By Mackenzie Lukenbill on July 28, 2025
Moving-image artist and scholar Alexandra Juhasz has been grappling with the past and present of AIDS on film, tape, and video and in print since she joined ACT UP’s media affinity group in 1987. That year, she began volunteering at the nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and made her first video, Living with AIDS: Women and AIDS, co-directed with Jean Carlomusto. Throughout ACT UP’s heyday in the ’80s and ’90s, Juhasz was a prominent and prolific contributor to the burgeoning genre of queer video activism. These videos, disseminated via public-access television and VHS, served as an alternative source of potentially life-saving information for the national queer community. In 1989, Juhasz established the Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE), a group of working-class women from Bronx and Brooklyn who met regularly to discuss, document, and dissect the ways in which the AIDS crisis had impacted their lives. Among them was video activist Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, who was Juhasz’s collaborator and friend for decades before she succumbed to complications arising from several chronic illnesses, including COVID-19, in 2022.
More recently, Juhasz’s video work and scholarship has focused on the stewardship of memories from the AIDS crisis, and caring for the objects, people, and ideas left in its wake. Her collection of nearly 200 VHS tapes concerning AIDS and queer activism, all of which were made by various artists and activists outside of the mainstream film industry between 1980 and 2010, are currently housed in the library at Brooklyn College.
In her searingly personal new experimental documentary Please Hold, Juhasz—serving as camera operator as well as diegetic narrator—continually returns to a perambulatory circuit: the walk from Manhattan’s Delancey Street/Essex Street subway platform to the Parkside Lounge, the storied queer bar on East Houston Street. Throughout this commute, Juhasz’s memories of living on Houston and Attorney Street—right next to the Parkside Lounge—in the late 1980s come back to her, specifically her time with her roommate and best friend James Robert Lamb, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1993. She guides the viewer through these memories in real time, recalling the “roving party of friends and strangers and loved ones” who cohabitated with her and Lamb, their entrance into the AIDS activist community, and the parties they attended at the Parkside. These memories spark discussions that are interspersed with the footage of Juhasz’s recursive stroll, including video conversations and remembrances between Juhasz and fellow AIDS workers Ted Kerr, Ji-Feh Cheng, Marty Fink, and Pato Hebert.
Please Hold is ostensibly named after a flashing message on a screen inside the labyrinthine Delancey-Essex subway station. But the title also encompasses the weight and joys of what Juhasz calls “memory work,” exemplified here by the deathbed videos of Lamb and Szczepanski that Juhasz filmed at their requests, each using the prevailing video technology of its era. Putting nearly 40 years of multimedia formats in conversation with one another, the essay film illuminates the prescience of AIDS video activism and its lessons for our age of long COVID-19 and the Trump administration’s catastrophic defunding of AIDS research and preventative care. Please Hold serves as both a walking tour of AIDS activist history and a communion with the queer lovers, friends, and caretakers—living and ghostly—who reside there.
Following the documentary’s premiere on March 2nd at the Parkside Lounge, presented by Visual AIDS and the historic queer experimental film festival MIX NYC, Juhasz made Please Hold available for free viewing online, with the caveat that the video is meant to be viewed and discussed with other people, in keeping with its themes of communal memory. The video will also screen at Anthology Film Archives on August 7 as part of their recurring Cinema of Gender Transgression series programmed by Joey Carducci and Angelo Madsen. In anticipation, I interviewed Juhasz via video call about her work.
Read the interview here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-alexandra-juhasz-on-please-hold/