It's an Apple podcast titled, The Deep Dive,
James Wensey, ACTUP, and the Gorilla Lens of
AIDS Activism, Apple Podcast Description. Uncover
the media ecology of the 1990s AIDS crisis through
the lens of James Wensey. We explore his transition
from 1970s underground New York cinematographer
to a pivotal videographer for the AIDS Coalition
to Unleash Power, ACTUP, and damned interfering
video activist television, DiveETV. Discover
how raw, unedited footage circumvented mainstream
media, the physical logistics of pre -internet
video distribution, and the philosophical tension
of institutionalizing guerrilla resistance at
the New York Public Library and MOCA. Essential
listening for those fascinated by documentary
film history, archival preservation, and grassroots
media strategy. Imagine for a second that you
have this incredible technical skill. Right.
You know exactly how to capture the world on
film, but then suddenly your entire world is
just turned completely upside down by a life
-altering medical diagnosis. It's the kind of
thing that reshapes your entire reality. Exactly.
So the question becomes, how does your lens change?
That is the thought experiment I want you to
keep in mind today. We are looking at a deeply
specific intersection. The exact point where
highly technical, behind -the -scenes media skills
collide with urgent grassroots survival. Because
if you look at the historical record of any major
social movement, there is almost always a massive
gap. A huge gap. Right. A gap between what the
mainstream evening news is broadcasting to the
suburbs and what is actually happening down on
the pavement. And today we are focusing on an
individual who stepped right into that gap during
one of the most devastating public health crises
in American history. We're doing a deep dive
into the life, the technical methodology and
the archival legacy of James Wensey. He was a
definitive American documentary filmmaker. Yes.
And a core visual architect of the AIDS activist
movement in New York City. We're using a concise
but incredibly potent Wikipedia biographical
article as our source material today. It really
traces his life and work perfectly. It does.
Our mission is to unpack this timeline and understand
how raw, unedited footage can become one of the
most powerful tools for activism. And historical
preservation too. If you've ever wondered how
history gets recorded when the mainstream cameras
look away, you are in the right place. The media
ecology of that specific era is just It's what
makes his trajectory so vital to study. I mean,
we are talking about the late 1980s and early
1990s here. Exactly. This is a period where controlling
the visual narrative meant physically controlling
heavy magnetic tapes. Yeah, finding ways to distribute
them without the luxury of the Internet. Right.
What is fascinating here is the intersection
of those technical media skills and urgent grassroots
survival. Wensey's story forces us to look at
how a counter narrative gets built from the ground
up. Not by polished media conglomerates. No,
by individuals who realize that if they do not
record their own survival, their history will
simply be erased or completely misrepresented
by the dominant culture. OK, let's unpack this,
because the foundation of Wensey's technical
ability actually starts far away from the activism
of 1990s New York. It does. The timeline begins
in the Midwest. According to the source, James
Oncey was born on October 21st, 1952 in Brookings,
South Dakota. A long way from the NYC underground.
Very. And he stays in that region for his education.
He eventually graduates from the Southern Illinois
University Film Program in 1976. 1976. Yeah.
And immediately after getting that degree, he
relocates to New York City. That geographical
and cultural leap alone is significant, but I
really want to focus on that year, 1976, and
what a film degree actually entailed at that
moment in time. You really have to strip away
any modern conception of pointing a smartphone
and hitting a red digital record button. No digital
sensors here. None. Graduating from a university
film program in the mid -1970s meant mastering
a highly mechanical, intensely chemical, and
frankly unforgiving physical art form. You are
dealing entirely with celluloid. Right. You are
learning the heavy mechanics of threading cameras.
You're understanding the intricate physics of
light meters. And you have to anticipate how
different film stocks are going to react. to
various lighting conditions. Because you can't
check a monitor. Exactly. It was a discipline
that required a deep hands -on understanding
of exposure and processing. If you made a mistake
with your exposure or your focus, you wouldn't
know until the film was processed. days later.
