by MATTHEW HAYS

The scene looks all too familiar as I settle in for an interview with Tom Waugh. The Concordia film studies professor seems a wee bit frazzled. As usual, he’s juggling a great deal, from his various teaching responsibilities (his specialties include gay, Third World and HIV- and AIDS-themed cinema) to preparing for the latest in the university’s landmark epidemic-oriented event, formally titled the Concordia University Community Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS.

The idea was Waugh’s, and the series - which has featured speakers from a broad variety of backgrounds, including Toronto-based gay playwright and screenwriter Brad Fraser and British academic and AIDS theorist Simon Watney - has had a profound impact on the city. So far, so good, says Waugh; after a decade, the series has managed to draw audiences in to hear, think about and discuss the issue of the AIDS epidemic approximately four times a year. And the events’ consistency has meant the epidemic has effectively been kept in the public eye, during times when people would have liked to have simply forgotten it existed.

Discrimination, disease and discourse

“We started with an internal committee at Concordia in the late ’80s,” Waugh says of the series’ beginnings. “We were working to come up with HIV anti-discrimination policies within the institution. At that point, it was cutting edge. We wanted to protect people at Concordia from any potential HIV-related workplace issues.”

As well, Waugh says he and other members of the committee were inspired by the fifth annual international AIDS conference, held in Montreal in ’89. “I served on the cultural committee for that conference,” he recalls. “At the same time, I had attended a conference or two by that point and had commented on how AIDS was treated in cinema.”

At a certain point, Waugh says he and the committee realized the university needed more than a mere anti-discrimination policy. “We knew we needed a kind of intellectual component, an ongoing discourse within the institution, a dialogue about AIDS, but also a discussion about the larger issues that surround it. So, we struck up a lecture series.”

As it turned out, there was a great thirst for knowledge and debate about the epidemic, both from Concordia staff and students as well as the Montreal public at large. Lectures, generally held in the Hall Building’s main hall, have drawn massive crowds. Award-winning filmmaker John Greyson, het AIDS activist Janet Connors, performance artist Ron Athey and dancer Margie Gillis have spoken, among others. “The series has been successful from the beginning,” says Waugh. “Esther Valiquette, the brilliant Quebec video artist, was part of our first lineup. She died the next year, which saddened me greatly.

“Generally, the most popular guests have been the charismatic media stars, like AA Bronson [one of the Toronto artists behind the cultural collective General Idea] or Ron Athey.”

Waugh says one of the series’ main strengths has been its eclecticism. “That was important from the beginning, to be interdisciplinary. Not only academic, but also to have a strong sense of grass roots political activism.”

Corporate conundrum

For all its success, some have argued that the Concordia series constituted a bit of a deal with the devil. For the first few years, the event’s sole sponsor was the pharmaceutical company Burroughs-Wellcome. Since the epidemic’s beginnings, pharmaceutical companies have received huge amounts of scorn for not doing enough to fight the epidemic, and for profiting from expensive, overpriced drugs. “It’s complicated having a corporate sponsor, because your independence becomes an issue, even though they have never exerted any pressure on us. You somehow feel the complexity of the relationship with them and your audience.”

One speaker did directly address the pharmaceutical company’s questionable role in the epidemic, Waugh recalls. “[Video artist and activist] Gregg Bordowitz came in ’97 and stood up in front of the audience and, just as his lecture was beginning, took his various HIV medications. Then he publicly denounced the pharmaceuticals for their advertising campaign of the time.” Ads at that point featured healthy-looking men mountain climbing and biking. Though the ads may have been an effort at sending positive messages to people struggling with HIV, Bordowitz took offence at what he saw as a massively deceptive pitch of what life with HIV and AIDS was actually like.

Waugh recalls the quandary Bordowitz’s action raised. “This directly called into question our relations with our sponsor: was our lecture series simply a publicity gambit for them? I don’t think it was, but that question was there. We’ve diversified our funding since then. Pharmaceuticals are still a basis point, but the university has since given us more money.” (Waugh contends, however, that while the university gives a certain sum, the faculties themselves have been very stingy in terms of the series. “It’s a zero priority for them,” he says.)

Out of Africa

But one of the biggest threats the series faced actually arrived in ’96, when combination drug therapies meant a new lease on life for many struggling with HIV and AIDS. “Overnight, there was a massive shift in mentality, with people beginning to think of HIV and AIDS as a chronic disease. Some people argued that we didn’t have a vocation anymore, that the series should simply be over. We said, ‘Wait a minute, what about other parts of the world, where people don’t have the money to pay for these treatments?’”

The following year, the series had its first-ever speaker from Africa, Esther Muia, who lectured about how community workers were fighting the epidemic on that continent. “Since then we’ve had three speakers from Africa and one from India. We try to keep tabs on what’s going on globally, though our focus has always been local. Since ’96, one speaker per season has lectured in French, another effort to broaden our appeal in the community.”

Waugh says that, overall, he’d give the series top marks for its first decade. “I think it’s given us an international perspective on the crisis. I think it’s provided an ongoing reality check, as we go off into our closed little worlds, that sort of brings us back to the bottom line. It reminds those of us who are academics that we’re not just about information, we’re also about human relations and society at large. We always have at least one HIV+ person in our lineup and that reminds us not to get too theoretical or abstract about AIDS.”

Waugh continues to look forward to planning the next decade of HIV/AIDS lectures, including a special collaboration with the MSO next season that he’s really thrilled about.

Despite the series’ success, though, Waugh acknowledges that the overall fight against AIDS ignorance is one that seems to be suffering from widespread head-in-sand syndrome. “The scariest thing is that after 10 years, the situation with AIDS has actually gotten worse. We thought things were bad in ’93, but in global terms, the devastation in Africa, the impending devastation in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia is very distressing.

“People are not waking up to this.” :