FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 30, 2007
TWENTY-SEVEN ARRESTED AT NYC PROTEST; HUNDREDS MARCH FOR SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE
Contact:
Cathy Renna, 917-757-6123, cathy@rennacommunications.com
Syd Peterson, 917-621-6411, syd@rennacommunications.com
Jay Blotcher, 845-612-9837, jblotcher@hvc.rr.com
NEW YORK CITY (March 30) – 27 people were arrested yesterday during a protest demanding health care for all, single-payer national health insurance, and drug price controls in the United States. Nearly a thousand attended the protest in downtown New York City, which commemorated ACT UP’s 20th anniversary of AIDS activism and direct action.
After marching through various downtown sites, the activists converged on the “Wall Street Bull” statute in the Financial District. Chanting “No more bull! Health care for all!” the group brought out 50 body bags, symbolizing the 50 Americans who die each day due to lack of health insurance. 27 people laid down in the street in front of traffic, and were arrested by police.
The protesters met at Federal Plaza at noon Thursday and headed down Broadway. The group stopped at five sites of government and corporate power historically responsible for thousands of AIDS deaths and for the United States’ current health care crisis. At City Hall, they demanded that the city expand access to health care for all poor people and people with HIV. They stopped at Trinity Church, the site of ACT UP’s first public action 20 years ago, to remember those who died of AIDS and/or lack of health care. The crowd swelled at the New York Stock Exchange, as call-and-response chants condemned health care profiteering by insurance and health care companies. The protest concluded at the “Wall Street Bull” statue, as the fervent group observed those engaging in civil disobedience.
Contact Renna Communications for the following resources available for journalists:
(1) selection of photos from the protest today.
(2) copies of speeches by Mark Hannay, Director of Metro NY Health Care for All Campaign; Dr. Oliver Fein, New York City Chair, Physicians for a National Health Program; and Mark Milano of ACT UP.
(3) 20 year timeline of ACT UP.
(4) historic photos from 1980s AIDS protests.
(5) Larry Kramer, Oliver Fein, Ann Northrop, Mark Milano, Mark Hannay, Jennifer Flynn, and other members of ACT UP are available for interviews.
Joining ACT UP/New York for this major demonstration are sponsoring organizations ACT UP/Philadelphia, African Services Committee, Housing Works, Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign, Physicians for a National Health Program, Healthcare NOW and the New York City AIDS Housing Network.
The following organizations endorsed this action:
ACT UP/New York
ACT UP/Philadelphia
AIDS Treatment News
The American Run for the End of AIDS, Inc.
African Services Committee
Church Ladies for Choice
Columbia University Global Justice Chapter
Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP)
Fordham University Student Global AIDS Campaign Chapter
Foundation for Integrative AIDS Research (FIAR)
Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)
Gill Foundation
Healthcare-Now
Housing Works
Housing Works Youth Advocacy Group
Make the Road by Walking
Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign
New York Buyers' Club (NYBC)
New York City AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN)
People of Color in Crisis
Physicians for a National Health Program - NY Metro Chapter
Positive Health Project
Positive Opportunities, Inc.
Redeemed Outreach Ministries
Special Audiences, Inc.
Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring
ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was founded in March, 1987. ACT UP is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. For more info, visit http://www.actupny.org
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Friday, March 30, 2007
ACT UP 20th Anniversary March in San Francisco 3-29-2007
Congratulations to our friends with ACT UP/Bay Area and Gay Shame members in San Francisco on a successful action today!!
Report and pix from ACT UP/Bay Area and Gay Shame "die-in" today in San Francisco:
and some more great coverage here
Blabbeando: ACT UP protest: Same old BS, twenty years later#links
Report and pix from ACT UP/Bay Area and Gay Shame "die-in" today in San Francisco:
and some more great coverage here
Blabbeando: ACT UP protest: Same old BS, twenty years later#links
Thursday, March 29, 2007
ACT UP 20th Anniversary March NYC
Thanks to all those that came out today and made the march a huge success!
See you at our first meeting on April 12th at the LGBT Center in NYC!
See you at our first meeting on April 12th at the LGBT Center in NYC!
Official Announcement: First Meeting of the Queer Justice League* April 12th
On the heels of today's very successful ACT UP demonstration, we are pleased to announce the first meeting of the Queer Justice League*!
Thursday, April 12th
7:30pm-9:00pm
The
(
The conversation is also happening online - sign up for the listserv to join in! Subscribe at https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/queerjusticeleague If you're located outside the
Visit our blog to read some background on the Queer Justice League* and Larry Kramer's call to action: http://queer-justice-league.blogspot.com
Check out our MySpace page, and join our growing list of friends:
http://www.myspace.com/queerjusticeleague
Finally, if you have any questions, feel free to email queerjusticeleague@hotmail.com
Please forward this message widely and spread the word to anyone who might be interested. Our aim is to include as wide and diverse a set of voices in this discussion as possible.
Thanks very much. We look forward to seeing you on the 12th!
*Official name is still to be determined.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Press Advisory for 3/29 Protest
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ATTENTION PHOTO DESKS/TELEVISION: THE PROTEST WILL END WITH SOME PARTICIPANTS ENGAGING IN CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND LAYING OUT 50 BODY BAGS, REPRESENTING THE 50 PEOPLE WHO DIE EVERY DAY BECAUSE THEY LACK HEALTH INSURANCE
Contact:
Cathy Renna, 917-757-6123, cathy@rennacommunications.com
Syd Peterson, 917-621-6411, syd@rennacommunications.com
Jay Blotcher, 845-612-9837, jblotcher@hvc.rr.com
HUNDREDS TO JOIN ACT-UP 20TH ANNIVERSARY PROTEST
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE PLANNED AT "WALL STREET BULL" TO DEMAND SINGLE-PAYER
HEALTH INSURANCE AND DRUG PRICE CONTROLS
March 29,2007, New York, NY.....In commemoration of ACT UP's 20th anniversary and demanding single-payer health insurance and drug price controls, hundreds of supporters of ACT UP/New York, along with sponsoring organizations that include ACT UP/Philadelphia, African Services Committee, Housing Works, Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign, Physicians For A National Health Plan, Healthcare NOW and the New York City AIDS Housing Network, will converge in a protest march in downtown New York City tomorrow, March 29th. This protest march is the kick-off for a campaign to make access to health care a major issue through the 2008 election cycle.
WHAT: Protest march organized by ACT UP and sponsoring organizations, calling for single-payer health care and drug price controls
WHEN: 11:45am PRESS CONFERENCE at Broad St. and Broadway, speakers will include author and ACT UP founder Larry Kramer, founding ACT UP member Eric Sawyer, Dr. Oliver Fein, New York City Chair, Physicians for a National Health Program, Jamie Love, and Jennifer Flynn, NYC AIDS Housing Network
12pm/Noon MARCH KICK OFF
Please note that the protest march will be making the following stops and include speakers who will commemorate the 20th anniversary of ACT UP and speak to the various issues related to the protest:
City Hall - this stop will include a demand for housing for all, especially those affected by HIV/AIDS; speakers will include a representative from Housing Works and others TBD.
Trinity Church - This stop will include a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of ACT UP and a moment of silence for al those we have lost to HIV/AIDS. Speakers will include Andy Velez and Brent Nicholson-Earle, founding members of ACT UP.
New York Stock Exchange - Protesters will call for health insurance reform and drug pricing controls. Speakers will include Mark Hannay, Director of Metro NY Health Care for All Campaign and Mark Milano, a longtime AIDS activist.
Bowling Green "bull statue" - official protest will end. Beginning of civil disobedience action. Speakers will include Ann Northrop, a founding member
of ACT UP/NY and a representative from ACT UP/Philadelphia.
FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO WWW.ACTUPNY.ORG
-30-
ATTENTION PHOTO DESKS/TELEVISION: THE PROTEST WILL END WITH SOME PARTICIPANTS ENGAGING IN CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND LAYING OUT 50 BODY BAGS, REPRESENTING THE 50 PEOPLE WHO DIE EVERY DAY BECAUSE THEY LACK HEALTH INSURANCE
Contact:
Cathy Renna, 917-757-6123, cathy@rennacommunications.com
Syd Peterson, 917-621-6411, syd@rennacommunications.com
Jay Blotcher, 845-612-9837, jblotcher@hvc.rr.com
HUNDREDS TO JOIN ACT-UP 20TH ANNIVERSARY PROTEST
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE PLANNED AT "WALL STREET BULL" TO DEMAND SINGLE-PAYER
HEALTH INSURANCE AND DRUG PRICE CONTROLS
March 29,2007, New York, NY.....In commemoration of ACT UP's 20th anniversary and demanding single-payer health insurance and drug price controls, hundreds of supporters of ACT UP/New York, along with sponsoring organizations that include ACT UP/Philadelphia, African Services Committee, Housing Works, Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign, Physicians For A National Health Plan, Healthcare NOW and the New York City AIDS Housing Network, will converge in a protest march in downtown New York City tomorrow, March 29th. This protest march is the kick-off for a campaign to make access to health care a major issue through the 2008 election cycle.
WHAT: Protest march organized by ACT UP and sponsoring organizations, calling for single-payer health care and drug price controls
WHEN: 11:45am PRESS CONFERENCE at Broad St. and Broadway, speakers will include author and ACT UP founder Larry Kramer, founding ACT UP member Eric Sawyer, Dr. Oliver Fein, New York City Chair, Physicians for a National Health Program, Jamie Love, and Jennifer Flynn, NYC AIDS Housing Network
12pm/Noon MARCH KICK OFF
Please note that the protest march will be making the following stops and include speakers who will commemorate the 20th anniversary of ACT UP and speak to the various issues related to the protest:
City Hall - this stop will include a demand for housing for all, especially those affected by HIV/AIDS; speakers will include a representative from Housing Works and others TBD.
Trinity Church - This stop will include a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of ACT UP and a moment of silence for al those we have lost to HIV/AIDS. Speakers will include Andy Velez and Brent Nicholson-Earle, founding members of ACT UP.
New York Stock Exchange - Protesters will call for health insurance reform and drug pricing controls. Speakers will include Mark Hannay, Director of Metro NY Health Care for All Campaign and Mark Milano, a longtime AIDS activist.
Bowling Green "bull statue" - official protest will end. Beginning of civil disobedience action. Speakers will include Ann Northrop, a founding member
of ACT UP/NY and a representative from ACT UP/Philadelphia.
FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO WWW.ACTUPNY.ORG
-30-
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
A Call to the Next Generation of Activists
as posted to the Queer Justice League listserv...
Like most of you, I attended Larry Kramer’s speech last Tuesday and was inspired by some of the things he said. What I heard was a call for ACT UP to reinvent itself, to incorporate new ideas, take advantage of new technologies, and think about going after new issues in order to tap into the energy and passion of a new generation of activists.
That’s what I heard. What I saw in the planning session that immediately followed was a bunch of existing ACT UP members trying to relive their past.
Largely white, male, and older – as ACT UP is often perceived to be – the crowd last Tuesday posed an intimidating space for new people to come into, let alone voice their thoughts and ideas. A few people tried. The “young woman in the back” made some important and provocative statements that have been referred to several times in the past week.
But it’s not just that her specific suggestion to change the time of the action was voted down, or that the real content of her comments was largely ignored. There were subtle ways in which new voices – hers and those who tried to expand on her comments – were drowned out. Collective murmurs of “that’s not how we do things” and the like pervaded the discussion.
At the end of the evening, a few of us chatted about these issues. But we stood in our own little clump of frustrated young people, separate from the clump of established ACT UP members and leaders.
I went to the ACT UP meeting on Thursday night to voice some of those concerns, because I felt that someone had to cross the divide. If we couldn’t get some communication going, how could there be any hope for change?
I told them exactly what I just told you. I told them that their organization, their space, is largely perceived as unwelcoming to young people. I told them that I believe strongly if the organization is to survive beyond its founders, young people MUST be incorporated – not just included but sought after. I told them that when I saw an email asking “Where’s the next generation of activists???!!!” I wanted to say “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you – we’re here, trying to be heard.”
I also told them I believed what Larry said was true: that AIDS, though still an important issue, does not excite the same quantity of energy and anger among our generation that it did in theirs – not having lived through the horror of seeing all our friends die, not being threatened with our very survival, we’re simply not mobilized around the same fight. I told Larry I appreciated his willingness to say it.
He was there that night – I don’t know how often he actually attends ACT UP meetings – and he was eager to continue the discussion he tried to start on Tuesday. Most of the people there were focused on planning work for the action on March 29th, but he insisted the conversation be had. And after I said my piece, as the discussion went on, several existing members admitted that they’d been thinking about the things Larry had brought to light for a long time.
Larry mentioned that when he speaks to students, he often encounters young people who want to enact change but “don’t know what to do.” I stressed the need for active teaching, mentoring, and cross-generational dialogue; the importance of saying “we’ve done this, and here’s what we’ve learned” instead of “that’s not how we do things.” I believe the real value of ACT UP is not in the brand but in the experience of its members. How fortunate are we to be part of a movement that has moved so quickly that many of its founders are still around? We’re not capitalizing on the opportunity to transfer knowledge across generations, and we need to be. And the “old guard” is still very much invested and ready to fight – but they could use our help adapting to the world we’ve created (“Some of us old farts don’t know HOW to use a listserv,” Eric pointed out).
Whether this new “queer justice league” should be an outgrowth of ACT UP, or a reinvention of it, or whether it should even be called “queer justice league” is all up in the air. We started to discuss it on Thursday and decided it was premature. This new group needs to come together, start talking, figure out what we want – which may be many different things – and ultimately define ourselves rather than be defined by the existing group.
A decision was made at Thursday’s meeting to form a committee to reach out to younger folks and explore all these possibilities, and I agreed to help lead that effort. 14 people signed up to work on that committee, many of them older ACT UP members. “There’s so much to learn from them!” one person said.
The point being that they really are interested in hearing from us, and they are looking for help in reaching out to and engaging young people. And more to the point, there is an opportunity right now, in the wake of Larry’s speech, for young people to come together and shift the course of this organization, maybe even this movement.
So I invite you to speak up, to start a discussion, to say what’s on your mind about politics, activism, or what makes you angry. Post a thought, a question, an opinion. And please invite others to join the conversation – let’s make it as far-reaching as possible. We need to talk and explore ideas as we start to figure out, collectively, what this new “army” will be. I’m calling for the next generation of activists to come together, start talking, and make this possibility, this vision, a reality. I know now that we ARE here, we WILL be heard, and the future is ours to create.
Please discuss…
Alex Kent
March 20, 2007
Visit https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/queerjusticeleague to subscribe to the listserv and join the conversation
Like most of you, I attended Larry Kramer’s speech last Tuesday and was inspired by some of the things he said. What I heard was a call for ACT UP to reinvent itself, to incorporate new ideas, take advantage of new technologies, and think about going after new issues in order to tap into the energy and passion of a new generation of activists.
That’s what I heard. What I saw in the planning session that immediately followed was a bunch of existing ACT UP members trying to relive their past.
Largely white, male, and older – as ACT UP is often perceived to be – the crowd last Tuesday posed an intimidating space for new people to come into, let alone voice their thoughts and ideas. A few people tried. The “young woman in the back” made some important and provocative statements that have been referred to several times in the past week.
But it’s not just that her specific suggestion to change the time of the action was voted down, or that the real content of her comments was largely ignored. There were subtle ways in which new voices – hers and those who tried to expand on her comments – were drowned out. Collective murmurs of “that’s not how we do things” and the like pervaded the discussion.
At the end of the evening, a few of us chatted about these issues. But we stood in our own little clump of frustrated young people, separate from the clump of established ACT UP members and leaders.
I went to the ACT UP meeting on Thursday night to voice some of those concerns, because I felt that someone had to cross the divide. If we couldn’t get some communication going, how could there be any hope for change?
I told them exactly what I just told you. I told them that their organization, their space, is largely perceived as unwelcoming to young people. I told them that I believe strongly if the organization is to survive beyond its founders, young people MUST be incorporated – not just included but sought after. I told them that when I saw an email asking “Where’s the next generation of activists???!!!” I wanted to say “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you – we’re here, trying to be heard.”
I also told them I believed what Larry said was true: that AIDS, though still an important issue, does not excite the same quantity of energy and anger among our generation that it did in theirs – not having lived through the horror of seeing all our friends die, not being threatened with our very survival, we’re simply not mobilized around the same fight. I told Larry I appreciated his willingness to say it.
He was there that night – I don’t know how often he actually attends ACT UP meetings – and he was eager to continue the discussion he tried to start on Tuesday. Most of the people there were focused on planning work for the action on March 29th, but he insisted the conversation be had. And after I said my piece, as the discussion went on, several existing members admitted that they’d been thinking about the things Larry had brought to light for a long time.
Larry mentioned that when he speaks to students, he often encounters young people who want to enact change but “don’t know what to do.” I stressed the need for active teaching, mentoring, and cross-generational dialogue; the importance of saying “we’ve done this, and here’s what we’ve learned” instead of “that’s not how we do things.” I believe the real value of ACT UP is not in the brand but in the experience of its members. How fortunate are we to be part of a movement that has moved so quickly that many of its founders are still around? We’re not capitalizing on the opportunity to transfer knowledge across generations, and we need to be. And the “old guard” is still very much invested and ready to fight – but they could use our help adapting to the world we’ve created (“Some of us old farts don’t know HOW to use a listserv,” Eric pointed out).
Whether this new “queer justice league” should be an outgrowth of ACT UP, or a reinvention of it, or whether it should even be called “queer justice league” is all up in the air. We started to discuss it on Thursday and decided it was premature. This new group needs to come together, start talking, figure out what we want – which may be many different things – and ultimately define ourselves rather than be defined by the existing group.
A decision was made at Thursday’s meeting to form a committee to reach out to younger folks and explore all these possibilities, and I agreed to help lead that effort. 14 people signed up to work on that committee, many of them older ACT UP members. “There’s so much to learn from them!” one person said.
The point being that they really are interested in hearing from us, and they are looking for help in reaching out to and engaging young people. And more to the point, there is an opportunity right now, in the wake of Larry’s speech, for young people to come together and shift the course of this organization, maybe even this movement.
So I invite you to speak up, to start a discussion, to say what’s on your mind about politics, activism, or what makes you angry. Post a thought, a question, an opinion. And please invite others to join the conversation – let’s make it as far-reaching as possible. We need to talk and explore ideas as we start to figure out, collectively, what this new “army” will be. I’m calling for the next generation of activists to come together, start talking, and make this possibility, this vision, a reality. I know now that we ARE here, we WILL be heard, and the future is ours to create.
Please discuss…
Alex Kent
March 20, 2007
Visit https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/queerjusticeleague to subscribe to the listserv and join the conversation
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Photos from today's protest at Times Square
Photo credit: Leah McElrath Renna, Renna Communications.
Next Meeting?
First, congratulations to everyone on a very successful, fabulous action (especially considering that it was planned in one day, I was impressed that we got so many big names there).
When is the first official meeting of the Queer Justice League?
Also, are we the Queer Justice League or the ACT UP Army? I like the freshness and inclusiveness of QJL, but I have seen some AUA messaging as well. As a peace activist/Quaker I personally prefer not to join an army, but mine is just one voice. Curious what other opinions are.
At any rate, I hope we can do some outreach for the next meeting, especially to youth groups (YES, FIERCE, college queer unions, etc.). Let's keep this ball rolling...
When is the first official meeting of the Queer Justice League?
Also, are we the Queer Justice League or the ACT UP Army? I like the freshness and inclusiveness of QJL, but I have seen some AUA messaging as well. As a peace activist/Quaker I personally prefer not to join an army, but mine is just one voice. Curious what other opinions are.
At any rate, I hope we can do some outreach for the next meeting, especially to youth groups (YES, FIERCE, college queer unions, etc.). Let's keep this ball rolling...
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Check out video of Larry K's now-infamous March 13 speech in NYC:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=519035777714255525
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=519035777714255525
recruiting station protest
I just got a call from our old colleague Laurie Arbeiter, who's managing an ongoing protest in front of the Times Square recruiting station. They're sitting there reading the names of war dead every half hour. The police came to her this morning to let her know we'd be coming tomorrow. Laurie and her fellow protestors welcome our action but just want us to be aware that they're there. Perhaps at 12:30, we can be silent while they read some names. Should be very dramatic.
Don't Bomb, Don't Tell, etc...
