Spotlight: Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach

By Silas Switzer

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            As a freshman in college, I had a directionless need to invest myself in something important, something lasting, something that felt meaningful. I had spent the last few years running a monthly open mic for queer youth in my area — that shut down because of COVID, and I no longer had an outlet that felt like I was contributing to my community. Fall semester of my freshman year, I took a class on documentary poetry. This is exactly what it sounds like — it's the combination of poetry and research to form an innovative and artistic analysis of a particular place, time, or event. My mother is a poet and my father is a researcher, it felt only natural to take a class that combined these two things that I had spent my entire life around.

            The final project for the class was to create a piece of documentary poetry. For a while I was at a loss, bouncing from topic to topic, not really latching onto anything in particular. I don't remember exactly when or why I fell down the rabbit hole, but at some point, I had the realization that I knew nothing about Pittsburgh's queer history, even though I had spent my whole life growing up here and spent a good portion of it being queer.

            The rest was history. In my searching around my school’s library website, I came across the old Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force (PATF) handbook that was released right at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. It was everything I could have hoped for in a research document and sent me down the path of researching the history of the AIDS crisis in Pittsburgh. I used the pages to make blackout poetry, took notes on them, and overall, just poured over the document, getting everything I could out of it. At the end, I had my work of documentary poetry that I presented to the class. This project was the beginnings of Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach.

            A little later on in my college career I had a photojournalism assignment that was completely open ended. I decided to go and take pictures of old gay bars in the Pittsburgh area, all of which had been shut down, some of which had been destroyed. I took pictures of what was left. These two projects combined, plus a lot of work and fine tuning, produced my chapbook. This book is my effort to understand something I can never possibly hope to grasp fully, but it also represents my insistence to try and understand as much as I can. It is a study of the history of the AIDS crisis in Pittsburgh through the eyes of a researcher, a poet, an archivist, and most importantly a queer kid who never had anyone to tell him his own history.