PLEASE HOLD : a Video by Alexandra Juhasz : how do mourning and memory change across time and tech for people with AIDS

This experimental video by Alexandra Juhasz does not make for easy viewing.  Especially for those of us of a certain age who somehow survived the AIDS pandemic whilst our loved ones didnt.  AIDS may have peaked some 30 years up until  the arrival of protese inhibitors in 1996 which removed the automatic death sentence for people with HIV, but it is by no means over.  Just because it is off the front page headlines, AIDS has not disappeared completely.  Far from it as statistics show that at the end 0f 2023  almost 40 million were living with HIV globally, and in that same year some 630,000 died from HIV related illnesses 

Jiuhasz’ video questions how do mourning and memory change across time and tech? She questions that what it means that twice in her life (in her late 20s and then in her late 50s), two friends (so different from each other) asked her to tape them—as AIDS activists and collaborators—as they were nearing death?

This video holds her images of: Jim, a gay white male go-go dancer who died painfully at 29 before there were meds in 1993; Juanita, a Black disabled queer feminist media activist who died in 2022 on her own terms, in her sixties, and due largely to inequities in the American healthcare system and COVID; me, Alex, queer feminist caught with them on tape at 29 and 59; fellow AIDS workers, Ted Kerr, Marty Fink, Pato Hebert, Jih-Fei Cheng, and the current owners of the Lower East Side’s legendary queer bar, the Parkside Lounge; as well as streets, hospitals, and apartments of NY, then and now.

                                     Please Hold
                 a new film by Alexandra Juhasz

Sunday, March 2, 2025
Parkside Lounge (317 E Houston St)
Doors at 3pm / Screening 5–7pm
Tickets available here

emceed by “High-Profile NYC Drag Queen!” Linda Simpson
followed by a live performance by CHRISTEENE,
whose music is featured in the video