Small groups engaging with this video yield stories, tears, and the deep connections that are themes and practices of Please Hold. This inter-generational screening comprised some of the scholars from the Knowledge of AIDS Network who lost uncountable friends and other graduate students who were born after all these losses. What resulted is not seen above: commitments to memory, AIDS activism, and each other. Here are two audience-members’ reflections:
Please Hold is a meditation on the ongoingness of collaboration with the living and dead across time and space. The film itself becomes a holding environment for the many legacies of AIDS that haunt and move us in the present. — Lisa Diedrich, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, SUNY Stonybrook
Please Hold granted me permission to consider the cruciality of memory in AIDS work. For me, it is not merely that we must remember what happened in the past. Rather, memory serves as a gateway into past moments that dutifully shape our present lives, actions, and essentially “why we do what we do” as AIDS workers. — Jarrett L. Joubert, Ph.D. Candidate, Biology and Society | History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), Arizona State University