Is there a handy list of slogans for tomorrow? For some reason I'm not getting all those replies anymore from the listserv.
mark
mark
ACT UP FOUNDER LARRY KRAMER ISSUES COMMUNITY CALL TO ARMS DURING 20TH ANNIVERSARY SPEECH
ACT UP FOUNDER LARRY KRAMER ISSUES COMMUNITY CALL TO ARMS DURING 20TH ANNIVERSARY SPEECH
Kramer calls for Direct Action Group to Fight for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Equality
In an address marking the 20th Anniversary of his historic speech that launched ACT UP 20 years ago, ACT UP Founder Larry Kramer issued a call to arms to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community to unite in direct action to fight for equality. In a speech filled with examples illustrating how LGBT communities continue to be one of the most hated sub-groups in society, Kramer directed audience attention to the homophobic remarks of General Peter Pace, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune on Monday, Pace was quoted as saying, "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way."
Kramer called for a militant reaction to Pace's outrageous comment. Immediately following the speech, plans for a demonstration at the military recruiting station on 43rd Street in Times Square began to form.
Who: Members of ACT UP and the newly formed Queer Justice League.
Where: 43rd Street and Broadway, Manhattan.
When: Thursday March 15th, at Noon (12pm).
What: The group will demand General Peter Pace's immediate resignation.
Why: We cannot tolerate top U.S. military officials making public statements of such a homophobic nature; such statements endanger all LGBT citizens currently serving in the military. We will not tolerate people in power whose personal hatred and bigotry make discrimination and prejudice against LGBT people acceptable.
For more information:
Cathy Renna, Renna Communications, 917.757.6123
Eric Sawyer of ACT UP at 917.951.5758
Syd Peterson, Renna Communications, 917.621.6411, syd@rennacommunications.com.
Kramer calls for Direct Action Group to Fight for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Equality
In an address marking the 20th Anniversary of his historic speech that launched ACT UP 20 years ago, ACT UP Founder Larry Kramer issued a call to arms to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community to unite in direct action to fight for equality. In a speech filled with examples illustrating how LGBT communities continue to be one of the most hated sub-groups in society, Kramer directed audience attention to the homophobic remarks of General Peter Pace, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune on Monday, Pace was quoted as saying, "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way."
Kramer called for a militant reaction to Pace's outrageous comment. Immediately following the speech, plans for a demonstration at the military recruiting station on 43rd Street in Times Square began to form.
Who: Members of ACT UP and the newly formed Queer Justice League.
Where: 43rd Street and Broadway, Manhattan.
When: Thursday March 15th, at Noon (12pm).
What: The group will demand General Peter Pace's immediate resignation.
Why: We cannot tolerate top U.S. military officials making public statements of such a homophobic nature; such statements endanger all LGBT citizens currently serving in the military. We will not tolerate people in power whose personal hatred and bigotry make discrimination and prejudice against LGBT people acceptable.
For more information:
Cathy Renna, Renna Communications, 917.757.6123
Eric Sawyer of ACT UP at 917.951.5758
Syd Peterson, Renna Communications, 917.621.6411, syd@rennacommunications.com.
MP3 of Larry Kramer's March 13 speech re: 20th anniversary of ACT UP
Audio for Larry's speech was recorded by John Riley of ACT UP and Out FM and is posted at :
http://www.outfm.org.
Specifications from John: You can download it by right clicking and
saving or listen to it stream with a left click. It misses one
sentence when I was changing tapes. It's about 60 minutes long and
takes up 25 Megabytes of space.
http://www.outfm.org.
Specifications from John: You can download it by right clicking and
saving or listen to it stream with a left click. It misses one
sentence when I was changing tapes. It's about 60 minutes long and
takes up 25 Megabytes of space.
Full text of Larry Kramer's March 13 speech
WE ARE NOT CRUMBS; WE MUST NOT ACCEPT CRUMBS
Remarks on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of ACT UP,
NY Lesbian and Gay Community Center,
March 13, 9007
By Larry Kramer
Rodger McFarlane, Eric Sawyer, Jim Eigo, Peter Staley, Troy Masters, Mark Harrington, David Webster, Jeremy Waldron, and Hannah Arendt contributed to the following remarks.
One day AIDS came along. It happened fast. Almost every man I was friendly with died. Eric still talks about his first boyfriend, 180 pounds, 28 years old, former college athlete, who became a 119 pound bag of bones covered in purple splotches in months. Many of us will always have memories like this that we can never escape.
Out of this came ACT UP. We grew to have chapters and affinity groups and spin-offs and affiliations all over the world. Hundreds of men and women once met weekly in New York City alone. Every single treatment against HIV is out there because of activists who forced these drugs out of the system, out of the labs, out of the pharmaceutical companies, out of the government, into the world. It is an achievement unlike any other in the history of the world. All gay men and women must let ourselves feel colossally proud of such an achievement. Hundreds of millions of people will be healthier because of us. Would that they could be grateful to us for saving their lives.
So many people have forgotten, or never knew what it was like. We must never let anyone forget that no one, and I mean no one, wanted to help dying faggots. Sen. Edward Kennedy described it in 2006 as “the appalling indifference to the suffering of so many.” Ronald Reagan had made it very clear that he was “irrevocably opposed” to anything to do with homosexuality. It would be seven years into his reign before he even said the word “AIDS” out loud, by which time almost every gay man in the entire world who’d had sex with another man had been exposed to the virus. During this entire time his government issued not one single health warning, not one single word of caution. Who cares if a faggot dies. I believe that Ronald Reagan is responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.
These are just a few of the things ACT UP did to make the world pay attention: We invaded the offices of drug companies and scientific laboratories and chained ourselves to the desks of those in charge. We chained ourselves to the trucks trying to deliver a drug company’s products. We liberally poured buckets of fake blood in public places. We closed the tunnels and bridges of New York and San Francisco. Our Catholic kids stormed St. Patrick’s at Sunday Mass and spit out Cardinal O’Connor’s host. We tossed the ashes from dead bodies from their urns on to the White House lawn. We draped a gigantic condom over Jesse Helms’ house. We infiltrated the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the first time in its history so we could confetti the place with flyers urging the brokers to “SELL WELLCOME.” We boarded ourselves up inside Burroughs-Wellcome, (now named GlaxoSmithKline), which owns AZT, in Research Triangle so they had to blast us out. We had regular demonstrations, Die-Ins we called them, at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, at City Halls, at the White House, in the halls of Congress, at government buildings everywhere, starting with our first demonstration on Wall Street, where crowds of us lay flat on the ground with our arms crossed over our chests or holding cardboard tombstones until the cops had to cart us away by the vans-full. We had massive demonstrations at the FDA and the NIH. There was no important meeting anywhere that we did not invade, interrupt, and infiltrate. We threatened Bristol-Myers that if they did not distribute it immediately we would manufacture it ourselves and distribute a promising drug some San Francisco activists had stolen from its Canadian factory and had duplicated. (The drug, now known as Videx, was released. Ironically Videx was discovered at Yale, where I went to school and with whom I am still engaged in annoyingly delicious activist battles to shape them up; they too are a stubborn lot.) We utterly destroyed a Hoffmann-LaRoche luncheon when they delayed a decent drug’s release. And always, we went after the New York Times for their shockingly, tragically, inept reporting of this plague. We plastered this city with tens of thousands of stickers reading, “Gina Kolata of the New York Times is the worst AIDS reporter in America.” We picketed the Fifth Avenue home of the publisher of the Times, one Arthur Sulzberger. We picketed everywhere. You name a gross impediment and we picketed there, from our historic 24-hour round the clock for seven days and nights picket of Sloan Kettering to another hateful murderer, our closeted mayor, Edward I. Koch. 3000 of us picketed that monster at City Hall. And, always we protested against our ignoble presidents: Reagan. We actually booed him at a huge AmFAR benefit in Washington. He was not amused. And Bush. 2500 of us actually tracked him down at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, which did not know what had hit it. And Clinton. I cannot tell you what a disappointment he was for us. He was such a bullshitter, as I fear his wife to be. And Bush again. The newest and most evil emperor in the fullest most repellant plumage. We can no longer summon those kinds of numbers to go after him.
A lot of us got arrested a lot of times. A lot of us. A lot of us. We kept our lawyer members busy. It actually was a wonderful feeling being locked up behind bars in cells with the brothers and sisters you have fought with side by side for what you fervently believe is right.
Slowly we were noticed and even more slowly we were listened to.
Along this journey some of our members taught themselves so much about our illness and the science of it and the politics of it and the bureaucracy of it that we soon knew more than anyone else did. We got ourselves into meetings with drug company scientists who could not believe our people weren’t doctors. I took a group to a meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom I had called our chief murderer in publications across the land. Dr. Fauci was and still is the government’s chief AIDS person, the Director of Infectious Diseases at NIH. We were able to show him how inferior all his plans and ideas under consideration were compared to the ones that we had figured out in minute detail. We told him what they should be doing and were not doing. We showed him how he and all his staff of doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians did not understand this patient population and that we did. By then we had located our own doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians to talk to, some of them even joining us. When our ideas were tried, they worked. We were consistently right. Our “chief murderer” Dr. Fauci became our hero when he opened the doors at NIH and let us in, an historic moment and an historic gesture. Soon we were on the very committees we had picketed, and soon we were making the most important decisions for treating our own bodies. We redesigned the whole system of clinical trials that is in use to this day for every major illness. And of course, we got those drugs out. And the FDA approval for a new drug that once took an average of 7-12 years can now be had in less than one. ACT UP did all this. My children—you must forgive me for coming to think of them as that—most of whom are dead. You must have some idea what it is like when your children die. Most of them did not live to enjoy the benefits of their courage. They were courageous because they knew they might die. They could and were willing to fight because they felt they soon would die and there was nothing to lose, and maybe everything to gain.
And of course funeral after funeral after funeral. We made funerals into an art form, too, just as our demonstrations, our street theater, our graphics, many of which are now in museums and art galleries, were all art forms as well. God, we were so creative as we were dying.
It is important to celebrate. But it is hard to do so when so many of us aren’t here. At least that is the way for me. I know we are twenty years old. It seems impossible to me that it has been so many years. I remember much of it as if it were yesterday. It is difficult to celebrate when one has such potent, painful tragic memories. We held so many of each other in our arms. One never forgets love like that. Make no mistake, AIDS was and is a terrible tragedy that need not have escalated into a worldwide plague. There were 41 cases when I started. There are some 75 million now. It takes a lot of help from a lot of enemies to rack up a tally like that.
