When you watch or screen Please Hold almost everything you will see was shot by me, or someone I know, on a consumer-grade media recording device: iPhone, Zoom, VHS camcorder, Super-8 film. Almost everything you see was shot by people at home, in their communities, and as part of an activist commitment to talking and working together about AIDS and other related social justice concerns including disability justice, COVID and long COVID, queerness, feminism, civil rights, and mediamaking.

But most critically, the documentary is based on deathbed/legacy videos that I shot on the request of two of the most important people in my life:

• My best friend, James Robert Lamb, in 1992, the year before he died of AIDS at 29.
• One of my dearest and longest collaborators on AIDS and community-based video, Juanita Mohammed Szczepasnki, shot in 2021, a few months before she died at 65.

(Learn more about Jim and Juanita)

Holding and sharing these precious videos is an act of legacy, love, hope, and mourning based in my responsibility and their trust. This stays very personal and tender for me, even as I make it public. Thus, I ask you to consider your viewing as part a personal, political, and communal act.

I suggest that you might approach the tape with the time and space you need to attend to its commitments to community, conversation, legacy, memory, and mourning.

In the documentary, I discuss with contemporary “AIDS workers,” how different technologies of memory serve our needs to commemorate and act. Take stock of the technologies you are using to engage with the tape.

• Is your viewing screen big or small?
• Are there distractions on the screen or in the room?
• Is there room for your feelings about death, life, memory, illness, community?

Ideally, you could watch the tape with another viewer or viewers. When it is through, take a breath and then talk to each other about what moved or stilled you. A list of some possible discussion themes and terms follows.

If you are watching on your own, particularly on a computer or other small digital screen, consider in advance what related viewing conditions might honor the video’s commitments to community-based dialogue, trust, and responsibility or to help further Juanita’s life mission: “to help people understand AIDS.”

Perhaps you want to look at some of the discussion themes and terms below; after watching the tape you could share your thoughts to be put on this website by taking up a technology of memory of your choice and engaging about AIDS, loss, or your life’s mission! I invite you to share your reflections, and we will add them to this website.

Please Hold is an extended conversation between a small group of people—alive and dead—who use a set of terms that are useful for their shared projects as queer artists and organizers working together, and in community, to address HIV/AIDS and related heath and wellness concerns.

• How do different characters in the documentary understand their AIDS work?
• Why did they come to HIV/AIDS? Why did they stay?
• Are you an AIDS worker? Do you engage in collective social change for other goals?

• Why did Jim and Juanita ask Alex to shoot them as they were approaching death?
• How are the tapes they made with Alex related to the specific technologies (VHS; iPhone) or times (1992; 2022) when they were shot?

Several of the AIDS workers in the video connect their work to other social and health issues.

• What is AIDS connected to for you?

The video suggests that different media—photos, films, videos, magazines, books, apartments, bars, scarves, sweaters—help us remember and connect in distinctive ways.

• Who do you feel has been lost?
• What are the conditions and technologies that can help you to hold them?

Alex and her friends discuss how place holds family, community, memory, and loss.

• What places are most resonant for you as holders of memory and lost loved ones?
• Why do the AIDS workers in the tape return to queer bars as places of care and community?
• How are the spaces where Alex remembers Juanita—Coler Rehabilitation Center and her family’s memorial service in Bushwick—similar to or different from where she recalls Jim: the Lower East Side, their Attorney Street Apartment, the Parkside bar?

Alex and her friends discuss losses felt over various decades of the AIDS pandemic as well as different moments in their lives. While videos, photos, poems, and scarves linger, our feelings about the loved ones we have lost change.

• How are loops, stills, composites and other formats used in the video to remember and mourn?
• The people in the video are shot during different stages of mourning. Henry has just recently lost his wife, Juanita. Alex lost Jim over thirty years ago. How has your grief changed over its varying stages?
• Alex walks and talks in “real time” through NYC neighborhoods and buildings. How is walking a technology of memory? Talking?

Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski was a community-based DIY videomaker, a mother, wife, friend, New Yorker, and an AIDS, disability rights, feminist, queer, and anti-racist media activist. To learn more about Juanita please visit Remembering Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski (1957–2022) on the Visual AIDS website, https://visualaids.org/blog/remembering-juanita-mohammed-szczepanski.

James Robert (Jim) Lamb (1963-1993) was a member of Everett Quinton’s reboot of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, a graduate of Amherst College (‘88), and the lover of Joe Guimento and Miguel Prieto. He was raised in New Caanan, CT where he was a founder and actor in a youth theater company, the Barnham Players. Jim lived and died before the internet held many or any traces of people.

Here are a few places where you can learn more about Jim:

• Portrait by Victor Carnuccio in Artflux: https://www.artflux.org/blog/?p=104.
• Off-Broadway Internet Database: http://www.iobdb.com/production/1415 and http://www.iobdb.com/production/1120 and http://www.iobdb.com/Production/1432.
• “A Mad and Busy Day in Ludlam’s First Venture,” Frank Rich: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/29/theater/review-theater-a-mad-and-busy-day-in-ludlam-s-first-venture.html.
• “Feminist history making and Video Remains,” by Alexandra Juhasz in exchange with Antoinette Burton, Jump Cut: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/AIDsJuhasz/index.html.