What Frank Ocean’s PrEP+ Party Understood
When people refer to the AIDS crisis, they’re often referring to a specific period in history. But HIV/AIDS is no mere memory to the more than 37 million people worldwide, most of them black or brown, living with the disease. It is no memory to the 270,000 Americans, many of them queer, who every day take a pill, PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), to prevent the possibility of contracting it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that more than 1 million Americans should be on that pill if AIDS is actually to be made into a memory. How might artists try to help close the gap in adoption? How can they reflect the way in which identity—sexuality and race and lifestyle and inheritance—has been tied up with a medical regimen?
Frank Ocean gave a shot at answering those questions Thursday, best-of-the-decade list, cementing his reputation as a great artist of our time. All along, he’s worked to maintain an enigmatic persona, and he hasn’t released an album since 2016’s . Every public move he makes is bound to reverberate. The move he chose to make recently was throwing a New York City party he named PrEP+: an ostensibly tasteless but nevertheless intriguing attempt to pay tribute to an urgent queer reality.