Rodger McFarlane made this list of ACT UP’s achievements: accelerated approval of investigational new drugs; expanded compassionate use of experimental drugs and new applications of existing drugs; mathematical alternatives to the deadly double-blind-placebo-controlled studies of old; rigorous statistical methods for community-based research models; accelerated and expanded research in basic immunology, virology, and pharmacology; public exposure of and procedural remedies to sweetheart practices between the NIH and FDA on one hand and pharmaceutical companies on the other (now, with our own decline, unfortunately out of control again); institutionalized consumer oversight and political scrutiny of FDA approvals for all drug classes and for vast NIH appropriations for research in every disease; state drug assistance programs; and vastly expanded consumer oversight of insurance and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement formularies. Each of these reforms profoundly benefits the health and survival of hundreds of millions of people far, far beyond AIDS and will do so for generations to come.
To this I might add that out of ACT UP came Needle Exchange and Housing Works and AID for AIDS and The AIDS Treatment Data Network and the Global AIDS Action Committee and HealthGAP and TAG, too, the Treatment Action Group.
Perhaps you did not know we did all this. As we know, historians do not include gay anything in their histories. Gays are never included in the history of anything.
Dr. Fauci now tells the world that modern medicine can be divided into two periods. Before us and after us. “ACT UP put medicine back in the hands of the patients, which is where it belongs,” he said to the New Yorker.
How could a population of gay people, call us the survivors, or the descendents, of those who did all this, be so relatively useless now? Maybe useless is too harsh. Ineffectual. Invisible. No, useless is not too harsh. Oh let us just call ourselves underutilized. As long as I live I will never figure this out.
Then, we only had the present. We were freed of the responsibility of thinking of the future. So we were able to act up. Now we only have our future. Imagine thinking that way. Those who had no future now only have a future. That includes not only everyone in this room but gay people everywhere. We are back to worrying about what “they” think about us. It seems we are not so free, most of us, to act up now. Our fear had been turned into energy. We were able to cry out fuck you fuck you fuck you. Troy Masters, the publisher of LGNY, wrote to me: ACT UP recognized evil and confronted it loudly.
Yes, we confronted evil. For a while.
We don’t say fuck you, fuck you, fuck you anymore. At least so anyone can hear.
Well the evil things that made me angry then still make me angry now. I keep asking around, doesn’t anything make you angry, too? Doesn’t anything make anyone angry? Or are we back in 1981, surrounded and suffocated by people as uninterested in saving their lives as so many of us were in 1981. I made a speech and wrote a little book called The Tragedy of Today’s Gays about all this. That was about two years ago. Lots of applause. Lots of thanks. No action.
There was a Danish study a few weeks ago. The life expectancy after infection by HIV is now thirty-five years. Thirty five years. Can you imagine that? That is because of ACT UP. A bunch of kids who learned how to launch street actions and release a propaganda machine and manipulate media masterfully, and use naked coercion, occasional litigations, and adept behind-the-scenes maneuverings that led to sweeping institutional changes with vast ramifications. We drove the creation of hundreds of AIDS service organizations across the country, leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars a year and fielding tens of thousands of volunteers, all the while amassing a huge body of clinical expertise and moral authority unprecedented among any group of patients and advocates in medical history.
We did all this. And we got all those drugs. The NIH didn’t get all those drugs. The FDA didn’t get all those drugs. We got all those drugs. And we rammed them down their fucking throats until they approved them and released them.
It was very useful, old ACT UP.
It is no longer useful. The old ACT UP is no longer useful enough. There are not enough of us. Few people go to meetings. Our chapters have evaporated. Our voice has dimmed in its volume and its luster. Our protests are no longer heard.
We must be heard! We must be.
We are not crumbs! We should not accept crumbs! We must not accept crumbs! There is not one single candidate running for public office anywhere that deserves our support. Not one. Every day they vote against us in increasingly brutal fashion. I will not vote for a one of them and neither should you. To vote for any one of them, to lend any one of them your support, is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us. And we must let every single one of them know that we will not support them. Perhaps it will win them more votes, that faggots won’t support them, but at least we will have our self-respect. And, I predict, the respect of many others who have long wondered why we allow ourselves to be treated so brutally year after year after year, as they take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood. There is not one single one of them, candidate or major public figure, that, given half a chance, would not sell us down the river. We have seen this time after time, from Bill Clinton with his Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and his full support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act (talk about selling us down the river), to Hillary with her unacceptable waffling on all our positions. The woman does not know how to make simple declarative statements that involve definite details. (Read David Mixner on Hillary and Bill. It’s scary. Go to his site: DMixner@AOL.com). To Ann Coulter calling people faggots and queers and getting away with it. As Andrew Sullivan responded to her: “The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry!” To this very morning’s statement to the world by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, that he believes the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops fighting right this very minute for our country are immoral. That our country’s top soldier can say something like this out loud and get away with it is disgusting.
If I am going after Hillary and Bill Clinton it is because I think she just might win, or should I say they might win. Two for the price of one will prove irresistible. Thus it is important to go after the Clintons now, while it still might be possible to negotiate their acceptance and support of our concerns, nay our demands, instead of climbing on their bandwagon that is akin to a juggernaut smashing all in their way as David Mixner describes. Too many gay and lesbians and our organizations are giving her fundraisers and kissing her ass too unreservedly and way way too early. As for Bill, yes, he is at last doing great work for AIDS in Africa but it sure would be nice if we had his generics in America for all those who fall through the cracks of the Ryan White Drug Assistance Program. Have you noticed how fashionable it is for foundations and the two Bills, Gates and Clinton, to do AIDS good deeds in Africa and obviously much too unfashionable to do them in America? I don’t like this woman, but I could, if she wasn’t cockteasing us just like her husband did.
We are not crumbs! We must not accept crumbs!
The CDC says some 300,000 men who had sex with men have died during the past 20 years. If I knew at last 500 of them, I know this CDC figure is a lie. Just as I know the CDC figure of gay people as only several percentage points of the population is a lie, instead of the at least some 20% of the population that the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School calculates it is possible to maintain. Who says that intentional genocide of “us” by “them” isn’t going on? They don’t want us here. When are we going to face up to this?
We are discriminated against at every turn. As we prepare to die the older among us will be taxed beyond belief. That prevents us leaving our estates to our lovers or to gay charities. God forbid the latter should happen, that gays with any money should endow gay organizations with all their gay riches. Do you think I am being too elitist in this concern? Well, you are using this gay and lesbian community center now. How do you think it supports itself? Taxation without representation is what led to our Revolutionary War. Well, way over two hundred years later gay people still have no equality. Gays are equal to nothing good or acceptable in this country. It is criminal how they treat us. We get further and further from progress and equality with each passing year. George Bush will leave a legacy of hate that will take who knows how many eons to cleanse away. He has packed every court in the land with a conservative judge who serves for life. He has staffed every single government job from high to low with a conservative inhabitant who, under the laws of Civil Service, cannot be removed. So even with the most tolerant of new Presidents we will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate for as long as most of us will live. Congresspersons now call judges to pressure them, which is illegal, and if the President doesn’t like a judge’s record, he fires them, which is also illegal. The Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality in any foreseeable future, and it is from the Supreme Court that it must come. They are the law of this land that will not make us equal. If that is not hate, if what I am talking about does not represent hate, I do not know what hate is. We are crumbs to them, if even that.
This is not just about gay marriage. Political candidates only talk about gay marriage, making nicey-nice maybes. But they are not talking about gay equality. And we are not demanding that they talk about the kind of equality I am talking about, marriage or no marriage. Gay marriage is a useful red herring for them to pretend they are talking about gays when they are not. For some reason our movement has confined its feeble demands to marriage. Well, my lover and I don’t want to get married just yet but we sure want to be equal.
I wish I could make all gay people everywhere accept this one fact I know to be an undisputed truth. We are hated. Haven’t enough of us died for all of us to believe this? Some seventy million cases of HIV were all brewed in a cauldron of hate.
Mark Harrington said to me last week that one of the great things about ACT UP was that it made us proud to be gay. Our activism came out of love. Our activism came out of our love for each other as we tried to take care of each other, and to keep each other alive.
No one is looking out for us anymore the way ACT UP looked out for us once upon a time.
ACT UP is not saving us now. This is not meant as finger-pointing or blame. It just is. No one goes to meetings and our chapters all over the globe have almost disappeared. And we must recognize this, I beg of you.
I don’t want to start another organization. And yet I know we must start another organization. Or at the very least administer major shock therapy to this one.
And I know that if we do go down a new road, we must do it right and just accept this fact that the old ACT UP we knew is no longer useful enough to the needs that we have now and move on to reparative therapy.
I also know that any organization that we start now must be an army. You have resisted this word in the past. Perhaps now that the man in charge of America’s army is calling you immoral you won’t resist it army anymore. We must field an organized army with elected leaders and a chain of command. It must be a gay army with gay leaders fighting for gay people under a gay flag, in gay battle formations against our common enemies, uncontaminated by any fear of offending or by any sense that this might not be the time to say what we really need to say. We must cease our never-ending docile cooperation with a status quo that never changes in its relationship to us. We are cutting our own throats raising money for Hillary or Obama or Kerry or, God forbid, Giuliani, or anyone until they come out in full support of all the things I am talking about, not just some tepid maybe-maybes about second-class partnership pieces of worthless paper. Immigration. Taxation without representation. Safety. Why aren’t they all supporting Hate Crimes bills that include us? Twenty-thousand Christian youths now make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls. I am sorry but this is not free speech. This is another version of hate. If any organization sent 20,000 Christian youths to pray for Jewish souls they would lose their tax-exempt status, or they would have before George Bush. Do we protest? It is very wearying to witness our carrying on so passively year after year, particularly now that all of us—and I mean all of us—have been given the gift of staying alive. I know that young gays don’t think this way, but many of us died to give you this gift of staying alive. You are alive because of us. I wish you would see this. And we all owe it to the dead as well as to ourselves to continue a fight that we have stopped fighting.
