Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
Speaker 2: a weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people
Speaker 2: fighting bad things, and one of the people who fights
Speaker 2: bad things is my guest, Francesco Quarantine Post of Situation Room.
Speaker 2: How are you.
Speaker 1: I'm okay.
Speaker 3: I feel like I have a cape on now, I'm
Speaker 3: I'm all right. I am yeah, I'm sort of girding
Speaker 3: my loins for the future bad things we have to fight,
Speaker 3: but excited to talk about the bad things we fought
Speaker 3: in the past with you, because maybe that's what we
Speaker 3: need to, like, you know, just fuel this anti fascist
Speaker 3: movement that we all, whether we know it or not,
Speaker 3: are part of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're kind of caught in it regardless.
Speaker 1: Of our desires. Sorry, you're in it now.
Speaker 2: No, it's okay, and actually that's a really Oh wait
Speaker 2: before I get into using your natural transition into our topic. Instead,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna talk about our producer, Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi,
Speaker 2: and our audio engineer, danel Hi.
Speaker 1: Danel Hey, danel.
Speaker 2: Everyone's to say high danel Hi danel Our theme music
Speaker 2: is written for us by Unwoman. So this week's topic
Speaker 2: isn't happy, but it is pretty victorious compared to most
Speaker 2: of what we talk about, and I also think it
Speaker 2: has a lot of lessons for where we are at
Speaker 2: right now in a very specific way that I will
Speaker 2: try not to get too heavy handed with throughout the script,
Speaker 2: because this week we're going to talk about one of
Speaker 2: the most important activist groups in US history, one of
Speaker 2: the most impactful, memorable, and successful movements I've ever studied.
Speaker 2: And even when I heard about them, their successes were
Speaker 2: like sort of downplayed. They were like, oh, they were great,
Speaker 2: little scrappy little group. But the more I read about them,
Speaker 2: the more I realized that they kind of invented everything
Speaker 2: about modern activism and ran across a lot of our
Speaker 2: problems and found solutions for a lot of them. Because
Speaker 2: this week we are talking about a little group called
Speaker 2: the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as act UP.
Speaker 1: I knew, I knew, I knew it, and I knew it.
Speaker 4: I was like, wait, wait, wait, this is so fucking
Speaker 4: act UP, which is great because maybe I am like
Speaker 4: some listeners because I know in a little bit, but
Speaker 4: I don't know a lot.
Speaker 1: And I'm very.
Speaker 3: Excited because there's just a million books I should have
Speaker 3: read and I haven't done that, and I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: There are a million books about this topic and some
Speaker 2: of them disagree with each other, and I haven't read
Speaker 2: them all. And I was actually thinking about it. I
Speaker 2: was like, it would be really easy to do a
Speaker 2: twelve part or whatever on act UP, and I'm only
Speaker 2: doing a two parter, and so I'm kind of I'm
Speaker 2: going to tell the big and I'm going to tell
Speaker 2: some of the details, but there's so many more details
Speaker 2: that anyone listening to this should feel free to go
Speaker 2: and learn about, because they're like big details. They're like
Speaker 2: entire movements and entire cities that did entire successful campaigns.
Speaker 2: When we get to understand act UP, we get to
Speaker 2: understand something that runs counter to the narrative that people
Speaker 2: tell about the AIDS crisis. I had always been presented
Speaker 2: with his image of the gay male community, which is
Speaker 2: the community most directly affected by the crisis in the US,
Speaker 2: or one of the most directly affected communities. It was
Speaker 2: not composed of helpless victims. And that's I'd always been
Speaker 2: presented the sort of like angelic, dying old white man
Speaker 2: as the like you know, icon of Tom Cruise.
Speaker 3: I mean Tom cruise, Tom Cruise in Philadelphia. He wishes
Speaker 3: Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen that.
Speaker 1: What that actually so good?
Speaker 2: Usually I do know something that's old enough to be this.
Speaker 1: Yeah that re friends h huh yeah. Tom Crass couldn't have
Speaker 1: played that role. He couldn't have. I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I have this weird soft spot for that scientologist. But
Speaker 3: Tom Hanks at least his acting. Also the fact that
Speaker 3: he's probably trapped. But yeah, the uh yeah, the idea
Speaker 3: of this like middle class even like the Angels in
Speaker 3: America characters kind of like middle class gay white gay
Speaker 3: guy who is like, yeah, is the perfect victim for
Speaker 3: this disease.
Speaker 2: Right, Which is funny because I still like progress from
Speaker 2: what came before that, which we'll talk about, which was
Speaker 2: like you know, ah, these horrible degenerates got what was
Speaker 2: coming to them, right, Yeah, But they were not helpless victims.
Speaker 2: The veterans have act up talk about it like it
Speaker 2: was a war, and it it was. They fought and
Speaker 2: an awful lot of them died, Just a ton of
Speaker 2: them died. But the writer Liz Heillyman put it simply,
Speaker 2: in the US AIDS initially struck gay men a relatively
Speaker 2: cohesive community that had considerable experience in political organizing. Act
Speaker 2: UP wasn't like some outside force that came in and
Speaker 2: saved people. And it wasn't like one gay man suddenly
Speaker 2: had an idea and birthed a whole new form of activism.
Speaker 2: Act UP. And this is one of the things that's
Speaker 2: so interesting to me about it. It is directly part
Speaker 2: of a lineage of decades of struggle for gay liberation
Speaker 2: in the US. It brought together experienced organizers from all
Speaker 2: sorts of movements and they put together a messy, imperfect, critiquable,
Speaker 2: astounding movement that fundamentally shifted the conversation about HIV and AIDS.
Speaker 2: It is a movement that saved countless lives, like easily
Speaker 2: in the tens of millions. I don't know if I've
Speaker 2: covered a movement that I can so directly say like
Speaker 2: these five thousand people saved twenty million lives. But that
Speaker 2: is a thing you can say say about act UP.
Speaker 2: And they let other people's lives end in dignified ways.
Speaker 2: They also land the groundwork for activism for decades to come.
Speaker 2: And to be honest, I think we're at risk of
Speaker 2: losing that connection in lineage, and that's part of why
Speaker 2: I'm so excited to talk about them today. I'm kind
Speaker 2: of curious. The first time I heard about Act Up.
Speaker 2: It was a late nineties I was sixteen, and I
Speaker 2: started taking art lessons from this like goth artist and
Speaker 2: musician who became my mentor, This guy named Stephen Archer.
Speaker 2: He's not related to this story, but he's the first
Speaker 2: person I saw an act Up thing on and I
Speaker 2: never shout him out, and he's a cool guy. He
Speaker 2: had been part of the DC punk and goth scene
Speaker 2: in the eighties and so on his leather jacket he
Speaker 2: had a black pin with a pink triangle and words
Speaker 2: in white that said Silence equals death, and this like
Speaker 2: blew my suburban goth kid mind. I had no idea
Speaker 2: what I was looking at, you know, and he explained
Speaker 2: it to me, and it's such an iconic image and
Speaker 2: a statement that it it stuck with me. Act Up
Speaker 2: was really good at branding. That's one thing you can
Speaker 2: say about them. Yeah, how did you first hear about
Speaker 2: Act Up? When? Was how did that so?
Speaker 3: When I was involved in the like anti Iraq war
Speaker 3: movements and the global justice movements in New York City.
Speaker 1: There were some like old heads.
