TY - JOUR
AU1 - Gamson, Joshua
AB - Abstract Through a qualitative, extended case study of the National AIDS Memorial Grove (NAMG) in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the only federally designated AIDS memorial in the United States, this article investigates collective memory as an organizationally bounded process. After locating the case in the scholarship on collective memory conflicts, and on complex and reflexive memorials, I suggest that the NAMG highlights the interaction between impulses within collective memory work that stand in tension. In the political struggle over the what, why, who, and how of memorializing at the NAMG and elsewhere, we can see an encounter between the forces of resolution, fixity, and unitary voice and those of openness, reflexivity, and multivocality. In the case of the NAMG, the balance has interestingly tipped towards the latter, what I call flexible memory production: the NAMG operates with relatively broad, porous categories of “victims” and “survivors,” and deliberately pursues nonlinear, fluid, decentered storytelling. My discussion then points to the conditions that enable and encourage such flexibility—the characteristics of the trauma itself; organizational conditions; and the features of memory technologies—and those that push back against it, within and beyond the Grove case. I conclude with a consideration of whether and how unsettled, mutable, flexible memory projects can be sustained over time. collective memory, memory, HIV/AIDS, memorials, trauma Walker within this circle, pause. Although they all died of one cause. Remember how their lives were dense With fine, compacted difference. – Thom Gunn, poem composed for the AIDS Memorial Grove, 1997For the life of me, I can’t remember his name. I’m not sure where we met, and the picture of his face in my mind is blurry. I remember other things: his tidy apartment, with a different display of flowers in the bathroom each of the few times I was there; the sex, unabashed for him but for me still an experiment tinged with fear; his expensive sports car, fast and low to the ground, which he told me he bought because life is short. We had little in common, but we had some fun. I remember, too, meeting him for a drink around 1990, at Moby Dick’s in the Castro, a year or so after our occasional get-togethers had fizzled. (Or was it a few months, or a couple of years?) His face was caked in makeup to cover up the Kaposi Sarcoma lesions that had spread over him, and I tried not to look away. I have no idea what we talked about, though certainly not about AIDS. We both knew the score. He was in his 30s and he would soon be gone. His picture would sit among the dozens of other weekly obituaries in the Bay Area Reporter—still pages and pages and pages of them then—and perhaps someone would make a panel for him on the AIDS quilt. To me he would become a cloudy memory, then a story in fragments of a man whose name I’ve forgotten. I came of gay age in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I worried like everyone else around me that a hint of a cold might be the beginning of the end, panicked each time a clinic counselor prepared to give me my HIV test results, and associated sex with death. I experienced the death around me, though, as an immigrant to a war zone, and only later as a fully assimilated citizen. I’d missed the glory days of the 1970s. Many of the people I met had moved to San Francisco then in order to be queer, had made joyful, liberated lives that were almost exclusively gay and lesbian, created new families of choice, and were now burying nearly all of their friends and lovers. My age or a few years older, they talked casually about “memorial fatigue” and “caregiver burnout” and could show you address books with pages of crossed-out names. Many of them had been hated out of their homes and families of origin and now watched that hate blossom again as religious leaders talked about AIDS as God’s retribution, and government inaction continually reminded them of how little they were valued. They alternated between grief, anger, dancing, activism, sex, caregiving, and avoidance, and many of them self-medicated with hard drugs and hard drinking. They helped each other die, and even as they fed soup and passed bedpans to boys who had just yesterday been so beautiful, floating on tubes on the Russian River or dancing shirtless in the streets, they figured they were next. Many of them were right. Sometimes, on the street, I’d see men greet each other with a slap on the butt and a chipper, “Girl, I heard you were dead!” Oddly, this was among the most vibrant periods of my life. I witnessed the dying, but I also joined the living. We were doing our best to hold onto the liberated gay culture that we knew was being decimated, one person at a time. We went out dancing a lot, at clubs where I would scan the crowd to see who was still alive, who was sick, and who was dead. I spent many afternoons writing, people watching, and running into friends at the Café Flore, which served as an informal activist community center. I’d jumped head first into the AIDS activist scene, joining the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) as a researcher (Gamson 1989) and then just as a participant. I felt sexy in my “Silence = Death” t-shirt and leather jacket—our battle gear—invigorated by the righteous fight against the medical, political, and social systems that deemed us worthless. Young and full of ourselves, we lay down in the street and went limp as we were arrested. We argued, flirted, strategized, drank. Many of my ACT UP colleagues were racing the clock, and organized demonstrations or wrote press releases as they were going blind, recovering from pneumocystis pneumonia, getting sick from the toxic medicines that were supposed to help them get better, or having trouble walking. These are some of the things I remember. Many more I have forgotten, which is at once embarrassing, comforting, and heartbreaking. Forgetting is as much a part of survival as remembering. I was spared by some combination of timing, condoms, and prudishness, but I stood—not idly but in a simmering rage of disbelief—at the center of a trauma whose proportions and cruelty my brain has never been able to hold onto. Had the world despised gay people a little less, or had I been born a few years earlier or a less cautious character, I guess I too would now be someone else’s smudged, dim remembrance. Problems of remembering have been baked into AIDS culture, as low-grade anxiety and high-octane activity, since its beginnings. How do we not forget what they sounded like, looked like, smelled like, the “dense compacted difference” within the common trauma of HIV and AIDS? How do we remember when many of us are still traumatized, only partially healed, maybe wanting to forget? How do we honor both our dead and our own survival? How do we remember something that is not over? Where do we even put the memories so that they are not lost to time? Whose memories are saved and whose are lost? What story is this? Whose story is this? These sorts of questions come up around other sorts of “difficult pasts” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991)—wars, for example—although they have taken some distinctive and pronounced forms within the AIDS world. I will return later to some of the ways AIDS sets particular conditions for memorializing, but I also want to suggest that AIDS has made especially visible dynamics that are inherent in larger processes of collective memory creation. This study attends to both, asking how problems of collective remembering are addressed in the practice of memorializing AIDS, how a memory organization’s responses to such problems shape collective memory production, and what this might tell us about collective memory processes more generally. I study collective memory production here through a qualitative case study, using interviews, participant observation, and documents, of the National AIDS Memorial Grove (NAMG)1 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the only federally designated AIDS memorial in the United States. After locating the case in the scholarship on collective memory conflicts, and on complex and reflexive memorials, I suggest that the NAMG highlights the interaction between impulses within collective memory work that stand in tension. In the political struggle over the what, why, who, and how of memorializing at the NAMG and elsewhere, we can see an encounter between the forces of resolution, fixity, and unitary voice and those of openness, reflexivity, and multivocality. In the case of the NAMG, the balance has interestingly tipped towards the latter, what I call flexible memory production: the NAMG operates with relatively