The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Vaccinated Day at the Ballpark, and Sarah Schulman on ACT-UP

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

The staff writer Patricia Marx checks out the new vaccinated sections at New York’s Major League Baseball parks. The author and activist Sarah Schulman talks with David Remnick about her new book on the early years of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The group’s radical tactics forced changes in government policy and transformed how America saw gay people and AIDS patients. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. All right. What's wrong? Well, you're in the mask. So that's going to be... What do you mean in the mask? The microphone is underneath the mask. There's no microphone?

Yeah, there's a microphone right here. Oh, okay. Yeah. So what do you want me to be doing? So take the mask off. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. So let's do the mask first, and then we'll put the earbuds in.

I put the mask on first. Yes. We get to take it out of here. It's so hard to be a reporter. And then take this off here. Okay. So let's just mask on. The other day, Patricia Marks got suited up by her producer, Stephen Valentino.

And Patty and Stephen headed out to City Field to see the Mets take on the Colorado Rockies. Okay, so we're... Are you sure we're heading in the right place? Yeah. It's like we're heading somewhere that we're advertising discount mufflers. It wasn't just any game. This was the first game. of the season with a vaccinated seating section where you could sit in a big group of your friends

and yell and cheer and chant and curse, just like the days of York. And Patty was psyched. So finally, after about 263 years, I was going to get to go to a baseball game and sit in the vaccinated section at City Field. Okay, so we should get our vaccine cards. and our IDs and our tickets. And now, of course, we have to find our seats. We pretty much took everything except a hot air balloon to get to the stratosphere where our seats in Section 534 were. It's probably unfashionable to say, but I love baseball.

I love baseball for all the reasons. Most people hate baseball. I love that it's so slow. It's like life that way. When you go to the restroom and you come back, you don't say what happened, because you know you'll figure it out eventually. And it may not matter in the long run anyway. I have loved baseball ever since I was a kid and used to go to Phillies games with my father. and every night when he came back from work,

I would practice my pitching with him because I was determined to be a pitcher for the Phillies. Well, this is our first game of the season, and I haven't been to a game for, in fact, a couple of years, and I'm amazed at how few people are here. It's the first game where vaccinated, unvaccinated people can come. Were you surprised? Yeah, this is our first game, too, back for a long time.

I thought the vaccinated section would have more people, for sure. We actually tried to get tickets today, and we were having trouble getting tickets, and I don't understand why. It's too. Maybe they should be a little more welcoming. Yeah. It's... We have the whole section to ourselves.

We could sit wherever we want. You'd think that they would sort of favor us. I actually said I thought that. the vaccinated people should get better seats instead of way up top where we are. On top of nobody there, it was fucking freezing. It was like the ambience on top of Mount Everest. What do you think it says about the world reopening that we're here? I think that it's very curious that the world is reopening and nobody

came. I think that maybe people, oh, somebody tried to get a, well, somebody meaning a Met, I guess a Met. That's a Met. It's really hard to tell the difference up here. But a Met tried to catch a foul ball and he fell into the stands. And I, yeah, what's the, I, I was expecting a big draw. I mean, New York is reopened. We have a, I think a lot of people too. It's really, exciting that we're allowed to be with other people and watch baseball and the Mets are doing really well. They're in first place. Maybe people don't like winners. I don't know. But they could be watching the Colorado Rockies or losers, so there's a little bit for everybody. You do feel like a sucker for being here. I mean, this is kind of sad. Kinda. Why did you put kind in front of that? This is very sad.

It's a Tuesday night. Clearly something else... It's a Monday night. A Monday night. Something else better is happening. There must be a special at the supermarket, at Morton Williams, on chicken thighs or something. Which, you know, that sounds kind of fun compared to this.

All right, and I'm not proud of this, but at the end of the fourth inning, I left. And it turns out I was right. The Mets lost three to two. We'll make this work, okay? Okay. Goodbye. Okay, thanks about it.

This is 161st Street, Yankee Stadium. So, the Mets game wasn't the only game in town. We also went to a Yankees game. We were in the unvaccinated section this time. and in this section we had to socially distance, which turns out it was quite nice. It was like going business class. Where are our seats?

Okay. Where are we seven? Now, to me, the Yankees are Pfizer, and the Mets are Moderna. And the Yankees were going to play the white socks, who are, of course, bleach. Who rose behind? the loudest person in America.

