost as a weapon to get my points across, whether to cut down what somebody else was saying, to fight for something I believed in, or push back against a narrative that I didn’t think was helpful. I think [that method] was useful and interesting at the time. What I’ve come to find is that writing, for me, is a process, and it results in an artifact, an article, or a book. The more attentive and generous and generative I am in the process, the more useful that artifact is. The longer I sit with an idea with the awareness that I have to divorce myself from it, the better. I say “divorce myself from it,” because as much as it is dangerous for me to write something too quickly and publish it, there’s also a danger in holding onto an idea for so long that I don’t even recognize it anymore.
LYNN: What do you do when you’re holding onto an idea for a period of time and you reach a point where you no longer relate to it? What do you do with all of that energy and whatever work you’ve compiled?
KERR: The number one thing that I think is useful to remember is that writing is not an individual act. The more you share your writing—with readers, with editors, with friends—the better. And to take that feedback. If I’ve held onto an idea for too long, or if I’ve become too enamored with a text I’ve written, I just share it. If it resonates with someone, if there’s still a spark there, then I can keep working on it. If there’s not a spark there, then you just have to let it go. You just let it go.