Activists in memoriam

>>Veteran AIDS warrior Sarah Schulman remembers fighters passed with the
ACT UP Oral History Project

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

By the time Ronald Reagan first mentioned AIDS, in May 1987, over 36,000 Americans had contracted the disease and over 20,000 had died. Two months before, a group of gay and lesbian activists in New York City had decided that they’d had enough of government inaction on the spreading epidemic, first detected in 1981, and dedicated their new group, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) to raising the issue by, essentially, raising hell. Over the next few years, ACT UP members would occupy the New York Stock Exchange, Grand Central Station, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, protest Cosmo magazine and disrupt Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News, among hundreds of other actions.

Sadly, however, many of those original protesters are now dead. But not forgotten. Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, two early AIDS activists, are working on the ACT UP Oral History Project, involving thousands of hours of interviews and archival footage available online, at libraries in New York and San Francisco and ultimately, in a few years, a feature documentary, to be titled United in Anger. Schulman will be in Montreal on Thursday, March 1, to talk about the project as part of Concordia’s HIV/AIDS Lecture Series.

There’s been a lot of progress since the dark days of the ’80s, of course, but Schulman says that in other ways, the situation today is even worse. “Homophobia is more vicious now,” she says over the phone from New York. Twenty-five years ago, far fewer people knew anyone who was openly gay, much less were friends with them. “Today, most people know someone who is gay, and to be anti-gay today is much more hurtful. And Americans are willing to elect people who would deny basic human rights to the gay community. Not a single presidential candidate is willing to endorse it.”

Schulman refers to the Bush Junior years as a “new Victorian era,” in which open, frank and honest discussion of sex and sexuality is discouraged. It’s also one of stultifying conformity, which has, if anything, drained the once-vital energy of the underground gay community by promising material gains and borderline acceptance into the mainstream, she says.

“Gay culture was an entire world that existed under the radar, with millions of people around the world interacting with each other,” she says. Literature, film, art, nightlife, code words—all were common points of cultural reference in the international gay community. “You could go anywhere in the world and have common points you could discuss. Now, gays are giving up that collective relationship and are imitating the straight community. I consider it a devolution. We’re giving up this rich tradition of a collective community.”

The collective community is still alive, if battered. Schulman says that transcripts from the Oral History Project have been downloaded by the thousands in places like Eastern Europe and Asia, to be used as how-to guides by community groups abroad for organization and activism tips. That often means getting in the face of the authorities, Schulman says, and long years of opposition.

“Our job was not to be liked,” she says. “Our job was to force society to change against its will. If you want to be liked, you’ll never get anything done because people in the dominant position never give up their dominance unless they’re pushed.”