Cool People Who Did Cool StuffPart One: ACT UP: How Angry, Dying Queers Invented Modern Activism
Margaret talks with Francesca Fiorentini about the AIDS activists who changed the world.
Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people fighting bad things, and one of the people who fights bad things is my guest, Francesco Quarantine Post of Situation Room. How are you.
I'm okay.
I feel like I have a cape on now, I'm I'm all right. I am yeah, I'm sort of girding my loins for the future bad things we have to fight, but excited to talk about the bad things we fought in the past with you, because maybe that's what we need to, like, you know, just fuel this anti fascist movement that we all, whether we know it or not, are part of.
Yeah, we're kind of caught in it regardless.
Of our desires. Sorry, you're in it now.
No, it's okay, and actually that's a really Oh wait before I get into using your natural transition into our topic. Instead, I'm gonna talk about our producer, Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi, and our audio engineer, danel Hi.
Danel Hey, danel.
Everyone's to say high danel Hi danel Our theme music is written for us by Unwoman. So this week's topic isn't happy, but it is pretty victorious compared to most of what we talk about, and I also think it has a lot of lessons for where we are at right now in a very specific way that I will try not to get too heavy handed with throughout the script, because this week we're going to talk about one of the most important activist groups in US history, one of the most impactful, memorable, and successful movements I've ever studied. And even when I heard about them, their successes were like sort of downplayed. They were like, oh, they were great, little scrappy little group. But the more I read about them, the more I realized that they kind of invented everything about modern activism and ran across a lot of our problems and found solutions for a lot of them. Because this week we are talking about a little group called the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as act UP.
I knew, I knew, I knew it, and I knew it.
I was like, wait, wait, wait, this is so fucking act UP, which is great because maybe I am like some listeners because I know in a little bit, but I don't know a lot.
And I'm very.
Excited because there's just a million books I should have read and I haven't done that, and I'm sorry.
There are a million books about this topic and some of them disagree with each other, and I haven't read them all. And I was actually thinking about it. I was like, it would be really easy to do a twelve part or whatever on act UP, and I'm only doing a two parter, and so I'm kind of I'm going to tell the big and I'm going to tell some of the details, but there's so many more details that anyone listening to this should feel free to go and learn about, because they're like big details. They're like entire movements and entire cities that did entire successful campaigns. When we get to understand act UP, we get to understand something that runs counter to the narrative that people tell about the AIDS crisis. I had always been presented with his image of the gay male community, which is the community most directly affected by the crisis in the US, or one of the most directly affected communities. It was not composed of helpless victims. And that's I'd always been presented the sort of like angelic, dying old white man as the like you know, icon of Tom Cruise.
I mean Tom cruise, Tom Cruise in Philadelphia. He wishes Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
I haven't seen that.
What that actually so good?
Usually I do know something that's old enough to be this.
Yeah that re friends h huh yeah. Tom Crass couldn't have played that role. He couldn't have. I mean, I don't know.
I have this weird soft spot for that scientologist. But Tom Hanks at least his acting. Also the fact that he's probably trapped. But yeah, the uh yeah, the idea of this like middle class even like the Angels in America characters kind of like middle class gay white gay guy who is like, yeah, is the perfect victim for this disease.
Right, Which is funny because I still like progress from what came before that, which we'll talk about, which was like you know, ah, these horrible degenerates got what was coming to them, right, Yeah, But they were not helpless victims. The veterans have act up talk about it like it was a war, and it it was. They fought and an awful lot of them died, Just a ton of them died. But the writer Liz Heillyman put it simply, in the US AIDS initially struck gay men a relatively cohesive community that had considerable experience in political organizing. Act UP wasn't like some outside force that came in and saved people. And it wasn't like one gay man suddenly had an idea and birthed a whole new form of activism. Act UP. And this is one of the things that's so interesting to me about it. It is directly part of a lineage of decades of struggle for gay liberation in the US. It brought together experienced organizers from all sorts of movements and they put together a messy, imperfect, critiquable, astounding movement that fundamentally shifted the conversation about HIV and AIDS. It is a movement that saved countless lives, like easily in the tens of millions. I don't know if I've covered a movement that I can so directly say like these five thousand people saved twenty million lives. But that is a thing you can say say about act UP. And they let other people's lives end in dignified ways. They also land the groundwork for activism for decades to come. And to be honest, I think we're at risk of losing that connection in lineage, and that's part of why I'm so excited to talk about them today. I'm kind of curious. The first time I heard about Act Up. It was a late nineties I was sixteen, and I started taking art lessons from this like goth artist and musician who became my mentor, This guy named Stephen Archer. He's not related to this story, but he's the first person I saw an act Up thing on and I never shout him out, and he's a cool guy. He had been part of the DC punk and goth scene in the eighties and so on his leather jacket he had a black pin with a pink triangle and words in white that said Silence equals death, and this like blew my suburban goth kid mind. I had no idea what I was looking at, you know, and he explained it to me, and it's such an iconic image and a statement that it it stuck with me. Act Up was really good at branding. That's one thing you can say about them. Yeah, how did you first hear about Act Up? When? Was how did that so?
When I was involved in the like anti Iraq war movements and the global justice movements in New York City.
There were some like old heads.