broad, porous categories of “victims” and “survivors,” and deliberately pursues nonlinear, fluid, decentered storytelling. My discussion then points to the conditions that enable and encourage such flexibility—the characteristics of the trauma itself; organizational conditions; and the features of memory technologies—and those that push back against it, within and beyond the Grove case. I conclude with a consideration of whether and how unsettled, mutable, flexible memory projects can be sustained over time. COLLECTIVE MEMORY: CONFLICT, FIXITY, AND REFLEXIVITY Although collective memory, many have suggested, is a “messy, unsystematic concept” (Boym 2001:54),2 scholars share several related understandings of how memory is “collective.” First is the simple observation that memory created by groups is analytically distinct from individual or biographical memory, “what individuals know, believe, and feel about themselves at earlier times in their lives” (Schwartz 2016:10). Second, collective memory comprises not so much “objective representations of the past” as emotional and moral relationships to the past, linked to present group circumstances, identities, and hierarchies (Wertsch and Roediger 2008:318). Third, as Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins (1998) put it, collective memory is “a process, not a thing” (p. 122), something we do, not something we have; ongoing activity, not permanent outcome (Young 1993:3). Finally, that process is political, often involving “contention and contestation among people rather than a static body of knowledge they possess” (Wertsch and Roediger 2008:318). Which parts of the past are remembered, and how those are represented and circulated, is tied to the generation of solidarity, collective identity, and often national identity; shaped by the interests particular stakeholders have in particular versions of the past, and their capacity to get those told; and informed by cultural norms around public emotion, the genres and institutions of storytelling, and so on. As John Bodnar (1992) asserted, “The shaping of a past worthy of public commemoration in the present is contested and involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments” (p. 13). Such struggles often focus on memorials, the concrete, observable “spaces of organizing where the staging and arrangement of collective memory is negotiated and contested” (Allen and Brown 2016:11). Memorials, like other “memory projects” (Irwin-Zarecka 1994:8) or “sites of memory” (Nora 1996), such as museums and monuments, explicitly mark the significance and define the meaning of particular past events. Engaging select “technologies of memory” (Sturken 1997:9)—statues, buildings, landscapes, films, photographs, poems, quilts, stories, even bodies—“‘moral entrepreneurs’ seek public arenas and support for their interpretations of the past,” which then become “embodied in the memorial’s symbolic structure” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991:382). Those generating memorial projects must, practically speaking, address questions with high emotional stakes for the diverse actors engaged in memorialization. Whose memories and who decides? Which parts of the past will be emphasized and which will be set aside? Through what technologies and objects will memory be concretized? For what purpose? Memorial projects are, not surprisingly, notorious for extensive, extended conflicts. In the 1980s, for instance, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial generated “bitter conflict” (Blair and Michel 2007:597), when Maya Lin’s memorial wall design came under attack both for its “modernist aesthetics” and as “a monument to defeat” that evoked “shame, sorrow, and dishonor” (Sturken 1997:51-2). Similar controversies emerged in the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (Linenthal 1995), the Oklahoma City National Memorial (Linenthal 2001), the National September 11 Memorial (Blais and Rasic 2015), Berlin’s HomoMonument (Wilke 2013), and many others. However, memory projects can and often do stabilize their representations of the past, meeting “the traditional expectation of closure that comes with the … promise of permanence” (Savage 2005:21). Often, in the course of volatile memorializing processes, organizers construct what Edward Linenthal (2001:195) calls “memorial hierarchies,” in which some people are designated as more entitled than others to determine what is being remembered and how, and in which some people are designated as entitled to be remembered as victims or honored as survivors.3 Such memorial hierarchies are then often deployed in decision making. Tensions over who, what, how, and why of memorializing reaches a sort of closure when “a certain version of the past” becomes concretized in a memorial’s structure and didactic elements, such that “some events and narratives are privileged while others are excluded or silenced” (Metz 2016:291), and “multiple voices are reduced and replaced with more generic memories for the sake of commonality” (Bishop 2016:506). Recent decades have seen a decided turn—both in collective memory scholarship and memorial projects themselves—towards memory practices that encourage reflexivity about the memorializing process itself, and resistance to closure around a single historical narrative in favor of a fluid multiplicity of voices, purposes, and meanings (Young 1993, 2000). In this sort of public commemoration, “cultural memories slide through and into each other, merging and then disengaging in a tangle of narratives” (Sturken 1991:118); the memory site “folds together wanted and unwanted memory, making the historical a matter of ongoing live concern but with the absence of a permanent guiding narrative,” creating “an ongoing and incomplete assembling of memorial activities and materials—a meshwork” (Allen and Brown 2016:25). Rather than suggesting “easy continuities between past and present identities,” “denying complexity,” and “fighting over who can claim which victims,” such projects embrace moral complexity and fuzzy group boundaries (Wilke 2013:140, 46). Many scholars mark Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial design as the key turning point towards nontraditional, reflexive, open-ended memorializing (Savage 2005; Sturken 1991). As Kirk Savage (2005) writes, Lin’s design was controversial largely because of its deliberate break with traditional “heroic” messaging: “Her memorial avoided delivering any message. The meaning was to be generated by the viewers themselves, in their experience of the place” (p. 267). Writing similarly of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, James E. Young (1993) describes designer James Ingo Freed’s initial insistence on “discontinuity and fragmentation,” on “keeping forms open-ended, abstract enough to accommodate all rememberers,” on “not forcing what he called ‘one reading’ on the visitors,” on providing “’an invocation of the incomplete … irresolution, imbalances’” (pp. 339-40). More recently, Matthew Allen and Steven Brown (2016) have pointed to the “deliberately ‘unfinished’ and ‘open’ properties” of London’s Hyde Park 7/7 Memorial, which is distinguished by “the absence of any clear guiding narrative around what is being commemorated and the meaning that ought to be accorded to the event” and the fluidity of its uses and activities (p. 24). These sort of memory projects also often receive pressure to stabilize, simplify, and unify the memories they evoke, to settle what they seek to leave unsettled. Changes were made to the Vietnam Memorial (the addition of a flagpole and nearby statue of three servicemen, plaques with didactic prologue and epilogue), for instance, that were “just the sort of imposed ‘message’ that Lin had avoided” (Savage 2005:277). The attempts by some organizers of Arizona’s 9/11 Memorial to maintain a “multivoiced memorial” with “fragmented, contradictory meanings” were “resisted and conquered” (Bishop 2016:506-7). While the U.S. Holocaust Memorial’s “evocation of the incomplete” could be built into the architectural space, it could not be “conveyed in the exhibition narrative itself,” which would “necessarily depend on the continuity and coherence of its telling of history” (Young 1993:342). Writing of the memorial landscape in Berlin, Christiane Wilke (2013) notes that while visitors “who come with an awareness of the fluidity and mutual implication of identities” might see that reflected, those memorials do not encourage such “considerations of complexity.” Wilke notes the “significant difference between memory practices that simply reflect present identities and memory practices that are self-reflexive about the identities that are reflected in them. It is this latter reflexivity that is too often