to art action in association with ACT-UP. Keith Haring notably deployed his practice to generate activism and advocate for awareness about AIDS in the final years of his life, as seen with the poster Ignorance = Fear (1989), or the acrylic on canvas painting Silence = Death (1989), both of which invoke the iconic poster and motto. Beyond the framework of activist art, photographer Nan Goldin would document this period of New York City in her seminal work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which encompassed a 1985 slide show exhibition and a 1986 artist's book publication of photographs taken between 1979 and 1986, capturing post-Stonewall gay subculture of the time. In 1989, British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien would release his film work Looking for Langston, which celebrated black gay identity and desire through a nonlinear narrative that drew from 1920s Harlem Renaissance in New York as well as then-current contexts of the 1980s, with Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial photographs of black gay men shown in the film, for example. Félix González-Torres would create works into the early 1990s that responded to the AIDS crisis that continued to ravage the gay community. González-Torres' Untitled (1991) featured six black-and-white photographs of the artist's empty double bed, enlarged and posted as billboards throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens in the winter of 1991. A highly personal point-of-view made public, it underscored the absence of a queer body, with the work on display after a time when González-Torres' lover, Ross Laycock, had died from AIDS-related complications in January 1991. Re-appropriation of 'queer' and identity politics Throughout the 1980s, the homophobic term of abuse, 'queer', began being widely used, appearing from sensationalised media reports to countercultural magazines, at bars and in zines, and showing up at alternative galleries and the occasional museum. The concept was thus integrated into the academy, and re-appropriated as a form of pride by queer activists. From the spring of 1989, a coalition of Christian groups and conservative elected officials waged a media war on government funding of "obscene" art, objecting that money from a National Endowment for the Arts grant went to queer artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, stoking a culture war. Mapplethorpe's 1988 retrospective, The Perfect Moment, which exhibited the photographer's portraits, interracial figure studies, and flower arrangements, would be a catalyst for the debate. Known for his black-and-white celebrity portraits, self-portraits, portraits of people involved in