<nettime> What ACT UP’s successes can teach today’s protest movements

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

This is article and book is a great reminder of the amazing ACT UP 
movement . Attending their meetings in Cooper Union in the early 90s was 
one of the most memorable moments of my life. It had impact on the fight 
against AIDS it also changed people's ideas about everything that 
activism could be.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/08/act-up-protest-movements-us-direct-action

What ACT UP’s successes can teach today’s protest movements
Sarah Schulman

Our group, which forced the US to step up in fighting Aids in the 80s 
and 90s, favoured direct action over debate

As we move into a new phase of the Covid crisis, it is hard to miss how 
the pandemic reveals the fissures in our society. Communities and 
countries of poor people of colour cannot access vaccines that are 
readily available to the most powerful and protected. Covid has been 
compared to Aids, but today’s pandemic is a collective public experience 
while Aids – especially during its height – was a private nightmare. Our 
group, ACT UP, fought to get it out into the public consciousness.

Five years after science first noticed the pattern of illness that would 
come to be known as Aids, 40,000 people were dead in the United States 
and the government and pharmaceutical companies were doing nothing. ACT 
UP (The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in 1987 to use 
direct action to end the Aids pandemic. I was an active member of this 
grassroots political organisation, having covered the crisis as a 
journalist in New York since the early 80s. In many ways, Aids activism 
was one of the most successful social movements in recent history.

In its first six years of existence, ACT UP transformed how 
pharmaceutical companies approached Aids medications by pushing for the 
use of unregulated treatments, and forced the government to make 
experimental drugs available to people who needed them. ACT UP won huge 
victories for women and poor people when we forced authorities to make 
needle exchange legal in New York City. ACT UP fought for four years to 
expand the government’s definition of Aids to include women’s symptoms, 
so that women could also qualify for benefits and get access to 
experimental treatments. ACT UP confronted the Catholic church when it 
tried to stop condom distribution in public schools, started housing for 
homeless people with Aids, and transformed how queer people and people 
with Aids were depicted in the media.

I was a rank-and-file member, attending the major actions, going to 
meetings, living inside the group’s counter culture, and getting 
arrested twice: first at “Trumpsgiving” where we sat in at Trump Towers 
demanding housing for homeless people with Aids, and then on the “Day of 
Desperation” when ACT UP protested against the first Gulf war by 
occupying Grand Central Station and interrupting television news 
programmes, chanting: “Fight Aids, not Arabs.” Although I was an 
experienced activist from the women’s reproductive rights movement of 
the 1970s and 80s, I had never been in an organisation with so many 
resources, that was able to be so optimally effective, determining our 
agenda by making the needs of people with Aids its central drive.

It is very difficult to access activist histories, and that is why my 
new book, Let the Record Show, is not rooted in nostalgia. Instead I 
interviewed 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years and collated 
the most important strategies and tactics, many of which can be of use 
today.

The biggest takeaways for today’s protest movements from ACT UP’s legacy 
are: it was not a consensus-based movement, not everyone had to agree on 
a strategy or action; a direct action movement, the needs of its members 
determined its agenda; while sectional interests were not allowed to get 
in the way of the aims of the organisation. ACT UP was solution-focused 
in its approach; eschewed corporate and government funding and raised 
its money primarily through community-based fundraising such as selling 
highly creative T-shirts and visual artwork. We were not afraid to 
proactively challenge the institutions comprising the power structure it 
fought against.

There was no time for theoretical debate. As one of the leaders, Maxine 
Wolfe, would often say: theory “emerged” from action. As ACT UP moved 
forward with a campaign, questions would emerge about how to do the 
action, and that is when people’s values would cohere. But there was no 
time wasted on debate that had no real-world application. To this end, 
women and people of colour in ACT UP did not stop the action to do 
“consciousness raising” for men or white people on sexism and racism. 
After all, you can spend your life trying to change one person and fail. 
Instead, they marshalled the ample resources of the larger organisation 
to run campaigns that benefited women and people of colour with HIV.

Decisions did not have to be unanimous and people did not have to agree. 
There was a one-line principle of unity: “Direct action to end the Aids 
crisis.” So if members wanted to do direct action (as opposed to social 
service positions, such as caring for those dying from Aids) they could. 
There was no effort to force the entire organisation to agree on one 
strategy or analysis. As a direct action movement, ACT UP was an 
organisation of and for people with Aids.

ACT UP created the solutions. Instead of being in an infantilised 
relationship to the powers that be, asking them to solve the problems, 
ACT UP became the experts on their issues, creating reasonable, winnable 
and doable solutions. ACT UP then presented them to the authorities. 
When those in power refused change, ACT UP would do what Martin Luther 
King called “self-purification”, or what ACT UP called “non-violent 
civil disobedience training”: a process of questioning moral strength 
and whether we could withstand the violence being inflicted without 
retaliating. We would then do non-violent creative direct action, to 
communicate through the media (not to the media) to pressure the 
institutions to change.

The organisation was not afraid of alienating institutions of power and 
was happy to fight across borders. We directly confronted the Catholic 
church by interrupting mass. We took on the New York Times (which ACT UP 
called “the New York Crimes”), the art world (taking visual art out of 
the galleries and into public space), the US government, and private 
pharmaceutical companies. ACT UP stood with Haitian refugees when the US 
did not want Black immigrants, and fought for HIV-positive people in 
Puerto Rico.

Today, America’s political movements against police violence, for Black 
lives, for immigration reform and for Palestine solidarity all have 
openly queer and trans people in leadership. Queer, trans and people 
with Aids are no longer forced into an LGBT-only context. Let’s use this 
new landscape to build a radical democracy, big tent movement where 
like-minded people can build effective campaigns around creative 
solutions, and stand shoulder to shoulder without demanding conformity 
and forced agreement. Let the needs of those most in danger set the 
agenda and lead the way.

    Sarah Schulman is a writer and activist. Her latest book, Let the 
Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York, 1987-1993, is out 
now


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