Richard Elovich

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Richard Elovich (born 1954) is a social psychologist, writer, performance artist, and AIDS activist focusing on harm reduction and low-threshold approaches to drug treatment.

Early life[edit]

A student at New York University from 1973 to 1975, Elovich dropped out to pursue life as a writer and artist after meeting William S Burroughs through his job at the Manhattan bookstore and cultural center, the Gotham Book Mart.[1] Elovich worked as a secretary to poet Allen Ginsberg,[2][3] and lived in the former YMCA building at 222 Bowery where Burroughs and poet John Giorno lived, and where Mark Rothko had painted his Seagrams murals in the former gymnasium.[4][5] In 1976, Elovich joined Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tibetan Lama Chögyam Trungpa in residence at the Hotel Boulderado, assisting Ginsberg and Burroughs with teaching duties at the Jack Keroauc School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and driving Burroughs to Denver to see his son William Burroughs, Jr., who was recovering from a liver transplant.[1][6] Elovich became an assistant to artist Jasper Johns from 1978 to 1982, and briefly in 1983, for poet John Ashbery.[5][7]

Writing, curating and performance[edit]

Elovich began writing for downtown magazines including Bomb, City Moon, Roof, Gay Sunshine Press and The World from the mid- 1970s,[8][9][10][11][12] and in 1980-1981 served as an art critic for The Burlington magazine.[13][14][15] In 1984, Elovich was dramaturge for the inaugural performance of Robert Wilson and David Byrne's The Knee Plays in Minneapolis, and conducted interviews with Ann Waldman, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others for a volume on William S. Burroughs, Jr.[6] With Jim Self, a dancer from the Merce Cunningham company, Elovich collaborated on performances combining movement and text at The Kitchen (New Zuyder Zee, and Lookout, 1985).[16][17][18] In 1986, poet Eileen Myles invited Elovich to curate performance at the St. Marks Poetry Project,[19] and Elovich also began writing and staging his own work, including Ivan and the Lamp (1986), What the Water Gave Me (1986), My Hat It Has Three Corners (1986, with dancer Yvonne Meier), Bobby's Birthday Like That (1987) and Faking House (1987, with Pat Oleszko) at venues including PS 122, Danspace, BACA downtown and the Performing Garage.[17][20] In 1987 Elovich was hired as the first administrative director of Movement Research, the dance organization focused on improvisation and experimentation, where he established the Performance Journal and an artist-in-residence program[21] while continuing to write and perform one-man shows (A Man Cannot Jump Over His Own Shadow (1988), If Men Could Talk, the Stories They Could Tell (1990).[22][23] Elovich organized other performance artists to challenge the 1990 decision by the National Endowment for the Arts chairman John Frohnmayer to defund four whose work included explicit sexual content, donating part of his own NEA award to support those defunded and charging the NEA with homophobia in an oped coauthored with Holly Hughes in the New York Times.[24][25][26] NEA funding for Movement Research itself was the center of controversy in 1991 when conservative Senator Jesse Helms, outraged by the content in the gender and sexuality issue of the Performance Journal Three, had copies delivered to every Senator's office so they could appreciate the "filth and rottenness" of publicly funded art.[27] Someone Else from Queens is Queer, Elovich's one-man play examining the intersection of AIDS activism, gay and Jewish identies in New York,[28][29] won the Bessie Award in 1991,[30] and led to an invitation to the Sundance Institute's screenwriters lab and to perform at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival.[31] Elovich has a cameo in Tom Kalin’s film Swoon,[32] and performed in Charles Atlas's live TV broadcast "We Interrupt This Program."[33]

HIV activism and organizing[edit]

