This is article and book is a great reminder of the amazing ACT UP
movement . Attending their meetings in Cooper Union in the early 90s was
one of the most memorable moments of my life. It had impact on the fight
against AIDS it also changed people's ideas about everything that
activism could be.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/08/act-up-protest-movements-us-direct-action
What ACT UP’s successes can teach today’s protest movements
Sarah Schulman
Our group, which forced the US to step up in fighting Aids in the 80s
and 90s, favoured direct action over debate
As we move into a new phase of the Covid crisis, it is hard to miss how
the pandemic reveals the fissures in our society. Communities and
countries of poor people of colour cannot access vaccines that are
readily available to the most powerful and protected. Covid has been
compared to Aids, but today’s pandemic is a collective public experience
while Aids – especially during its height – was a private nightmare. Our
group, ACT UP, fought to get it out into the public consciousness.
Five years after science first noticed the pattern of illness that would
come to be known as Aids, 40,000 people were dead in the United States
and the government and pharmaceutical companies were doing nothing. ACT
UP (The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in 1987 to use
direct action to end the Aids pandemic. I was an active member of this
grassroots political organisation, having covered the crisis as a
journalist in New York since the early 80s. In many ways, Aids activism
was one of the most successful social movements in recent history.
In its first six years of existence, ACT UP transformed how
pharmaceutical companies approached Aids medications by pushing for the
use of unregulated treatments, and forced the government to make
experimental drugs available to people who needed them. ACT UP won huge
victories for women and poor people when we forced authorities to make
needle exchange legal in New York City. ACT UP fought for four years to
expand the government’s definition of Aids to include women’s symptoms,
so that women could also qualify for benefits and get access to
experimental treatments. ACT UP confronted the Catholic church when it
tried to stop condom distribution in public schools, started housing for
homeless people with Aids, and transformed how queer people and people
with Aids were depicted in the media.
I was a rank-and-file member, attending the major actions, going to
meetings, living inside the group’s counter culture, and getting
arrested twice: first at “Trumpsgiving” where we sat in at Trump Towers
demanding housing for homeless people with Aids, and then on the “Day of
Desperation” when ACT UP protested against the first Gulf war by
occupying Grand Central Station and interrupting television news
programmes, chanting: “Fight Aids, not Arabs.” Although I was an
experienced activist from the women’s reproductive rights movement of
the 1970s and 80s, I had never been in an organisation with so many
resources, that was able to be so optimally effective, determining our
agenda by making the needs of people with Aids its central drive.
It is very difficult to access activist histories, and that is why my
new book, Let the Record Show, is not rooted in nostalgia. Instead I
interviewed 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years and collated
the most important strategies and tactics, many of which can be of use
today.
The biggest takeaways for today’s protest movements from ACT UP’s legacy
are: it was not a consensus-based movement, not everyone had to agree on
a strategy or action; a direct action movement, the needs of its members
determined its agenda; while sectional interests were not allowed to get
in the way of the aims of the organisation. ACT UP was solution-focused
in its approach; eschewed corporate and government funding and raised
its money primarily through community-based fundraising such as selling
highly creative T-shirts and visual artwork. We were not afraid to
proactively challenge the institutions comprising the power structure it
fought against.
There was no time for theoretical debate. As one of the leaders, Maxine
Wolfe, would often say: theory “emerged” from action. As ACT UP moved
forward with a campaign, questions would emerge about how to do the
action, and that is when people’s values would cohere. But there was no
time wasted on debate that had no real-world application. To this end,
women and people of colour in ACT UP did not stop the action to do
“consciousness raising” for men or white people on sexism and racism.
After all, you can spend your life trying to change one person and fail.
Instead, they marshalled the ample resources of the larger organisation
to run campaigns that benefited women and people of colour with HIV.
Decisions did not have to be unanimous and people did not have to agree.
There was a one-line principle of unity: “Direct action to end the Aids
crisis.” So if members wanted to do direct action (as opposed to social
service positions, such as caring for those dying from Aids) they could.
There was no effort to force the entire organisation to agree on one
strategy or analysis. As a direct action movement, ACT UP was an
organisation of and for people with Aids.
ACT UP created the solutions. Instead of being in an infantilised
relationship to the powers that be, asking them to solve the problems,
ACT UP became the experts on their issues, creating reasonable, winnable
and doable solutions. ACT UP then presented them to the authorities.
When those in power refused change, ACT UP would do what Martin Luther
King called “self-purification”, or what ACT UP called “non-violent
civil disobedience training”: a process of questioning moral strength
and whether we could withstand the violence being inflicted without
retaliating. We would then do non-violent creative direct action, to
communicate through the media (not to the media) to pressure the
institutions to change.
The organisation was not afraid of alienating institutions of power and
was happy to fight across borders. We directly confronted the Catholic
church by interrupting mass. We took on the New York Times (which ACT UP
called “the New York Crimes”), the art world (taking visual art out of
the galleries and into public space), the US government, and private
pharmaceutical companies. ACT UP stood with Haitian refugees when the US
did not want Black immigrants, and fought for HIV-positive people in
Puerto Rico.
Today, America’s political movements against police violence, for Black
lives, for immigration reform and for Palestine solidarity all have
openly queer and trans people in leadership. Queer, trans and people
with Aids are no longer forced into an LGBT-only context. Let’s use this
new landscape to build a radical democracy, big tent movement where
like-minded people can build effective campaigns around creative
solutions, and stand shoulder to shoulder without demanding conformity
and forced agreement. Let the needs of those most in danger set the
agenda and lead the way.
Sarah Schulman is a writer and activist. Her latest book, Let the
Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York, 1987-1993, is out
now
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