Years Yet Yesterday is a gay abecedary of 24 hand-lettered, greyscale eye charts about the AIDS crisis using words spoken by playwright and activist Larry Kramer in his 2004 call-to-action speech, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays. The book and alphabetic drawings commemorate the 10th anniversary of Kramer’s speech at The Great Hall in New York City.
Each page is dedicated to a letter in the alphabet and generated using only three words, rewritten hundreds of times, that appear in the original speech. By reconfiguring each drawing’s word order as a series of three-word phrases, the viewer is incited to question past and present conditions surrounding a decade-long sliver of the 30+ ongoing years of the AIDS pandemic. This abecedary contains 24 drawings because Kramer’s speech did not include any words beginning with an X or Z.