In 1988, Elovich became a member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, working first with other Treatment and Data Committee members to start the AIDS Treatment Registry compiling lists of clinical trial sites for people with HIV.[5] Elovich drew on his own experience of injecting drug use in his activism, challenging the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci, at a public meeting where Dr. Fauci dismissed people who injected drugs as a “noncompliant” population ineligible for inclusion in clinical trials.[34][35] Elovich's activism generally sought to challenge assertions that people who use drugs were incapable of rational or healthy choices, and he was an organizer for ACT UP of needle exchange, then illegal in New York City.[5] As a result, Elovich and other members of ACT UP and the National AIDS Brigade were arrested in 1990 for violation of laws prohibiting possession of injecting paraphernalia.[36] Elovich and other defendants subsequently known as the “needle 8’—including Gregg Bordowitz, Cynthia Cochran, Debra Levine, Kathy Otter, Jon Parker, Monica Pearl, and Dan Keith William—were tried in 1990–1991, with Elovich representing himself and convincing former New York City Health Commissioner Stephen C. Joseph to testify on behalf of the defendants.[37] The judge found that the group's actions were justified through the “necessity” defense, which allows for the breaking of a law in an emergency to prevent a greater imminent public harm, and the ruling paved the way for the beginning of community -based needle exchange programs in New York.[38][39] Elovich was also a member of Gran Fury, the AIDS activist artist collective who used techniques of advertising and propaganda to urge action on key policy issues. He later collaborated with Gran Fury members Donald Moffett and Marlene McCarty to produce publications and posters for gay men's HIV prevention.

In 1990, Elovich was appointed by New York mayors Dinkins and Giuliani as a chair of the Alcohol and Drugs working group of New York City's Ryan White Planning Council, which disbursed more than $330M million in federal assistance for HIV programming, and where he advocated a new "recovery readiness" approach to engage people using drugs without requiring abstinence.[40][41] Elovich joined the policy department of Gay Men's Health Crisis, the nation's first and largest AIDS organization, and became the founding director of GMHC's substance use counseling and education program in 1994 and the director of HIV prevention in 1996.[42] His work included creation of programs for HIV negative men, Black men, and Latino men, and urged a move beyond universal calls for condom use to considering social dynamics and context for HIV risk behavior.[43][44][45] In 1994, Elovich successfully secured $2.1M in funding for gay men's HIV prevention from New York State, the first funding for gay health included in the New York State budget. He authored the New York State curriculum on harm reduction, an approach that helped people unable or unwilling to stop using drugs to make positive change, and produced a series of videos on HIV and drug use with Gregg Bordowitz including Clean Needles Save Lives (1991).[46] The gay men's sexual health survey conducted by GMHC and the New York City Health department found decreased HIV infection and increased use of safer sex, and was hailed on the front and edtiorial pages of the New York Times in 1999 as the largest such study in history.[47]

International work on substance use and drugs programming[edit]