missing in memorials” (p. 156). If scholars of collective memory have trained their focus on the emergence of fluid, open-ended, reflexive memorials, they have also tended to treat them primarily as distinct types of modern, “counter-monumental” (Young 1993) memory sites. This may obscure the ongoing social and organizational processes in which memorial rigidity and flexibility compete, even within the most reflexive of memory projects. What remains murky is how social and organizational process give rise to the fragmentation, fluidity, multivocality, reflexivity, and complexity that make up flexible collective memory work; whether and how such efforts can be maintained over time; and how impulses towards memory interact with the forces that push hard towards closure, fixity, and a unitary narrative. Looking at the case of the National AIDS Memorial Grove, I aim to reveal how practices that leave memory flexible and unsettled meet up with the pressures towards fixity, how the “politics of memory” (Schwartz 2011:242) can lead not just to closure but to reflexivity, and to consider some of the conditions that might encourage and sustain flexible collective memory production at the NAMG and beyond. THE NATIONAL AIDS MEMORIAL GROVE AS A CASE STUDY: BACKGROUND AND METHODS Most empirical scholarship on commemoration and memorializing focuses on memory projects after they’ve been established, studying how people experience and give meaning to memorials (e.g., Dekel 2013; Lewis and Fraser 1996; Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007), reading memorials as cultural objects (e.g., Bartov 1997; Delano and Nienass 2016; White 1997; Young 1993), or reconstructing the memorial-making project after its conclusion (e.g., Fominaya 2016; Linenthal 2001; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991). Very little research examines the process of memorializing as it happens. The National AIDS Memorial Grove offers a useful opportunity to view an in-process, organizationally bounded memory project. That memory-making process is made visible, first, because HIV and AIDS are not over. While most memorials mark past struggles, events, or trauma, the Grove—like other AIDS memory projects—involves commemorating a phenomenon that is ongoing and continually changing. Second, at the time of this research the NAMG was in the early stages of a five-year strategic plan, offering an unusual chance to see up-close the planning and implementation of a national memory project, within its organizational structure, as it unfolds. I approached the research qualitatively, using a combination of participation observation from July 2015-October 2016 (attending Grove work days and events, working with the NAMG’s Storytelling Committee), archival data (internal documents from NAMG and external coverage of the Grove), and interviews with current and former board members and volunteers (13 in-depth interviews averaging 2 hours each, as well as numerous shorter, informal interviews in the field). Working within the extended case method tradition (Barata 2015; Burawoy 1998), I analyzed the findings in relation to existing theory, looking in particular for ways the case departs from existing expectations and knowledge, then using it to further revise and “elaborate existing theory” (Burawoy 1998:16) and attempting to “delineate the social forces that impress themselves upon the ethnographic locale” (Burawoy 1998:15). The AIDS Memorial Grove has been, from the start, an unusual mix of elite and grassroots, public and private, and conventional and unconventional memorialization practices. It began in 1988 when a small group of San Francisco residents with links to the gay community, devastated by the losses they were experiencing and helpless in the face of AIDS, began discussing the need for “a place where people could find solace, solidarity, and hope” (Bruner Foundation 1999:71). These particular folks had been involved with urban environmental groups, and were quickly joined by friends who were landscape designers and architects. Their idea, “born out of desperation” was to create a “living memorial,” a natural setting in which to “express their collective grief,” to mourn openly without stigma, to remember and remind others of their lost friends (Bruner Foundation 1999). In the founders’ words, they wanted a “positive focus for our grief” (National AIDS Memorial Grove 1991:1), a “beautiful, beautiful testament to the beautiful people we’ve lost to the AIDS epidemic” (Gordon 1991:4), a place where “hope, so long absent from the lives of so many, can be found” (“Golden Gate Memorial Grove Ginko Project” 1989). Golden Gate Park would be the ideal location, they wrote in their original description, and a grove of trees the ideal form: a “living symbol of hope” (“Golden Gate Memorial Grove Ginko Project” 1989). Within two years, the group had identified a location—the de Laveaga Dell, then an “overgrown, dilapidated, and boggy basin” (Carlson 1991) in an easy-to-miss spot in Golden Gate Park; many saw the deterioration of the place as “an apt metaphor for the impact of the AIDS epidemic,” and reclaiming the dell’s beauty as a concrete mechanism for reclaiming life (Bruner Foundation 1999). They had reached an agreement with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department for a 99-year-lease on the seven-acre plot, committing in exchange to raise funds to sustain a dedicated gardener in perpetuity. They had raised initial funds, partly through donations in memory of one of the initial team, Stephen Marcus, who’d died shortly after the Grove idea was born. They had developed a sophisticated landscaping plan, in which visitors would move into the darkness and shadows of the woods and emerge into the light of a meadow, and in which they would encounter a number of hardscaped “broken circles,” including a circular list of names called the Circle of Friends. The mix of elite and grassroots ties was critical to the Grove’s growth. The founders were a well-connected group. Their first fundraiser was at the home of philanthropist James Hormel; co-founder Alice Russell-Shapiro is a member of the Haas family, wealthy owners of Levi-Strauss; and the Advisory Committee they put together included Mayor Art Agnos, State Senator Quentin Kopp, Diane Feinstein, and Madeleine Haas Russell. While the Grove grew in part through ties to San Francisco’s political, social, and financial elites, it grew also from its organizers’ lives within San Francisco’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities, which had of course been among the hardest hit by the early epidemic and also among the most organized responders. The Grove was designed to serve and draw from these local communities. Indeed, wealthy donors, corporate sponsors, and big-ticket fundraisers were crucial to the organization’s survival in part because of the organizers’ commitments to and desire for community engagement. Very early on, Grove organizers recognized that they could not be in competition with AIDS service and advocacy organizations for funds—or be perceived to be—and garner any significant community involvement. They announced that they would not take any public AIDS money, leaving them entirely reliant on private funding. The community roots reach beyond funding commitments. The Grove has been built, literally, through community labor. Indeed, this was a central part of the original vision of a “living memorial,” as “the acts of organizing, volunteering, and creating the Grove were, and continue to be, part of the healing process, creating a living testimony to renewal” (Bruner Foundation 1999:74). From its first workday in September of 1991, when around two hundred people came to start what would turn out to be many months of weeding, hacking, and clearing of the land, the Grove has relied on community volunteers for its renovation and upkeep. Since that time, thousands of volunteers have donated tens of thousands of hours of labor at monthly workdays. These workdays have involved not just labor, but also community building and rituals: Each work day ends with a “healing circle,” in which, after announcements and thanks, and sometimes a poem or song, participants are invited to “throw names” of lost loved or suffering loved ones into the circle; then lunch. The Grove has also been put to multiple uses by members of various overlapping communities: not only solitary meditation and grieving, but also memorial services, weddings, and regular events such as Flagging in the Park, in which several hundred people gather to spin colorful flags to the rhythms of DJ-provided music (a tradition that emerged out of gay male dance subculture) (Caylor 2010). The Grove’s founders had not imagined it as a national memorial; indeed, the