We do not seem to realize that the more we become visible, the more that more and more of us come out of the closet, the more vulnerable we become to the more and more increasingly visible hate against us. In other words, the more they see us, the more they hate us. The more new gays they see, the more new ways they find to hate us. We do not seem to realize that the more we urge each other to come out—which indeed we must never stop doing—the more we must protect ourselves for and from our exits from our closet on to the stage of the world that hates us more and more. I don’t think we realize this and we must. We must.
Why do I think we need the word “army”? Because it connotes strength and discipline, which we desperately need to convey. Because it scares people, and God knows nobody is all that scared of us. Which they were for a while. The drug companies were afraid of us. The NIH and FDA were afraid of us. Closeted everybodies were afraid of us. No more. Our days of being democratic to a flaw at those endless meetings must cease. It has been a painful lesson to learn but democracy does not protect us. Unity does. United commitment to confront our many foes.
We never consider the establishment of a gay army, just as in the approach of the Holocaust the Jews did not consider one, even though urged, no begged, no implored to do so by their great philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who had the tragic misfortune to see what was coming and to not have her warnings heeded or even believed. Why only last week Mr. Obama implored his people, albeit with a certain timidity: “Put on your marching shoes! Go do some politics! Change this country!” If all the blacks in this country did all that, he would not only win but they would have the power they never have.
What we refuse to see is what is going on around us, believing it is happening to others but not believing that it can happen to us: the use and defense of torture, concentrations of prisoners regarded as threats to America in camps where they languish indefinitely beyond the reach of law; hidden “duplicate” governments existing under the auspices of the homeland security state, shadowing the constitutional government but secret and free of legal constraint.” (Waldron). You don’t think any of this can happen to you. I do. You don’t think that any of those “political” prisoners shipped off to camps are gay? You’re wrong. Much of the Episcopalian church is now aligning itself with Nigeria. Homosexuality is a punishable crime in Nigeria, in Ghana, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in a hundred different countires, as is any activism on behalf of it. Punishable means prison. Punishable means death. The Nigerian head archbishop of the Episcopalian church believes we should be put in prison. Episcopalians! Whoever thought we’d have to worry about Episcopalians. Well, whoever thought we’d have to worry about Wyoming. Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming.
When will we acknowledge that we are constantly being lied to? We must have fiercely observant eyes. We must understand and confront the unprecedented, with “attentive facing up to, and resistance of, reality—whatever that might be.”(Arendt) Intelligent people—and gays are certainly that—have proved more than once that we are less capable of judging for ourselves than almost any other social group. When a conservative columnist can get away with calling presidential candidates “a faggot” and “a queer,” without any serious reprisals, than why can’t we see that we are in trouble? When the New York Times does not run an obituary on quite possibly the most famous lesbian in modern times, Barbara Gittings, than we are in trouble. When I can’t get US News and World Report to publish a letter about an insidiously homophobic cover story they wrote on Jamestown, we’re in trouble. When our country’s top military officer can call us immoral, we’re in trouble.
No, ACT UP is not saving us now. No one is saving us now.
We all think we have straight friends. We think if we have straight friends then everything is OK. But these friends are not protesting with us. They aren’t fighting with us. They enjoy the freedoms they have with their marriages and all their fringe benefits. Yes, they like us but are they going to sacrifice any of their freedoms to get us ours? Of course not. And what’s more we should not expect them to. Even though it sure would be nice; we’ve fought for them and theirs often enough.
The old ACT UP model served us well but it is time to take the next step. I am not saying that there are not more fights to be had for AIDS. There are and we must continue to fight them. Infections are up again. Prevention efforts are not good enough. It is still illegal for HIV foreigners to enter America. But these issues no longer appear to excite sufficient participation. Few people come to meetings and our chapters have disappeared. Many of us have tried to figure out what happened to us and why we ceased to be what we were. We all have thoughts about what happened but as I said I think its time to stop trying to figure it out and just move on. Expanding our demands will hopefully not silence our past concerns but invite increased numbers to meld these newer concerns I am talking about into a stronger, total mix.
ACT UP requires a new model to do this. A new model that will allow for different kinds of actions, tactics and issues, not just HIV. I am not asking you if you even want another organization. I am hoping that you are smart enough to realize—eureka!—that the great deeds we once accomplished which changed history can be accomplished again. For we are still facing the same danger, our extermination, and from the same enemy, our own country, our own country’s “democratic process.” Day after day our country declares that we are not equal to anything at all. All the lives we saved are nothing but crumbs if we still aren’t free. And we still aren’t free. Gay people still aren’t free.
Go to Queens, go to Jamaica, go to Iran, go to Wyoming, we still aren’t free. How many places in this country, in this world, can we walk down a street holding a beloved’s hand? I went to my nephew’s wedding in Jamaica twenty years ago. They are out for blood against gay men in Jamaica now. They do it to you the minute you get off the plane. There are men with iron crowbars waiting to maim you at the airport. Does our government protest? Of course not. Who cares if a faggot dies. They are actually beheading gays in Iran. This is progress? The European Parliament which in the past had played a key role in advancing gay rights worldwide, is about to be taken over by conservative delegates that will strengthen their neo-fascist bloc, which will actually call for capital punishment for homosexuals. You don’t think that any of this can’t happen here? I do. Our country’s top soldier said so this morning. We are immoral. The Mayor of Moscow calls us dirt. Polish leaders call us scum. Ann Coulter calls us sissies. General Pace calls us immoral. Who cares if a faggot dies. A gay person murdered in Iraq or Libya or Nigeria or Jamaica or Ghana or Saudi Arabia is the same as a gay person murdered here. Why do I harp so on gay murders in foreign countries. Because gay murders in Iran have a way of becoming gay hate in Paris and London and Chicago and in the highest rank of US Army. Particularly when our own government ignores all attacks against us anywhere. Who cares of a faggot dies. It is all one world now. The disposal of gay people is an equal opportunity employer and hate is a disease that spreads real fast. I repeat: a gay kid murdered anywhere is a gay kid murdered here.
Yes, we have many things to worry about now besides HIV.
You can get married now in New Jersey but New York judges handed down some of the most bigoted “legal” hate outside of Iran, where as I have just said they are now actually decapitating gay men. They are stringing up gay boys and putting masks over their heads and hanging them as Saddam Hussein was hanged. For being gay. Does our government protest? Does any government protest? Of course not. Who cares if a faggot dies. Do you have friends in love with partners forbidden from entering America? To be separated by force from the one you love is one of the saddest things I can think of. What kind of police state do we live in? This is not right. This is wrong. It does not happen for straight lovers. It can only happen to gays who live in a country where we are hated. How many years do we have to endure being treated like this? If countries like Australia and New Zealand recognize relationship residencies for mixed nationalities, why can’t we? There was not one single demonstration against those New York judges, or indeed against any judges who are such dictators of our lives, where they work and live and sleep each night. They cannot be allowed to continue to hate us so legally. America cannot be allowed to continue to hate us so actively. It is not right. It is wrong. Don’t right and wrong mean anything anymore? Why are we not specifically included in Hate Crimes laws in many states? How many Matthew Shepherds must there be before we are specifically included in Hate Crime laws in every state?
We have right on our side and we must make everyone know it. If ACT UP is to stand for anything, let it stand for our Army Corps to Unleash Power.
Think about it. Think about all of this. Please.
We are the only people in America that it is socially acceptable to hate and discriminate against. Indeed so much hate of us exists that it is legally acceptable to pass constitutional amendments to hate us even more. This is democracy? This is how our courts and laws protect us? These are the equal rights for all that America’s Bill of Rights proclaims for all?
The biggest enemy we must fight continues to be our own government. How dare we stop? We cannot stop. We are not crumbs and we must not accept crumbs and we must stop acting like crumbs.
ACT UP is the most successful grass roots organization that ever lived. Period. There never was, never has been one more successful that has achieved as much as we. We did it before. We can do it again. But to be successful, activism must be practiced every day. By a lot of people. It made us proud once. It united us.
I constantly hear in my ears the refrain: “an army of lovers cannot lose.” Then why are we losing so? We must trust each other to an extent we never have, enough to allow the appointment of leaders and a chain of command to stay on top of things and keep some sort of order so that we not only don’t self destruct as we seem to have more or less done, but also, this time, as we did not do before, institutionalize ourselves for longevity.
I am very aware that as I spin this out I am creating reams of unanswered questions. Well, we didn’t know when we first met in this very room twenty years ago what we wanted ACT UP to become. But we figured it out. Bit by bit and piece by piece we put it together. We have a lot to thrash out and codify in a more private fashion. Armies shouldn’t show all their cards to the world. Many parts of the old ACT UP will still serve us: the choices of a variety of issues to obsess us in the detail that we became famous for; the use of affinity groups that develop their own forms of guerilla warfare. Our call for Health Care for All must still be sought. I have a personal bug up my ass that gay history is not taught in the schools. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were gay. It may be up to activists to ram this truth down the throats of America because gay historians are too timid to. Timidity is so boring, don’t you agree?
Much of what I am calling for involves laws, changing them, getting them. We need to cobble together an omnibus gay rights bill and then hold every politician’s feet to this fire until he or she supports it. We’d find out fast enough who are friends aren’t. TAG and AmFAR once cobbled together a bunch of research priorities into a bill that they got through congress.
How about this: Jim Eigo wrote me: “a full generation after AIDS emerged as a recognizable disease, having sex still poses the same risk for HIV infection or reinfection. Having a sexual encounter with another person—a central, meaningful activity in most people’s lives—has been shadowed by fear, by the prospect of a long-term disease and by a whole new reason for guilt for more than a quarter of a century now. How have we allowed this unnatural state of affairs to persist for so long? Where are the 21st century tools for preventing the sexual transmission of HIV: cheap, effective, and utterly unobtrusive. Lovers deserve nothing less. Instead of sinking time, effort, and money into excavating the fossils of its ancient achievement, ACT UP might consider marking its birthday by mounting a fresh drive to remind government and industry that people have a right to sex without fear, without being forced to make a choice between pleasure and health. It’s an issue that might actually speak across the divides of generation, race, gender and sero-status. And it might regain for the organization some measure of the relevance it once had for the grassroots activists that gave of themselves as if their lives depended on it, because they really did.” Jim is calling for nothing less than the reclamation of our sex lives. What an utterly fantastic notion, or shall I now say goal? Why even raising this issue will find us hated even more. I am so ready for another organized fight.
Are you beginning to see how all this that I am talking about can be streamed into one new ACT UP army?