Elovich trained as a researcher at Columbia University, receiving his PhD in 2008. His award-winning dissertation and subsequent years of professional work focused on narcology, the subspecialty of Soviet psychiatry authorized to treat addiction, and on the tensions between rigid health systems and lived experiences of people who use drugs in countries of the former Soviet Union and Asia.[48] As a senior consultant for Open Society Foundations, he pioneered overdose prevention and other new approaches to address problematic substance use in Central Asia, helped design the Kazakhstan AIDS program funded through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and helped create programs in Indonesia, Nepal, and Ukraine. He was a critic of the impact of the Russian invasion of Crimea, which resulted in closure of a pioneering program providing opioid substitution treatment,[49] and of the general inability of narcology to respond effectively to HIV epidemics concentrated among people who inject drugs in post-Soviet countries.[50][51] He has also been critical of international donor practices, including US failure to protect a grantee detained on false charges in Uzbekistan.[52] As with HIV prevention, he has advocated for greater attention to context and particularities in responses to drug use or descriptions of “addicts,”[53] and for public health programs to be aware of how often they stand “in the footprint of drug control”, mimicking law enforcement's inclination to control and contain.[54]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Schulman, Sarah (2007). "ACT UP Oral History--Richard Elovich" (PDF). ACT UP Oral History Project. Retrieved December 23, 2021.
  2. ^ "Gay Sunshine interview inscribed by Ginsberg - May 27, 2021 | PBA Galleries in CA". LiveAuctioneers. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  3. ^ Morgan, Bill (2007-09-25). I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-311249-5.
  4. ^ "222 Bowery". Ephemeral New York. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  5. ^ a b c d Schulman, Sarah (2021-05-18). Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-71995-1.
  6. ^ a b "Interview with James Grauerholz". LJWorld.com. September 24, 2006. Retrieved December 23, 2021.
  7. ^ AIDS, Estate Project for Artists with; N.Y.), Alliance for the Arts (New York (2002). Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS. Univ of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-17074-5.
  8. ^ Elovich, R (1975). "The merchant of glamour and the disposition of his earthly remains". City Moon Broadcast. 1.
  9. ^ Elovich, Richard (1976). "Talking House, St. Petersburg". ROOF. 1 (1).
  10. ^ Giorno, Jon; Grauerholz, James; Elovich, Richard (1975). "Interview with Taylor Mead". Gay Sunshine Journal. No. 75. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help)
  11. ^ Elovich, Richard (1982). "Nervous and Joking Joseph". Bomb. October 1.
  12. ^ Elovich, Richard (1978). "Suitcase, An Excerpt From Travelling Phrases" (PDF). The World. 31: 36. JSTOR community.28046997 – via JSTOR.
  13. ^ Elovich, Richard (1980). "British Art now : an American perspective at the Guggenheim Museum". The Burlington Magazine. 122: 371–372.
  14. ^ Elovich, Richard (1981). "Edward Hopper - the art and the artist, Whitney Museum of American Art". The Burlington Magazine. 123: 110–112.
  15. ^ Elovich, Richard (1981). "Nicolas de Staël at the Tate". The Burlington Magazine. 123: 691–695.
  16. ^ Anderson, Jack (1985-03-25). "DANCE: JIM SELF PERFORMS AT THE KITCHEN". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  17. ^ a b Robinson, Marc; Houston-Jones, Ishmael; Kelly, John; Finley, Karen; Elovich, Richard (1987). "Performance Strategies". Performing Arts Journal. 10 (3): 31–55. doi:10.2307/3245451. ISSN 0735-8393. JSTOR 3245451.
  18. ^ Dunning, Jennifer (1982-02-23). "DANCE: JIM SELF IN 'LOOKOUT,' REVIVING DADA". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  19. ^ "AVANT-GARDE EXTRAVAGANZAS ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-01-10.
  20. ^ Blau, Eleanor (1987-06-12). "THEATRICAL AVANT-GARDE GOES FORWARD TO THE PAST". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-26.
  21. ^ George, Laurel (2009). "The Changing Contours of Movement Research". Movement Research Performance Journal. Fall/Winter.
  22. ^ Anderson, Jack (1988-04-03). "Review/Dance; A Guy Named Samson". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  23. ^ Champagne, Lenora (1990). "Richard Elovich's "If Men Could Talk, the Stories They Could Tell"". High Performance. 13 (2 (Summer)): 70.
  24. ^ Hughes, Holly; Elovich, Richard (1990-07-28). "Opinion | Homophobia at the N.E.A." The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  25. ^ "As Protest, Performer Rejects Federal Grant". The New York Times. 1990-07-01. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-26.
  26. ^ Honan, William H. (1990-07-06). "Arts Panel Seeks Review For Four Rejected Grants". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-26.