Speaker 3: And they weren't old like Vietnam War old heads, but
Speaker 3: like the gen X old heads, right, so they're just
Speaker 3: like a one generation younger again, like those who are
Speaker 3: really active. And I am forgetting his name, but like
Speaker 3: when you said Steve, I was like, maybe mine's a
Speaker 3: Steve too. But yeah, this guy who was involved, I
Speaker 3: think in United for Peace Injustice, who also wore the
Speaker 3: like act up pins and you just see it around
Speaker 3: New York as like this was once a battleground in
Speaker 3: this fight and occasionally would be referenced as Yes, just
Speaker 3: something that was like those who were organizing against their
Speaker 3: very like for their very own lives because their friends
Speaker 3: were dying every single week. And it's like just that
Speaker 3: the enormity and the the like urgency of that moment.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it can be restated. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think we're seeing a version of that now with
Speaker 3: the Palasaitian diaspora, people who are fighting against the genocide there.
Speaker 3: But it is it is pretty amazing that there was
Speaker 3: an entire people that you know, the American public was
Speaker 3: trying to sweep under the rug.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just really rose to the occasion, you know,
Speaker 2: this like monumental horror that they were facing and like
Speaker 2: rose up to fight it, and.
Speaker 3: The idea that it would was falling on like like
Speaker 3: silent voices, you know, and and being men being met
Speaker 3: with nothing just like either yes, you deserve it or
Speaker 3: I think that actually is was from what I've read
Speaker 3: and heard, the scariest part of the AIDS epidemic, in
Speaker 3: the HIV epidemic was like pretending like it wasn't happening,
Speaker 3: and that I think is what a lot of the
Speaker 3: activists were fighting against.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, we're gonna talk about some of the specific
Speaker 2: ways they did it. First, I want to draw historical
Speaker 2: lineage through lines that I was surprised to find, but
Speaker 2: I was really excited to find because I really like
Speaker 2: remembering that we are part of a direct lineage where
Speaker 2: you can say, oh, this person knew this person, knew
Speaker 2: this person knew this person going back a long ass time.
Speaker 2: I'm going to draw this back to the Spanish Civil War,
Speaker 2: because why not after the fall of the Spanish Republic
Speaker 2: to Franco's fascism, anarchists and other like republic people minded
Speaker 2: people fled en mass and a whole bunch of these
Speaker 2: anarchists ended up in New York City, where they hung
Speaker 2: out with a bunch of theater kids and poets and
Speaker 2: theory nerds and eventually hippies and eventually punks.
Speaker 1: Fuck yeah, I love this.
Speaker 3: I didn't know there was a lineage between people that
Speaker 3: went to go fight in the Spanish Civil War and
Speaker 3: the punk scene in New.
Speaker 2: York, so that one's easy to draw. Oddly, interestingly, we
Speaker 2: talked about it. There's this group called Up Against the
Speaker 2: Wall Motherfuckers that was a late sixties movement in the
Speaker 2: Lower East Side that was like white and Puerto Rican.
Speaker 2: They were hippies, but they wore all black and motorcycle
Speaker 2: jackets and were a gang. They were punks, and then
Speaker 2: they liked pretty directly like when the punks came around.
Speaker 2: I think there was like a lot of crossover and
Speaker 2: they were like fighting cops and throwing down with the
Speaker 2: black panthers and made it the whole thing about them.
Speaker 2: But the guy who started at ben Mooream, he was
Speaker 2: in these like book clubs with veterans from the Spanish
Speaker 2: Civil War, And interestingly enough, these people who fled the
Speaker 2: Spanish Civil War in terms of how they've influenced later activism.
Speaker 2: The export that really spread the furthest wasn't anarchism the
Speaker 2: political theory. It was a bunch of the organizing models
Speaker 2: that they had developed in that battleground. For the past
Speaker 2: few generations, especially the past few decades, mass movements across
Speaker 2: the world have tended towards horizontal organizing and the promotion
Speaker 2: of direct action as the way to get things done.
Speaker 2: And two ideas proliferated. One was the model of the
Speaker 2: Affinity Group and the other was the model of the
Speaker 2: spokes Council.
Speaker 3: And I like, oh, this is bringing me back, Margaret. Yes,
Speaker 3: spokes counsel of the Affinity Group. It's two thousand and four.
Speaker 3: Were organizing against the Republican National Convention. There's undercovers everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's fucking great.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I walked out of a mass arrest and none
Speaker 2: of my friends wanted to get out of it. Like
Speaker 2: I had a plan on how to get out of it.
Speaker 1: You've told me this story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's right. I have like one story
Speaker 2: about the RNC and I tell it all the time
Speaker 2: because you got caught, right, you got to rest at that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I can't remember if we've decided that we
Speaker 3: were arrested in the same spot. Did you hop over
Speaker 3: and run through a graveyard? No defense.
Speaker 2: I when the police were closing people near Washington Square Park,
Speaker 2: they were like, they trapped in it. I think it
Speaker 2: was the second day massarrests. On the first day, they
Speaker 2: trapped everyone at the end of the block, and then
Speaker 2: they started drawing the police line and squeezing people together.
Speaker 2: And so I just walked past the police line while
Speaker 2: they were drawing it and then stood on the sidewalk
Speaker 2: and watched because I couldn't leave because there's still too
Speaker 2: many police. Because like, one of my favorite lessons I've
Speaker 2: ever learned is that while cops are in the process
Speaker 2: of drawing a police line, their command is. Cops are
Speaker 2: very simple machines. They can only follow one order at
Speaker 2: a time, and the order is draw the police line,
Speaker 2: not arrest people. So you can move past it while
Speaker 2: they're drawing it. I've used I've gotten on mass arrests
Speaker 2: three times using this trick.
Speaker 3: Nope, but that would break the affinity group back to
Speaker 3: what you were trying to explain.
Speaker 2: Right, well done behind Yeah, well, I was like, hey,
Speaker 2: let's get out of here, and they were like no,
Speaker 2: we're having too much fun. They're like, you know, the
Speaker 2: bands playing, and I'm like, I'm getting out of here,
Speaker 2: and you were just like bye.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then I had survivor's guilt, and then I didn't
Speaker 2: make a bunch of money in a lawsuit, but I
Speaker 2: eventually lost from a different.
Speaker 3: As I was thirteen thousand dollars as yeah, I bought
Speaker 3: a new laptop with that.
Speaker 1: Money and other things.
Speaker 2: Obviously a lot of people like were like, I live
Speaker 2: in Pittsburgh, I'm buying a whole ass house with my thirties.
Speaker 2: Technically I know God anyway, so I didn't get to
Speaker 2: buy a house. So infinity groups and spokes councils are
Speaker 2: the building blocks of a lot of social movements. Or
Speaker 2: affinity groups are the building blocks, and spokes councils are
Speaker 2: the mortar that holds them together. An affinity group is
Speaker 2: basically a group of like five to fifteen people that
Speaker 2: shares affinity and common goals and strategies. And I would
Speaker 2: say three to nine. Actually five to fifteen is what
Speaker 2: people often say. My experience, I often see like three
Speaker 2: to nine. But whatever. Spokes councils are decision making and
Speaker 2: information sharing bodies where they someone from a group, such
Speaker 2: as an affinity group, comes and speaks for that group,
Speaker 2: and they are usually fairly directly speaking for that group
Speaker 2: and can They're not there to express their own opinion,
Speaker 2: They're there to represent the group.
