The NPR Politics Podcast - NPR's It's Been A Minute: A History Of AIDS/HIV Activism

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

Forty years ago this month, the CDC reported on patients with HIV/AIDS in the United States for the very first time. In the years since, LGBTQIA+ Americans have been fighting for treatment and recognition of a disease that was was understudied, under-reported, and deeply stigmatized. In this episode Sam Sanders talks with activists about how they got the media and the government to pay attention to the crisis.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's Asma Khalid. And I know it's Saturday and you need a break from the White House and Congress, and frankly, so did we. But we knew you'd really enjoy this special episode from It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. The episode is all about the history of HIV activism in the United States. And as you're closing out Pride Month, we thought this episode might give you a chance to learn a little bit about the political struggle of LGBTQ people. So, enjoy! you a chance to learn a little bit about the political struggle of LGBTQ people. So enjoy. In 1987, there was a new activist group in New York City called Act Up. And they held weekly meetings on Monday evenings at this place called The Center, an LGBT community nonprofit in the West Village. At the time, it was a crumbling old school. Paint was peeling

off the walls and it had never been rehabbed. That is Sarah Schulman. She's a writer and activist, and she joined ACT UP in 1987. And you know, even though that building was raggedy, those meetings, they were really something else. I was hanging around the center on a Monday, and there was a lot of noise coming from Room 101. Because I saw so many people there, I knew, you know, something really big was going on. The feeling of ACT UP in its heyday, when the room is packed and the weather is nice, the meeting spills out into the courtyard, and there's all kinds of cruising going on and eye-catching and chattiness.

And Sarah says that vibe was the key to the group's impact. I think any political movement for it to be successful has to be a place that makes the participants' lives better. If you're just joining a political movement out of some kind of sense of responsibility and burden, it's not going to work. And that's why Emma Goldman famously said, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution. So ACT UP was a dance. You know, it was a place that was life-affirming. It was sex positive. It was all about being effective. And it was filled with very young people who were very energetic and desperate for change. Those weekly meetings began with the recitation of ACT UP's motto.

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power is a diverse, nonpartisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to be quiet and end the AIDS crisis. Committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Whether you know it or not, you've probably seen ACT UP and that group's activism in TV shows and movies and newspaper front pages. The loud confrontational protest, that phrase, silence equals death, the pink triangle logo, those iconic images of queer people disrupting a Catholic mass in Manhattan with a die-in. That was all ACT UP. Today on the show, we're going to talk about that movement and how it earned critical funding and treatment of the disease, and how it

completely transformed the way we talked about the AIDS crisis. Sarah Schulman was a rank and file member of ACT UP in the late 80s and early 90s. And in 2001, she began the ACT UP Oral History Project with filmmaker Jim Hubbard. For that project, they interviewed 187 members of ACT UP. And you'll hear from many of these interviews in this episode, including other archival tape, some of it from NPR. On top of her oral history, Sarah is out with a new book. It's called Let the Records Show, A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987 through 1993. That book draws a lot on those interviews. And it's also got Sarah's analysis and some critique of Act Up's methods. The purpose of my book is not nostalgia. The purpose is to give today's world details

about what strategies and tactics worked for ACT UP and which ones didn't. I really can't think of a better time to have this conversation than right now, during Pride Month, in a moment when the U.S. is figuring out another pandemic, and while multiple new activist movements seek change right now. So today we ACT UP and talk about what it meant then,

what it means now, and what that movement can still teach us all. So what exactly was ACT UP? How would you define it? Well, I think we have to go back and look at the context a little bit. Yes, yes, yes. We now know that AIDS probably existed since the beginning of the 20th century and certainly was in New York in the 60s and 70s. But science did not notice the pattern of disease until 1981. And that's when the first public announcement was in the New York Times, July 3rd, 1981. And that's when the first public announcement was in the New York Times, July 3rd, 1981. 41 cases of rare cancer found among homosexuals in San Francisco. The lifestyle of some male

homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer. Eight young gay men have died this year, struck by the virus, and then rapidly rendered helpless in the face of other, usually harmless, infectious agents. Now, we have to go way back to the early 80s. The condition of life for gay people was one of supreme oppression. Gay sex was illegal. In fact, sodomy laws were not overturned in this country nationally until 2003. There was no gay rights bill in New York City. So you could be thrown out of your apartment for being gay. You could be fired from your job. You could be denied public accommodation like restaurants and hotels. Familial homophobia was the standard and it was brutal. And violence against people who looked gay was very common. There was almost a sport called gay bashing, where straight people would come into gay neighborhoods looking

to hurt people who looked gay. We're not talking about name calling. We're talking about physical abuse, stabbings, beatings, broken bones, slashed faces. In some cases, we're talking about murder. It was really a bad time for gay people and for queer people. And in the early 80s, there were theories about homosexuality being one thing that was caused by biology. So when there was a new disease that they could track through homosexuals, the early theories were that homosexuality was itself a disease and was biological, and that this new disease was somehow related to that. Our best guess is that it's somehow related to the gay lifestyle,

that whether it's drug use, whether it's sexual activity, we're not completely sure at this time. So the first name for this new disease was GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. And they had terms like gay cancer. Like today, we know there's no such thing as gay cancer. It's absurd. How could cancer be gay? But at the time, there was so much prejudice. So the first five years of the AIDS crisis, 40,000 people died in this country. And the government did absolutely nothing. And pharmaceutical companies, they were recycling failed cancer drugs that they own the patents for, because they saw a huge potential

market and they were trying to find a pill that you could take that would fix your AIDS and then they could sell it to everybody. What the gay community tried to do in the first five years was sort of recreate support networks that people didn't have, often because of familial homophobia. So for example, Gay Men's Health Crisis started a buddy system where somebody would be assigned to a person with AIDS to help them do their food shopping or just to talk to them. We can talk about things you want to discuss and maybe there's something else GMHC can do for you. Well you people are really great. I didn't expect, well I guess

everybody's really after it. Well we're awfully concerned. There's a lot of sick guys. There was God's Love We Deliver that brought home-cooked meals for free to homebound people with AIDS. We want to be able to say with confidence that no homebound person with AIDS is going hungry. But it wasn't until 1987 that ACT UP was founded, which was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. And this was the political response. Now, a few things happened right before ACT UP's founding in March of 1987 that really contributed to it. One of it was that the Supreme Court upheld the sodomy law. It was called the Bowers v. Hardwick decision. Many groups advocating gay rights are dismayed by yesterday's Supreme Court decision, which ruled the Constitution does not protect adult homosexual relations, even in the

privacy of the home. So in the middle of this horrible epidemic where people were suffering and dying, the Supreme Court said that gay sex should be illegal. So people were in the streets demonstrating without permits, very angry demonstrations. So you could see that things were erupting. But then Larry Kramer, the writer, gave a speech at the Lesbian and Gay Center. The room was packed. It's a Tuesday night. Kramer delivered a fiery speech. I remember he asked like half of the audience to stand up and he said, you're all going to be dead in six months. Now what are we going to do about it? People in the audience decided that they wanted to form an organization

to do a political response. And so they met a few days later and they formed ACT UP, the AIDS coalition to unleash power. Coming up, the diversity and range of ACT UP. What happens after a police officer shoots someone who's unarmed? For decades in California, internal affairs investigations, how the police police themselves were secret. Until now. Listen to On Our Watch, a podcast from NPR and KQED. you know so at this moment when act up is beginning most of the american public doesn't really understand hiv aids and the national news media was a big part of this me reading your book

i was reminded and shamed at how thoroughly the news media dropped the ball on this. What kind of messaging was, you know, the person outside of New York just reading their paper getting about AIDS, if they were getting any at all during that time? Well, people in New York were not getting good messages. I mean, Act Up called the New York Times the York Crimes. Mainstream media had never depicted gay people accurately in the first place and certainly did not depict people with AIDS with any reality. For the most part, they just ignored it. And what's interesting, when you compare AIDS with COVID, you know, COVID is a collective public experience that we're all having on television.