  27. ^ Link, William A. (2008-02-05). Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-35600-2.
  28. ^ "AIDS Nostalgia and 1991's Someone Else From Queens Is Queer". HuffPost. 2014-06-13. Retrieved 2021-12-26.
  29. ^ "Kathy O'Dell on Richard Elovich". www.artforum.com. 8 October 1991. Retrieved 2021-12-30.
  30. ^ Anderson, Jack (1991-09-23). "For the 'Bessie' Festivities, Awards and a Little Music". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  31. ^ Lefkowitz, David (1997). "Gomez and Elovich to Perform at Sundance Fest". Playbill. January 20.
  32. ^ Swoon (1992) - IMDb, retrieved 2021-12-24
  33. ^ "We Interrupt This Program: Live Television Broadcast for Day Without Art". The Kitchen Archive. 1991. Retrieved December 25, 2021.
  34. ^ Schindler, Paul (2 June 2021). "Democracy, Politics, and Privilege in the War on AIDS". gaycitynews.com. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  35. ^ Cohen, Sascha (2021-09-13). "Lessons From a New History of ACT UP: An Interview with Sarah Schulman". The New Inquiry. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  36. ^ Lambert, Bruce (1990-03-07). "10 Seized in Demonstration As They Offer New Needles". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  37. ^ Szalavitz, Maia (2021). Undoing drugs : the untold story of harm reduction and the future of addiction. New York: Hachette. ISBN 978-0-7382-8576-4. OCLC 1195434946.
  38. ^ Sullivan, Ronald (1991-06-26). "Needle-Exchangers Had Right to Break Law, Judge Rules". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  39. ^ Elovich, Richard, and Rod Sorge. "Toward a community-based needle exchange for New York City." AIDS & Public Policy Journal 6, no. 4 (1991): 165-172.
  40. ^ Elovich, R.E., & Cowing, M. (1995). Recovery-readiness: Strategies that bring treatment to addicts where they are. In Harm Reduction and Steps Toward Change: A Training Sourcebook. New York: The Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
  41. ^ Nealy, Eleanor C. (1997-11-07). "Early Intervention with Active Drug and Alcohol Users in Community-Based Settings". Journal of Chemical Dependency Treatment. 7 (1–2): 5–20. doi:10.1300/J034v07n01_02. ISSN 0885-4734.
  42. ^ "Series XII. Public Policy Department (p. 83)" (PDF). New York Public Library--Guide to the Gay Men's Health Crisis Records. Retrieved December 23, 2021.
  43. ^ Elovich, Richard (1999-06-01). "Beyond Condoms". POZ Magazine. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  44. ^ Elovich, R. (1996). "Staying negative--it's not automatic: a harm-reduction approach to substance use and sex". AIDS & Public Policy Journal. 11 (2): 66–77. ISSN 0887-3852. PMID 10915240.
  45. ^ Gallagher, John (1998). "Risky Business". The Advocate. March 17: 46–=50.
  46. ^ Pasternak, Anne (2008-09-17). Creative Time: The Book. Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978-1-56898-804-7.
  47. ^ Altman, Lawrence K. (1999-06-28). "New York Study Finds Gay Men Using Safer Sex". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  48. ^ Elovich, Richard (2008). Behind Every Doctor Is a Policeman: Narcology, Drug Users and Civil Society in Uzbekistan. OCLC 716102515 – via WorldCat.
  49. ^ "ReSovietizing Crimea? What the Vote Means for the Twin Epidemics of Drug Use and HIV". HuffPost. 2014-03-21. Retrieved 2021-12-24.
  50. ^ Elovich, Richard; Drucker, Ernest (2008-06-24). "On drug treatment and social control: Russian narcology's great leap backwards". Harm Reduction Journal. 5 (1): 23. doi:10.1186/1477-7517-5-23. ISSN 1477-7517. PMC 2474597. PMID 18577225.
  51. ^ Wolfe, Daniel; Elovich, Richard; Boltaev, Azizbek; Pulatov, Dilshod (2009), Celentano, David D.; Beyrer, Chris (eds.), "HIV in Central Asia: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan", Public Health Aspects of HIV/AIDS in Low and Middle Income Countries: Epidemiology, Prevention and Care, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 557–581, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-72711-0_25, ISBN 978-0-387-72711-0, retrieved 2021-12-24
  52. ^ Elovich, Richard (2010). "From the American People? Donors Ignore the Plight of an Imprisoned HIV Educator". Rewire News Group. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  53. ^ Friedman, Samuel R.; de Jong, Wouter; Rossi, Diana; Touzé, Graciela; Rockwell, Russell; Jarlais, Don C Des; Elovich, Richard (2007). "Harm reduction theory: Users culture, micro-social indigenous harm reduction, and the self-organization and outside-organizing of users' groups". The International Journal on Drug Policy. 18 (2): 107–117. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2006.11.006. ISSN 0955-3959. PMC 1945155. PMID 17689353.
  54. ^ Wolfe, Daniel; Saucier, Roxanne (2021-02-01). "Biotechnologies and the future of opioid addiction treatments". International Journal of Drug Policy. 88: 103041. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.103041. ISSN 0955-3959. PMID 33246267. S2CID 227191111.

External links[edit]

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