Speaker 3: It's a form of direct, directly democratic decision exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And these models infuse an awful lot of the
Speaker 2: social movements of the era, I think, especially starting in
Speaker 2: the seventies and eighties. If I were to map my
Speaker 2: understanding the genealogy of social movements in the US, You've
Speaker 2: got these sort of like proper movements fighting for civil
Speaker 2: rights through approve channels in the fifties, which then moved
Speaker 2: into nonviolent action in the early sixties, moving into more
Speaker 2: big militant organizations in late sixties, which then, in response
Speaker 2: to repression, moved underground and separated from mass organizing and
Speaker 2: moved to clandestinity and like you know, blowing things up
Speaker 2: and robbing people and stuff. In the early seventies, how
Speaker 2: the weather underground and the Black Liberation Army grew out
Speaker 2: of the Students for Democratic Society and the Black Panthers.
Speaker 2: On some level, these are really broad strokes I'm drawling with,
Speaker 2: And this all does come together because these things are
Speaker 2: more related than people are like they're not. I mean,
Speaker 2: every movement is separate, but they're also all tied together.
Speaker 2: When these clandestine movements were hunted down, what was left
Speaker 2: was really interesting and radical community organizing. All of these
Speaker 2: hardened revolutionaries doing social work, setting up schools, building infrastructure,
Speaker 2: doing the like less confrontational stuff that was still vital
Speaker 2: to either social progress or revolution. And then slowly movements
Speaker 2: grew back up again, and it was the movements growing
Speaker 2: up at this point, the peace movement, the anti nuke movement,
Speaker 2: the feminist movement, gay rights, food not bombs, civil rights,
Speaker 2: social justice stuff, abortion, clinic defense, Earth First, and act
Speaker 2: UP that took on this decentralized leaderless or leader full
Speaker 2: depending on who you ask, character that has since defined
Speaker 2: protests for so long. An act Up, I'm going to argue,
Speaker 2: was kind of an early culmination of this model. It
Speaker 2: brought together the veterans of all of these different movements
Speaker 2: into one place and focused them on one major goal,
Speaker 2: how to help stop the AIDS crisis when it comes
Speaker 2: out of all kinds of movements, its most immediate legacy
Speaker 2: was the gay liberation movement, which we've talked about in
Speaker 2: the show before they get a whole week of it.
Speaker 2: A while back, queer folks were decently well organized in
Speaker 2: militant and they had been for about a decade at
Speaker 2: this point when the AIDS crisis hits. Then in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty one, on June fifth, the CDC announced a strange phenomenon.
Speaker 2: A bunch of gay men in LA were getting types
Speaker 2: of pneumonia that are seen in immunocompromise people. It's sort
Speaker 2: of cropping up among gay men in cities around the country.
Speaker 2: Soon enough, by nineteen eighty two, they suspected it was
Speaker 2: some kind of sexually transmitted infection that was behind this.
Speaker 2: And the first name they gave it was grid gay
Speaker 2: related immune deficiency or even more informally and more evilly,
Speaker 2: gay cancer.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were three other groups of pay related.
Speaker 1: Like how unscientific do you have to know? What calls?
Speaker 1: Ye it's gay related?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. There's a bunch of gays. What
Speaker 2: can you who's to.
Speaker 1: Know there's a relation here? I'm not going to look
Speaker 1: into it. Who's called gay related?
Speaker 2: Yeah? There was three other groups of people that were
Speaker 2: also immediately getting it. Hemophiliacs who needed like blood transfusions
Speaker 2: and stuff ivy drug users, and Haitian immigrants. By August
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty two, the CDC named it Acquired Immune deficiency syndrome,
Speaker 2: or AIDS. And at the start, there were two theories
Speaker 2: about what caused AIDS. And what's interesting is that, like
Speaker 2: this gets like way political about some people were like
Speaker 2: wildly mad at each other about what causes AIDS. Sure,
Speaker 2: and I'm not going to get into the ins and
Speaker 2: outs of the political parts of it because it is
Speaker 2: messy and people that you don't expect would have opinions
Speaker 2: that turned out to be incorrect. One of these two theories,
Speaker 2: which will call the correct theory but they called the
Speaker 2: new agent theory, was that there was a specific pathogen
Speaker 2: causing AIDS. The second theory, which we'll call the nope
Speaker 2: they were wrong, was the multi factoral theory, which was
Speaker 2: basically the idea that there's like something that in semen
Speaker 2: where if you get too much of it, it suppresses
Speaker 2: your immune system. And this isn't as like wacky bunk
Speaker 2: science as it immediately sounds. There was like people who
Speaker 2: actually were affected by it and like had some reasons
Speaker 2: to think about some stuff like we're developing this theory
Speaker 2: and it was incorrect.
Speaker 1: The too much gum theory, yeah, the too.
Speaker 2: Much cum theory yeah, which is Yeah. They did a
Speaker 2: lot of like work around, trying to work backwards to
Speaker 2: be like, Okay.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you can be too gay. We're trying to think of.
Speaker 2: A way of less come involved.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So there's this new bad thing going around killing people,
Speaker 2: and right away people are organizing. By May nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 2: two men with aids and a doctor friend and then
Speaker 2: one of their partners as an editor, get together and
Speaker 2: publish one of the first safer sex guides in history.
Speaker 2: Almost all like I used to when I had a
Speaker 2: different publishing life. I like once read an awful lot
Speaker 2: of old Victorian sex manuals. Yeah, yeah, and old Victorian
Speaker 2: sex manuals are like they're all like sex is bad.
Speaker 2: If you're going to do it, feel bad about yourself,
Speaker 2: and then do the following.
Speaker 1: Right and enjoy it whatever you do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there were to be clear, there were people
Speaker 2: like smuggling in actual safe sex practices and often going
Speaker 2: to jail for it, and it ties into the history
Speaker 2: of birth control and all of this stuff. But and
Speaker 2: like the wild idea that the female orgasm is real.
Speaker 2: Was this like whole big thing people were fighting for
Speaker 2: in the early twentieth century anyway, in terms of like
Speaker 2: modern sex positive safer sex guides, this is like one
Speaker 2: of the first ones, if not the first one. It's
Speaker 2: called how to Have Sex in an Epidemic one Approach,
Speaker 2: And it was the first advocacy for condoms for gay
Speaker 2: male sex because before before that, people did not routinely
Speaker 2: use condoms because there was not a risk of pregnancy, right,
Speaker 2: So that was one thing, and then they actually were
Speaker 2: into the multi factoral theory. They were into the too
Speaker 2: much com theory. But like it's not because they were
Speaker 2: like fools.
Speaker 3: But this is what's interesting about this moment is like
Speaker 3: it kind of reminds you of any epidemic, I mean,
Speaker 3: in COVID nineteen right any pandemic where you're like people
Speaker 3: are dying literally right now, and you're trying to figure
Speaker 3: out whether it's a Chinese virus leaked by a lab
Speaker 3: or whether it you know, came from someone eating a
Speaker 3: pangolin who had a cold. You know, like it's like,
Speaker 3: who the fuck cares, Let's save some lives right now.
Speaker 1: But the but of course it is so much easier
Speaker 1: to deflect.
Speaker 3: And you know, I don't know, make some money off
Speaker 3: anti China rhetoric by by nasaying.
Speaker 1: By basically just focusing on the forest.
Speaker 3: And missing you know, focusing on the trees and missing
Speaker 3: the forest of the fact that people are dying. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 3: and politicizing it. So it's just like and so that's
Speaker 3: just crazy because in a year they had lost the
Speaker 3: like I mean, I know that there was still the stigma,
Speaker 3: but you stopped calling it grid and started calling it
Speaker 3: AIDS in just a year.
