ACT UP

Identification Grassroots activist group committed to direct-action protests to demand increased resources for fighting AIDS

Date Founded in 1987

ACT UP’s primary goal was to protest the difficulty of gaining access to experimental drugs, the high cost of the few AIDS treatments then available, and the lack of a coherent national policy initiative to fight the disease. The group became most famous for its tactics, however, which emphasized confrontation and a refusal to be ignored.

Probably best known for slowing down Wall Street in the year of its formation, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) is a political activist group that began in New York City. In 1987, the year the group was formed, public awareness of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the country largely took the form of paranoia. People living with AIDS had few advocates. New treatment drugs were costly to develop, and drug manufacturers charged outrageous fees to sell their products, making it impossible for most AIDS sufferers to hope for an available cure. Doctors treating these patients had little access to the drugs, and only a few individual voices challenged the manufacturers’ authority.

Larry Kramer and the Call to Action

One of those voices, Larry Kramer’s, had long been active in the fight for AIDS awareness. Born in 1935, Kramer began his career as a screenwriter. However, with the gay liberation movement in the 1970’s, Kramer’s explorations of his own homosexuality came to the forefront of his writing. His novel Faggots, published in 1978, examined gay male lifestyles from the perspective of an insider, but with scathing humor that elicited ire from the gay community. Kramer was among the first to recognize the devastating effect of AIDS on gay men and to call for increased government funding and better media coverage of the disease, as well as improved treatment of patients. However, his position was not given high esteem because of the general attitude toward his novel, which in time would, like Kramer himself, gain deserved respect. In 1982, he and several friends formed Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) to help AIDS sufferers. However, Kramer’s outspoken political positions soon put him on the outs with the rest of the group’s board, and he resigned in 1983.

Kramer continued speaking and writing about the impact of AIDS on the gay community, and by 1987, he was as well known for his anger as for his activism. On March 10, 1987, he was invited to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. He took advantage of the speech to urge others to very specific political action. He asked the audience if they were as frustrated as he was by the lack of progress toward a cure for AIDS and by the trouble doctors were having obtaining new AIDS drugs. He asked for interested parties to join him to form a political activist group. He received a resoundingly positive response, and the resulting organization became known as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP/New York for short. Branches formed throughout the country, indeed throughout the world, in the following months and years.

Activities in the 1980’s

ACT UP did not waste any time in establishing itself as a strong voice in AIDS activism. Within two weeks of its formation, the group already had a specific political goal and a method of broadcasting its message. On March 24, 1987, 250 members gathered on Wall Street’s trading floor with the intent of delaying the opening bell of the stock exchange. Their message was simple. They felt Burroughs Wellcome, manufacturer of the new AIDS treatment drug azidothymidine (AZT), was charging too much for its medication, with prices around ten thousand dollars per patient annually. They were particularly incensed because, though AZT was new to the market, some of the research behind it came out of federally funded studies dating back to the 1960’s. ACT UP’s campaign was successful. Seventeen ACT UP members were arrested, and Wall Street had to push back the opening of the day’s trading, garnering huge publicity.

The next month, ACT UP took advantage of the standard media coverage of last-minute tax filers on April 15 by staging a protest at the New York City general post office. The news crews came to film down-to-the-wire filers, guaranteeing attention for ACT UP’s cause as well. It was at this protest that the motto “Silence = Death,” still associated with ACT UP, first appeared.

In 1988, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article about AIDS that implied the disease was virtually impossible to transmit via heterosexual sex, and ACT UP had another significant goal. The ensuing protest was organized by women involved with ACT UP, and the group staged protests outside the offices of the Hearst Corporation, Cosmopolitan’s parent company, leading to mainstream media coverage of the article’s inaccuracies. Cosmopolitan eventually issued a partial retraction.

Impact

Besides having a very specific impact on the prices of AIDS drugs, which, though still quite high, have been lowered since the 1980’s, ACT UP represented a new kind of militant activism. It went beyond the civil disobedience tactics of its 1970’s forerunners in the gay liberation movement to incorporate a more sophisticated understanding of mainstream media practices, which were more than capable of blunting the efficacy of 1960’s and 1970’s style protests. The group’s militant approach, which embraced almost any action that would generate publicity for its cause, alienated some potential supporters, who did not always believe that the ends justified the means. However, ACT UP consistently received the news coverage it sought in the late 1980’s. As a result, the group not only spurred a new age of AIDS awareness but also spawned numerous splinter groups—both within the gay liberation movement and in other grassroots movements—that used similar tactics to achieve success.

Bibliography

Cohen, Peter F. Love and Anger: Essays on AIDS, Activism, and Politics. New York: Haworth, 1998. Examines literary works surrounding AIDS activism and includes several scholarly fictional works alongside interviews with activists to broaden readers’ understanding of AIDS activism.

Hubbard, Jim, and Sarah Schulman. ACT UP Oral History Project. http://www.actuporalhistory.org/index1.html. 2003-present. Interviews with the surviving members of the original ACT UP/New York designed to encourage other activists by demonstrating effective tactics to bring about change.

Kramer, Larry. Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Autobiographical reflections from the founder of ACT UP. Kramer’s political activities prior to founding ACT UP were central in creating in him an activist who was willing to challenge popular notions.

Shepard, Benjamin Heim, and Ronald Hayduk, eds. From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization . New York: Verso, 2002. A study of militant activism including the tactics used by ACT UP’s founders and discussions of some of the associated breakaway groups.