We are in a section that is as high as you can get without being on the roof. And when I say hi, I don't mean performance-enhancing drugs. And yet, it is still, even from miles above the field, it's gorgeous. Oh, wait a minute. Wait, okay. Did he get tagged out? He must have. They'd be cheering.

Two outs. Two outs. Well, the guy running home got tagged out. Oh, gosh. That's bad. Oh, see, I know we were going to have bases loaded, but we don't. Okay. No.

Two out. There was a Fellini-esque quality to the night, too, which was that at some point, Stephen and I noticed that the stadium was filling up with young people in, say, their 20s who were all wearing purple graduation gowns and mortar boards. Thank you for being so conveniently located to us. Could you tell me why you're here and did you graduate today or do you just love wearing the gown?

On the first day of freshman year, we were told that we would be graduating here at Yankee's Stadium last Wednesday. So we figured we'd come to Yankee in our attire anyways and have a good time. How was your last year being there but not there? It wasn't the same. The city was empty for most of the year. The professors did a good job for the most part, but it didn't really capture the full college experience.

Yeah, with that being said, we got some really cool opportunities that we wouldn't have. We got to climb the Wall Street Bowl and ride that. We got to swim in the fountains. There were so many things we could do because there were no people. Until the ninth inning, the game was good, but you had to be kind of an expert to appreciate it, because what was good was the pitching. So it was a tied game one-to-one at the top of the ninth. The White Sox come up.

They get two hits. There's a man on first and a man on second, and... Grounded to third. There's one. There's two. Full play to get out of the jam. And the bottom of the ninth was wonderful. Aaron Judge hits a single.

Giorchalit hits another single. Now there's a guy on first and a guy on second. Labor Torres, who has just returned from having been sidelined because of COVID, is up to bat. He hits a grounder past the shortstop, into left field. Judge rounds third. there's chaos, and he beats the ball to the plate, and the Yankees win. A good day at the ballpark for Patricia Mark. She's a longtime staff writer.

Stephen Valentino is one of our producers. That was exciting, and I'm not just saying that because I've been locked up for 14 months. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This is the first weekend of Pride Month, and we're joined now by an important figure of queer history. Sarah Schulman is a writer, the author of 10 or more novels, but she's better known as an activist. She fought for reproductive rights and gay rights, and she was a member of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition, to unleash power. For 20 years, Sarah Schulman has run the Act Up Oral History Project, along with Jim Hubbard, and they've interviewed surviving members of the group.

And out of that work, she's written a history of ACT-Up in its early days when they employed radical tactics to force America to acknowledge at last the disease as a public health crisis. Well, here's an example. So I participated in Stop the Church. This is when the church tried to stop condom distribution in the public schools, and Actup decided to disrupt Mass. This was in December of 1989. We had a big discussion inside the organization of how are we going to organize this. Now, I think Actup was primarily Catholic and Jewish, but there were Protestants, and they were concerned about the organization looking anti-Catholic. The Jews and the Catholics were not concerned about that at all.

But so the compromise was that we were going to do a silent die-in during Mass. And so we went into the church. There were 7,000 people outside. It was Actup's largest demonstration. And we were ready to do the silent dion when one member, Michael Petrellus, jumped on the pew and started screaming at Cardo O'Connor. You're killing us. You're killing us. Stop it. Stop it. And all pandemonium broke loose and the police were everywhere. People were screaming and

throwing things. And it was crazy and a bunch of people got arrested. Sarah, I have a pretty clear memory of ACT UP as anybody of a certain age might. What was ACT UP and what role did it play in the politics of AIDS? So just to give a little background, there's a famous New York Times article, July 3rd, 1981, 41 cases of cancer found among homosexuals in San Francisco. So that was the public donning of the disease. Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study, which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer. The scientists say this probably means they are dealing with some new, deadly, sexually transmitted disease.

The first five years of AIDS in America were extremely chaotic. 40,000 people died. The government did absolutely nothing. It's known as gay plague. No, it is. I mean, it's a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died, and I wondered if the president is aware of it. I don't have it, or you?

Do you? You don't have it. Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry. Do you? You didn't answer my question. How do you know? Does the President, in the words, the White House looks on this as a great joke? No, I don't know anything about it, Lester.

