Flashback Friday Remembers the Birth of Act Up

We are into the fifth decade of the AIDS crisis. Let that sink in. And one could argue it's the sixth decade if you go back to when some believe it first started to make headway in the population, in the late 70s. And yes, it is still a crisis. Advancements in drugs and treatments have prolonged lives and made viral loads undetectable, to be sure, but with new legislation making its way in Florida to bar HIV and AIDS drugs and treatments from Medicare and Medicaid recipients, while, remarkably, some are saying this could start a new wave of AIDS deaths for a new generation. Additionally, HIV infections are creeping up in some areas. It was March 12th, 1987, when ACT UP was formed after a fiery speech by activist and playwright Larry Kramer to New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center on March 10th. Two days later, Act Up was born.

Act Up, The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, was a loosely organized ensemble of angry people affected by the crisis, who stood outside the margins of centralized power, struggling for a voice for the dying. Kramer's speech on that fateful day was in response to what he felt was ineffectual leadership and focus at GMHC, the Gay Men's Health Crisis, which he cofounded in 1982. He felt they didn't have the anger and fire in their bellies anymore to get the work done that was so desperately needed. Kramer's main propulsion was his anger at the Reagan administration for dragging their feet in response to the growing number of dead and dying, and at the gay community for what he felt was acquiescence to the systemic bigotry and playing it too safe. He believed you can't make real change by asking nicely.

In addition to direct action and protests, ACT UP also worked to speed up medical research, get faster and better medical treatment, advocate for the communities affected, and work to change legislation and public policies. In October 1987, the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was held. It was there that ACT UP made its debut on the national stage, with civil disobedience acts at the Supreme Court. Participants in these rallies and protests would return to their homes and form their own local chapters in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Rhode Island, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and then spread internationally.

Demonstrations were held on Wall Street and at the NY Stock Exchange to protest the costs of healthcare for AIDS patients, especially the staggering 10K/year cost of the only available drug, AZT.

A protest at the NY General Post Office on April 15th, 1987, was the first time we started to see the famous SILENCE = DEATH imagery with the right-side up pink triangle. This connected Kramer's belief that the AIDS crisis was our contemporary holocaust; gay men in the German camps wore upside-down pink triangles. This also displayed ACT UP's media savvy, as they knew television cameras would be present to do soft news coverage of down-to-the-wire tax filers at the post office. They knew they'd get the press coverage.

In January 1988, we saw for the first time mostly female ACT UP members protesting in front of the offices of Cosmopolitan magazine for the refusal to print an apology and retraction by psychiatrist Robert E. Gould, for his medically and scientifically erroneous article "Reassuring News About AIDS: A Doctor Tells Why You May Not Be At Risk," in which he argued for straight men and women "with clean genitals," men could not transmit HIV to women.

The October 11th, 1988, protest of the FDA against their slow and ineffectual response to drug approvals and manufacturing was the largest mass protest since the Vietnam War. Large-scale visibility and, basically, fucking shit up and getting arrested was the point. The result of this and other such actions marked just how well researched and educated ACT UP and the gay community in general were becoming about the minutiae of details of how medical research and drug companies actually worked. As they said at the time, "The success of SEIZE CONTROL OF THE FDA can perhaps best be measured by what ensued in the year following the action. Government agencies dealing with AIDS, particularly the FDA and NIH, began to listen to us, to include us in decision-making, even to ask for our input."

A popular form of protest that emerged was the "die-in."

Countless other large acts of civil disobedience, and some not so civil, took place over the ensuing years. The protest against Cardinal John Joseph O'Connor of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the church's stand against, well, anything related to sex, resulted in the takeover of St Patrick's Cathedral on December 10, 1989, in which hundreds of protesters inside and out chained themselves to parts of the church, did a "die-in" down the ailes, shouted and blew whistles to drown out the still-preching O'Connor, and "desecrating" the communion host.

Kramer felt that one of their largest and most successful was the storming of the National Institutes of Health, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. They were rallying against what they felt was too slow a response to medical needs. Fauci would later commend Kramer's actions to spur people to action, saying, "There was medicine before Larry Kramer, and there's medicine after Larry Kramer."

Larry Kramer died in 2020. His 1985 play, the searing and powerful The Normal Heart, is still produced around the world and on Braodway and, with a contemporary film version.

The AIDS crisis is not over. The lack of medical care for the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities is not over. ACT UP is still active and still fighting the good fight.

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