original plan had been to disband after the fundraising they had promised in their agreement with the Recreation and Parks Department had been met. In 1996, however, it became the first and only federally recognized AIDS memorial in the United States when the National AIDS Memorial Grove Act was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The effort had been spearheaded by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, whose district included San Francisco. Pelosi, an early Grove volunteer—again, organizational connections to elites were crucial—joined Congress with an explicit commitment to AIDS advocacy. By that time, an endowment campaign had generated funds to hire a full-time gardener, Grove volunteers had revived the dell and installed much of the planned hardscape, the Grove had begun hosting annual World AIDS Day events and had formally organized as a non-profit, with a Board of Directors, Executive Director, a fiscal agent, and small support staff. It would be nearly ten years, though, before the National AIDS Memorial Grove made its first major attempt to “come fully into its own as a national memorial” (Schwartz 2006:vi), by initiating an international design competition to construct a “new memorial element,” an installation that would transform the Grove from a relatively hidden “bucolic space for personal contemplation” into a nationally known destination that “tells the story” of AIDS and speaks to its “new global reality” (Schwartz 2006:13). While the competition itself yielded over two hundred designs, including several finalists the jury admired, the process as a whole was something of a disaster—as I will describe later in more detail. In the end, after considerable controversy and its own financial concerns, the Board decided not to proceed. The next year, the Board considered and rejected a proposal to dissolve the organization, and instead hired a new executive director, John Cunningham. In 2013, Cunningham and the NAMG Board initiated a five-year strategic plan aimed—nearly 25 years into its existence—to engage a “bold and futurist” vision and transform the NAMG into “an organization with broad reach and deep impact.” The plan had two central components: to “tell the story” in order to ensure that “what happened during the AIDS pandemic is evident to all who visit the memorial,” and to move towards creating “an architecturally significant, environmentally sensitive installation to convey” the “stories of the HIV/AIDS pandemic to the public.” In addition, the plan was to build “stakeholder engagement” and “organizational capacity” for the storytelling and new structure (NAMG 2013). Many NAMG insiders refer to its current work as a “pivot.” It is indeed pivotal: both a turn in a new direction and a decisive moment in the Grove’s memory work. NAMG AND THE TENSION BETWEEN CLOSURE AND OPENNESS The National AIDS Memorial Grove has certainly exhibited the kinds of conflict over the shape and content of collective memory creation familiar from theory and research on collective memory projects, most notably in its mid-2000s’ controversy over the international design competition initiated by the NAMG Board. In the political struggle over the what, why, who, and how of memorializing, we can see an encounter between the forces of resolution, fixity, and unitary voice and those of openness, reflexivity, and multivocality. The argument from advocates for adding an installation to the Grove was that the Grove had achieved its initial goals of providing the local community with a place to remember and grieve, and now had to consider future generations. “What will happen in 25 or 50 years when the people with firsthand experience of living through the dark ages of the 80s and early 90s are gone?” one attendee at a “listening session” asked at the time. “How do we tell the story in a way that will be meaningful for people? For me, a lovely garden doesn’t do it” (The Grove [2011]). Opponents, many of them longtime volunteers and founding members, argued that the Grove was already a fully realized memorial, and expressed concerns about threats to the land and the memorial’s integrity through an installation and increased tourism. “The Grove itself is the marker,” argued co-founder Alice Russell-Shapiro. “Nothing more needs to be superimposed on top of it” (Hemmelgarn 2007:1). The jury-selected winning design, “Living Memorial,” ignited this simmering dispute. Working from the metaphor of wildfire, the two young New York designers proposed to install within the dell a “charred-wood viewing deck, a stand of black fiber rods with mirrored tips evocative of burnt trees, and a charred walkway where new plants would grow” (Marech 2005:B4). The co-chair of the competition praised the design for conveying “the magnitude of the pandemic,” showing that “AIDS is not pretty,” and helping visitors understand the devastation “in a visceral way” (Marech 2005:B4). Opponents were not having it. They saw the design as intrusive, ugly, defiling of sacred space, and unnecessary. “It is hallowed ground, it is sacred ground,” said a longtime volunteer, David Valdez Moreno (The Grove [2011]). “We don’t want whistles and bells,” said another, Jack Porter (Marech 2005:B4), who also threatened to “throw himself in front of the bulldozer” (The Grove [2011]). Co-founder Isabel Wade said the design reminded her of burnt telephone poles (Hemmelgarn 2007:1). She, Porter, and others organized a petition pressuring the board against proceeding. Eventually, in an eight-to-seven vote in the last of five phases of voting, the board decided not to proceed, mainly on the grounds that NAMG didn’t have the fundraising or staffing capability the design demanded. Several people resigned from the board in protest, and some donors threatened to withdraw support. “It really tore us apart as a board,” former board member Gina Gatta says. “We spent months and months and months on this, and it really took the direction away, and it exhausted the board. It made enemies. There was just so much conflict. Everybody had such ownership over this place” (author interview, 12/3/2015). A decade later, core NAMG participants still regularly refer to the design controversy as a critical point in the organization’s history. It is critical, in part, because it made plain tensions—familiar from other memory projects and often noted by collective memory scholars—over the purpose of, constituency for, and mechanisms of memorializing. Tension over the purpose of memorializing, which exploded in the design controversy, emerged quite early in the Grove’s history. Organizers’ original emphasis was on creating a place where local residents who had lost friends and lovers could openly grieve, remember those who had died, get comfort and healing from nature, and find community. Designed to be a sort of open-roofed cathedral, the Grove functioned like a private memorial space, and taking care of the land was understood as a mechanism for coping with traumatic memory. An outward or forward-looking focus was rare. In fact, the geographic hiddenness was protection. As co-founder Russell-Shapiro said early on, uncomplainingly, “No one knows it’s here unless they know” (Morse 1991:A3). Even now, says longtime volunteer Marge Boric, “There are certain factions that want it to remain very, very personal, and they don’t want it taken away from them” (author interview, 2/1/2016). As a site for healing and personal remembrance for community members, the Grove needed neither to tell a particular story nor to speak in a unified voice. Over time, especially after the memorial received its national designation, the functions of semiprivate grieving, healing, and remembrance came into competition with the function of public storytelling, oriented towards a national audience in both the present and the future. Changes in the Grove’s mission statement reflect this change: from building “a living tribute to all lives touched by AIDS” (NAMG 1999:1); to, a few years later, providing “a public landscape for grieving, gathering, and renewal … to keep the human tragedy of AIDS in the forefront of the national consciousness by honoring all lives touched by AIDS” (NAMG 2008:4; emphasis added); to, a few years after that, providing “in perpetuity, a place of remembrance, so that the lives of people who died from AIDS are not forgotten and the story is known by future generations” (NAMG 2013:1; emphasis added). As a board member put it in 2007, “the National AIDS Memorial is maybe not for the people with memories, it’s not for the people who suffered the direct loss” (The Grove [2011]). From this perspective, the fact that people often stumbled onto the place by accident—an ongoing inside joke was that people stopped in the Grove only to