Silence = Death Collective at Jorge Socarrás Residence

History

At the end of 1985, art director Avram Finkelstein, graphic designer Oliver Johnston, and musician Jorge Socarrás, all in their early 30s, decided to form what would become a consciousness-raising group in response to the AIDS epidemic. Their motivation was deeply personal. Finkelstein’s partner Don Yowell died a year earlier from AIDS-related complications and Socarrás had lost so many lovers and friends to the disease that he stopped writing down their names once the list reached 100. (Johnston, diagnosed with HIV in 1986, died of AIDS-related causes in 1990.) Each group member invited a friend, and soon art directors Chris Lione and Charles Kreloff and photo editor Brian Howard joined.

The six artists, forming a political collective, met for weekly potlucks at each other’s apartments. From these came the idea to create a poster to mobilize LGBT people and to counter the nationwide silence over AIDS. Kreloff and Finkelstein remembered how young people in 1960s Greenwich Village used the streets to exchange and post information. In contrast to that highly political decade, however, they felt that a poster for the 1980s called for a less text-heavy approach.

The poster’s now-iconic tagline, Silence = Death, came into existence in less than a minute, according to Finkelstein, at a December 1986 holiday dinner in Socarrás’s East Village apartment. (Socarrás, born to Cuban parents in New York City, lived at 508 East 5th Street from at least 1985 to 1988.) Finkelstein suggested “Gay Silence is Deafening” based on a phrase from an unrelated New York Times article. Johnston then proposed “Silence is Death,” which someone followed with “Silence Equals Death.” When another suggested using the equal sign instead, the group simultaneously jumped up and shouted so loudly in agreement that Finkelstein was sure people as far as Avenue A could hear them.

On that same evening, the group that became known as the Silence = Death collective (also the Silence = Death Project) agreed that the poster needed a blank and expansive black background. Black was then a popular color in the design field. Finkelstein notes that it also “implied a foreboding storm of political action, and of course, it directly referred to death.” The collective sketched out the poster’s proportions before toasting each other and the poster.

Before that holiday dinner, the pink triangle had been selected, after much debate, as the poster’s image. Recognizing that AIDS also impacted women and people of color, the collective felt that a pictographic image would be the most inclusive choice. The group – half Jewish – was well aware of the Holocaust origins of the pink triangle, which, by the early 1970s, had been controversially reclaimed as a gay pride symbol. Finkelstein writes, “the codes activated by the triangle were open-minded enough to be useful, signifying lesbian and gay identity to some audience members, maleness to others, and referencing the historical meanings of genocide to audiences familiar with that history.” Only after the poster was printed did the collective realize that the triangle mistakenly pointed up rather than down. They decided the change was effective and kept it.

From the last week of February through March 1987, hundreds of Silence = Death posters were wheat-pasted on the temporary plywood walls of construction sites. Placing them next to commercial advertisements on these walls was intentional because it implied a voice of authority and a level of funding and organizing the six-person collective did not actually have. Posters were placed where LGBT people lived and gathered. This included the East Village, lower Broadway, SoHo, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, and parts of the Upper West Side. Gay bars, other than Uncle Charlie’s and Boots & Saddle in the Village, largely declined to display the poster out of concern that its AIDS messaging would deter patrons.

The initial response was underwhelming. Soon, however, the Silence = Death poster became one of the most influential works of American protest art through its association with the newly formed group ACT UP. Lione, Johnston, and Finkelstein regularly attended its meetings as founding members and saw its potential to provoke people into action. With the collective’s permission, ACT UP first used the poster at its second demonstration, the Tax Day Action held on April 15, 1987, at the U.S. General Post Office (now the James A. Farley Building) in Manhattan. This and future demonstrations around the world have since turned the Silence = Death imagery into a global symbol synonymous with ACT UP.

The poster is now in several collections, including those of the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of American History.

Entry by Amanda Davis, project manager (March 2025).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.