Does the President, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry? I don't think so. I don't think there's been any. There's been no personal experience here, Lester. No, I mean, I thought you were. I checked thoroughly with Dr. Rugi this morning, and he's had no, no patient. suffered from AIDS or whatever it is. So that's Larry Speaks, President Reagan's press secretary in 1982,

early in the crisis, making jokes, and it's really startling to hear it now. Yeah. Within the gay community, there was a lot of chaos, and most of the organizations that were created at first were service organizations, but there was no political response. Finally, in 1987, Act Up began. What would you say were its main victim, victories and achievements. So Actup forced science and pharma to restructure. Actup forced the food and drug

administration to give people access to experimental drugs that had not been approved. Actup forced the government to change its definition of AIDS so that symptoms that only women got would be included. This was a four-year campaign. Women with AIDS could not get benefits and could not get access to experimental drug trials until ActUp's campaign. Actup made needle exchange legal in New York City, which transformed the crisis in the city. And in a very large sense, Actup changed the way that queer people and people with AIDS saw themselves and were seen by others. Because before Act Up, the only image of people with AIDS in the media were emaciated,

weak people dying in their beds. I would ask you this. Actup started to conceive itself. Did it base its voice, did it base its sense of organization on any other political group of the past, whether it was in racial politics, whether it was in any realm of politics before? Not consciously. And that's something that's very interesting. So there were individuals in Actup who had been in previous movements, in the Black Panthers, certainly in the reproductive rights. rights movement in Latin American anti-fascist student movements. And they brought strategies and tactics

from those movements. And in the book, I can name who these people are and which tactics they brought in. But there was a larger zeitgeist issue of influence. So I was born in the 1950s that a lot of people in Act Up were born in the 50s and 60s. So when we were queer children, we had no concept that there was a gay community waiting for us out there or a gay movement. But we did see black resistance. You know, we saw images of black people on television and Life magazine and Jet Magazine. A number of people's families participated in those movements. And they were doing nonviolent direct action. Famously, black students sitting in at segregated lunch counters, this sort of thing. And I think that young gay kids really identified with these images of

resistance and internalized these tactics. Because later, when I was working on the book, I re-werectures. read Dr. King's letter from Birmingham jail, where he lays out his definition of direct action, and it is almost identically what Act Up did, although we never acknowledged it at the time. So it was something that I think our generation had internalized. You try to complicate, and I think quite successfully, complicate the picture of what was happening in terms of AIDS, that this was not only white gay men who were at the forefront of Actup for so long. Well, what's interesting is that, you know, in America, we love the white male hero.

We love John Wayne, and we're always looking for that single person to come rescue us. So the history of Act Up has been very narrowed to just a handful of white male individuals who have been presented as the heroes. But actually, there were wide range of people, many other kinds of white men, and also people of color and many women in ActUp who were in leadership, who drove the organization. forward. The reason that they were not represented is quite interesting. In the 1980s, the media was entirely white and male. There was no Joy Reid, no Rachel Maddow at the time. The government was white male. The private sector was white and male. And if there were gay men in those power apparatuses, they were closeted. Sarah, I think one figure that we should talk about was Larry Kramer, are playwright, novelist, and a leader of ACT UP,

and probably at least in some tellings of history of ACT UP and the broader gay movement, that the confrontation between, say, Larry Kramer and one Tony Fauci was something that was pivotal. You are not easy on Larry Kramer in your book. Why is that? Well, you know, I interviewed 188 surviving members of Act Up and not one person thinks that Larry Kramer was the leader of Act Up.

So Larry being constructed as the leader of Act Up is a media construction. Fauci, this is quite interesting because I submitted the manuscript before the second coming of Anthony Fauci. And so he really wasn't in my mind when I was organizing it. But looking back, you can see in the book that every time an innovative idea came out of Act Up that was presented to Fauci, he said no. And Fauci was what at that time? What were was he playing in the medical bureaucracy? Same job he has now. So, you know, Richard Ellovich, who was a leader

in act up of IV drug users, he confronted Fauci about drug users being excluded from experimental drug trials, and Fauci said that they shouldn't be included because they were not a reliable community. And Richard was like, no, you cannot exclude an entire class of people. But didn't Fauci have a kind of conversion experience

to some extent? He was forced to change, act up, did huge demonstration surrounding the NIH. This is an acyclivir molecule. It's representing that there's treatments out there that the NIH isn't testing. They're not testing high doses of acyclivir as prophylase against CMV.

I mean, he really was an object of ACTUP's ire, and he ultimately realized that he needed to work with that. But isn't that what activism should do? In other words, to push someone to the point where they change and are able to then affect change within the bureaucracy. Hopefully, but then there are people who understand from the beginning. I'm thinking of Ruth Messinger, for example, who almost became our mayor at one point.

