Just a Little Lovin'

Just a Little Lovin' 2012

2012-02-01T07:04:00.017-08:00

“Like a little bit of lovin'
From some lovin' someone like you”

What?
The larp “Just a Little Lovin'” will be played a second time. Same game, new players, new producers. 60 players. Three days. All nationalities welcome - the game will be in English.

Signup opens here on March 8th.
To be reminded you can fill in the pre-signup and we will send you an e-mail when the sign-up is up.

When?
8-13 June

Where?
Gålögården, Haninge, south of Stockholm

Cost
The particpant fee is 900 Swedish kronor (100 €) if you are 26 or younger and 1 500 Swedish kronor (170 €) if 27+ of age .

Who?
Organized by Tor Kjetil Edland, Hanne Grasmo, Miriam Lundqvist, Anna-Karin Linder & Petter Karlsson trough the LajvVerkstaden association.

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A larp about friendship, desire and the fear of death

2012-01-02T09:00:00.015-08:00

- We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it's like, what we're going through. We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.

- Larry Kramer, playwright and AIDS activist

1982: It was the summer AIDS came to New York City

Two group of friends from New York City celebrate the 4th of July in upstate New York. The 1970s have been a decade of women's liberation, youth rebellion, anti-war protests and sexual promiscuity. This changed America forever, but the early 1980s is also a time of a resurging conservative movement which President Ronald Reagan is the sunny face of. Gay men are migrating to New York to become part of the vibrant and hedonistic scene in Greenwitch Village. Unbeknownst to everyone however the HIV virus has started spreading in the city. An article in the New York Times last summer described a mysterious "gay cancer", but it's cause remains still unknown.

During the larp we play three 4th of July partys of 1982, 1983 and 1984. Every morning after breakfast there is an act break where we find out what has happened with the characters and their relationships the following year before the next act starts one year later. When the game starts neither the players nor the characters know who will become infected by the virus, but the lives of all the characters will be deeply effected by the epidemic. Our goal for the game is that all the characters will have friendships that are important to them, experience a little bit of lovin' at the summer parties and feel the fear of death as people around them start to become infected.

The Death of Skye, a photo taken during the first run of the larp. Photo: Tore Olbert

Just a Little Lovin' was played for the first time in July of 2011. It then created some debate in the culture pages of the Swedish newspaper Expressen. Read our contribution here and a later comment from us here. There you will also find links to the other articles in this debate.

Journalist and radio host Johanna Koljonen recently wrote an article in Fokus about her thoughts about Just a Little Lovin' before playing the larp herself. Read her article "Lajv på blodigt allvar" here.

Two group of friends

2012-01-01T09:00:00.015-08:00

The members of the Saratoga friendship pact from the first run of the larp, photo Li Xin

The story will follow two group of friends. One of the groups revolves around Terrence Thurlow ("Mr. T." among friends and enemies alike), a successful and openly gay owner of a public relations firm. Every 4th of July he hosts a party for friends, past- and future lovers as well as new acquaintances from the scene which he finds interesting enough to receive an invitation. This is a party people want to be at, so unless you have front row seats at the latest Liza Minnelli show on the very same night, you will be there.

In upstate New York not far from the small town of Saratoga there is what used to be the Saratoga Centre for Hope and Healing, a rehabilitation centre for young people with cancer. After the centre closed it's doors 5 years ago some of the former patients started to gather here for the 4th of July. In 1977 they all slept in tents down by the lake, but from 1978 they have been allowed to rent part of the old institution. The core of this group of close knit friends met each other as teenagers at the rehabilitation centre and have stayed connected ever since. Every year they renew their pact of friendship. The rest of this groups are spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends of the cancer survivors. As in many close group of friends there are many overlapping and past (and future?) relationships in this group making friendships and lovelifes sometimes quite complicated. These young cancer survivors have learned to celebrate life fully. Some of them are frequent visitors to free-spirited places like swinger's clubs and some are practitioners of alternative forms of spirituality.

Last year Mr. T decided he wanted to get out of the city for the 4th of July party and asked Pen, his secretary, to find a place that was remote, but not too far from the city and next to a lake. The result was that Mr. T also rented a house for his guests at the former Saratoga Centre for Hope and Healing. This year, in 1982 both groups will return to Saratoga. Last year the two parties were largely separate, but late into the night they started merging. It is likely that this will happen to a greater extent this year.

At the larp we will play the 4th of July parties 3 years in a row. After breakfast the morning after each party there will be an act break where we will decide what has happened in the lives of the characters in the year that has passed and how relationships between charactes have changed since last summer. During the act breaks we will also have a method for deciding which of the charactes have become infected with the HIV virus.