And they weren't old like Vietnam War old heads, but like the gen X old heads, right, so they're just like a one generation younger again, like those who are really active. And I am forgetting his name, but like when you said Steve, I was like, maybe mine's a Steve too. But yeah, this guy who was involved, I think in United for Peace Injustice, who also wore the like act up pins and you just see it around New York as like this was once a battleground in this fight and occasionally would be referenced as Yes, just something that was like those who were organizing against their very like for their very own lives because their friends were dying every single week. And it's like just that the enormity and the the like urgency of that moment. I don't know if it can be restated. I mean, I think we're seeing a version of that now with the Palasaitian diaspora, people who are fighting against the genocide there. But it is it is pretty amazing that there was an entire people that you know, the American public was trying to sweep under the rug.
Yeah, and just really rose to the occasion, you know, this like monumental horror that they were facing and like rose up to fight it, and.
The idea that it would was falling on like like silent voices, you know, and and being men being met with nothing just like either yes, you deserve it or I think that actually is was from what I've read and heard, the scariest part of the AIDS epidemic, in the HIV epidemic was like pretending like it wasn't happening, and that I think is what a lot of the activists were fighting against.
Yeah. Absolutely, we're gonna talk about some of the specific ways they did it. First, I want to draw historical lineage through lines that I was surprised to find, but I was really excited to find because I really like remembering that we are part of a direct lineage where you can say, oh, this person knew this person, knew this person knew this person going back a long ass time. I'm going to draw this back to the Spanish Civil War, because why not after the fall of the Spanish Republic to Franco's fascism, anarchists and other like republic people minded people fled en mass and a whole bunch of these anarchists ended up in New York City, where they hung out with a bunch of theater kids and poets and theory nerds and eventually hippies and eventually punks.
Fuck yeah, I love this.
I didn't know there was a lineage between people that went to go fight in the Spanish Civil War and the punk scene in New.
York, so that one's easy to draw. Oddly, interestingly, we talked about it. There's this group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers that was a late sixties movement in the Lower East Side that was like white and Puerto Rican. They were hippies, but they wore all black and motorcycle jackets and were a gang. They were punks, and then they liked pretty directly like when the punks came around. I think there was like a lot of crossover and they were like fighting cops and throwing down with the black panthers and made it the whole thing about them. But the guy who started at ben Mooream, he was in these like book clubs with veterans from the Spanish Civil War, And interestingly enough, these people who fled the Spanish Civil War in terms of how they've influenced later activism. The export that really spread the furthest wasn't anarchism the political theory. It was a bunch of the organizing models that they had developed in that battleground. For the past few generations, especially the past few decades, mass movements across the world have tended towards horizontal organizing and the promotion of direct action as the way to get things done. And two ideas proliferated. One was the model of the Affinity Group and the other was the model of the spokes Council.
And I like, oh, this is bringing me back, Margaret. Yes, spokes counsel of the Affinity Group. It's two thousand and four. Were organizing against the Republican National Convention. There's undercovers everywhere.
It's fucking great.
Yeah. I walked out of a mass arrest and none of my friends wanted to get out of it. Like I had a plan on how to get out of it.
You've told me this story.
Yeah, that's right, that's right. I have like one story about the RNC and I tell it all the time because you got caught, right, you got to rest at that.
Yeah, but I can't remember if we've decided that we were arrested in the same spot. Did you hop over and run through a graveyard? No defense.
I when the police were closing people near Washington Square Park, they were like, they trapped in it. I think it was the second day massarrests. On the first day, they trapped everyone at the end of the block, and then they started drawing the police line and squeezing people together. And so I just walked past the police line while they were drawing it and then stood on the sidewalk and watched because I couldn't leave because there's still too many police. Because like, one of my favorite lessons I've ever learned is that while cops are in the process of drawing a police line, their command is. Cops are very simple machines. They can only follow one order at a time, and the order is draw the police line, not arrest people. So you can move past it while they're drawing it. I've used I've gotten on mass arrests three times using this trick.
Nope, but that would break the affinity group back to what you were trying to explain.
Right, well done behind Yeah, well, I was like, hey, let's get out of here, and they were like no, we're having too much fun. They're like, you know, the bands playing, and I'm like, I'm getting out of here, and you were just like bye.
Yeah.
And then I had survivor's guilt, and then I didn't make a bunch of money in a lawsuit, but I eventually lost from a different.
As I was thirteen thousand dollars as yeah, I bought a new laptop with that.
Money and other things.
Obviously a lot of people like were like, I live in Pittsburgh, I'm buying a whole ass house with my thirties. Technically I know God anyway, so I didn't get to buy a house. So infinity groups and spokes councils are the building blocks of a lot of social movements. Or affinity groups are the building blocks, and spokes councils are the mortar that holds them together. An affinity group is basically a group of like five to fifteen people that shares affinity and common goals and strategies. And I would say three to nine. Actually five to fifteen is what people often say. My experience, I often see like three to nine. But whatever. Spokes councils are decision making and information sharing bodies where they someone from a group, such as an affinity group, comes and speaks for that group, and they are usually fairly directly speaking for that group and can They're not there to express their own opinion, They're there to represent the group.
It's a form of direct, directly democratic decision exactly.