I have asked Eric to convey the main difference of what is available to us now that we did not have to work with in the past:
“In the age of the internet we can do much of what we did in our meetings and on the streets, on the world wide web.
“The information technology available today could help end the need for those endless meetings.
“Creating a blog could, in fact, incorporate even more voices and varieties of opinions and ideas than any meeting ever could.
“Where ACT UP once had chapters in many cities, we could now involve thousands more via simple list-serves and blogs. We can draw in students and schools and colleges all over the world. It is the young we have to get to once again.
“Creating a blog would allow for expression and refinement of ideas and policies, like a Queer Justice League for denouncing our enemies.
“A well organized website could function as an electronic clearing house for sharing information, for posting problems, for demanding solutions, for developing and communicating action plans.
“List-serves and a website could coordinate grassroots organizing and mobilize phone, e-mail and physical zaps or actions. They could also be used to spotlight homophobic actions, articles, movies and tv, and laws.
“Why aren't we fighting fire with fire? Where is our radical gay left think tank? We need our own "700 Club" and our own talk radio show. Developing such gay content programming for the LOGO or Here Networks or for streaming on-line is completely possible today. Why are all the shows our community is producing about fashion, decorating or just another gay soap?”
Why even Time Magazine is now stating as a fact that websites drive the agendas of political parties.
I know that even without these tools we reordered an entire world’s approach to a disease that would have killed us all. Surely with these tools and with all our creativity we can start to take control of our destinies again.
With these tools, and with a renewed commitment to love and support and to fight to save each other, with a renewed commitment to the anger that saved us once before, with the belief that anger, along with love, are the two most healthy and powerful emotions we are good at, I believe that we could have such a historical success again.
May I conclude these thoughts, these remarks toward the definition of a new ACT UP that will hopefully begin to be discussed forthwith, with this cry from my heart:
Farewell ACT UP.
Long live ACT UP.
Thank you.
Remarks on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of ACT UP,
NY Lesbian and Gay Community Center,
March 13, 9007
By Larry Kramer
Rodger McFarlane, Eric Sawyer, Jim Eigo, Peter Staley, Troy Masters, Mark Harrington, David Webster, Jeremy Waldron, and Hannah Arendt contributed to the following remarks.
One day AIDS came along. It happened fast. Almost every man I was friendly with died. Eric still talks about his first boyfriend, 180 pounds, 28 years old, former college athlete, who became a 119 pound bag of bones covered in purple splotches in months. Many of us will always have memories like this that we can never escape.
Out of this came ACT UP. We grew to have chapters and affinity groups and spin-offs and affiliations all over the world. Hundreds of men and women once met weekly in New York City alone. Every single treatment against HIV is out there because of activists who forced these drugs out of the system, out of the labs, out of the pharmaceutical companies, out of the government, into the world. It is an achievement unlike any other in the history of the world. All gay men and women must let ourselves feel colossally proud of such an achievement. Hundreds of millions of people will be healthier because of us. Would that they could be grateful to us for saving their lives.
So many people have forgotten, or never knew what it was like. We must never let anyone forget that no one, and I mean no one, wanted to help dying faggots. Sen. Edward Kennedy described it in 2006 as “the appalling indifference to the suffering of so many.” Ronald Reagan had made it very clear that he was “irrevocably opposed” to anything to do with homosexuality. It would be seven years into his reign before he even said the word “AIDS” out loud, by which time almost every gay man in the entire world who’d had sex with another man had been exposed to the virus. During this entire time his government issued not one single health warning, not one single word of caution. Who cares if a faggot dies. I believe that Ronald Reagan is responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.
These are just a few of the things ACT UP did to make the world pay attention: We invaded the offices of drug companies and scientific laboratories and chained ourselves to the desks of those in charge. We chained ourselves to the trucks trying to deliver a drug company’s products. We liberally poured buckets of fake blood in public places. We closed the tunnels and bridges of New York and San Francisco. Our Catholic kids stormed St. Patrick’s at Sunday Mass and spit out Cardinal O’Connor’s host. We tossed the ashes from dead bodies from their urns on to the White House lawn. We draped a gigantic condom over Jesse Helms’ house. We infiltrated the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the first time in its history so we could confetti the place with flyers urging the brokers to “SELL WELLCOME.” We boarded ourselves up inside Burroughs-Wellcome, (now named GlaxoSmithKline), which owns AZT, in Research Triangle so they had to blast us out. We had regular demonstrations, Die-Ins we called them, at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, at City Halls, at the White House, in the halls of Congress, at government buildings everywhere, starting with our first demonstration on Wall Street, where crowds of us lay flat on the ground with our arms crossed over our chests or holding cardboard tombstones until the cops had to cart us away by the vans-full. We had massive demonstrations at the FDA and the NIH. There was no important meeting anywhere that we did not invade, interrupt, and infiltrate. We threatened Bristol-Myers that if they did not distribute it immediately we would manufacture it ourselves and distribute a promising drug some San Francisco activists had stolen from its Canadian factory and had duplicated. (The drug, now known as Videx, was released. Ironically Videx was discovered at Yale, where I went to school and with whom I am still engaged in annoyingly delicious activist battles to shape them up; they too are a stubborn lot.) We utterly destroyed a Hoffmann-LaRoche luncheon when they delayed a decent drug’s release. And always, we went after the New York Times for their shockingly, tragically, inept reporting of this plague. We plastered this city with tens of thousands of stickers reading, “Gina Kolata of the New York Times is the worst AIDS reporter in America.” We picketed the Fifth Avenue home of the publisher of the Times, one Arthur Sulzberger. We picketed everywhere. You name a gross impediment and we picketed there, from our historic 24-hour round the clock for seven days and nights picket of Sloan Kettering to another hateful murderer, our closeted mayor, Edward I. Koch. 3000 of us picketed that monster at City Hall. And, always we protested against our ignoble presidents: Reagan. We actually booed him at a huge AmFAR benefit in Washington. He was not amused. And Bush. 2500 of us actually tracked him down at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, which did not know what had hit it. And Clinton. I cannot tell you what a disappointment he was for us. He was such a bullshitter, as I fear his wife to be. And Bush again. The newest and most evil emperor in the fullest most repellant plumage. We can no longer summon those kinds of numbers to go after him.
A lot of us got arrested a lot of times. A lot of us. A lot of us. We kept our lawyer members busy. It actually was a wonderful feeling being locked up behind bars in cells with the brothers and sisters you have fought with side by side for what you fervently believe is right.
Slowly we were noticed and even more slowly we were listened to.
Along this journey some of our members taught themselves so much about our illness and the science of it and the politics of it and the bureaucracy of it that we soon knew more than anyone else did. We got ourselves into meetings with drug company scientists who could not believe our people weren’t doctors. I took a group to a meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom I had called our chief murderer in publications across the land. Dr. Fauci was and still is the government’s chief AIDS person, the Director of Infectious Diseases at NIH. We were able to show him how inferior all his plans and ideas under consideration were compared to the ones that we had figured out in minute detail. We told him what they should be doing and were not doing. We showed him how he and all his staff of doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians did not understand this patient population and that we did. By then we had located our own doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians to talk to, some of them even joining us. When our ideas were tried, they worked. We were consistently right. Our “chief murderer” Dr. Fauci became our hero when he opened the doors at NIH and let us in, an historic moment and an historic gesture. Soon we were on the very committees we had picketed, and soon we were making the most important decisions for treating our own bodies. We redesigned the whole system of clinical trials that is in use to this day for every major illness. And of course, we got those drugs out. And the FDA approval for a new drug that once took an average of 7-12 years can now be had in less than one. ACT UP did all this. My children—you must forgive me for coming to think of them as that—most of whom are dead. You must have some idea what it is like when your children die. Most of them did not live to enjoy the benefits of their courage. They were courageous because they knew they might die. They could and were willing to fight because they felt they soon would die and there was nothing to lose, and maybe everything to gain.
And of course funeral after funeral after funeral. We made funerals into an art form, too, just as our demonstrations, our street theater, our graphics, many of which are now in museums and art galleries, were all art forms as well. God, we were so creative as we were dying.
It is important to celebrate. But it is hard to do so when so many of us aren’t here. At least that is the way for me. I know we are twenty years old. It seems impossible to me that it has been so many years. I remember much of it as if it were yesterday. It is difficult to celebrate when one has such potent, painful tragic memories. We held so many of each other in our arms. One never forgets love like that. Make no mistake, AIDS was and is a terrible tragedy that need not have escalated into a worldwide plague. There were 41 cases when I started. There are some 75 million now. It takes a lot of help from a lot of enemies to rack up a tally like that.
Rodger McFarlane made this list of ACT UP’s achievements: accelerated approval of investigational new drugs; expanded compassionate use of experimental drugs and new applications of existing drugs; mathematical alternatives to the deadly double-blind-placebo-controlled studies of old; rigorous statistical methods for community-based research models; accelerated and expanded research in basic immunology, virology, and pharmacology; public exposure of and procedural remedies to sweetheart practices between the NIH and FDA on one hand and pharmaceutical companies on the other (now, with our own decline, unfortunately out of control again); institutionalized consumer oversight and political scrutiny of FDA approvals for all drug classes and for vast NIH appropriations for research in every disease; state drug assistance programs; and vastly expanded consumer oversight of insurance and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement formularies. Each of these reforms profoundly benefits the health and survival of hundreds of millions of people far, far beyond AIDS and will do so for generations to come.
To this I might add that out of ACT UP came Needle Exchange and Housing Works and AID for AIDS and The AIDS Treatment Data Network and the Global AIDS Action Committee and HealthGAP and TAG, too, the Treatment Action Group.
Perhaps you did not know we did all this. As we know, historians do not include gay anything in their histories. Gays are never included in the history of anything.
Dr. Fauci now tells the world that modern medicine can be divided into two periods. Before us and after us. “ACT UP put medicine back in the hands of the patients, which is where it belongs,” he said to the New Yorker.
How could a population of gay people, call us the survivors, or the descendents, of those who did all this, be so relatively useless now? Maybe useless is too harsh. Ineffectual. Invisible. No, useless is not too harsh. Oh let us just call ourselves underutilized. As long as I live I will never figure this out.