Speaker 1: And that's just shows you.
Speaker 3: I assume how fast it was spreading, how broad it was,
Speaker 3: and how many people were dying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is an awkward place to transition to ads.
Speaker 2: And yet we are left doing that because here's dads
Speaker 2: and we're back.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And people, like I said right away, they're doing things
Speaker 2: about it. They're saying, like, how do we change our
Speaker 2: culture to keep ourselves safe? How do we publish these
Speaker 2: books talking about it. Another person who started doing something
Speaker 2: about it was this guy named Larry Kramer. He had
Speaker 2: never been an activist before he was in the movie business,
Speaker 2: and he was sort of infamous in both the straight
Speaker 2: world and the gay world. For a novel he wrote
Speaker 2: called Fagots that talked about a life of emotionless sex
Speaker 2: and drugs and so like the straight people are like, ah,
Speaker 2: gay stuff, and then a lot of the gay community
Speaker 2: was like, stop spreading our dirty laundry around the world.
Speaker 2: He considers himself like a just a bruly, honest kind
Speaker 2: of guy. I read a long form interview with him
Speaker 2: from the act Up. I didn't write down the name
Speaker 2: of this, it's in my sources somewhere, but the act
Speaker 2: Up audio. There's an oral history project that some people
Speaker 2: did in the early aughts. Anyway, His family was Russian
Speaker 2: and Jewish and working class from Maryland. In August nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty one, he invited like eighty gay men over to
Speaker 2: his apartment so they could talk about what the fuck
Speaker 2: they were gonna do. And so within a few months
Speaker 2: they started a group called the Gay Men's Health Crisis,
Speaker 2: which is the longest running aid service organization and probably
Speaker 2: in the world, and it is still around today. Their
Speaker 2: first meeting once they were incorporated was at the Church
Speaker 2: of Saint Joseph and Greenwich Village, which is a Catholic church.
Speaker 2: It's going to come up. A lot of the activism
Speaker 2: is going to be against the Catholic Church, but also
Speaker 2: a lot of Catholics are going to be involved in
Speaker 2: the fighting.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But also they have like free meeting space, so we're
Speaker 3: going to take that meeting space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. And most of the people that I
Speaker 2: was reading about in act up were either Catholic or Jewish,
Speaker 2: whether by heritage or actual faith, with some like Protestants
Speaker 2: here and there. Yeah. And so the Gay Men's Health
Speaker 2: Crisis was a fairly traditionally organized group. They were a nonprofit.
Speaker 2: They had a president, they had a crisis hotline, and
Speaker 2: they offered legal aid, access to social workers. They raised
Speaker 2: money through like normal fundraiser channels and things like that,
Speaker 2: which is good and important, but they were like very
Speaker 2: don't rock the boat. They were very don't antagonize people.
Speaker 2: You catch more flies with honey or whatever.
Speaker 3: Right, we're going to solve this. This community can solve
Speaker 3: this kind of not on our own, but like, yeah,
Speaker 3: a little of a bit of a charity case situation
Speaker 3: will help, Which is like I can't imagine how many cases,
Speaker 3: how many people needed help.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just like what like that seems just
Speaker 1: like a whack a mole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very quickly, within tens of thousands, and with
Speaker 2: New York City alone per year. And Larry Kramer was like,
Speaker 2: he was not a I want to be polite guy.
Speaker 2: And soon enough he's going to start doing a bunch
Speaker 2: of stuff that eventually will have him leaving the group
Speaker 2: over difference of opinions about strategy and about whether or
Speaker 2: not to be angry. He told Sarah Schulman in an
Speaker 2: interview in two thousand and three. We tried to be
Speaker 2: very nice to the New York Times and to Ed Coke,
Speaker 2: the mayor at the time, and you learn very fast
Speaker 2: that you're a faggot. And it doesn't make any difference
Speaker 2: that you went to Yale and were assistant to presidents
Speaker 2: of a couple of film companies, and that you had money.
Speaker 2: And the GMHC didn't like when people raise their voice
Speaker 2: is or criticize the mayor. So Larry Kramer's like, whatever
Speaker 2: comes next is not going to be rigidly structured and
Speaker 2: it's not going to be polite. He wrote an essay
Speaker 2: called and twelve and Counting in nineteen eighty three in
Speaker 2: a gay magazine that was a screed about lack of
Speaker 2: government and response to the spread of the disease. He
Speaker 2: blamed the CDC and the NIH, but he also blamed
Speaker 2: gay men who were ignoring the problem. And basically he
Speaker 2: was like, well, we kind of need to stop having
Speaker 2: sex while we get to sort it out. People didn't
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nobody likes abstinence except for the modern Republican Party.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, who don't actually like it themselves, they want
Speaker 2: everyone else to do it. He also started confronting bureaucrats.
Speaker 2: He threw a drink and a gay Republican fundraiser's face
Speaker 2: for his hypocrisy. There's this really long and contentious history
Speaker 2: and gay activism about whether or not you should publicly
Speaker 2: out homophobic gay people who are like wielding power from
Speaker 2: the right wing.
Speaker 1: Oh right, so who do you protect? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Like it goes to like real identity politics, like you know,
Speaker 3: like intersectionality questions here.
Speaker 2: Totally and also just like how rude do you, like,
Speaker 2: do you want to expose someone to homophobia in order
Speaker 2: to make a political point?
Speaker 1: Sure s sure, especially by outing them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Forced outing was like absolutely a tactic of gay
Speaker 2: liberation going back, like the first gay men's magazine, des
Speaker 2: Shwimmer in Germany from the eighteen nineties. I think would
Speaker 2: do forced outing of like really yeah, and it's it's
Speaker 2: Lady Gray like and I don't I don't know how
Speaker 2: I feel about it. I also don't know Lady Gray is.
Speaker 2: And Sophie's giving me the like Margaret doesn't know that
Speaker 2: to get this reference, isn't.
Speaker 3: That's Lindsay Graham's nickname in DC apparently is Lady Gray.
Speaker 2: Okay, And so Larry Kramer spent a couple of years
Speaker 2: doing this kind of activism alone. It's not because he
Speaker 2: was the only person doing it. It's because he hadn't
Speaker 2: connected up with folks who are also doing it. Because
Speaker 2: like throwing drinks in like people's faces and stuff is cool,
Speaker 2: but it works better when it's coordinated. And so for
Speaker 2: all the shit, he basically gets kicked out of this
Speaker 2: group he started, and he breaks up with his partner
Speaker 2: who's still on the board, and he goes wandering. He
Speaker 2: goes to Dico, the concentration camp, and he writes a
Speaker 2: play called The Normal Heart. And it's not a coincidence
Speaker 2: that he's Jewish and that he's going to concentration camps
Speaker 2: and looking at this because he absolutely is perceiving this
Speaker 2: as a holocaust that is happening right. Gay men are
Speaker 2: dying in mass fifty thousand gay men are dying a year.
Speaker 2: Gay men in big cities are going to a funeral
Speaker 2: every week, sometimes more. Sometimes you miss one friend's funeral
Speaker 2: because you're at a different friend's funeral. Life expectancy after
Speaker 2: diagnosis was too. By nineteen eighty four, two French doctors
Speaker 2: had figured out that there was this virus HIV that
Speaker 2: caused AIDS the most likely origin. Speaking of the politicization
Speaker 2: of where does the thing come from? How racist can
Speaker 2: we be about it? You know, I'm going to talk
Speaker 2: about where the best understanding of where it comes from
Speaker 2: is because it ties into colonialism. Most likely it was
Speaker 2: passed from chimpanzees to humans sometimes around the tourney of
Speaker 2: the twentieth century during the like scramble for Africa, when
Speaker 2: Europe was just fucking over Africa as hard as they could.