Ruth Messenger didn't have power the way Fauci did. Or to say nothing of Ronald Reagan is what I'm suggesting. I'm not excusing Fauci's behavior in the beginning, but he had power to affect change and act up was incredibly effective in pushing him toward it. Yes, I'm not attacking him nor excusing him. I'm just reporting that he was. resistant to innovative ideas and had to be brought around. Tell me a little bit about how you feel about Angels in America, the play by Tony Kushner,

which had an incredible following, highly celebrated, and I think you have critical things to say about Tony Kushner and angels. Well, you know, we have to look at the most rewarded works about AIDS in our time and what their message is. and what is the source of the reward with those pieces? And I look at a few different works. I look at the movie Philadelphia by Jonathan Demi, which won an Oscar, which had a story of a gay man with AIDS who needs a lawyer. So he goes to a homophobic lawyer played by Denzel. And then Denzel heroically overcomes his prejudices to help the poor alone gay man.

In real life, he would have gone to a gay lawyer. But the conceit of the film is that there are no gay lawyers and there is no gay community and gay people are dependent on straight people. And in Angels in America, there's a similar construction where a man abandons his boyfriend who has AIDS, which I can tell you almost never happened. I mean, the people who were abandoned where people with AIDS were abandoned by their families. That was the abandonment. But in Angels, so the treacherous betraying homosexual abandons his,

partner and this was something that people, the public or the reward system loved and upheld and did not question. Did you, you interviewed so many people for your book, did you talk at all with Tony Kushner? He was not in act up, but I did interview Stephen Spinella, who was an act up activist and I asked him some questions about this. Who was Stephen Spinella? Oh, he played prior Walter, he won a Tony, I think two maybe, for that play. And I asked him about this representation of gay people as abandoning and treacherous and betraying and there being no gay community and no support for people with AIDS as there was in real life. And he said he hadn't really thought about it. Sarah, your book is not only history. It's also in some sense a tactical guide

to activism today. What lessons do you think that the history of Act Up and you're involved in Act Up gives us today in terms of contemporary movements. The takeaways from Act Up are very important for movements today. I think the most important is that Act Up was not a consensus-based movement. People did not have to agree in order for actions to go forward. There was a one-line principle of unity, direct action to end the AIDS crisis, and that was direct action as opposed to social service provision. So if you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, you could do it.

And if I didn't like it, I might argue with you, but I wouldn't try to stop you from doing it. I just wouldn't do it. And I would go off with my people and organize what we wanted to do. And as a result, the wide range of action and the different milieu and levels at which ActUp responded was so broad that it created a kind of simultaneity of response. And that was a great contributor to the paradigm shift. So I think the big message is radical democracy, inside your organizations, big tent politics, and the kind of movements that enable people to respond from where they're at in a way that makes sense to them.

You know, I think that act up really was the most recent successful social movement in America. And it wasn't entirely successful, but it did achieve a paradigm shift. And that's why this book is not nostalgia, but it's actually something that can be helpful to activists today because getting information about strategies and tactics of movements is very, very difficult to do. What mistakes did the organization make? I think Actup's biggest mistake was that we lost track of the question of access.

And in fact, today... What do you mean by that? Well, the drugs that, if you are infected with HIV, today, the drugs exist that you can live a normal lifespan. However, not everyone has access to those drugs. We still see people dying of AIDS. We still see people who are not diagnosed until they get into the emergency room. Linda Villarosa, the reporter for the New York Times,

showed that today, black gay men in the U.S. South, have a higher rate of AIDS infection than any country in the world. So even though we could defeat HIV in a sense, we could not defeat capitalism. And we still don't have a logical and coherent healthcare system in this country. If you could go back to the early 90s when you were fighting with ACT UP and leave a voice message for the young queer person growing up in New York City today or anywhere else on the other side of medicine for HIV, what would you tell them? Well, I think the most exciting thing for young queer people today is that

all of our most radical movements right now, the movement against police violence, the movement for black lives, the movement for immigration reform, Palestine solidarity, all of these movements have openly queer and trans people in leadership. And so people can be queer and take their place in any socially progressive movement.

Sarah Schulman, thank you so much. Thank you, David. Sarah Schulman's new book about Act Up is Let the Record Show. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Hope you enjoy the show, and I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon-Corby, Cala, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Butubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. And we had additional help from Harrison Keith Lyne. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.