Yeah. And these models infuse an awful lot of the social movements of the era, I think, especially starting in the seventies and eighties. If I were to map my understanding the genealogy of social movements in the US, You've got these sort of like proper movements fighting for civil rights through approve channels in the fifties, which then moved into nonviolent action in the early sixties, moving into more big militant organizations in late sixties, which then, in response to repression, moved underground and separated from mass organizing and moved to clandestinity and like you know, blowing things up and robbing people and stuff. In the early seventies, how the weather underground and the Black Liberation Army grew out of the Students for Democratic Society and the Black Panthers. On some level, these are really broad strokes I'm drawling with, And this all does come together because these things are more related than people are like they're not. I mean, every movement is separate, but they're also all tied together. When these clandestine movements were hunted down, what was left was really interesting and radical community organizing. All of these hardened revolutionaries doing social work, setting up schools, building infrastructure, doing the like less confrontational stuff that was still vital to either social progress or revolution. And then slowly movements grew back up again, and it was the movements growing up at this point, the peace movement, the anti nuke movement, the feminist movement, gay rights, food not bombs, civil rights, social justice stuff, abortion, clinic defense, Earth First, and act UP that took on this decentralized leaderless or leader full depending on who you ask, character that has since defined protests for so long. An act Up, I'm going to argue, was kind of an early culmination of this model. It brought together the veterans of all of these different movements into one place and focused them on one major goal, how to help stop the AIDS crisis when it comes out of all kinds of movements, its most immediate legacy was the gay liberation movement, which we've talked about in the show before they get a whole week of it. A while back, queer folks were decently well organized in militant and they had been for about a decade at this point when the AIDS crisis hits. Then in nineteen eighty one, on June fifth, the CDC announced a strange phenomenon. A bunch of gay men in LA were getting types of pneumonia that are seen in immunocompromise people. It's sort of cropping up among gay men in cities around the country. Soon enough, by nineteen eighty two, they suspected it was some kind of sexually transmitted infection that was behind this. And the first name they gave it was grid gay related immune deficiency or even more informally and more evilly, gay cancer.
No.
Yeah, there were three other groups of pay related.
Like how unscientific do you have to know? What calls? Ye it's gay related?
Yeah, I don't know. There's a bunch of gays. What can you who's to.
Know there's a relation here? I'm not going to look into it. Who's called gay related?
Yeah? There was three other groups of people that were also immediately getting it. Hemophiliacs who needed like blood transfusions and stuff ivy drug users, and Haitian immigrants. By August nineteen eighty two, the CDC named it Acquired Immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS. And at the start, there were two theories about what caused AIDS. And what's interesting is that, like this gets like way political about some people were like wildly mad at each other about what causes AIDS. Sure, and I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of the political parts of it because it is messy and people that you don't expect would have opinions that turned out to be incorrect. One of these two theories, which will call the correct theory but they called the new agent theory, was that there was a specific pathogen causing AIDS. The second theory, which we'll call the nope they were wrong, was the multi factoral theory, which was basically the idea that there's like something that in semen where if you get too much of it, it suppresses your immune system. And this isn't as like wacky bunk science as it immediately sounds. There was like people who actually were affected by it and like had some reasons to think about some stuff like we're developing this theory and it was incorrect.
The too much gum theory, yeah, the too.
Much cum theory yeah, which is Yeah. They did a lot of like work around, trying to work backwards to be like, Okay.
Sometimes you can be too gay. We're trying to think of.
A way of less come involved.
Yeah yeah.
Yeah. So there's this new bad thing going around killing people, and right away people are organizing. By May nineteen eighty three, two men with aids and a doctor friend and then one of their partners as an editor, get together and publish one of the first safer sex guides in history. Almost all like I used to when I had a different publishing life. I like once read an awful lot of old Victorian sex manuals. Yeah, yeah, and old Victorian sex manuals are like they're all like sex is bad. If you're going to do it, feel bad about yourself, and then do the following.
Right and enjoy it whatever you do.
Yeah, And there were to be clear, there were people like smuggling in actual safe sex practices and often going to jail for it, and it ties into the history of birth control and all of this stuff. But and like the wild idea that the female orgasm is real. Was this like whole big thing people were fighting for in the early twentieth century anyway, in terms of like modern sex positive safer sex guides, this is like one of the first ones, if not the first one. It's called how to Have Sex in an Epidemic one Approach, And it was the first advocacy for condoms for gay male sex because before before that, people did not routinely use condoms because there was not a risk of pregnancy, right, So that was one thing, and then they actually were into the multi factoral theory. They were into the too much com theory. But like it's not because they were like fools.
But this is what's interesting about this moment is like it kind of reminds you of any epidemic, I mean, in COVID nineteen right any pandemic where you're like people are dying literally right now, and you're trying to figure out whether it's a Chinese virus leaked by a lab or whether it you know, came from someone eating a pangolin who had a cold. You know, like it's like, who the fuck cares, Let's save some lives right now.
But the but of course it is so much easier to deflect.
And you know, I don't know, make some money off anti China rhetoric by by nasaying.
By basically just focusing on the forest.
And missing you know, focusing on the trees and missing the forest of the fact that people are dying. Yeah, absolutely, and politicizing it. So it's just like and so that's just crazy because in a year they had lost the like I mean, I know that there was still the stigma, but you stopped calling it grid and started calling it AIDS in just a year.