Speaker 2: And this probably happened in the Belgian Congo, the place
Speaker 2: where King Leopold was murdering millions of people. It also,
Speaker 2: and really importantly, and I wish I didn't have to
Speaker 2: say it, it didn't jump to humans through humans fucking animals.
Speaker 1: As hot as that sounds.
Speaker 2: It comes through hunting practices almost certainly, where you're just
Speaker 2: exposed to the blood of event animals. The virus spread
Speaker 2: from Africa, probably the Congo, hitting Haiti in around nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty seven, and there's a whole lot that has been
Speaker 2: written about how the spread of it was happening because
Speaker 2: of like the way in which like social practices and
Speaker 2: cultural things and how everyone was living was shifted so
Speaker 2: completely by colonization. Right, it hit Haiti probably around nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty seven. There's again a lot of different takes about
Speaker 2: how it's spread, and there's like political motivations behind people
Speaker 2: giving you different ideas of how it's spread, but the
Speaker 2: one that seems likely or maybe I'm drawn to this
Speaker 2: explanation because it blames capitalism and colonial extraction.
Speaker 1: But you're biased in favor of, you know, just reality.
Speaker 2: That's certainly how I perceive it. Yes, there was this
Speaker 2: corrupt politician in Haiti named Luckner Kimbrone, and he was
Speaker 2: called the Vampire of the Caribe because he ran sketchy
Speaker 2: blood clinics and sold people's plasma to the US, often
Speaker 2: killing people for their blood, like perfectly safe, haunting people
Speaker 2: in the streets to oh my god, kill them for
Speaker 2: their blood.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, poor hate. I swear to fucking Knoddy.
Speaker 3: He's like, every time you learn of like some former
Speaker 3: awful dictator in Haiti, there's like another guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And this guy wasn't even dictator. He just
Speaker 2: like worked for.
Speaker 1: One of the guys, you know, O side side hustle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like we really the West was like, oh,
Speaker 2: you all like gonna have this slave revolution. We're going
Speaker 2: to fucking punish you forever.
Speaker 1: We're going to punish you forever.
Speaker 2: Sixteen hundred gallons of plasma a month was exported to
Speaker 2: the US during this guy's time, and HIV was spreading
Speaker 2: between the patients in his clinics because they didn't sanitize
Speaker 2: their equipment, and it spread in the US partly from
Speaker 2: that exported plasma. Wow, it spread most aggressively in the
Speaker 2: gay male community because unprotected anal intercourse is the riskiest
Speaker 2: kind of sex for HIV transmission. It also the communities
Speaker 2: that hit first in the US Plazitian immigrants was probably
Speaker 2: IV drug users. It was called drunkie flu or the
Speaker 2: dwindles or junkie pneumonia and no one cared or noticed.
Speaker 2: Because if there is a community even more disregarded by
Speaker 2: society at large than gay people in the late seventies
Speaker 2: and early eighties, it is homeless drug users. It actually
Speaker 2: probably hit this community first in like nineteen seventy seven
Speaker 2: or so, and nothing was done about it. These people's
Speaker 2: deaths aren't even written down, you know. So and fortunately,
Speaker 2: actually Act Up is going to be so fucking intersexual.
Speaker 2: This is like where they a lot of people will
Speaker 2: like critique them, and I'm not going to get too
Speaker 2: much into the critiques of them in this episode, but
Speaker 2: like a lot of people were like a lot of
Speaker 2: the early act Up people are middle class white gay men,
Speaker 2: right right, right, but a lot of their immediate supporters
Speaker 2: are not. And the people who come in with like
Speaker 2: a lot of activist information are not. And they like
Speaker 2: challenge themselves and do a lot of work about how
Speaker 2: to become and act intersectionally. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that they do is they really go to bat for
Speaker 2: ivy drug users.
Speaker 3: That's fucking huge, right, because they realize like they need
Speaker 3: to be in the same boat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely right.
Speaker 3: They didn't turn against them. It's like, no, no, this
Speaker 3: is their problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're the good sufferers.
Speaker 1: Right exactly, which you could sort of see happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it could have happened.
Speaker 1: No, that is another thing.
Speaker 3: That I remembered about this movement was precisely that was
Speaker 3: that while destigmatizing you know, being gay, it the AIDS
Speaker 3: ANTI you know, the act up movement was also about
Speaker 3: destigmatizing IVY drug use.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and we'll talk about it later. But like
Speaker 2: did an awful lot of the work for the modern
Speaker 2: Needle Exchange program, and like, yes, they just I don't know.
Speaker 2: I had known the broad strokes in some of the
Speaker 2: cool specific actions, but like they're just I love. Most
Speaker 2: of the time when I do these episodes, I start
Speaker 2: off with a group, I'm like, oh, that group's cool,
Speaker 2: and then I like read more and I'm like, this
Speaker 2: is the coolest thing in the world.
Speaker 1: Like why can't we have this?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So meanwhile, queers all over the country are organizing,
Speaker 2: and of course this means New York City. Also on
Speaker 2: December twentieth, the New York Times ran a headline sale
Speaker 2: of Sight to Homosexuals planned because this is where a
Speaker 2: building that gets called the Center is still which is
Speaker 2: still around, comes into being a community center. It is
Speaker 2: now called the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center
Speaker 2: and fell into some queer hands in nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: It was originally called the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.
Speaker 2: A director described it that whole rush to address the
Speaker 2: AIDS epidemic was critical to institution building in the gay community.
Speaker 2: There was this realization that if we do it together,
Speaker 2: we get it done. If we don't do it together,
Speaker 2: we're going to die.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So a bunch of groups got together to buy it,
Speaker 2: including Sage, Senior Action in a Gay Environment and the
Speaker 2: Metropolitan Community Church, which was a queer affirming Protestant congregation,
Speaker 2: and by the end of the first year, sixty groups
Speaker 2: were meeting there. These days, hundreds of groups meet there
Speaker 2: because it's still around, and they brought in speakers all
Speaker 2: the time. One day in early nineteen eighty seven they
Speaker 2: brought in Larry Kramer, the guy we were talking about
Speaker 2: you promised to talk about the fight against AIDS. He
Speaker 2: started off his talk by having two thirds of the
Speaker 2: room stand up, and then he said, you will all
Speaker 2: be dead in five years. And then he said, quote,
Speaker 2: if my speech tonight doesn't scare the shit out of
Speaker 2: you we're in real trouble. What you're here doesn't rouse
Speaker 2: you to anger, fury, rage, and action. Gay men will
Speaker 2: have no future here on earth? How long does it
Speaker 2: take before you get angry and fight back? Then he
Speaker 2: pitched that they start a new political organization devoted to
Speaker 2: political action. And he didn't say, this is what it's
Speaker 2: got to be and I'm going to be in charge. Right,
Speaker 2: he actually did, which is the same thing he did
Speaker 2: last time. He said we should start something, and the
Speaker 2: thing that got started was too polite for his tastes.
