“ACT UP could
easily become your life,” said John Riley at a weekly ACT UP/NY meeting held
earlier this Summer on June 18th, 2012. He was talking about ACT UP when it first started in 1987,
when Americans were angry and scared, watching an incurable disease take the
lives of their friends and family.
“Meetings used to be held in Cooper Union, and up to 400 people would
go,” said Riley, who is one of the early members of ACT UP, and a co-founder of
Health GAP (Health Global Access Project http://www.healthgap.org/)
an organization that works to provide generic AIDS drugs to developing
countries.
Now, ACT UP
meetings are quite different. ACT UP, the AIDS
Coalition To Unleash Power, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals
united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis (http://www.actupny.org/).
This year, ACT UP celebrates its 25 birthday. When I went to the June 18th meeting, there were
about 20 people who eventually trickled in, mostly older, original
members. There were maybe five
other people there around my age, all from other organizations like Queerocracy
or VOCAL-NY (Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders). It seemed to me that ACT UP had
fractured and branched out into a dozen new organizations focused on different
aspects of the AIDS fight — housing, health reform, community development, and
global distribution of HIV/AIDS drugs.
Part of what made
ACT UP so powerful in the beginning years was its mass of determined
youth. Demonstrations wracked with
symbolism and anger attracted publicity, and publicity attracted the
government’s attention. Suffering
young people were uniting to demand solutions to the AIDS crisis—they wanted
cheaper healthcare for those with the disease, and since very little was known
about AIDS, ACT UP demanded government money for research. “I was HIV positive in 1981, back when
they were calling the disease GRID — Gay-Related Immune Deficiency,” said Eric
Sawyer, one of the founders of the ACT UP, and a co-founder of Housing Works
and Health GAP.
We now know that HIV does not only
affect Gay men, but in 1987 it did not matter what the disease was called
because thousands of people were dying from a disease that might be curable, if the government would only listen. “Every other
week there were obituaries read out during the general meetings—obituaries of
members who had just died from AIDS,” Riley remembers.
Where has ACT UP gone? That is a
question Larry Kramer asks in his article in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-kramer/act-up_b_1382314.html ) called
“Happy Birthday, ACT UP, wherever you are.” Kramer is a founding member of both
ACT UP and GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), but in his recent article, he
wonders what and where ACT UP is today, and talks about the organization as if
it only exists in the past. According to Kramer, ACT UP was started by “a bunch
of terrified kids,” but it’s thanks to those scared young activists that those
diagnosed with HIV over 25 years ago are still alive and well today.
Today, the fight
against AIDS suffers from apathy because we have medications that can extend
the life of a person with HIV to its natural length. We know how HIV is transmitted, and how to prevent the
spread of HIV. Indeed the United
State has not only made pharmaceutical advances, but also political advances.
This July, Washington DC hosted the International AIDS Conference after
twenty-two years of not allowing people with HIV to enter the country. Today that law is no longer in
existence, but there are still policies in this country that feed
discrimination or prevent those infected with HIV from receiving the highest
level of medical care.
At the Convention
in Washington DC, protesters gathered to object to the current United States
ban on the entry of sex workers and drug users into the country. As these two populations are among the
highest risk groups for contracting AIDS, many protesters felt that to ignore
these populations is discrimination, and it is a human rights violation to
prevent them from receiving necessary medical attention. Those who showed up to the protest were
not explicitly representing ACT UP, but it did not go unmentioned that this
tradition of protest is mainly thanks to the original organizations that set
precedents for how to object and how to draw media attention to an important
issue. According to an article in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/blog/169029/protest-greets-international-aids-conference-dc ),
protesters chanted “No
sex workers? No drug users? No IAC!” near the place where the conference was
taking place.
As the father of the branch organizations that
demonstrated at the International AIDS Conference, ACT UP—and specifically ACT
UP/NY—was also getting ready for its time in the spotlight. When I attended the general meeting in
early July, ACT UP/NY was planning to join forces with Occupy Wall Street to
campaign for the Robin Hood Tax.
This tax is something a
coalition of forces around the world, including ACT UP/NY, conceived to solve
many issues with one tax on government and big business practices such as
currency and stock exchanges. The
idea of the Robin Hood Tax, or the Financial Transaction Tax, was brought to
OWS where young and angry people began to rally support for the tax that will
raise money for poverty reduction, green energy implementation in developing
countries, and AIDS and healthcare coverage in the United States. OWS started in much the same way as
ACT UP/NY; both were formed by young people who were
frustrated with the government, and both started on Wall Street (the site of
ACT UP’s first New York protest). This must be the sort of thing that Larry Kramer is
looking for. ACT UP is still
fighting and protesting with OWS and other AIDS activism organizations.
At the ACT
UP/NY meeting, plans to protest HIV criminalization during the Gay Pride march
were discussed. “We now have the history of 25 years of activism, and we know
now what to expect,” said Sawyer after the meeting, when I learned a few of ACT
UP’s current goals: decriminalization of HIV and financial propositions like
the Robin Hood Tax. Individual members of ACT UP had their own goals for the
future of AIDS reform, and many have devoted their careers to AIDS activism.
Sawyer, who now works at UNAIDS said “It’s not fair that I can buy thirty years
of life while people in the developing world die within two years of receiving
diagnosis.” Riley, Health GAP co-founder, also stated his goal that generic
AIDS drugs will one day be available to people in developing counties as well
as those with money in developed areas like the United States and Europe.
ACT UP is not gone. The size
and goals of the organization has changed, but as long as people are willing to
fight for the cause, ACT UP will continue to affect change for another 25
years. By sharing goals and ideas with other activism groups today, ACT UP will
be able to share its wisdom and knowledge of how to unite a group of people to
affect social and political change.
--Virginia Marshall
GET DOWN Youth Blogger
@vrosemarshall
virginiarosemarshall@college.harvard.edu