And that's just shows you.
I assume how fast it was spreading, how broad it was, and how many people were dying.
Yeah, which is an awkward place to transition to ads. And yet we are left doing that because here's dads and we're back.
Yeah.
And people, like I said right away, they're doing things about it. They're saying, like, how do we change our culture to keep ourselves safe? How do we publish these books talking about it. Another person who started doing something about it was this guy named Larry Kramer. He had never been an activist before he was in the movie business, and he was sort of infamous in both the straight world and the gay world. For a novel he wrote called Fagots that talked about a life of emotionless sex and drugs and so like the straight people are like, ah, gay stuff, and then a lot of the gay community was like, stop spreading our dirty laundry around the world. He considers himself like a just a bruly, honest kind of guy. I read a long form interview with him from the act Up. I didn't write down the name of this, it's in my sources somewhere, but the act Up audio. There's an oral history project that some people did in the early aughts. Anyway, His family was Russian and Jewish and working class from Maryland. In August nineteen eighty one, he invited like eighty gay men over to his apartment so they could talk about what the fuck they were gonna do. And so within a few months they started a group called the Gay Men's Health Crisis, which is the longest running aid service organization and probably in the world, and it is still around today. Their first meeting once they were incorporated was at the Church of Saint Joseph and Greenwich Village, which is a Catholic church. It's going to come up. A lot of the activism is going to be against the Catholic Church, but also a lot of Catholics are going to be involved in the fighting.
Yeah.
But also they have like free meeting space, so we're going to take that meeting space.
Yeah, yeah, totally. And most of the people that I was reading about in act up were either Catholic or Jewish, whether by heritage or actual faith, with some like Protestants here and there. Yeah. And so the Gay Men's Health Crisis was a fairly traditionally organized group. They were a nonprofit. They had a president, they had a crisis hotline, and they offered legal aid, access to social workers. They raised money through like normal fundraiser channels and things like that, which is good and important, but they were like very don't rock the boat. They were very don't antagonize people. You catch more flies with honey or whatever.
Right, we're going to solve this. This community can solve this kind of not on our own, but like, yeah, a little of a bit of a charity case situation will help, Which is like I can't imagine how many cases, how many people needed help.
I mean, it's just like what like that seems just like a whack a mole.
Yeah, it's very quickly, within tens of thousands, and with New York City alone per year. And Larry Kramer was like, he was not a I want to be polite guy. And soon enough he's going to start doing a bunch of stuff that eventually will have him leaving the group over difference of opinions about strategy and about whether or not to be angry. He told Sarah Schulman in an interview in two thousand and three. We tried to be very nice to the New York Times and to Ed Coke, the mayor at the time, and you learn very fast that you're a faggot. And it doesn't make any difference that you went to Yale and were assistant to presidents of a couple of film companies, and that you had money. And the GMHC didn't like when people raise their voice is or criticize the mayor. So Larry Kramer's like, whatever comes next is not going to be rigidly structured and it's not going to be polite. He wrote an essay called and twelve and Counting in nineteen eighty three in a gay magazine that was a screed about lack of government and response to the spread of the disease. He blamed the CDC and the NIH, but he also blamed gay men who were ignoring the problem. And basically he was like, well, we kind of need to stop having sex while we get to sort it out. People didn't like that.
Yeah, nobody likes abstinence except for the modern Republican Party.
Yeah, totally, who don't actually like it themselves, they want everyone else to do it. He also started confronting bureaucrats. He threw a drink and a gay Republican fundraiser's face for his hypocrisy. There's this really long and contentious history and gay activism about whether or not you should publicly out homophobic gay people who are like wielding power from the right wing.
Oh right, so who do you protect? Right? Yeah?
Like it goes to like real identity politics, like you know, like intersectionality questions here.
Totally and also just like how rude do you, like, do you want to expose someone to homophobia in order to make a political point?
Sure s sure, especially by outing them.
Yeah. Forced outing was like absolutely a tactic of gay liberation going back, like the first gay men's magazine, des Shwimmer in Germany from the eighteen nineties. I think would do forced outing of like really yeah, and it's it's Lady Gray like and I don't I don't know how I feel about it. I also don't know Lady Gray is. And Sophie's giving me the like Margaret doesn't know that to get this reference, isn't.
That's Lindsay Graham's nickname in DC apparently is Lady Gray.
Okay, And so Larry Kramer spent a couple of years doing this kind of activism alone. It's not because he was the only person doing it. It's because he hadn't connected up with folks who are also doing it. Because like throwing drinks in like people's faces and stuff is cool, but it works better when it's coordinated. And so for all the shit, he basically gets kicked out of this group he started, and he breaks up with his partner who's still on the board, and he goes wandering. He goes to Dico, the concentration camp, and he writes a play called The Normal Heart. And it's not a coincidence that he's Jewish and that he's going to concentration camps and looking at this because he absolutely is perceiving this as a holocaust that is happening right. Gay men are dying in mass fifty thousand gay men are dying a year. Gay men in big cities are going to a funeral every week, sometimes more. Sometimes you miss one friend's funeral because you're at a different friend's funeral. Life expectancy after diagnosis was too. By nineteen eighty four, two French doctors had figured out that there was this virus HIV that caused AIDS the most likely origin. Speaking of the politicization of where does the thing come from? How racist can we be about it? You know, I'm going to talk about where the best understanding of where it comes from is because it ties into colonialism. Most likely it was passed from chimpanzees to humans sometimes around the tourney of the twentieth century during the like scramble for Africa, when Europe was just fucking over Africa as hard as they could. And this probably happened in the Belgian Congo, the place where King Leopold was murdering millions of people. It also, and really importantly, and I wish I didn't have to say it, it didn't jump to humans through humans fucking animals.