Speaker 2: And so then a couple of years later he's like, hey,
Speaker 2: we should start something and be angry, And three hundred
Speaker 2: people came two days later back to the Center to
Speaker 2: form act UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
Speaker 1: To unleash power. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 3: I mean I know that maybe that followed from the
Speaker 3: acronym of wanting to say like act up, but.
Speaker 1: Like to unleash power. He's like, so fucking tight.
Speaker 2: You can get some good poetry from a backronym, you know,
Speaker 2: because you're like, the restrictions help bring out the creative absolutely.
Speaker 3: But now would you call this was this a spokes
Speaker 3: counsel or you're going to get some spokes cancel part leader.
Speaker 2: So it's actually from the kind of funny Larry Kramer
Speaker 2: talks a lot about how he's like, I don't know
Speaker 2: any of that leftist terminology, and the interviewer is like,
Speaker 2: but we used affinity groups and direct action. He was like,
Speaker 2: when I was in the film industry, everyone was a
Speaker 2: Marxist and used Marxist slang, and I refuse to learn
Speaker 2: any of it because he's like an old grouch who
Speaker 2: kind of rules, you know, right.
Speaker 1: He was just like it was a meeting. I don't
Speaker 1: know it was meaning of other meetings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, meaning of groups, like are we gonna use
Speaker 2: direct actor? Well, we're gonna go fight the fuckers? Like, yes,
Speaker 2: direct action, you know. So I think it started off
Speaker 2: on an affinity group model. But the way that I
Speaker 2: kind of understand it is that this very very initial group,
Speaker 2: or at least Larry Kramer is like not a political actor,
Speaker 2: doesn't perceive himself as a political actor, but immediately, like
Speaker 2: within a couple of weeks, if not at that first meeting,
Speaker 2: these like veterans from all of these other movements come
Speaker 2: together and help and help form it, and I think
Speaker 2: at that point you start getting very explicitly. We talk
Speaker 2: about how we use direct action, we are using affinity groups,
Speaker 2: and all of their organizing happens through affinity groups. That
Speaker 2: it's gonna be really interesting how that happens. But what
Speaker 2: else they didn't do is they didn't have advertisers. Actually, okay, wait,
Speaker 2: I take that back. Later we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: a bunch of like advertising people who are graphic designers
Speaker 2: who are an act up who like change the fucking world.
Speaker 2: So everyone has a day job, and some people's day
Speaker 2: job is to make ads, and some people's day job
Speaker 2: is this podcast, which now is going to ads. And
Speaker 2: we're back. Okay. You know that famous Margaret Meade quote.
Speaker 2: I don't know shit about Margaret Meade, but there's that
Speaker 2: quote that's famous. Hell never doubt that a small group
Speaker 2: of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's
Speaker 2: the only thing that ever has so good. I know.
Speaker 2: I've also always had a like because it has to
Speaker 2: be a small group, not a like. I think like
Speaker 2: one person very rarely like really like you change history
Speaker 2: by like connecting in with groups, you know, And I
Speaker 2: say this as someone who like, I'm an introvert, and
Speaker 2: it makes me sad this realization, you know. But this
Speaker 2: group act Up, I feel like, proves this quote better
Speaker 2: than anything I've ever read. It's biggest actions captain about
Speaker 2: five thousand people. Probably most people who've listened to this
Speaker 2: have been to way bigger protests than five thousand people.
Speaker 1: But also it just depends on like, if those five
Speaker 1: thousand people are doing direct action, that's fucking crazy. That's
Speaker 1: a massive number exactly.
Speaker 2: Act Up is far and away one of the most
Speaker 2: successful groups I've ever covered on the show. Despite not
Speaker 2: they weren't tiny. It wasn't forty people in clandestine clicks,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't huge. I chalk up their outside impact
Speaker 2: to a few factors. You got one of them already.
Speaker 2: They were at the right place at the right time.
Speaker 2: It was a movement that needed to happen. The horizontal
Speaker 2: structure of it emphasized the agency of individuals and small groups.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't a few thousand people who are like
Speaker 2: following the crowd. It's a few thousand people divided into groups,
Speaker 2: each of which is like, all right, how are we
Speaker 2: going to get this shit done? And so you have
Speaker 2: five thousand leaders instead of five thousand people the handful
Speaker 2: of leaders. I used to kind of like make fun
Speaker 2: of that quote, like when people be like, oh no,
Speaker 2: we're leader full on that leader list. I was like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah No.
Speaker 3: I definitely never heard that until later in life when
Speaker 3: I was no longer an activist. But I I do
Speaker 3: think it's kind of funny. But then you're like, nah,
Speaker 3: that's a good way of thinking about it. You know,
Speaker 3: you know which it is true. That's the other one,
Speaker 3: Like I mean a calling in versus calling out, you know,
Speaker 3: like okay, but you're still calling them out.
Speaker 2: No, but right.
Speaker 3: The affinity group I think is really interesting because it
Speaker 3: is sort of you know, it's people who should trust
Speaker 3: one another. It can be you know, not that there
Speaker 3: were necessarily infiltrators and act up, but it can be
Speaker 3: like infiltration proof, you know, a little bit cop proof.
Speaker 3: If everyone if you've got five to fifteen people who
Speaker 3: trust one another and can vouch for one another, and
Speaker 3: they're all kind of like down and have each other's back,
Speaker 3: So it's I mean, man, I don't even have like
Speaker 3: five close friends. Shit, man, they're all over the plate,
Speaker 3: like like I can't even name ten people I want
Speaker 3: to hang out with on a Saturday night. So I
Speaker 3: think it's it's it's tight, like you know that that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and folks still are organizing in affinity groups. But I just, yeah,
Speaker 3: big ups the model of the affinity group.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, no, but I feel you right. It's like
Speaker 2: you're like, okay, well, you know, it's probably easier you're
Speaker 2: twenty and part of a social scene.
Speaker 3: You know exactly, we're all dumpster diving together, we're all
Speaker 3: fucking the same people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and then it'll all fall apart because
Speaker 2: we're all fucking the same people.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, and then one of them is also an
Speaker 3: undercover and it's all terrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you just described nineteen ninety nine to two
Speaker 2: thousand and five.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Other things that they had going for them, they had
Speaker 2: a commitment to direct action and to inclusivity and not
Speaker 2: policing each other. So it was very like you show
Speaker 2: up and be like, oh, we're doing this action, and
Speaker 2: people be like okay, not like, oh, we all need
Speaker 2: to come to consensus about whether or not it's okay
Speaker 2: for you to do that action. You know, so everyone
Speaker 2: wanted to do it.
Speaker 1: You go, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Also the fact that so much of the
Speaker 2: direction came from directly affected people, and one of their
Speaker 2: specific things was, we are going to become the experts
Speaker 2: on our condition. We are going to be the ones
Speaker 2: who are coming up with what the policy should be
Speaker 2: from the government about our issues, because we are now
Speaker 2: the experts. And they did also they had this dual strategy,
Speaker 2: which is basically good cup, bad cop. They would be
Speaker 2: both the protesters outside screaming at the politicians and they'd
Speaker 2: be the negotiators inside working on solutions. And it's fascinating
Speaker 2: and there's like tension there right, Like you know, some
Speaker 2: people are like, oh, you're all fucking liberals, don't fight
Speaker 2: hard enough, and other people be like, oh, you're all
Speaker 2: too unruly and disorganized, you know. But it's like it's
Speaker 2: that tension where all this interesting shit comes from.
