Bloody mixer

Maxime De L’Isle’s sanguinary performances
shoot for shock and politics

SERO NEVER NEUTRAL: De L’Isle

by LINA HARPER

At the most recent World AIDS Day, a political performance by Maxime De L’Isle combined HIV-positive blood with a sample of De L’Isle’s own seronegative blood. “First Coffins, now Prisons!” was a performance that aimed to shed light on the criminalization of HIV and queers—and it’s got people in the queer community talking.

De L’Isle, a trained nurse who, by day, works with people with drug dependencies, has been slowly making a move on the Montreal queer scene since moving to the city three years ago. Originally from Sherbrooke, the young activist/artist/nurse is no stranger to the disease, having cared for HIV-positive people in palliative care both in Canada and in Africa, as well as having participated in risky play under a politicized BDSM lifestyle.

“If I am not HIV-positive, it is because I am very fucking lucky. This could happen in my future life. You can be born with HIV, but you can also get HIV from so many things in your life,” says De L’Isle. After a friend’s bloody art project performance, De L’Isle got to thinking about blood as a politically charged art medium. Elements quickly materialized to make the Coffins performance happen. “[Society] has been working around fear of HIV since the ’80s... there has been this fear propaganda—this is happening again,” says De L’Isle. “I started to think, ‘What is my link to someone with positive?’”

After a performance at a queer event this spring—Stonewall 40 (in which De L’Isle transitioned from femme clothes to butch clothes)—a young man doing his masters on the criminalization of HIV approached the scene with a proposition. “Someone came up and said, ‘I am HIV-positive and I want you to mix my blood with someone’s else’s blood who is not seropositive.’”

De L’Isle admits that an exciting part of the political performances is indeed the shock value. Soliciting an audience’s reactions is intoxicating, says De L’Isle, adding that “it’s a lot about the shock value but it’s a great pretext to engage people in a debate afterwards.” Another performance featured De L’Isle slapping a kneeling fag boi in the face with a dildo. De L’Isle has gone through shocking personal changes in appearance as well in the past year, vacillating from high-femme to fag boi to genderqueer.

Being a radical queer with a day job is intrinsic to De L’Isle’s life. In the early part of 2009, during Radical Queer Semaine, De L’Isle participated in a workshop about how to start one’s own radical queer collective and the PolitiQ collective was started. As an active collective member and artist, De L’Isle plans on continuing with queer radical actions all around town.