get directions to the nearby Japanese Tea Garden—was an unfunny sign of mission failure. Nor was focusing on beauty and positivity enough since, as board member Margarita Gandia said, the Grove memorializes “something very dark: disease, death, society’s blindness to it, the government’s refusal to act” (author interview, 11/5/2015). As a national destination oriented towards future generations, the Grove needed to provide “the story” of AIDS: a push towards narrative closure tied to the NAMG’s organizational function. In addition to these strains surrounding purpose, the NAMG has struggled with the question of whose memories are relevant and who decides. For instance, the question of whether or not the Grove is a “gay memorial” has loomed large, as it has with other AIDS memory projects (Sturken 1997). Organizationally, socially, and culturally, the NAMG is—not surprisingly, given the early trajectory of HIV/AIDS in San Francisco—gay. The board has been, and continues to be, comprised predominantly of gay men, most of them also white, professional, and middle aged. Fundraising has often involved gay San Francisco cultural figures (e.g., the late Steve Silver, creator of Beach Blanket Babylon, and Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin) and beer busts at gay bars; the signature Grove fundraiser, Light in the Grove, was voted “Best LGBT Fundraiser” by readers of the LGBT community newspaper Bay Area Reporter in 2015. Everyday Grove culture is similar. At a 2015 committee meeting, for instance, a spontaneous discussion of wish-list performers for a silver anniversary became a recitation of gay and gay-friendly icons: Elton John, Tracy Chapman, Annie Lenox, Margaret Cho, Rachel Maddow (field notes, 12/15/2015). At the World AIDS Day ceremony that same year, big applause lines included mention of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision and big laugh lines included a reference to Levi Strauss as a “lifelong bachelor” (field notes, 12/1/2015). The semi-regular Flagging in the Park event at the Grove celebrates what its organizer, Xavier Caylor, calls “a gay art form,” “part of our heritage,” a “religion that has been held by the gay community” when “churches have generally not risen to our needs or invited us” (author interview, 11/18/2015). The Grove’s “us” is often presumed to be gay by identity or culture, which along with its board composition pushes towards the center a dominant white gay male, middle-aged, privileged class voice—what board member Kory Powell-McCoy calls “the older rich white guy profile” (author interview, 12/14/2015). This profile sits uneasily within the larger, national mission of the Grove, however. For instance, when Gina Gatta helped initiate World AIDS Day observances at the Grove in 1994, she saw the event partly as a mechanism for expanding beyond “gay men in San Francisco dying of AIDS,” and to communicate that “this is a national AIDS Memorial” (author interview, 12/3/2015). When the committee tasked with investigating the feasibility of a physical structure began their work in 2014, says board member Mike Shriver, “We got stuck, over and over, thinking about, ‘What is it we’re talking about? Is it gay? Is it gay rights through the prism of AIDS? Is it intersectionality?’ We got caught in this spin cycle” (author interview, 9/28/2015). The mismatch between the organization’s composition and its status as a national AIDS memory project has become more problematic as the national mission has displaced the local one. In part because of the organization’s commitment to eschew government funding and reliance on private fundraising, the NAMG has thus far tended to deal with its “older rich white guy profile” less through board and staff diversification and more through programming (such as the Pedro Zamora Scholarship Fund, which honors activist-oriented students, often students of color) and public presentation (such as a 2015 public service announcement called Hope, which features several Grove participants, none of them white men). Gay men’s experience thus inheres in the organization and culture even as multivocality and intersectionality have become organizational commitments, leaving the NAMG at times “stuck,” caught in a “spin cycle,” pushed at once towards a unified, dominant voice and a more fragmented multiplicity of voices. Contestation over how the Grove memorializes reveals a parallel interaction between fluidity and fixity. For some participants, the most powerful memorial technology is nature itself, as the natural cycle of emergence, growth, decline, death, and regrowth, along with the experience of shadowy forest giving way to sunny meadow, serve as both metaphor and marker of loss, survival, and hope. For others, however, this seemed too nuanced. “The Grove is like a beautiful poem,” Shriver says, “like it grows, it dies, it follows all the life patterns, it’s all architecturally based on loss and pain. It’s like a beautiful poem, but I think it’s way too subtle” (author interview, 9/28/2015). Another board member, Margarita Gandia, argues similarly that the more recently embraced commitments to “future generations” and becoming a “national destination” require different memory technologies. “We need to build a building that will serve both as an attraction itself, because of its architectural importance, and that will house the stories,” she says. “It’s very hard to tell stories outdoors. It is very hard to tell a very complex story outdoors” (author interview, 11/5/2015). As The New York Times drily put it, “Visitors’ emotions run high, but the details of exactly how AIDS devastated and transformed the world are not found here” (James 2017:1). Nature, with its constant change, its nuanced, ambiguous meanings, stands in tension with architectural memory tools, with their capacity to mark significance and facilitate legible storytelling. NAMG AND THE PURSUIT OF FLEXIBLE MEMORY PRODUCTION Interestingly, unlike many memory projects, the National AIDS Memorial Grove has responded to controversy and internal tensions not by simplifying its approach to memory construction, nor by developing a sharply delineated “memorial hierarchy” that shuts down the question of whose memories can and should be at the center, nor by rejecting memory technologies that emphasize impermanence. In fact, while clearly aiming to balance the forces of closure and openness, over time the NAMG has become more rather than less flexible and reflexive in its approach to memory production. As Savage (2005) has pointed out, while the “old fashioned hero monument unabashedly made distinctions of value, elevating some men over others,” the more contemporary “victim memorials” hold at bay the “nagging issue [of] why one person’s murder, or one group’s suffering, can be more important than another’s,” rarely reaching out “beyond their own boundaries of victimhood” (pp. 294-85). NAMG, however, operates with surprisingly broad, loose, and porous categories of “victim” and” “survivor.” Even as gay men have occupied much of the NAMG’s leadership and volunteer base, very little energy is devoted to ranking survivors or victim, developing criteria for who qualifies as a legitimate AIDS survivor or victim, or policing the boundaries of who is or isn’t part of the Grove’s memorializing. On the contrary, the official criterion for memorial inclusion casts a wide, loose net—“anyone who has been touched by AIDS”—that is maintained across both public and private expressions. The impulse has been to build a “coalition of the suffering” (Savage 2005:295) rather than to establish a memorial hierarchy. The Grove has become increasingly deliberate in its decentering of white gay men in its self-presentation, putting forward a multivocal, pluralistic, often intersectional set of voices. In a 2015 “Pivot” video, a public service announcement called Hope, four Grove members talk about their connection to the Grove, how it has changed with the passage of time, and the “transition from hopelessness to hope.” The Grove, says D. K. Haas, a middle-aged white woman living with HIV, “is the place that holds the epidemic, and holds the stories, and whether those people are living and not, all of our lives are memorialized here, all of our stories.” At the end of the video, she and other participants—an Asian trans woman named Cecilia Chung and an African American man named Brett Andrews—each say to the camera, “I am hope.” Co-founder Alice Russell-Shapiro has the last line: “We are hope” (Hope [2015]). The “we” represented here is diverse, absorbent, and almost aggressively undefined; the Grove “holds the stories” of people living or not, those “touched” lightly or heavily by AIDS. In practice, the collective boundaries are sometimes even more loose. As described