As hot as that sounds.
It comes through hunting practices almost certainly, where you're just exposed to the blood of event animals. The virus spread from Africa, probably the Congo, hitting Haiti in around nineteen sixty seven, and there's a whole lot that has been written about how the spread of it was happening because of like the way in which like social practices and cultural things and how everyone was living was shifted so completely by colonization. Right, it hit Haiti probably around nineteen sixty seven. There's again a lot of different takes about how it's spread, and there's like political motivations behind people giving you different ideas of how it's spread, but the one that seems likely or maybe I'm drawn to this explanation because it blames capitalism and colonial extraction.
But you're biased in favor of, you know, just reality.
That's certainly how I perceive it. Yes, there was this corrupt politician in Haiti named Luckner Kimbrone, and he was called the Vampire of the Caribe because he ran sketchy blood clinics and sold people's plasma to the US, often killing people for their blood, like perfectly safe, haunting people in the streets to oh my god, kill them for their blood.
Oh my god, poor hate. I swear to fucking Knoddy.
He's like, every time you learn of like some former awful dictator in Haiti, there's like another guy.
Yeah, yeah, And this guy wasn't even dictator. He just like worked for.
One of the guys, you know, O side side hustle.
Yeah, and like we really the West was like, oh, you all like gonna have this slave revolution. We're going to fucking punish you forever.
We're going to punish you forever.
Sixteen hundred gallons of plasma a month was exported to the US during this guy's time, and HIV was spreading between the patients in his clinics because they didn't sanitize their equipment, and it spread in the US partly from that exported plasma. Wow, it spread most aggressively in the gay male community because unprotected anal intercourse is the riskiest kind of sex for HIV transmission. It also the communities that hit first in the US Plazitian immigrants was probably IV drug users. It was called drunkie flu or the dwindles or junkie pneumonia and no one cared or noticed. Because if there is a community even more disregarded by society at large than gay people in the late seventies and early eighties, it is homeless drug users. It actually probably hit this community first in like nineteen seventy seven or so, and nothing was done about it. These people's deaths aren't even written down, you know. So and fortunately, actually Act Up is going to be so fucking intersexual. This is like where they a lot of people will like critique them, and I'm not going to get too much into the critiques of them in this episode, but like a lot of people were like a lot of the early act Up people are middle class white gay men, right right, right, but a lot of their immediate supporters are not. And the people who come in with like a lot of activist information are not. And they like challenge themselves and do a lot of work about how to become and act intersectionally. And one of the things that they do is they really go to bat for ivy drug users.
That's fucking huge, right, because they realize like they need to be in the same boat.
Yeah, absolutely right.
They didn't turn against them. It's like, no, no, this is their problem.
Yeah, we're the good sufferers.
Right exactly, which you could sort of see happening.
Yeah, it could have happened.
No, that is another thing.
That I remembered about this movement was precisely that was that while destigmatizing you know, being gay, it the AIDS ANTI you know, the act up movement was also about destigmatizing IVY drug use.
Yeah. Yeah, and we'll talk about it later. But like did an awful lot of the work for the modern Needle Exchange program, and like, yes, they just I don't know. I had known the broad strokes in some of the cool specific actions, but like they're just I love. Most of the time when I do these episodes, I start off with a group, I'm like, oh, that group's cool, and then I like read more and I'm like, this is the coolest thing in the world.
Like why can't we have this?
Yeah. So meanwhile, queers all over the country are organizing, and of course this means New York City. Also on December twentieth, the New York Times ran a headline sale of Sight to Homosexuals planned because this is where a building that gets called the Center is still which is still around, comes into being a community center. It is now called the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center and fell into some queer hands in nineteen eighty three. It was originally called the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. A director described it that whole rush to address the AIDS epidemic was critical to institution building in the gay community. There was this realization that if we do it together, we get it done. If we don't do it together, we're going to die.
Yeah.
So a bunch of groups got together to buy it, including Sage, Senior Action in a Gay Environment and the Metropolitan Community Church, which was a queer affirming Protestant congregation, and by the end of the first year, sixty groups were meeting there. These days, hundreds of groups meet there because it's still around, and they brought in speakers all the time. One day in early nineteen eighty seven they brought in Larry Kramer, the guy we were talking about you promised to talk about the fight against AIDS. He started off his talk by having two thirds of the room stand up, and then he said, you will all be dead in five years. And then he said, quote, if my speech tonight doesn't scare the shit out of you we're in real trouble. What you're here doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action. Gay men will have no future here on earth? How long does it take before you get angry and fight back? Then he pitched that they start a new political organization devoted to political action. And he didn't say, this is what it's got to be and I'm going to be in charge. Right, he actually did, which is the same thing he did last time. He said we should start something, and the thing that got started was too polite for his tastes. And so then a couple of years later he's like, hey, we should start something and be angry, And three hundred people came two days later back to the Center to form act UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
To unleash power. Yeah, I love that.