The title Just a Little Lovin' has been borrowed from Dusty Springfield's classic soul song. Dusty's songs are a favourite of many of the characters.

- HIV is certainly character-building. It's made me see all the shallow things we cling to, like ego and vanity. Of course, I'd rather have a few more T-cells and a little less character.
- Randy Shilts, the writer of And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic

Just a Little Lovin' exhibition at Oslo Central Station

2011-11-03T09:12:00.002-07:00

Just a Little Lovin' exhibition at Oslo Central Station for World AIDS day 1st of December, 2011

This is a colaborative art project with contributions from visual art, photography, role-playing and game design.

New York 1982. A group of friends travel to upstate New York to celebrate the 4th of July. The HIV virus has started spreading, but no one yet knows that before the end of the decade this group of friends will be hard hit by disease and death as a result of the epidemic. For 3 days a group of 60 participants played out the stories of these characters as part of the live roleplaying game Just a Little Lovin'. The exhibition consists of documentary photos together with 80s style visual art made for the game. Various performances will be part of it.

Venue: Oslo Central Station, next to "La Baguette"

Opening of the exhibition: December 30th at 20.00 with concert by When Mary and with some very special dresses made for World AIDS Day by Ragnhild Simensen (Ragga Design).

The exhibition will be open between 08.00 and 18.00 on the 1st of December

Visual art and overall design of the exhibition: Astrid Solgaard

Game design: Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo

Photos: Li Xin and Frida Sofie Jansen

Performers: Tor Kjetil Edland, Erlend Eidsem Hansen, Aarni Korpela, Trine Lise Lindahl, Johan Lundby, Johanna McDonald, Elin Nilsen, Astrid Solgaard and Emma Wieslander

Update: Some images from World AIDS day has been posted here on Facebook

Queer America in the 70s and 80s

2011-05-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

From virtual silence to wide-ranging outrage in less than twenty years

by Victor Bernhartz

This article aims at painting a picture of the political movements for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in the United States as they developed in the 1970s and were in the early 1980s. By no means does the author claim that the text is exhaustive – on the contrary, much can indeed be added to these words. Further, terminology in this text has not been adapted to the context of 1960s-1980s. For example, terms like “queer” were not used in the same way as here and “bisexual” was for many a person waiting to take the full leap to “gay” or “lesbian”. However, the article will hopefully provide the reader with useful insights.

Stonewall Riots 1969

The US LGBT movements have always worked from a position of relative exclusion from mainstream society. While this exclusion has sparked many vile phenomena, from state-sponsored homophobia to the advice among queer friends not to wear too tights jeans if visiting any place in the country not situated on a coast, it has also given birth to a vibrant, diverse and comparatively militant movement. This was indeed the case in the early 1980s. After the legendary riots in New York City in 1969, sparked by the events around Stonewall. Inn and Christopher Street in late June and early July, lesbian, gay and transgender political activism sprung up in cities around the US at a pace previously unseen. After 1969, queers in the US found themselves, quite suddenly, out. Up until 1969 the lesbian and gay scene had been a secret affair (patrons of Stonewall Inn were looked at through an eye-sized hole in the door and deemed “gay enough” before admitted). Society had harsh morals, and in many cases legislation, barring access to public life – in the streets, in the nightlife and in the public sphere.

After the summer of 1969 activists began calling for rights – from the abolishment of state sodomy laws to a paradigm shift regarding how doctors and psychiatrist viewed and addressed “homosexuality”. Work was carried out through both classical political activities, such as marching and lobbying, but more direct action methods, such as occupations and sit-ins, were also employed. Many battles were fought and many victories won. Simultaneously, the community came to a realization that the people constituting the queer movements often do not share common causes. Some viewed drag queens and their art as derogatory towards women; others claimed that racism and white hegemony wasn’t dealt with within the community. Others still wanted to put social and class issues, such as housing for queers cast from their families or shut out from a market that legally would discriminate against queer tenants (which is still the case in many states), at the front. This created gaps between people leaning more to the left or right on the political scale; between women and men and between people of colour and white people. Subcultures formed new groups, organizing bisexual people or circles for people practising BDSM, to give two examples.

On the political scene, several open lesbian and gay people entered public office during the 1970s. Outside of politics, everyday life changed during the 1970s as well. Nightlife in larger cities such as New York City and San Francisco transformed radically. Clubs were allowed to exist more openly and venues catering to a clientele looking to express sexuality, such as bathhouses, were established. Locations offering dark rooms to allow casual and anonymous sexual activity appeared.