Then, we only had the present. We were freed of the responsibility of thinking of the future. So we were able to act up. Now we only have our future. Imagine thinking that way. Those who had no future now only have a future. That includes not only everyone in this room but gay people everywhere. We are back to worrying about what “they” think about us. It seems we are not so free, most of us, to act up now. Our fear had been turned into energy. We were able to cry out fuck you fuck you fuck you. Troy Masters, the publisher of LGNY, wrote to me: ACT UP recognized evil and confronted it loudly.
Yes, we confronted evil. For a while.
We don’t say fuck you, fuck you, fuck you anymore. At least so anyone can hear.
Well the evil things that made me angry then still make me angry now. I keep asking around, doesn’t anything make you angry, too? Doesn’t anything make anyone angry? Or are we back in 1981, surrounded and suffocated by people as uninterested in saving their lives as so many of us were in 1981. I made a speech and wrote a little book called The Tragedy of Today’s Gays about all this. That was about two years ago. Lots of applause. Lots of thanks. No action.
There was a Danish study a few weeks ago. The life expectancy after infection by HIV is now thirty-five years. Thirty five years. Can you imagine that? That is because of ACT UP. A bunch of kids who learned how to launch street actions and release a propaganda machine and manipulate media masterfully, and use naked coercion, occasional litigations, and adept behind-the-scenes maneuverings that led to sweeping institutional changes with vast ramifications. We drove the creation of hundreds of AIDS service organizations across the country, leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars a year and fielding tens of thousands of volunteers, all the while amassing a huge body of clinical expertise and moral authority unprecedented among any group of patients and advocates in medical history.
We did all this. And we got all those drugs. The NIH didn’t get all those drugs. The FDA didn’t get all those drugs. We got all those drugs. And we rammed them down their fucking throats until they approved them and released them.
It was very useful, old ACT UP.
It is no longer useful. The old ACT UP is no longer useful enough. There are not enough of us. Few people go to meetings. Our chapters have evaporated. Our voice has dimmed in its volume and its luster. Our protests are no longer heard.
We must be heard! We must be.
We are not crumbs! We should not accept crumbs! We must not accept crumbs! There is not one single candidate running for public office anywhere that deserves our support. Not one. Every day they vote against us in increasingly brutal fashion. I will not vote for a one of them and neither should you. To vote for any one of them, to lend any one of them your support, is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us. And we must let every single one of them know that we will not support them. Perhaps it will win them more votes, that faggots won’t support them, but at least we will have our self-respect. And, I predict, the respect of many others who have long wondered why we allow ourselves to be treated so brutally year after year after year, as they take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood. There is not one single one of them, candidate or major public figure, that, given half a chance, would not sell us down the river. We have seen this time after time, from Bill Clinton with his Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and his full support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act (talk about selling us down the river), to Hillary with her unacceptable waffling on all our positions. The woman does not know how to make simple declarative statements that involve definite details. (Read David Mixner on Hillary and Bill. It’s scary. Go to his site: DMixner@AOL.com). To Ann Coulter calling people faggots and queers and getting away with it. As Andrew Sullivan responded to her: “The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry!” To this very morning’s statement to the world by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, that he believes the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops fighting right this very minute for our country are immoral. That our country’s top soldier can say something like this out loud and get away with it is disgusting.
If I am going after Hillary and Bill Clinton it is because I think she just might win, or should I say they might win. Two for the price of one will prove irresistible. Thus it is important to go after the Clintons now, while it still might be possible to negotiate their acceptance and support of our concerns, nay our demands, instead of climbing on their bandwagon that is akin to a juggernaut smashing all in their way as David Mixner describes. Too many gay and lesbians and our organizations are giving her fundraisers and kissing her ass too unreservedly and way way too early. As for Bill, yes, he is at last doing great work for AIDS in Africa but it sure would be nice if we had his generics in America for all those who fall through the cracks of the Ryan White Drug Assistance Program. Have you noticed how fashionable it is for foundations and the two Bills, Gates and Clinton, to do AIDS good deeds in Africa and obviously much too unfashionable to do them in America? I don’t like this woman, but I could, if she wasn’t cockteasing us just like her husband did.
We are not crumbs! We must not accept crumbs!
The CDC says some 300,000 men who had sex with men have died during the past 20 years. If I knew at last 500 of them, I know this CDC figure is a lie. Just as I know the CDC figure of gay people as only several percentage points of the population is a lie, instead of the at least some 20% of the population that the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School calculates it is possible to maintain. Who says that intentional genocide of “us” by “them” isn’t going on? They don’t want us here. When are we going to face up to this?
We are discriminated against at every turn. As we prepare to die the older among us will be taxed beyond belief. That prevents us leaving our estates to our lovers or to gay charities. God forbid the latter should happen, that gays with any money should endow gay organizations with all their gay riches. Do you think I am being too elitist in this concern? Well, you are using this gay and lesbian community center now. How do you think it supports itself? Taxation without representation is what led to our Revolutionary War. Well, way over two hundred years later gay people still have no equality. Gays are equal to nothing good or acceptable in this country. It is criminal how they treat us. We get further and further from progress and equality with each passing year. George Bush will leave a legacy of hate that will take who knows how many eons to cleanse away. He has packed every court in the land with a conservative judge who serves for life. He has staffed every single government job from high to low with a conservative inhabitant who, under the laws of Civil Service, cannot be removed. So even with the most tolerant of new Presidents we will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate for as long as most of us will live. Congresspersons now call judges to pressure them, which is illegal, and if the President doesn’t like a judge’s record, he fires them, which is also illegal. The Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality in any foreseeable future, and it is from the Supreme Court that it must come. They are the law of this land that will not make us equal. If that is not hate, if what I am talking about does not represent hate, I do not know what hate is. We are crumbs to them, if even that.
This is not just about gay marriage. Political candidates only talk about gay marriage, making nicey-nice maybes. But they are not talking about gay equality. And we are not demanding that they talk about the kind of equality I am talking about, marriage or no marriage. Gay marriage is a useful red herring for them to pretend they are talking about gays when they are not. For some reason our movement has confined its feeble demands to marriage. Well, my lover and I don’t want to get married just yet but we sure want to be equal.
I wish I could make all gay people everywhere accept this one fact I know to be an undisputed truth. We are hated. Haven’t enough of us died for all of us to believe this? Some seventy million cases of HIV were all brewed in a cauldron of hate.
Mark Harrington said to me last week that one of the great things about ACT UP was that it made us proud to be gay. Our activism came out of love. Our activism came out of our love for each other as we tried to take care of each other, and to keep each other alive.
No one is looking out for us anymore the way ACT UP looked out for us once upon a time.
ACT UP is not saving us now. This is not meant as finger-pointing or blame. It just is. No one goes to meetings and our chapters all over the globe have almost disappeared. And we must recognize this, I beg of you.
I don’t want to start another organization. And yet I know we must start another organization. Or at the very least administer major shock therapy to this one.
And I know that if we do go down a new road, we must do it right and just accept this fact that the old ACT UP we knew is no longer useful enough to the needs that we have now and move on to reparative therapy.
I also know that any organization that we start now must be an army. You have resisted this word in the past. Perhaps now that the man in charge of America’s army is calling you immoral you won’t resist it army anymore. We must field an organized army with elected leaders and a chain of command. It must be a gay army with gay leaders fighting for gay people under a gay flag, in gay battle formations against our common enemies, uncontaminated by any fear of offending or by any sense that this might not be the time to say what we really need to say. We must cease our never-ending docile cooperation with a status quo that never changes in its relationship to us. We are cutting our own throats raising money for Hillary or Obama or Kerry or, God forbid, Giuliani, or anyone until they come out in full support of all the things I am talking about, not just some tepid maybe-maybes about second-class partnership pieces of worthless paper. Immigration. Taxation without representation. Safety. Why aren’t they all supporting Hate Crimes bills that include us? Twenty-thousand Christian youths now make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls. I am sorry but this is not free speech. This is another version of hate. If any organization sent 20,000 Christian youths to pray for Jewish souls they would lose their tax-exempt status, or they would have before George Bush. Do we protest? It is very wearying to witness our carrying on so passively year after year, particularly now that all of us—and I mean all of us—have been given the gift of staying alive. I know that young gays don’t think this way, but many of us died to give you this gift of staying alive. You are alive because of us. I wish you would see this. And we all owe it to the dead as well as to ourselves to continue a fight that we have stopped fighting.
We do not seem to realize that the more we become visible, the more that more and more of us come out of the closet, the more vulnerable we become to the more and more increasingly visible hate against us. In other words, the more they see us, the more they hate us. The more new gays they see, the more new ways they find to hate us. We do not seem to realize that the more we urge each other to come out—which indeed we must never stop doing—the more we must protect ourselves for and from our exits from our closet on to the stage of the world that hates us more and more. I don’t think we realize this and we must. We must.
Why do I think we need the word “army”? Because it connotes strength and discipline, which we desperately need to convey. Because it scares people, and God knows nobody is all that scared of us. Which they were for a while. The drug companies were afraid of us. The NIH and FDA were afraid of us. Closeted everybodies were afraid of us. No more. Our days of being democratic to a flaw at those endless meetings must cease. It has been a painful lesson to learn but democracy does not protect us. Unity does. United commitment to confront our many foes.
We never consider the establishment of a gay army, just as in the approach of the Holocaust the Jews did not consider one, even though urged, no begged, no implored to do so by their great philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who had the tragic misfortune to see what was coming and to not have her warnings heeded or even believed. Why only last week Mr. Obama implored his people, albeit with a certain timidity: “Put on your marching shoes! Go do some politics! Change this country!” If all the blacks in this country did all that, he would not only win but they would have the power they never have.
What we refuse to see is what is going on around us, believing it is happening to others but not believing that it can happen to us: the use and defense of torture, concentrations of prisoners regarded as threats to America in camps where they languish indefinitely beyond the reach of law; hidden “duplicate” governments existing under the auspices of the homeland security state, shadowing the constitutional government but secret and free of legal constraint.” (Waldron). You don’t think any of this can happen to you. I do. You don’t think that any of those “political” prisoners shipped off to camps are gay? You’re wrong. Much of the Episcopalian church is now aligning itself with Nigeria. Homosexuality is a punishable crime in Nigeria, in Ghana, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in a hundred different countires, as is any activism on behalf of it. Punishable means prison. Punishable means death. The Nigerian head archbishop of the Episcopalian church believes we should be put in prison. Episcopalians! Whoever thought we’d have to worry about Episcopalians. Well, whoever thought we’d have to worry about Wyoming. Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming.