Which breeds a very specific type of rigorous,
methodical technician. It had to. Which makes
his immediate career path in New York City so
compelling. He takes this formal academic training
in celluloid mechanics and plunges straight into
the underground economy of 1970s New York. It's
quite a pivot. Right. His early work included
being a film cinematographer for the porn industry,
and he also worked extensively as a printer for
various photographers. What strikes me about
that specific combination of jobs is the kind
of pressure cooker environment it creates for
a young cinematographer. How so? Well, the 1970s
New York porn industry was not the sterilized,
high budget, studio controlled environment you
might associate with mainstream Hollywood production.
Definitely not. It was gritty, marginalized,
and highly clandestine. Working as a cinematographer
in that space meant you were operating entirely
outside of the traditional safety nets of the
film industry. You are dealing with minuscule
budgets. Minuscule. You are likely shooting in
cramped, unpermitted locations, rundown hotel
rooms or dingy apartments where you have absolutely
no control over the ambient environment. And
you have to work fast. Very fast. You can't spend
three hours setting up a single lighting rig
when the location might be compromised or the
budget only covers a single day of shooting.
Right. That environment forces a very specific
kind of scrappy, adaptable, technical proficiency.
You learn how to maximize whatever practical
light is available. You learn how to keep the
camera rolling through chaotic, unscripted moments
and how to get the necessary shots efficiently
without a massive grip. an electric crew supporting
you. That adaptability is crucial. He's essentially
going through a guerrilla filmmaking boot camp.
That's a great way to put it. Oh. And simultaneously,
his work as a photographic printer is honing
an entirely different but complimentary skill
set. The darkroom work. Yeah. Photographic printing
in the analog era was a meticulous laboratory
process. It requires immense patience, an eye
for the absolute finest details of contrast,
shadow, and exposure. And a deep understanding
of the chemical baths required to bring an image
to life. Right. So on one hand, you have the
chaotic high speed capture of moving images in
unpredictable underground settings. And on the
other hand, you have the precise, careful, solitary
processing of still images in a dark room. He
is building a formidable technical toolkit. and
it's completely independent of corporate media
structures. He knows how to operate in the margins.
Nice. He knows how to manipulate the physical
medium of film from the moment the shutter clicks
to the final chemical bath. And that foundational
reality is what sets the stage for the rest of
his life. He isn't just the guy who decides to
buy a camcorder one day. He is a master technician
who understands the architecture of visual storytelling
on a molecular level. Here's where it gets really
interesting, though. because all of that technical
mastery collides with a devastating personal
and historical reality. The pivot. The pivot.
The year is 1990. The sources give us two stark
events that happened to Wensey in this single
year. First, he is diagnosed with HIV. Right.
Second, he immediately joins the activist group
ACTUP that exact same year. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, We need to contextualize
the immense weight of the year 1990 in New York
City regarding the AIDS epidemic. Please do,
because it's vital. To understand the synthesis
of those two facts, the diagnosis and the immediate
pivot to activism, you have to understand the
environment. By 1990, the crisis had been ravaging
the city for nearly a decade. A full death load.
The medical treatments we consider standard today,
like highly active antiretroviral therapy, simply
did not exist. They weren't there. An HIV diagnosis
was, for all intents and purposes, viewed as
a terminal sentence. It was often accompanied
by horrific physical decline and an overwhelming
social stigma. And it wasn't just a medical crisis.
We have to report this clearly. It was viewed
by the community as a profound political failure.
Absolutely. The source material outlines how
the government response from the municipal level
all the way up to the White House was perceived
as silence. apathy and hostility. Public health
institutions were dragging their feet on drug
trials. And the mainstream media frequently framed
the epidemic in ways that blamed the victims
or isolated them as social pariahs. Which is
precisely why ACTUP existed in the first place.
For those who might not be familiar, ACTUP stands
for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Formed
in 1987. Right. As a direct, militant response
to that exact systemic neglect. It was a diverse,
nonpartisan group of individuals united in anger,
committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.
So when Wensey receives his diagnosis in 1990,
it acts as an undeniable absolute catalyst. The
diagnosis forces a fundamental shift in his identity.