by veteran volunteer Marge Boric, the Grove is not restricted to those who directly or indirectly experienced AIDS, but is “a place where anybody who has hurt or pain because of loss can come and find comfort. Whatever your loss is, you can come there and expose it and be comforted” (author interview, 2/1/2016). The Grove’s use of individual names—a staple of contemporary public memorials—reveals a similar flexibility in the boundaries of both the memorialized and the memorializing. At sites such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the September 11 Memorial, and even the AIDS Quilt, names mark and honor the dead; at the Grove’s Circle of Friends, which serves as both memorial object and an annual “naming opportunity” to raise funds, this is not the case. The names that line the circle include both living and dead, including people who died from causes other than AIDS (someone’s parents, a friend who died in a car crash), with no categorical, alphabetical, or chronological order whatsoever. The range of uses of the physical space is also strikingly wide-ranging, including activities typically discouraged at memorials. Weddings are prohibited at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and one is not likely to find Hora dancing at Yad Vashem; at the Grove one finds private meditation and weddings, somber services and festive flag dancing. “It’s a place of ambiguity,” says former board member Gandia (author interview, 11/5/2015). The kind of “politics of memory” that often resolve in the reassertion of didacticism and the negation of complexity and ambiguity seems to have instead yielded, at the Grove, an accentuated commitment to open-ended, nonlinear, fluid, multifarious storytelling about AIDS. In interviews and casual conversations, “Whose story is this?” and “What is the story of AIDS?” did not resonate as questions that needed to be, or could be, answered. Although a storytelling committee was formed to collect and curate community-based memories, discussions rarely focus on a unifying narrative or voice. Indeed, when an initial e-mail draft soliciting stories included a particular narrative frame (“we are looking for stories of courage, compassion, strength, sorrow, and unity in the face of calamity, fear, rejection, prejudice, and death”) and warnings about tone (“the NAMG will not be posting stories in a tone that adds ugliness, no matter how justified the anger and bitterness”), in a subsequent discussion those were removed on the grounds that drawing a “line between okay and not okay may not be possible or desirable” (field notes 4/19/2016). A later communication spoke of plans to “democratize our platform to any and all stories” (field notes 4/19/2017). To the degree that participants agree on an overarching story to be told, it’s understood to be constantly changing, ambiguous, and unstable. Grove folks speak of themselves as “stewards”—not only of the land but also of the stories. A multivocal, fluid approach to memorial storytelling is less the result of political compromise—as it was, for instance, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991)—as an articulated goal of the Grove memory project, present in both its formal and informal discourse. In its strategic plan, the organization set the aim of strengthening “the capacity to tell these stories using multiple avenues that are educational, dynamic, and flexible to reflect how the story is evolving” (NAMG 2013). The Grove, Executive Director Cunningham asserts, has to have “the capability to be fluid,” to “have ever-moving populations and communities”; he speaks of the AIDS story as a moving, always-in-process “tapestry” made up of thousands of parallel and intersecting strands (author interview, 10/19/2015). “The story is a rope and it’s made up of a variety of strings or threads,” echoes Carlin Holden, chair of the Storytelling Committee (author interview, 10/28/2015). Board member Shriver advocates for talking about “the stories” of AIDS in the plural “because there is no common narrative to the thing—none” (author interview, 9/28/2015). Other current and former board members speak similarly: It’s not about how do we tell the story, it’s about how many ways do we start telling the story … You can’t tell the story of AIDS. There’s one story, and in that one story are a million stories … What we know is that part of the way you tell the story is by telling as many stories as possible (Eric Ciasullo, author interview, 10/5/2015). There isn’t a story. There are multiple stories, and multiple ways of telling that story. What you see is an understanding that there are many stories and that the story continues (Margarita Gandia, author interview, 11/5/2015). There are a lot of stories that need to be told, from a variety of different directions, from a variety of different perspectives. I don’t really think that there’s a linear way of doing that (Kory Powell-McCoy, author interview, 12/14/2015).The Grove’s storytelling actions have thus taken place on multiple fronts using multiple technologies, collaboratively across organizational lines, and without the imposition of an overarching framework. So, for instance, in 2014 the NAMG began working with a filmmaking nonprofit, the HIV Story Project, in a collaboration they call “Joining Forces/Surviving Voices,” to produce a series of videos documenting the memories of a variety of affected populations and to sponsor joint events at which attendees could record their stories inside the HIV Story Project’s video booth. The approach to this project has been anchored in the notion of “telling as many stories as possible,” and seeing the Grove as, in the words of the HIV Story Project’s Marc Smolowitz, “a storytelling container” (author interview, 12/15/2015). The NAMG’s storytelling efforts have also purposefully focused on decentering the narrative of middle-class, white, gay men’s experiences of AIDS. For instance, the group premiered their first video coproduced with the HIV Story Project at the 2015 World AIDS Day observance at the Grove. The video featured interviews conducted with members of San Francisco’s leather community, that year’s recipients of the Grove’s Unsung Heroes Award, shot at Alchemy, a club for the leather and bondage/domination subculture that features two dungeons (see Figure 1). The decision to lead with the memories of what is arguably the most marginalized sexual community—and a more distinctly multiracial one—was driven partly by funding contacts, but also by the belief that doing so would deliver “a real statement to the broader LGBT community and to the mainstream” about whose stories are valued as part of the memory project, Smolowitz says (author interview, 12/15/2015). In fact, marginalization was presented in the video itself as one of the reasons for the leather community’s vanguard role in AIDS service provision, advocacy, and education, since sexual freedom, frankness, assertion, and taking-care-of-one’s-own were already central to the leather scene. The other honoree at World AIDS Day that year was Robert Haas, chairman emeritus of Levi-Strauss and great-great-grand-nephew of Levi Strauss himself. “We all knew,” Smolowitz says, “there was going to be something super-powerful about putting Bob Haas on the same stage as the leather community” (author interview, 12/15/2015). Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Still from Unsung Heroes: The Leather Community of San Francisco honored for World AIDS Day 2015. Copyright Rick Gerharter; reprinted with permission. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Still from Unsung Heroes: The Leather Community of San Francisco honored for World AIDS Day 2015. Copyright Rick Gerharter; reprinted with permission. The next collaboratively produced video, shown first at the 2016 World AIDS Day ceremony at the Grove, similarly decentered the common narrative of AIDS as the story of young urban gay men in San Francisco and New York, focusing instead on the early AIDS experience of the hemophilia community, which faced HIV infection through tainted blood products; the parallels to and intersections with gay experiences of AIDS (stigma, fear, government inaction, anger, activism) are both implicit and explicit in the video (Hemophilia and AIDS [2016]). Again, some of the decision to present hemophilia stories next was pragmatic—good contacts at the Committee of Ten Thousand, a grassroots hemophiliac HIV/AIDS organization—but it was also a conscious move to counter the notion that Grove is, as an acquaintance once characterized it to me, a memorial for “rich, white gay men and their friends to go be sad.” The memorializing process at the National AIDS Memorial Grove—how the organization has coped with strains over its meaning, purpose, and constituents—involves porous social categories (victims and survivors, insiders and outsiders, living and dead) and fluid, decentered, nonlinear, and multivocal storytelling. The organization has moved itself towards rather than away from flexible memory production. DISCUSSION: WHAT FORCES FACILITATE AND MAINTAIN FLEXIBLE MEMORY PRODUCTION? The National AIDS Memorial Grove’s memory project makes particularly visible the complicated, sometimes explosive, interaction between impulses in collective memory work that stand in tension. On the one hand, we see forces encouraging—and sometimes actors pushing for—resolution and fixity, in a dominant narrative rooted in a memorial hierarchy and a didactic memory technology. On the other hand, we see forces facilitating—and sometimes actors pushing for—irresolution, changeability, and multiple voices. This is not a dynamic unique to the NAMG, I would argue, but characteristic of organized collective memory-making processes, if more muted or pronounced in some projects than others. In this case, however, unlike in many others, the balance has tipped towards what I’ve called flexible memory production. How might we understand this? What conditions might tip the memorial process towards openness, reflexivity, mutability, and multivocality? The NAMG case highlights three forces that facilitate flexible memory production: the characteristics of the trauma itself; organizational conditions, needs, and resources; and the particulars of the memory technology. First, the characteristics of the AIDS trauma itself predispose the NAMG towards an open-ended, multiple, and dynamic sort of collective memory generation. AIDS is a moving target, and the experiences of AIDS are ongoing, widely variable, and ever changing. That other AIDS memory projects exhibit some similar features is telling. The AIDS Quilt, for instance, is perpetually unfinished, as new panels are added, and its panels are often put in different combinations, such that it provides “no unified interpretive authority” and “if it can claim a narrative at all it is a protean one” (Blair and Michel 2007:598). Indeed, cultural studies scholar Marita Sturken (1997) has suggested that the AIDS epidemic generated a “unique kind of cultural memory production,” which is “not about achieving closure but about keeping any sense of closure at bay.” The meanings of AIDS and HIV and their relationship to national discourse are so continually in flux that any sense of closure—with the implication that the story of AIDS can be known, told, and understood—is unrealistic … In the AIDS epidemic, the marginal and the mainstream, the commercial and the home-made, the sentimental and the cynical all converge in producing meaning. The complexity of this tangled set of meanings keeps closure at bay; simple narratives cannot take hold (pp. 176, 182).NAMG participants, in fact, routinely refer to both the “past-and-present” feature of AIDS in conversation and public presentations of the Grove’s work. “Any memorial is a marker in history,” Executive Director Cunningham says in a 2016 Grove promotional video, for instance. “The very unique thing about this memorial that I challenge anybody to think about is that this memorial was built during the loss and continues to be built during the loss” (NAMG Promotional Video [2016]). A memory project that aims towards singularity and closure appears to NAMG organizers—the core “memory entrepreneurs” at the Grove—not just undesirable but untenable. Claims that AIDS memorializing is unique may be overstated, but they do point to the possibility that some traumas or events push more forcefully than others against closure and towards flexibility—or at least make room for memorial organizers to do so. One sees, for instance, in the civil rights memorial landscape not just conventional, linear storytelling focused on major events and heroic figures, but also an assertion that the civil rights struggle is ongoing, past and present both. To the degree that the experiences being memorialized are seen as ongoing, more room seems to be made for irresolution and reflexivity. As Owen Dwyer (2000) has described it, the civil rights memorial landscape thus “does not so much seal and settle the movement as it opens a new chapter of struggle intimately associated with the mechanisms of memory—place, narrative, and interpretation” (p. 668). Second, flexible memory making at the Grove appears to be enabled and encouraged by organizational conditions. For instance, over time the public-private partnership expanded the memory technologies the NAMG could consider. The organization has generated a strong reputation and trusted working relationship with the Recreation and Parks Department—good will, a kind of organizational capital—through its upkeep of and improvements to the Grove (Ray Goodenough, author interview, 1/18/2016). In 2012, the department “gifted” extra acreage to the Grove adjacent to its original footprint. This allowed the NAMG to consider building a structure without threatening the “hallowed ground” of the central Grove—to expand memorial activities rather than sideline some in favor of others, and to do so with less likelihood of eliciting resistance. The broad definitions of survivor and victims, and the relatively expansive and porous “we,” might also be understood in terms of organizational needs. Heterogeneous storytelling that does not narrow to a linear narrative, for instance, is useful both for engaging Grove members and for facilitating fundraising. The assertions that “we are all survivors” and “we are hope”—core rhetoric as the NAMG “pivots”—lend themselves to a variety of organizational tasks: reorienting “stakeholders” towards the future (through the rhetoric of “hope”), while expanding the fundraising and membership (through the broad definition of “survivorship”). The expansive rather than hierarchical definition of survivor, coupled with the forward-looking hope rhetoric, potentially deepens commitment to the memory project. If you’re a survivor, you have an obligation both to those you’ve survived and those who come after you. You also have a story, which belongs at the Grove, the place that “holds our stories.” Framing the Grove’s mission this way is a deliberate, careful attempt to avoid repeating the sort of controversy that threatened the organization years earlier and to garner a wide base of community support for a possible extension of memorial activities. That particular organizational conditions make room for and encourage organizational actors to make use of flexible memory work at the NAMG does not necessarily mean the same conditions will do so in other memory projects; it does remind us, though, that organizational dynamics underlie collective memory, and that fluidity, loose boundaries, and reflexivity can be organizational resources. Writing of London’s Hyde Park 7/7 Memorial, for instance, Allen and Brown (2016) argue that its “openness and provisional character … are precisely its strengths,” allowing it to “weave together different and unanticipated flows of memorial concern,” enabling “a capacity to tolerate unexpected and potentially unwelcome activities” that ensure that the “site and the event that it seeks to commemorate will, to some degree, remain an object of concern, whatever form that might take” (p. 25). They can be, that is, mechanisms for a memorial’s long-term survival. Finally, the particular memory technology that has for a quarter of a century been the Grove’s central means of memorializing—nature as a “living memorial”4—set a pathway that directed the NAMG towards flexible memory creation. Even as it has come to be seen within the organization as “no longer enough,” the notion of nature as a collective memory tool is deeply embedded at the Grove as both idea and practice. As former board member Marsha Raulston described it, “The Grove itself is a continuum of regrowth and healing and learning. That’s what a garden is. If things don’t die, you know, they can’t come up again the next year. It’s a microcosm of life and death.” Memorializing through nature mitigates against linearity, stasis, and control. As Raulston continued: Some people were going to survive, some people weren’t, and those who weren’t help us remember that in a way that’s not static, because life is just not static … It’s almost like taking care of children. We can’t control what it’s going to be. We do our best, but then you walk down there, you know, and a hundred-year-old cypress tree falls and crushes our ADA walk and kills other things. How can that be? Well, that is life. You’re doing your best to be the stewards, but it’s gonna be what it’s gonna be (author interview, 2/1/2016).Board member and veteran volunteer Carlin Holden, walking through