Speaker 3: Thad, Yeah, I mean, I think what's really you know,
Speaker 3: I think there's like sort of a new a trendy
Speaker 3: idea nowadays that you're not supposed to do like emotional
Speaker 3: labor for people, which like I understand on a certain level,
Speaker 3: but on the other level, it's like if you're actually
Speaker 3: going to like change hearts and minds and actually get
Speaker 3: to work.
Speaker 1: You do need to do some emotional labor for people.
Speaker 3: You need to do I mean, I don't know about
Speaker 3: making them care about death, but you kind of do
Speaker 3: need to be like this, like Act Up is proving,
Speaker 3: you need to be experts on the thing that you're
Speaker 3: working around. You need to be educating people in your
Speaker 3: community and outside of your community. And that's going to
Speaker 3: be the hard work. It's not just going to be like, well,
Speaker 3: everyone has to like you know, come to their own senses,
Speaker 3: like noah, nah, you're gonna have to be leading the
Speaker 3: way on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, Like do your own research.
Speaker 1: No, you've got to do the research.
Speaker 2: You know, totally. And I feel like there's this difference
Speaker 2: between fault and responsibility that society doesn't set us up
Speaker 2: to understand, where it's like, is it my fault that
Speaker 2: as a trans woman, I like suffer certain bad shit. No,
Speaker 2: that's not my fault. Is it my responsibility?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: No one else is fucking fixing it, right, you know?
Speaker 2: And like I appreciate the like allies and like literal allies,
Speaker 2: like allies in a war who are helping me do that,
Speaker 2: but it's still up to me. It is my responsibility
Speaker 2: because it is not anyone else's, even if it's not like.
Speaker 3: I'm thankful for you know, the transactivists that took me
Speaker 3: through all you know, new terminology, new pronouns, you know.
Speaker 3: That's but exactly if they had been like, no, I'm
Speaker 3: not going to teach you, it's like, well, then I
Speaker 3: will be dumb.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly for a long time. I will pull in
Speaker 2: a china like China shop this, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I've read some narratives about act UP that was
Speaker 2: kind of like, well, we weren't political until all of
Speaker 2: a sudden we had to be, and other narratives that
Speaker 2: talk about act UP like it's the supergroup of activism
Speaker 2: in the eighties, and I, like I was saying, I
Speaker 2: think it's both. I think the initial founders are mostly
Speaker 2: desperate gay men, and soon help rushed in from experienced
Speaker 2: organizers from a bunch of movements which included gay men
Speaker 2: and gay women. And then you have the rank and
Speaker 2: file on top of that, which is also largely new
Speaker 2: to politics. Because of this horizontal structure, the direction and
Speaker 2: guidance of the experienced organizers was like subtle instead of explicit.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like, hey, we're coming in were in charge, right,
Speaker 2: It's like they're coming in and being like, here's ways
Speaker 2: of democratically organizing to figure out what we all want,
Speaker 2: and so that kind of almost becomes invisible. They built
Speaker 2: up horizontal movement built out of affinity groups that were
Speaker 2: each autonomous. It was nonpartisan in both that they didn't
Speaker 2: have an ideological label and also that they didn't endorse
Speaker 2: political parties. It spread across the country in the world
Speaker 2: soon enough. At their first meeting, they were like, all right, great,
Speaker 2: what are we going to do about it? And someone
Speaker 2: suggested they go after the FDA for being too slow
Speaker 2: to approve experimental drugs that could save their lives. Larry
Speaker 2: Kramer wrote an op ed about it for the New
Speaker 2: York Times, and then they marched on Wall Street the
Speaker 2: same day that op ed came out March twenty fourth,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four. This is their first action. Seventeen people
Speaker 2: were arrested pretty much right off. They had doctors and
Speaker 2: shit coming and joining, including this woman, this chemist, Iris Long,
Speaker 2: who was a straight woman who had no connection to
Speaker 2: aid suffering communities. She just was like, Oh, I know
Speaker 2: about this stuff. I should go be helpful. So she
Speaker 2: was her fucking rules. She showed up, and she was
Speaker 2: the one explaining the science and the medicine and of
Speaker 2: all like all the things that people were working on,
Speaker 2: and helped people become the experts. You know. One of
Speaker 2: their first actions was in DC on June first, nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty seven, at the White House. Cops are so homophobic
Speaker 2: that they're wearing rubber gloves when they arrest the protesters,
Speaker 2: afraid they'll catch like gay cancer, which, yeah, shut the
Speaker 2: fuck up. By this point, people knew that that was
Speaker 2: not the case.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: An airline refused to let people with AIDS fly, so
Speaker 2: act Up went for two strategies at once with this airline.
Speaker 2: They sued them, and they also protested that their offices
Speaker 2: like broken their offices. Well they're well, it's open, you know,
Speaker 2: and they won. Cosmopolitan magazine ran an article by a psychiatrist,
Speaker 2: and the psychiatrist had like put doctor in his name
Speaker 2: when he wrote it, but he was actually a psychiatrist,
Speaker 2: not a doctor of internal medicine. That he was like
Speaker 2: representing himself, you know. And the article was like, hey,
Speaker 2: don't worry you straight, you won't get AIDS.
Speaker 3: Dude, and so first tend sex positions to avoid getting AIDS.
Speaker 2: It was basically like, you're not a gay man, You're fine,
Speaker 2: you know. And so a bunch of women from Act
Speaker 2: Up met up with the author and were like, Hey,
Speaker 2: you gonna you're gonna do a retraction, You're gonna apologize,
Speaker 2: and he's like no. So they went to Cosmopolitan. They
Speaker 2: took a protest to the streets. They forced media attention
Speaker 2: on the fact that women can get AIDS, and Cosmo
Speaker 2: was forced to print a partial retraction. Nice, which Get
Speaker 2: said some of their like intersectionality right away too, like
Speaker 2: a lot of their campaigns are like, hey, women can
Speaker 2: get AIDS, you know. And it wasn't all like, hey,
Speaker 2: we can only focus on the gay men who are
Speaker 2: like the most suffering people because we are focusing on them,
Speaker 2: but we are also focusing on all these other communities that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, on the misinformation, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: They They started round the clock protests at a hospital
Speaker 2: demanding better clinical trials and that the clinical trials include
Speaker 2: more patients with AIDS. They shut down the FDA for
Speaker 2: a day at this One of the arrestees was a
Speaker 2: well known artist named David Wochnarowitz, who later died of
Speaker 2: AIDS in nineteen ninety two. And this is where you
Speaker 2: get this photo. He had painted up his jacket with
Speaker 2: the now famous words, if I die of AIDS, forget burial,
Speaker 2: just drop my body. On the steps of the FDA.
Speaker 2: They paired all of their protests with very specific demands
Speaker 2: for how experimental drugs could be made available sooner, and
Speaker 2: it worked. Within a year. Act Up activists and experts
Speaker 2: were regularly negotiating with the FDA and the National Institute
Speaker 2: for Health. They obviously had to keep it wasn't just
Speaker 2: like hunky dory, Everything's fine now, right. They had to
Speaker 2: keep up all this pressure in order to.
Speaker 3: Well, that's interesting. There's like such an inside outside strategy.
Speaker 3: They're like, you know, pressuring from the streets, but then
Speaker 3: also like hind closed doors, like meeting with folks, and
Speaker 3: that's you know, I'm curious about how that was all
Speaker 3: divvied up, you know, internally, but just to.
Speaker 1: Show like they had it was so clear.