I mean I know that maybe that followed from the acronym of wanting to say like act up, but.
Like to unleash power. He's like, so fucking tight.
You can get some good poetry from a backronym, you know, because you're like, the restrictions help bring out the creative absolutely.
But now would you call this was this a spokes counsel or you're going to get some spokes cancel part leader.
So it's actually from the kind of funny Larry Kramer talks a lot about how he's like, I don't know any of that leftist terminology, and the interviewer is like, but we used affinity groups and direct action. He was like, when I was in the film industry, everyone was a Marxist and used Marxist slang, and I refuse to learn any of it because he's like an old grouch who kind of rules, you know, right.
He was just like it was a meeting. I don't know it was meaning of other meetings.
Yeah, exactly, meaning of groups, like are we gonna use direct actor? Well, we're gonna go fight the fuckers? Like, yes, direct action, you know. So I think it started off on an affinity group model. But the way that I kind of understand it is that this very very initial group, or at least Larry Kramer is like not a political actor, doesn't perceive himself as a political actor, but immediately, like within a couple of weeks, if not at that first meeting, these like veterans from all of these other movements come together and help and help form it, and I think at that point you start getting very explicitly. We talk about how we use direct action, we are using affinity groups, and all of their organizing happens through affinity groups. That it's gonna be really interesting how that happens. But what else they didn't do is they didn't have advertisers. Actually, okay, wait, I take that back. Later we're going to talk about a bunch of like advertising people who are graphic designers who are an act up who like change the fucking world. So everyone has a day job, and some people's day job is to make ads, and some people's day job is this podcast, which now is going to ads. And we're back. Okay. You know that famous Margaret Meade quote. I don't know shit about Margaret Meade, but there's that quote that's famous. Hell never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has so good. I know. I've also always had a like because it has to be a small group, not a like. I think like one person very rarely like really like you change history by like connecting in with groups, you know, And I say this as someone who like, I'm an introvert, and it makes me sad this realization, you know. But this group act Up, I feel like, proves this quote better than anything I've ever read. It's biggest actions captain about five thousand people. Probably most people who've listened to this have been to way bigger protests than five thousand people.
But also it just depends on like, if those five thousand people are doing direct action, that's fucking crazy. That's a massive number exactly.
Act Up is far and away one of the most successful groups I've ever covered on the show. Despite not they weren't tiny. It wasn't forty people in clandestine clicks, but it wasn't huge. I chalk up their outside impact to a few factors. You got one of them already. They were at the right place at the right time. It was a movement that needed to happen. The horizontal structure of it emphasized the agency of individuals and small groups. So it wasn't a few thousand people who are like following the crowd. It's a few thousand people divided into groups, each of which is like, all right, how are we going to get this shit done? And so you have five thousand leaders instead of five thousand people the handful of leaders. I used to kind of like make fun of that quote, like when people be like, oh no, we're leader full on that leader list. I was like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah No.
I definitely never heard that until later in life when I was no longer an activist. But I I do think it's kind of funny. But then you're like, nah, that's a good way of thinking about it. You know, you know which it is true. That's the other one, Like I mean a calling in versus calling out, you know, like okay, but you're still calling them out.
No, but right.
The affinity group I think is really interesting because it is sort of you know, it's people who should trust one another. It can be you know, not that there were necessarily infiltrators and act up, but it can be like infiltration proof, you know, a little bit cop proof. If everyone if you've got five to fifteen people who trust one another and can vouch for one another, and they're all kind of like down and have each other's back, So it's I mean, man, I don't even have like five close friends. Shit, man, they're all over the plate, like like I can't even name ten people I want to hang out with on a Saturday night. So I think it's it's it's tight, like you know that that. Yeah, and folks still are organizing in affinity groups. But I just, yeah, big ups the model of the affinity group.
Yeah no, no, but I feel you right. It's like you're like, okay, well, you know, it's probably easier you're twenty and part of a social scene.
You know exactly, we're all dumpster diving together, we're all fucking the same people.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and then it'll all fall apart because we're all fucking the same people.
Yes, exactly, and then one of them is also an undercover and it's all terrible.
Yeah. Yeah, you just described nineteen ninety nine to two thousand and five.
Okay.
Other things that they had going for them, they had a commitment to direct action and to inclusivity and not policing each other. So it was very like you show up and be like, oh, we're doing this action, and people be like okay, not like, oh, we all need to come to consensus about whether or not it's okay for you to do that action. You know, so everyone wanted to do it.
You go, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Yeah, exactly. Also the fact that so much of the direction came from directly affected people, and one of their specific things was, we are going to become the experts on our condition. We are going to be the ones who are coming up with what the policy should be from the government about our issues, because we are now the experts. And they did also they had this dual strategy, which is basically good cup, bad cop. They would be both the protesters outside screaming at the politicians and they'd be the negotiators inside working on solutions. And it's fascinating and there's like tension there right, Like you know, some people are like, oh, you're all fucking liberals, don't fight hard enough, and other people be like, oh, you're all too unruly and disorganized, you know. But it's like it's that tension where all this interesting shit comes from.