redwoods and boulders in the Grove, made a similar point: The trees have grown, but also it’s getting light now from places it didn’t used to. People like to make towers of rocks on the boulders, and the problem is when they fall, they can damage the engraving. We have to accept that. We could put all the rocks into cement so that they couldn’t move, but I don’t really want to do that. That’s the challenge, to create a project and give over, let go of enough control to get something real and valuable, to allow things to come forward that you may not have expected (author interview, 10/28/2015).This need to “give over,” to be a “steward,” to see memory as “not static,” becomes part of the lived experience of volunteers through workdays, and part of the organizational culture, spilling over into such activities as the storytelling effort. The repeated metaphor of broken circles, carved out in several locations in the Grove (the Circle of Friends, the Circle of Peace, the Crossroads Circle), sets a similar memorializing pathway, literally, in stone. As board member Eric Ciasullo put it: The circle is never-ending, a sign of infinity in life. These are all broken circles, these are interrupted relationships, but then these are also circles people can enter into. There’s a brokenness and fragility, while at the same time a sort of unity and welcoming that takes place. There’s something really profound about that that transcends the epidemic (author interview, 12/5/2015).The sense that memory itself is both bounded and open, more like drawing circles than lines, a job of caretaking but not of control, is bolstered by the Grove’s foundational choice of memory technologies—as well as by the new digital technologies that make open-ended and nonlinear storytelling so achievable in practice. None of these conditions make flexible memory work inevitable, of course, just perhaps more likely. These are conditions of possibility; they require action by collective memory makers. Moreover, the organizational and cultural forces that support flexibility are themselves historically specific and changing. In the case of the NAMG, this could very well turn out to be a passing period of flexible memorializing. Medical advances have transformed AIDS, in some parts of the world, from devastating epidemic to chronic disease; the characteristics of the trauma itself, that is, increasingly point towards closure. If things go according to the organization’s own plan, nature will no longer be the primary memory technology; the technology of a structure may increase pressures for a more conventional, singular narrative. Organizational needs, as the NAMG enters its nationalizing phase, are likely to facilitate new structures and relationships—new funding streams, new internal governance structures5—that could also leave less room for flexibility, trigger new cycles of conflict and memory hierarchy struggles, and give rise to greater fixity and linearity in the memory production process. And then there is the simple fact of the passage of time, and “the inevitable erosion of memory,” which puts pressure on memorials to “dramatize [their] lasting significance” (Savage 2005:309). We might reasonably expect flexibility to erode as those people managing the Grove’s memory project are no longer those who lived through the AIDS epidemic, and stewardship of land and memory become increasingly professionalized. Broken circles may close. CONCLUSION “Knowledge of memory’s pathologies is indispensible to its understanding,” Barry Schwartz (2016) has recently argued, but “knowledge of collective memory’s normal working is underdeveloped” (p. 10). This study of the National AIDS Memorial Grove investigated just such normal working—how persistent problems of memorializing are managed by organizations and individuals, what doing memory looks like from the perspective of those developing a memorial, and the ordinary workings of a memory project. In doing so, it highlights the dynamic struggles between dominant and multiple narratives, completeness and partiality, simplicity and reflexivity, straight lines and broken circles, proposing that these tensions are endemic in collective memory work and especially visible at the Grove. I’ve suggested that, in the case of the National AIDS Memorial Grove, conditions have been ripe for a particularly flexible approach to memory work, rooted in the interplay between the memory technologies, organizational demands and resources, and characteristics of the difficult pasts being memorialized. Future research can tell us how far beyond this single case the analysis sheds light. At the very least, the Grove case suggests analytical places to look as we seek to understand the processes that give rise to complex, reflexive collective memory projects—and more generally, to understand the ongoing process by which the fading fragments and well-worn stories of memory, linked to complex and cross-cutting identities past and present, become shared public memory. The case of the Grove also raises the question, both theoretically and practically, of whether and how flexible collective memory can be maintained over time. Some conditions can’t be easily influenced by most people invested in memorializing: the passage of time; the course of diseases or wars; the actions of medical scientists or terrorists. Others, however, are within their grasp: organizational governance and funding decisions, for instance, and choices of memory tools. One can imagine, for example, a Grove that institutionalizes the volunteer stewardship of the land, and one that professionalizes the upkeep of the “living memorial”; a Grove that institutionalizes a commitment to multiple, mutable storytelling and one that does not. Whether and how flexibility becomes institutionalized—at the Grove and beyond—are questions of choices-yet-to-be-made, questions for the future of memory. For their kind support, the author wishes to thank the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), where the author was a 2015-16 Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication; and the University of San Francisco Faculty Development Fund. For their thoughtful, lively feedback on this project, the author wishes to thank the 2015-16 CASBS Fellows, especially the Works In Progress group (Victoria Bernal, Carol Heimer, Natasha Iskander, Glenn Loury, Maureen Perry-Jenkins, Barbara Risman, and Mick Smyer); the anonymous Social Problems reviewers; and Jeffrey Olick. For their generous contributions of time, words, documents, and thoughts, the author wishes to thank the National AIDS Memorial Grove participants, with special thanks to Eric Ciasullo, John Cunningham, Carlin Holden, Jack Porter, and Michael Shriver. Footnotes 1 As do participants, I use “National AIDS Memorial Grove” to refer to the memorial organization, and “The Grove” mainly to refer to the site itself. 2 Collective memory is variously defined as “a memory shared by the members of a group, with the memories helping to create and sustain the group, just as the group supports the continued existence of the memories” (Corning and Schuman 2015:1), “what social groups select out of the happenings of their lives that they consider important and worthy of preserving” (Conway 2010:443), “a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history” (Sturken 1997:1), and “the distribution throughout society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about the past, how they judge the past morally, how closely they identify with it, and how much they are inspired by it as a model for their conduct and identity” (Schwartz 2016:10). 3 In the Oklahoma City National Memorial planning process, for example, the planning committee created a “Survivor Definition Subcommittee” in order to decide who counted as a survivor. They parsed out in great detail the “zones of danger” during the bombing and who was in them, proximity to the blast zone, and levels of trauma; they developed criteria for ranking different sorts of “witnesses,” those who “felt the blast, heard the blast, had concrete particles on them, [had] ceiling [fall] on their head” (Linenthal 2001:202). 4 This model of the “living memorial,” in which people “seek to embed memory in the landscape” is found elsewhere, especially in community-based responses to 9/11 (Sullivan 2007:34). 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TI - “The Place That Holds Our Stories”: The National AIDS Memorial Grove and Flexible Collective Memory Work
JF - Social Problems
DO - 10.1093/socpro/spx043
DA - 2017-11-30
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-place-that-holds-our-stories-the-national-aids-memorial-grove-and-Apf6PXIy25
SP - 33
EP - 50
VL - 65
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -