‘I want a president who has been gaybashed’: America’s underground anthem

Inspired by Eileen Myles’s 1992 presidential bid … Leonard’s work beneath the High Line. Photograph: Timothy Schenck, Courtesy of the High Line

‘I want a dyke for president,” reads the opening of Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President. “I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice-president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.”

Originally intended to be published as “a statement” in an underground LGBT magazine, I Want a President was written in the run-up to the 1992 US presidential race. This took place at the height of the Aids epidemic, a medical issue turned political crisis that was, in the previous decade, catastrophically silenced by Ronald Reagan. President from 1981 to 89, Reagan failed to acknowledge Aids until thousands had died. The queer community was in turmoil, in the grip of a disease that took the lives of so many, and stigmatised even more.