Thad, Yeah, I mean, I think what's really you know, I think there's like sort of a new a trendy idea nowadays that you're not supposed to do like emotional labor for people, which like I understand on a certain level, but on the other level, it's like if you're actually going to like change hearts and minds and actually get to work.
You do need to do some emotional labor for people.
You need to do I mean, I don't know about making them care about death, but you kind of do need to be like this, like Act Up is proving, you need to be experts on the thing that you're working around. You need to be educating people in your community and outside of your community. And that's going to be the hard work. It's not just going to be like, well, everyone has to like you know, come to their own senses, like noah, nah, you're gonna have to be leading the way on that.
Yeah, absolutely, Like do your own research.
No, you've got to do the research.
You know, totally. And I feel like there's this difference between fault and responsibility that society doesn't set us up to understand, where it's like, is it my fault that as a trans woman, I like suffer certain bad shit. No, that's not my fault. Is it my responsibility?
Well?
No one else is fucking fixing it, right, you know? And like I appreciate the like allies and like literal allies, like allies in a war who are helping me do that, but it's still up to me. It is my responsibility because it is not anyone else's, even if it's not like.
I'm thankful for you know, the transactivists that took me through all you know, new terminology, new pronouns, you know. That's but exactly if they had been like, no, I'm not going to teach you, it's like, well, then I will be dumb.
Yeah, exactly for a long time. I will pull in a china like China shop this, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I've read some narratives about act UP that was kind of like, well, we weren't political until all of a sudden we had to be, and other narratives that talk about act UP like it's the supergroup of activism in the eighties, and I, like I was saying, I think it's both. I think the initial founders are mostly desperate gay men, and soon help rushed in from experienced organizers from a bunch of movements which included gay men and gay women. And then you have the rank and file on top of that, which is also largely new to politics. Because of this horizontal structure, the direction and guidance of the experienced organizers was like subtle instead of explicit. It wasn't like, hey, we're coming in were in charge, right, It's like they're coming in and being like, here's ways of democratically organizing to figure out what we all want, and so that kind of almost becomes invisible. They built up horizontal movement built out of affinity groups that were each autonomous. It was nonpartisan in both that they didn't have an ideological label and also that they didn't endorse political parties. It spread across the country in the world soon enough. At their first meeting, they were like, all right, great, what are we going to do about it? And someone suggested they go after the FDA for being too slow to approve experimental drugs that could save their lives. Larry Kramer wrote an op ed about it for the New York Times, and then they marched on Wall Street the same day that op ed came out March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four. This is their first action. Seventeen people were arrested pretty much right off. They had doctors and shit coming and joining, including this woman, this chemist, Iris Long, who was a straight woman who had no connection to aid suffering communities. She just was like, Oh, I know about this stuff. I should go be helpful. So she was her fucking rules. She showed up, and she was the one explaining the science and the medicine and of all like all the things that people were working on, and helped people become the experts. You know. One of their first actions was in DC on June first, nineteen eighty seven, at the White House. Cops are so homophobic that they're wearing rubber gloves when they arrest the protesters, afraid they'll catch like gay cancer, which, yeah, shut the fuck up. By this point, people knew that that was not the case.
You know.
An airline refused to let people with AIDS fly, so act Up went for two strategies at once with this airline. They sued them, and they also protested that their offices like broken their offices. Well they're well, it's open, you know, and they won. Cosmopolitan magazine ran an article by a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist had like put doctor in his name when he wrote it, but he was actually a psychiatrist, not a doctor of internal medicine. That he was like representing himself, you know. And the article was like, hey, don't worry you straight, you won't get AIDS.
Dude, and so first tend sex positions to avoid getting AIDS.
It was basically like, you're not a gay man, You're fine, you know. And so a bunch of women from Act Up met up with the author and were like, Hey, you gonna you're gonna do a retraction, You're gonna apologize, and he's like no. So they went to Cosmopolitan. They took a protest to the streets. They forced media attention on the fact that women can get AIDS, and Cosmo was forced to print a partial retraction. Nice, which Get said some of their like intersectionality right away too, like a lot of their campaigns are like, hey, women can get AIDS, you know. And it wasn't all like, hey, we can only focus on the gay men who are like the most suffering people because we are focusing on them, but we are also focusing on all these other communities that.
Yeah, on the misinformation, Yeah, totally.
They They started round the clock protests at a hospital demanding better clinical trials and that the clinical trials include more patients with AIDS. They shut down the FDA for a day at this One of the arrestees was a well known artist named David Wochnarowitz, who later died of AIDS in nineteen ninety two. And this is where you get this photo. He had painted up his jacket with the now famous words, if I die of AIDS, forget burial, just drop my body. On the steps of the FDA. They paired all of their protests with very specific demands for how experimental drugs could be made available sooner, and it worked. Within a year. Act Up activists and experts were regularly negotiating with the FDA and the National Institute for Health. They obviously had to keep it wasn't just like hunky dory, Everything's fine now, right. They had to keep up all this pressure in order to.
Well, that's interesting. There's like such an inside outside strategy. They're like, you know, pressuring from the streets, but then also like hind closed doors, like meeting with folks, and that's you know, I'm curious about how that was all divvied up, you know, internally, but just to.
Show like they had it was so clear.