Speaker 3: Obviously most a lot of spokes councils and affinity groups
Speaker 3: and all that that I've been involved in our very
Speaker 3: like broad nebulous movement, like you know, the global justice movement,
Speaker 3: or the even the anti war movement, which you could argue,
Speaker 3: I mean, even if it was very it was focused,
Speaker 3: it was still a massive issue. This is so specific
Speaker 3: and so yeah, yeah, it's interesting to see how, Yeah,
Speaker 3: when you can really hone in, you can fucking win.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. They talk a lot about like, hey, you
Speaker 2: should have and I don't think this is the only
Speaker 2: way to run a movement, but they were fairly effective
Speaker 2: with the strategy of like, come up with specific, articulable
Speaker 2: demands that are winnable and then go out and win them, right,
Speaker 2: and use that to build power, instead of using that
Speaker 2: to be like, Haha, we've won our little reform, you know,
Speaker 2: instead be like, okay, we've won that reform. Now what's next.
Speaker 2: We've gained power, you know. From nineteen eighty one to
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty six, the government spent a total of two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty million dollars on AIDS research. By nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one, when act Up was in full swing, the
Speaker 2: government was spending a billion dollars a year. And this
Speaker 2: is a direct correlation. You asked me earlier before, Well,
Speaker 2: we weren't recording whether I was gonna talk shit on
Speaker 2: Anthony Fauci, and he's one of their main targets during
Speaker 2: all of this, right, But it's like the quotes I
Speaker 2: have from him are kind of like Fauci told someone
Speaker 2: from Act Up, the more you're demonstrating, the more money
Speaker 2: I'm going to get to work with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean that, right, It's like you have This is
Speaker 3: the I think the thing that people miss is like
Speaker 3: and back to the calling in is like those folks
Speaker 3: in power you are, they are your targets. And if
Speaker 3: they are amenable targets like meaning if they're not like massive.
Speaker 3: If Fauci had been a psychotic homophobe, right, I don't
Speaker 3: think they would have gotten that funding. Right, his job
Speaker 3: would have been to deny that funding. So it matters
Speaker 3: who your targets are, even though they should still be
Speaker 3: your targets.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think it's funny. Maybe even last week or something
Speaker 2: brought up This a thing I think about all the time,
Speaker 2: Liz rent Free in my head is the art of
Speaker 2: war from a million years ago. One of the rules
Speaker 2: is don't fully surround your enemy. You have to give
Speaker 2: your enemy an out otherwise they fight to the death. Right,
Speaker 2: you need to have a way in which and I
Speaker 2: see this a lot with like other stuff where you're like,
Speaker 2: if I'm trying to convince someone to stop being transphobic,
Speaker 2: my goal is to stop them from being transphobic and
Speaker 2: not to just yell at them forever.
Speaker 1: Like you know, my goal is to have them out
Speaker 1: for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. You know, whenever people are like, ah, this
Speaker 2: person used to be a transphobe, like that rules they
Speaker 2: used to be. That's great, that's progress. You know, I
Speaker 2: used to be a transphobe. I grew up in the
Speaker 2: nineties and I was afraid of myself, Like what do
Speaker 2: you want?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: No, And I think that's the biggest critique of like
Speaker 3: left movements that every a lot of people have, which
Speaker 3: is there's not enough on ramps. There's not enough again
Speaker 3: the calling in and like it's not I think, you know,
Speaker 3: Michael Albert used to say, you know who's who wrote
Speaker 3: like what is it para con participatory economics? He's like
Speaker 3: a yeah, movement economist about like our movements aren't sticky enough,
Speaker 3: you know, like they you should want to be involved
Speaker 3: in them and rather than feeling just repelled by them
Speaker 3: or like they're totally antagonizing, and that's not to say
Speaker 3: you shouldn't be militant.
Speaker 1: Those two things are very different.
Speaker 3: No, totally.
Speaker 2: And it's actually one of the things that it's not
Speaker 2: too much in the script, but one of the things
Speaker 2: I read a bunch of times about act UP is
Speaker 2: that one of the ways in which people wanted to
Speaker 2: be part of it was that it was also a
Speaker 2: cultural thing that you go and become part of, and
Speaker 2: you are part of something and like and it's kind
Speaker 2: of ironic and interesting, like everyone's hooking up right right,
Speaker 2: you know, and everyone's like maybe yeah, hopefully yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: or you know, they're in conditions where they don't care
Speaker 2: anymore or whatever, you know, Like, but it's like, you know,
Speaker 2: they're creating an entire culture and like something that's like
Speaker 2: worth being part of. And all of their work and
Speaker 2: like this work pressuring about AIDS research. This leads directly
Speaker 2: to the development of proteas inhibitors that are now taken
Speaker 2: by millions of people worldwide. I think it's like twenty
Speaker 2: million people worldwide take this are Wow, it's not every
Speaker 2: day that you can save millions of lives. And when
Speaker 2: we come back on Wednesday, we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: a whole lot more of the specifics about all the
Speaker 2: cool shit they did, how they took on the Catholic Church,
Speaker 2: how they reinvented political art, how they developed methods of
Speaker 2: fighting burnout. I know that's not like a big sexy topic,
Speaker 2: but it is to me. And how they change the
Speaker 2: way that harm reduction works in this kind. But that's
Speaker 2: on Wednesday. There's no way you can look it up. Now,
Speaker 2: that's huge.
Speaker 1: I'm excited for Wednesday because.
Speaker 2: No one else has ever covered this story whatever anyway.
Speaker 2: But if people want to know more about what you do,
Speaker 2: how can they do that me all?
Speaker 3: You can find me on all podcasts, apps and YouTube
Speaker 3: and twitch, Habituation room at Franny Feo on YouTube and Twitch.
Speaker 3: My podcast is weekly. It's a news comedy and everything
Speaker 3: in between. And there's lots of bonus episodes, so yeah,
Speaker 3: I get at that.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah. Cool Zone Media has new podcasts out that
Speaker 2: you've probably already heard. Because if you haven't heard sixteenth
Speaker 2: Minute of Fame, I don't. I live under a rock
Speaker 2: and I've heard of it, and I've even heard of
Speaker 2: some of the topics that covers. But you can listen
Speaker 2: to sixteenth minute of Fame. It is about all the
Speaker 2: crazy memes that happen on the Internet and like what
Speaker 2: happens after the fifteen minutes of Famer up. But since
Speaker 2: it's a Jamie Loftis production, it's about that the same
Speaker 2: way that the book Raw Dog is about the history
Speaker 2: of hot dogs and what hot dogs taste the best,
Speaker 2: which is to say, it's about an awful lot more
Speaker 2: than that, and it's like super interesting. Even if I
Speaker 2: like the book Raw Dog and I'm a vegan, that's
Speaker 2: my endorsement, and so you can listen to that podcast.
Speaker 2: I have a book that is currently kickstarting, is a
Speaker 2: fiction book as a young adult book. It is called
Speaker 2: The Sapling Cage. And if you're listening to this in
Speaker 2: the future, it's not currently kickstarting, it's kickstarted. But I
Speaker 2: know it was successful because we met our funding goal
Speaker 2: within an hour, and within the first day we hit
Speaker 2: three times our funding goal, So it clearly people like it.
Speaker 2: They some of them have read it even and you
Speaker 2: could too, could go read it by backing it on
Speaker 2: Kickstarter or getting from the library or whatever method you
Speaker 2: like to use to acquire books. And that's what I
Speaker 2: gote on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Cool people who did cool Stuff is a production of
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