When will we acknowledge that we are constantly being lied to? We must have fiercely observant eyes. We must understand and confront the unprecedented, with “attentive facing up to, and resistance of, reality—whatever that might be.”(Arendt) Intelligent people—and gays are certainly that—have proved more than once that we are less capable of judging for ourselves than almost any other social group. When a conservative columnist can get away with calling presidential candidates “a faggot” and “a queer,” without any serious reprisals, than why can’t we see that we are in trouble? When the New York Times does not run an obituary on quite possibly the most famous lesbian in modern times, Barbara Gittings, than we are in trouble. When I can’t get US News and World Report to publish a letter about an insidiously homophobic cover story they wrote on Jamestown, we’re in trouble. When our country’s top military officer can call us immoral, we’re in trouble.
No, ACT UP is not saving us now. No one is saving us now.
We all think we have straight friends. We think if we have straight friends then everything is OK. But these friends are not protesting with us. They aren’t fighting with us. They enjoy the freedoms they have with their marriages and all their fringe benefits. Yes, they like us but are they going to sacrifice any of their freedoms to get us ours? Of course not. And what’s more we should not expect them to. Even though it sure would be nice; we’ve fought for them and theirs often enough.
The old ACT UP model served us well but it is time to take the next step. I am not saying that there are not more fights to be had for AIDS. There are and we must continue to fight them. Infections are up again. Prevention efforts are not good enough. It is still illegal for HIV foreigners to enter America. But these issues no longer appear to excite sufficient participation. Few people come to meetings and our chapters have disappeared. Many of us have tried to figure out what happened to us and why we ceased to be what we were. We all have thoughts about what happened but as I said I think its time to stop trying to figure it out and just move on. Expanding our demands will hopefully not silence our past concerns but invite increased numbers to meld these newer concerns I am talking about into a stronger, total mix.
ACT UP requires a new model to do this. A new model that will allow for different kinds of actions, tactics and issues, not just HIV. I am not asking you if you even want another organization. I am hoping that you are smart enough to realize—eureka!—that the great deeds we once accomplished which changed history can be accomplished again. For we are still facing the same danger, our extermination, and from the same enemy, our own country, our own country’s “democratic process.” Day after day our country declares that we are not equal to anything at all. All the lives we saved are nothing but crumbs if we still aren’t free. And we still aren’t free. Gay people still aren’t free.
Go to Queens, go to Jamaica, go to Iran, go to Wyoming, we still aren’t free. How many places in this country, in this world, can we walk down a street holding a beloved’s hand? I went to my nephew’s wedding in Jamaica twenty years ago. They are out for blood against gay men in Jamaica now. They do it to you the minute you get off the plane. There are men with iron crowbars waiting to maim you at the airport. Does our government protest? Of course not. Who cares if a faggot dies. They are actually beheading gays in Iran. This is progress? The European Parliament which in the past had played a key role in advancing gay rights worldwide, is about to be taken over by conservative delegates that will strengthen their neo-fascist bloc, which will actually call for capital punishment for homosexuals. You don’t think that any of this can’t happen here? I do. Our country’s top soldier said so this morning. We are immoral. The Mayor of Moscow calls us dirt. Polish leaders call us scum. Ann Coulter calls us sissies. General Pace calls us immoral. Who cares if a faggot dies. A gay person murdered in Iraq or Libya or Nigeria or Jamaica or Ghana or Saudi Arabia is the same as a gay person murdered here. Why do I harp so on gay murders in foreign countries. Because gay murders in Iran have a way of becoming gay hate in Paris and London and Chicago and in the highest rank of US Army. Particularly when our own government ignores all attacks against us anywhere. Who cares of a faggot dies. It is all one world now. The disposal of gay people is an equal opportunity employer and hate is a disease that spreads real fast. I repeat: a gay kid murdered anywhere is a gay kid murdered here.
Yes, we have many things to worry about now besides HIV.
You can get married now in New Jersey but New York judges handed down some of the most bigoted “legal” hate outside of Iran, where as I have just said they are now actually decapitating gay men. They are stringing up gay boys and putting masks over their heads and hanging them as Saddam Hussein was hanged. For being gay. Does our government protest? Does any government protest? Of course not. Who cares if a faggot dies. Do you have friends in love with partners forbidden from entering America? To be separated by force from the one you love is one of the saddest things I can think of. What kind of police state do we live in? This is not right. This is wrong. It does not happen for straight lovers. It can only happen to gays who live in a country where we are hated. How many years do we have to endure being treated like this? If countries like Australia and New Zealand recognize relationship residencies for mixed nationalities, why can’t we? There was not one single demonstration against those New York judges, or indeed against any judges who are such dictators of our lives, where they work and live and sleep each night. They cannot be allowed to continue to hate us so legally. America cannot be allowed to continue to hate us so actively. It is not right. It is wrong. Don’t right and wrong mean anything anymore? Why are we not specifically included in Hate Crimes laws in many states? How many Matthew Shepherds must there be before we are specifically included in Hate Crime laws in every state?
We have right on our side and we must make everyone know it. If ACT UP is to stand for anything, let it stand for our Army Corps to Unleash Power.
Think about it. Think about all of this. Please.
We are the only people in America that it is socially acceptable to hate and discriminate against. Indeed so much hate of us exists that it is legally acceptable to pass constitutional amendments to hate us even more. This is democracy? This is how our courts and laws protect us? These are the equal rights for all that America’s Bill of Rights proclaims for all?
The biggest enemy we must fight continues to be our own government. How dare we stop? We cannot stop. We are not crumbs and we must not accept crumbs and we must stop acting like crumbs.
ACT UP is the most successful grass roots organization that ever lived. Period. There never was, never has been one more successful that has achieved as much as we. We did it before. We can do it again. But to be successful, activism must be practiced every day. By a lot of people. It made us proud once. It united us.
I constantly hear in my ears the refrain: “an army of lovers cannot lose.” Then why are we losing so? We must trust each other to an extent we never have, enough to allow the appointment of leaders and a chain of command to stay on top of things and keep some sort of order so that we not only don’t self destruct as we seem to have more or less done, but also, this time, as we did not do before, institutionalize ourselves for longevity.
I am very aware that as I spin this out I am creating reams of unanswered questions. Well, we didn’t know when we first met in this very room twenty years ago what we wanted ACT UP to become. But we figured it out. Bit by bit and piece by piece we put it together. We have a lot to thrash out and codify in a more private fashion. Armies shouldn’t show all their cards to the world. Many parts of the old ACT UP will still serve us: the choices of a variety of issues to obsess us in the detail that we became famous for; the use of affinity groups that develop their own forms of guerilla warfare. Our call for Health Care for All must still be sought. I have a personal bug up my ass that gay history is not taught in the schools. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were gay. It may be up to activists to ram this truth down the throats of America because gay historians are too timid to. Timidity is so boring, don’t you agree?
Much of what I am calling for involves laws, changing them, getting them. We need to cobble together an omnibus gay rights bill and then hold every politician’s feet to this fire until he or she supports it. We’d find out fast enough who are friends aren’t. TAG and AmFAR once cobbled together a bunch of research priorities into a bill that they got through congress.
How about this: Jim Eigo wrote me: “a full generation after AIDS emerged as a recognizable disease, having sex still poses the same risk for HIV infection or reinfection. Having a sexual encounter with another person—a central, meaningful activity in most people’s lives—has been shadowed by fear, by the prospect of a long-term disease and by a whole new reason for guilt for more than a quarter of a century now. How have we allowed this unnatural state of affairs to persist for so long? Where are the 21st century tools for preventing the sexual transmission of HIV: cheap, effective, and utterly unobtrusive. Lovers deserve nothing less. Instead of sinking time, effort, and money into excavating the fossils of its ancient achievement, ACT UP might consider marking its birthday by mounting a fresh drive to remind government and industry that people have a right to sex without fear, without being forced to make a choice between pleasure and health. It’s an issue that might actually speak across the divides of generation, race, gender and sero-status. And it might regain for the organization some measure of the relevance it once had for the grassroots activists that gave of themselves as if their lives depended on it, because they really did.” Jim is calling for nothing less than the reclamation of our sex lives. What an utterly fantastic notion, or shall I now say goal? Why even raising this issue will find us hated even more. I am so ready for another organized fight.
Are you beginning to see how all this that I am talking about can be streamed into one new ACT UP army?
I have asked Eric to convey the main difference of what is available to us now that we did not have to work with in the past:
“In the age of the internet we can do much of what we did in our meetings and on the streets, on the world wide web.
“The information technology available today could help end the need for those endless meetings.
“Creating a blog could, in fact, incorporate even more voices and varieties of opinions and ideas than any meeting ever could.
“Where ACT UP once had chapters in many cities, we could now involve thousands more via simple list-serves and blogs. We can draw in students and schools and colleges all over the world. It is the young we have to get to once again.
“Creating a blog would allow for expression and refinement of ideas and policies, like a Queer Justice League for denouncing our enemies.
“A well organized website could function as an electronic clearing house for sharing information, for posting problems, for demanding solutions, for developing and communicating action plans.
“List-serves and a website could coordinate grassroots organizing and mobilize phone, e-mail and physical zaps or actions. They could also be used to spotlight homophobic actions, articles, movies and tv, and laws.
“Why aren't we fighting fire with fire? Where is our radical gay left think tank? We need our own "700 Club" and our own talk radio show. Developing such gay content programming for the LOGO or Here Networks or for streaming on-line is completely possible today. Why are all the shows our community is producing about fashion, decorating or just another gay soap?”
Why even Time Magazine is now stating as a fact that websites drive the agendas of political parties.
I know that even without these tools we reordered an entire world’s approach to a disease that would have killed us all. Surely with these tools and with all our creativity we can start to take control of our destinies again.
With these tools, and with a renewed commitment to love and support and to fight to save each other, with a renewed commitment to the anger that saved us once before, with the belief that anger, along with love, are the two most healthy and powerful emotions we are good at, I believe that we could have such a historical success again.
May I conclude these thoughts, these remarks toward the definition of a new ACT UP that will hopefully begin to be discussed forthwith, with this cry from my heart:
Farewell ACT UP.
Long live ACT UP.
Thank you.
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