Harvey Milk

All branches of US society did not welcome this progress with open arms. Most notably, political forces within Christian movements and the Republican Party viewed the emerging LGBT culture and their political gains as something that must be stopped. Several Christian national movements were fashioned with the purpose to halt the liberalization. Tension rose. The 1970s ended as violently as the previous decade, when Harvey Milk, an open politician in San Francisco, was murdered. In May 1979, the perpetrator Dan White was found guilty of “voluntary manslaughter”, i.e. the most lenient conviction possible. The San Francisco police had raised funds for the defence of White, and people of a demographic traditionally sympathetic with White’s values composed the jury. This created outrage among LGBT activist, culminating in the White Night Riots, on 21 May. Thousands of protestors clashed on several sites in the city. Many of the police covered their badges to avoid identification. Gay bars were raided by police in riot gear. Some 140 people were injured.

The coming out of the movements during the 1970s had made an impact – 1980 began with the Democratic Party adopting its first platform on “homosexual rights”. Things were looking bright, but changed radically and forever when AIDS made its entry in the early 1980s. Early on the condition was coined “gay disease” and “the punishment from God” by the champions of the religious political opposition to LGBT rights, such as the notorious rev. Jerry Falwell (the very same Falwell who made himself world famous in 1999 by marking Tinky Winky the Teletubby as gay). Although knowledge about the condition was at best hazy and the research in very early stages, mass media was quick to adopt a truth that AIDS was connected to gay men. This led to a double backlash. Firstly, it gave new wings to fear-driven homophobia. Secondly, because of the victimization of an already subordinate group in society, it was not difficult for politicians to ignore the problem.

Poster by by Donald Mofett

Ronald Reagan, the republican president who entered office in January 1981, the same year the first medical journals started to describe AIDS, didn’t publically utter the word “AIDS” until his sixth year in office, in 1987. In 1985 Reagan (without mentioning the actual term) questioned whether children living with HIV should attend regular schools. During his 1980 campaign, Reagan had referred to the LGBT community as such:

“My criticism is that [the gay movement] isn’t just asking for civil rights; it’s asking for recognition and acceptance of an alternative lifestyle which I do not believe society can condone, nor can I.”

During the first years following the discovery of AIDS, research, education and community programmes alike were chronically underfunded by the state. Needless to say, Reagan’s silence and destructive politics made him a central target early on for LGBT activists. 1980s LGBT activism largely became the same thing as AIDS activism. The positive offshoot of the opening of space in the 1970s had paved way for a party culture. That culture was shocked with the entry of something as horrible as a condition no one had much information on, but seemed to give you deadly cancer with names such as “Kaposi’s sarcoma”. As liberation had also meant sexual liberation, and sex-positivism was at the heart of much activism, the fact that AIDS seemed to be a sexually transmitted infection struck a hard blow. Denial was a common reaction. Many attribute the “waking up” from the shock to Larry Kramer, a writer and activist, who in 1982 co-founded the AIDS-service organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC).

In March 1983, Kramer wrote the essay 1,112 and Counting, in which he indignantly rejected the poor response of the US health complex to AIDS, but also raged and his fellow gay men, whom he claimed refused to see what was going on. Kramer called for action, in a style that took militancy to a new level (he would not hesitate to out closeted gay men in public health institutions or throw a drink in the face of a prominent politician), which led to his expulsion from GMHC, but also inspired people. In 1985, Kramer wrote the play The Normal Heart, a story of AIDS in 1981-1984, seen through his alter ego Ned Weeks, a work later dubbed “one of the 100 greatest plays of the 20th century”, by the UK Royal National Theatre.

The NAMES project

LGBT activism related to AIDS in the early 1980s was in many respects directed at the government and the media, both putting up an astounding ignorance. As people were dying at an already alarming pace, death held a prominent position in the politics. The lack of public attention fuelled the militancy in the activism, but also the more artful means of protest. Among the more memorable is the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, conceived in 1985.

Important to mention is that the dominance of AIDS pushed out other issues, such as demands from lesbian and bisexual women, as well as feminist perspectives. Many female activists laid their energy in AIDS activism in solidarity with their male friends. Further, lesbian activism also occurred through female-exclusive groups and networks. Rage and sense of urgency mixed with inventive and camp methods characterized the AIDS activism, which in the later years of the 1980s and early years of 1990s was to grow increasingly militant and separatist. Prominent texts such as the Queer Nation Manifesto (1990) have many of their roots in the early 1980s – a point in LGBT history when activism by default meant opposition against the establishment.