I pull ribbons from a drawer and offer them to my boyfriends. Their unique design folds rather than looping to economise on fabric. As we dress for the Basquiat | Haring: Crossing Lines opening at the National Gallery of Victoria, we debate its timing. It is World AIDS Day. I insist that it can’t be an accident. Surely, I say. Hours later, I lumber through the gift shop in a halogen induced stupor. This feeling stays with me for weeks which grow, like mould, into months. A novel coronavirus breaks the world. Still, I can’t identify the wound. In the shower and sitting at my desk, there’s a pulsing sting in my chest. 

When Keith Haring painted the NGV’s glass facade in 1984, he used no preparatory drawings and made no mistakes. Every line is visceral. He dressed in a tank top of his own design, some paint-stained shorts and his trademark gold-rimmed glasses. The gallery director at the time claimed that the mural was a statement about how institutions value contemporary art. Haring said that it was about life and the things which threaten life. Either way, it proved too much for our delicate sensibilities, and someone smashed it with a brick a few weeks later.