He transitions from being an observer, a technician
living and working in the background of the city,
to a man thrust into a fight for his own survival.
and the survival of his community. I really tried
to put myself in his shoes in 1990. It's hard
to imagine. It really is. I honestly don't know
if I would have had the instinct to pick up a
camera. The natural human response to that kind
of trauma is often to retreat, to seek comfort,
or just succumb to the overwhelming fear of the
unknown. Sure. But once he takes this deeply
terrifying private medical crisis and instantly
translates it into fierce uncompromising political
action. He grabs his camera and joins the front
lines. Exactly. He takes the specific tools he
has spent 15 years mastering, the framing, the
lighting, the understanding of the lens, and
he weaponizes them. He brings his entire professional
identity into the movement. The camera transforms
from a tool used to make a living in the underground
economy into a critical mechanism for collective
survival. And the way he wields that mechanism
is what defines his legacy, which brings us to
the actual aesthetic of his resistance. How he
shot the movement. Yes. How did he shoot this
movement? The historical record describes his
specific style of coverage during his time with
ACTUP using three very deliberate adjectives.
Angry, raw, and thorough. Angry, raw, and thorough.
Furthermore. His work intentionally relied on
unedited shots and heavily featured activist
interviews who cover the topics discussed. Those
adjectives are doing heavy lifting. They really
are. They represent a radical departure from
the traditional rules of documentary filmmaking.
Let's look closely at the insistence on unedited
shots. Okay. In the realm of media studies, the
moment you edit a piece of footage, you become
a mediator. You're filtering it. Right. You are
making a subjective choice about what the audience
needs to see, what order they see it in, and
most crucially, what is left on the cutting room
floor. But let me play doubles advocate here.
Doesn't unedited and raw footage run the risk
of alienating the exact mainstream audience they
needed to convince? That's the traditional thinking.
Right. If you are trying to win hearts and minds,
conventional wisdom says you package the message
neatly, you provide a calm voiceover, you trim
the chaotic streaming, and you make it palatable
for the suburban viewer watching the six o 'clock
news. Why lean so heavily into the raw anger?
Because you have to look at the flip side of
that conventional wisdom. ACTUP wasn't trying
to win the hearts and minds of a comfortable
mainstream audience that had already proven it
was content to look away. They were trying to
force the hand of the FDA, the NIH, and the political
establishment. They were trying to disrupt the
machinery of the state. So making it palatable
wasn't the goal. Exactly. Mainstein news networks
would show up to an ACTUP demonstration, film
five seconds of people yelling to paint them
as chaotic radicals, and then cut back to a clean
-cut anchor who would contextualize the protest
in a way that sanitized the actual desperation.
They would strip the context to maintain the
status quo. Precisely. By relying on unedited
shots, Wensey was intentionally removing the
mediator. He was circumventing the establishment's
ability to soften or twist the reality of the
crisis. Because unedited footage demands that
the viewer confront the entire event in its actual
context. Yes. When the camera doesn't cut away,
you were forced to sit with the discomfort. You
see the arrests without the framing of a press
conference. You hear the uninterrupted demands
of the activists. And by letting the activists
speak for themselves in these direct, on -the
-ground interviews, he was creating an undeniable
primary source. He wasn't making a polished retrospective.
He was manufacturing evidence. Evidence? That's
a powerful word for it. The anger of the ACT
-UP movement was a core component of the truth.
to edit the anger out, to polish it away for
a more comfortable viewing experience, would
be a fundamental lie about what was actually
happening on those streets. That commitment to
the unvarnished truth ties directly into the
third adjective, thorough. Angry, raw, thorough.
A thorough approach means you don't just drop
in, grab a sensational clip of a clash with the
police, and then pack up your gear. Thorough
implies an exhaustion of the subject. Once he
was staying for the entire process, he was documenting
the boring logistical meetings, the profound
exhaustion of the organizers, the nuance of the
medical debates they were having, and the full
spectrum of the activism. So what does this all
mean? It means his raw, angry, unedited aesthetic
was a highly calculated tactical choice. Highly
calculated. He recognized that the traditional,
objective, neat documentary format was a luxury
that a dying community could not afford. The
aesthetic had to match the urgency of the moment.
And that raw aesthetic didn't just stay on the
streets. It eventually scaled up into something
highly organized, which leads us to his broader
institutional impact. The scaling up of this
media strategy is where we see his technical
background really merge with organizational foresight.