Obviously most a lot of spokes councils and affinity groups and all that that I've been involved in our very like broad nebulous movement, like you know, the global justice movement, or the even the anti war movement, which you could argue, I mean, even if it was very it was focused, it was still a massive issue. This is so specific and so yeah, yeah, it's interesting to see how, Yeah, when you can really hone in, you can fucking win.
Yeah, totally. They talk a lot about like, hey, you should have and I don't think this is the only way to run a movement, but they were fairly effective with the strategy of like, come up with specific, articulable demands that are winnable and then go out and win them, right, and use that to build power, instead of using that to be like, Haha, we've won our little reform, you know, instead be like, okay, we've won that reform. Now what's next. We've gained power, you know. From nineteen eighty one to nineteen eighty six, the government spent a total of two hundred and fifty million dollars on AIDS research. By nineteen ninety one, when act Up was in full swing, the government was spending a billion dollars a year. And this is a direct correlation. You asked me earlier before, Well, we weren't recording whether I was gonna talk shit on Anthony Fauci, and he's one of their main targets during all of this, right, But it's like the quotes I have from him are kind of like Fauci told someone from Act Up, the more you're demonstrating, the more money I'm going to get to work with.
Yeah, that's yeah.
I mean that, right, It's like you have This is the I think the thing that people miss is like and back to the calling in is like those folks in power you are, they are your targets. And if they are amenable targets like meaning if they're not like massive. If Fauci had been a psychotic homophobe, right, I don't think they would have gotten that funding. Right, his job would have been to deny that funding. So it matters who your targets are, even though they should still be your targets.
Yeah.
I think it's funny. Maybe even last week or something brought up This a thing I think about all the time, Liz rent Free in my head is the art of war from a million years ago. One of the rules is don't fully surround your enemy. You have to give your enemy an out otherwise they fight to the death. Right, you need to have a way in which and I see this a lot with like other stuff where you're like, if I'm trying to convince someone to stop being transphobic, my goal is to stop them from being transphobic and not to just yell at them forever.
Like you know, my goal is to have them out for them.
Yeah, exactly. You know, whenever people are like, ah, this person used to be a transphobe, like that rules they used to be. That's great, that's progress. You know, I used to be a transphobe. I grew up in the nineties and I was afraid of myself, Like what do you want?
You know?
No, And I think that's the biggest critique of like left movements that every a lot of people have, which is there's not enough on ramps. There's not enough again the calling in and like it's not I think, you know, Michael Albert used to say, you know who's who wrote like what is it para con participatory economics? He's like a yeah, movement economist about like our movements aren't sticky enough, you know, like they you should want to be involved in them and rather than feeling just repelled by them or like they're totally antagonizing, and that's not to say you shouldn't be militant.
Those two things are very different.
No, totally.
And it's actually one of the things that it's not too much in the script, but one of the things I read a bunch of times about act UP is that one of the ways in which people wanted to be part of it was that it was also a cultural thing that you go and become part of, and you are part of something and like and it's kind of ironic and interesting, like everyone's hooking up right right, you know, and everyone's like maybe yeah, hopefully yeah, I mean, or you know, they're in conditions where they don't care anymore or whatever, you know, Like, but it's like, you know, they're creating an entire culture and like something that's like worth being part of. And all of their work and like this work pressuring about AIDS research. This leads directly to the development of proteas inhibitors that are now taken by millions of people worldwide. I think it's like twenty million people worldwide take this are Wow, it's not every day that you can save millions of lives. And when we come back on Wednesday, we're going to talk about a whole lot more of the specifics about all the cool shit they did, how they took on the Catholic Church, how they reinvented political art, how they developed methods of fighting burnout. I know that's not like a big sexy topic, but it is to me. And how they change the way that harm reduction works in this kind. But that's on Wednesday. There's no way you can look it up. Now, that's huge.
I'm excited for Wednesday because.
No one else has ever covered this story whatever anyway. But if people want to know more about what you do, how can they do that me all?
You can find me on all podcasts, apps and YouTube and twitch, Habituation room at Franny Feo on YouTube and Twitch. My podcast is weekly. It's a news comedy and everything in between. And there's lots of bonus episodes, so yeah, I get at that.
Hell yeah. Cool Zone Media has new podcasts out that you've probably already heard. Because if you haven't heard sixteenth Minute of Fame, I don't. I live under a rock and I've heard of it, and I've even heard of some of the topics that covers. But you can listen to sixteenth minute of Fame. It is about all the crazy memes that happen on the Internet and like what happens after the fifteen minutes of Famer up. But since it's a Jamie Loftis production, it's about that the same way that the book Raw Dog is about the history of hot dogs and what hot dogs taste the best, which is to say, it's about an awful lot more than that, and it's like super interesting. Even if I like the book Raw Dog and I'm a vegan, that's my endorsement, and so you can listen to that podcast. I have a book that is currently kickstarting, is a fiction book as a young adult book. It is called The Sapling Cage. And if you're listening to this in the future, it's not currently kickstarting, it's kickstarted. But I know it was successful because we met our funding goal within an hour, and within the first day we hit three times our funding goal, So it clearly people like it. They some of them have read it even and you could too, could go read it by backing it on Kickstarter or getting from the library or whatever method you like to use to acquire books. And that's what I gote on Wednesday.
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