Starting in 1991, James Wensey becomes a producer
and director for an entity known as DivaTV. DivaTV.
And we should clarify for the listener, DivaTV
stands for Damned Interfering Video Activist
Television. Such a great name. It really is.
It was an affinity group within ACTUP, specifically
focused on video documentation and alternative
media production. And Wensey's explicit goal
within this organization was incredibly ambitious.
What was the mission? The source states his aim
was to create a national media network devoted
to reflecting the struggles, needs, and state
of mind of people affected by AIDS. The phrasing
of that mission statement requires deep analysis.
Let's do it. Notice the specific conclusion of
the phrase state of mind. Yeah. He didn't just
say he wanted a network to broadcast their political
demands or to document their medical struggles.
Reflecting the state of mind of people affected
by AIDS is a profound psychological distinction.
It elevates the project from mere political propaganda
to a comprehensive anthropological record. It
ensures that the humanity of the community remains
at the forefront. Mainstream media might occasionally
flash a statistic about rising infection rates
or show b -roll of a hospital ward, but capturing
the state of mind means broadcasting the complex
emotional reality. It means showing the dark
necessary humor the activists used to survive.
Right. It means capturing the profound grief
of memorial services, the fierce solidarity of
the meetings, and the sheer terror of the unknown.
You cannot capture a community state of mind
unless you are embedded within it. What really
strikes me about that goal is the sheer logistical
audacity of trying to build a national media
network from the grassroots level in 1991. We
have to remind ourselves of the technological
limitations of the era. It's hard to even conceptualize
now. This is a pre -internet media landscape.
There are no social media platforms, no algorithmic
feeds, no instant global distribution channels
where you can upload a video and reach a million
people overnight. If you wanted to share a video
in 1991, it required immense physical labor.
And exercise and brute force logistics. We're
talking about shooting on... heavy physical videotapes,
likely formats like Hi8 or 3 1⁄4 inch Eumatic.
Heavy gear. Very heavy gear. Once the footage
was captured the editing process was linear and
painstakingly slow and then came distribution.
The sneaker net. Exactly. Creating a national
network meant setting up massive VHS dubbing
stations. Activists would physically copy tapes
one by one in real time. In real time. If it's
a two -hour tape, it takes two hours to copy.
Right. Then they had to establish complex mail
trees. physically shipping these VHS cassettes
across the country to other activist chapters
in the mail. And they were constantly lobbying
public access television stations in various
cities to secure late night broadcast slots just
to get the footage in front of civilian eyeballs.
It was a massive community organizing effort
masquerading as a media project. And once he
wasn't just facilitating this distribution, he
was actively creating long form content for it.
During this period, he directed his first feature
length documentary. It was titled Fight Back,
Fight AIDS. The existence of Fight Back, Fight
AIDS within that specific timeline is fascinating.
Because it wasn't retrospective. Right. This
wasn't a film made decades later with the benefit
of hindsight and massive historical archives.
This was a piece of media generated in the exact
middle of the maelstrom. An immediate real time
dispatch from the front lines. Designed to be
watched by the people who were actively fighting
the war. The function of a documentary like that
is entirely different from a historical retrospective.
It is meant to educate, to radicalize, and to
provide a tactical blueprint for other activists
in other cities. But his dedication doesn't end
when the peak of the 1990s crisis subsides. No,
it continues. The historical record shows his
involvement stretching across decades. Over 20
years later, he serves as the cinematographer
for the 2012 documentary film United in Anger,
a history of ACT -UP. The contrast between those
two projects is a perfect illustration of his
lifelong commitment. Fight back. Fight AIDS is
the urgent, messy, real -time broadcast. And
United in Anger, released in 2012, is a structured,
reflective historical text. It represents the
movement looking back at itself, codifying its
own history for a new generation. Going from
the man holding the camera in the chaotic street
protests of 1990 to serving as the formal cinematographer
for the definitive historical documentary in
2012. It demonstrates an unwavering dedication
to the narrative. He didn't just capture the
history as it occurred. He stayed in the room
to ensure the story was framed correctly when
society finally decided to look back. And that
transition from the urgent capture of history
to the meticulous preservation of it brings us
to the final and perhaps most philosophically
complex chapter of his work. The archiving. Yes.
Today, James Wensey is a video archivist for
the Estate Project's AIDS Activist Video Preservation
Project, which is housed at the New York Public
Library. That is a massive institution. Beyond
that, his footage is currently being exhibited
at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles. This raises an important question about
the life cycle of grassroots resistance. What
happens to the physical artifacts of a rebellion
when the immediate street protests conclude?
They don't just magically preserve themselves.
Not at all. The reality of analog video is terrifying
from a preservation standpoint. Because the tape
degrades. Magnetic tape physically breaks down
over time. It is susceptible to temperature,
humidity, and simple magnetic decay. If someone
doesn't take the active, incredibly tedious step
of digitizing and archiving those hundreds of
hours of raw, unedited tapes, that history literally
crumbles into dust. Which makes his role as an
archivist just as critical as his role as a cinematographer.
It really is. He transitions from being the man
wielding the camera in the center of a chaotic,
illegal demonstration to the man sitting quietly
in an archive. meticulously cataloging and preserving
the physical media for the New York Public Library.
It is the absolute full life cycle of historical
preservation. But we also have to grapple with
the profound philosophical tension of where that
footage ended up. Right, the institutionalization.
Think about the nature of this media. These tapes
were born out of desperate anti -institutional
protests. Yes. They were angry. unedited guerrilla
style recordings specifically designed to disrupt
the status quo to challenge the government and
to bypass the establishment media. And now that
exact same revolutionary footage is being carefully
preserved. protected and institutionalized by
massive established cultural pillars like the
New York Public Library and MOCA. It is the ultimate
institutionalization of resistance. You have
to wonder, is there an irony in the fact that
a movement which had to rebel against the systemic
institutions of society ultimately requires those
same types of legacy institutions to ensure its
survival in the historical record? It is an inherent
paradox in any successful radical movement. Not
this. But rather than viewing it as a compromise,
I see it as a profound victory. A victory? Yes.
The activists forced their way into the cultural
canon. The institutions didn't naturally invite
them in. The sheer undeniable weight, thoroughness,
and artistic vitalism of the footage Wensie and
Diva TV created demanded to be preserved. They
made themselves impossible to ignore. Exactly.
By securing a place in the New York Public Library,
Wensie ensures that the unedited truth he fought
so fiercely to capture remains permanently accessible.
He secured the primary sources so that future
historians cannot easily sanitize the narrative.
The mediator remains permanently removed from
the archive. The activists will always be able
to speak for themselves because he saved the
tapes. So as we look at the totality of James
Wensey's impact, we see a remarkable evolution.
We see a highly trained celluloid technician
from South Dakota who masters his craft in the
gritty margins of 1970s New York. We see how
a terrifying 1990 HIV diagnosis galvanized that
technical mastery, turning him into a definitive
unflinching lens for the ACT -UP movement. We
see a man who understood the media ecology of
his time well enough to help build DivaTV, utilizing
a raw, thorough aesthetic to force a counter
-narrative into the public consciousness through
massive logistical effort. And finally, we see
the archivist, guarding the magnetic memory of
his community against the erosion of time. It
is a masterclass in how an individual can control
the means of production to combat systemic erasure.
I want to leave you, the listener, with a final
thought as we wrap up this deep dive. It's important
to reflect on where we are now. Today, we exist
in an entirely different media universe. Almost
all of us walk around with high -definition digital
cameras in our pockets. We possess the capability
to broadcast our own unedited realities to the
entire globe in a matter of seconds. We effortlessly
wield the instant, frictionless distribution
network that James Wensey, DivaTV, and ACT -UP
could only dream of building in 1991. But looking
back at Wensey's deeply deliberate, rigorously
thorough and purposeful documentation of a vital
movement, You have to ask yourself a question.
A tough question. In an era of constant overwhelming
digital noise where everyone is broadcasting
all the time, are we actually capturing the true
state of mind of our communities? Or have we
lost something in the noise? Right. In our endless
rush to post and consume fleeting content, have
we lost the focused necessary clarity that made
a gorilla lens so powerful in the first place?
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. Keep
asking the hard questions and look closely at
the unedited realities in the world around you.