People are talking about it in their families. AIDS, on the other hand, was like our private nightmare. Our battle was to get it into the public. And that was the biggest fight. But when people with AIDS were depicted, either they were depicted as helpless, emaciated, dying, weak people with no community and no organization or when the media did start finally covering it they divided people into quote innocent victims and quote guilty victims they actually use those terms ryan white was a so-called innocent victim of aids he wasn't gay or an intravenous drug user he got the disease from a bad blood transfusion. A guilty victim was a person who had sex or used a needle.

And an innocent victim was like a blood transfusion. Wow. And so you also write that even when national news media, local news media began to cover HIV AIDS and began to cover the queer communities experiencing this. It was often written through the lens of whiteness, through the lens of maleness, and through the lens of like straight family who was going to be sad because their gay whatever died. It was always through these lenses that were very palatable to these folks and not

portraying the reality. But what's interesting is that because gay people were not represented in the mainstream media, this whole underground community of journalists evolved and created these newspapers that were for the community. So there was a feminist newspaper called Woman News. There was a gay male newspaper called the New York Native. There was a lesbian and gay newspaper called Woman News. There was a gay male newspaper called the New York Native. There was a lesbian and gay newspaper called Gay Community News. And the journalists work for free. I was one of these journalists. And we were out there, you know, figuring out what are the stories and reporting and our community was reading their own press, but the mainstream press ignored it. And what's interesting is, you know, the media at the time, this is the early 1980s, was entirely white and male. And the private sector was entirely white and male.

And the government was entirely white and male. And if there were gay men in these spaces, they were usually closeted. That's right. So there was an alternative media that was grassroots that was telling the truth. When I was a reporter covering AIDS from about 82 to about 87, before ACT UP was founded, I covered pediatric AIDS, women being excluded from experimental drug trials, homeless people with AIDS. I mean, the whole social justice lens. When it got into the mainstream media, that all disappeared. And when they did cover it, they only covered the people who they identified with and could recognize. I remember this. Yeah. As a kid, when I would see these images of, you know, these frail, almost angelic white men, and I could not relate at all. Well, why should you? I mean, it was propaganda on some other level.

You know, I interviewed this photojournalist named Donna Binder who was taking photos of demonstrations of women and of people of color and of all kinds of people who were fighting for their lives and bringing them to photo editors who would say, no, no, we don't want this. We want that emaciated white man in the bed. But once ACT UP went into St. Patrick's Cathedral, that changed. And the image of what a person with AIDS looked like became a person fighting until the day they died for their own survival.

Yeah. And we should point out, you know, you write in the book, before that protest, when certain images of people with AIDS were prioritized, you know, cisgendered white men, some of that was coming from inside of ACT UP. Larry Kramer said at certain moments, we'll send the best victims to talk to the press, meaning the white guys, right? Well, it came from people like him, but ACT UP had its own visual media because ACT UP was the first movement to really use video. Video used to be a very cumbersome technology. You had to carry a huge deck that was like the size of a piece of luggage, and then somebody else had to carry a boom mic. But once the camcorder was invented,

video activism came with it. Viva TV is jam-interfering video activist television. We're a new activity group, and there's a lot of us around, as you can see. And tomorrow, we're going to be doing police surveillance. We're going to make sure the police can hear us. ACT UP produced its own images

and those images really show the complexity of who was in the movement and what they were doing. So there was one part of ACT UP that only spoke to other elites and then there was another part of ACT UP that really spoke to a larger

constituency and coalition. Yeah. So let's talk about that coalition and how broad it is. But first, we have to acknowledge how the image that most of us have now when we think of AIDS activism and ACT UP, so much of that imagery, as we've said, it still revolves around cisgendered gay white men and what they did. And you wrote in the book, quote, AIDS activist history has been mistakenly placed in the trajectory of gay male history. And it was true then, and it still feels true now. When I see on TV and in movies portrayals of that era,

it still looks like it is the trajectory of gay male history and white gay male history only. Why is it so hard for us to shake that? What I'm trying to say is actually quite complex, which is that ACT UP was predominantly a white gay male organization. And I'm not saying anything different than that. However, the women and people of color in ACT UP tended to come from previous movements. And of the white illuminated for me personally as a white gay man in dramatic ways because women have always known this. I think it's one of the reasons why lesbians in particular, but women in general, have taken such an active role in this struggle. So people who came from Latin American student movements against fascism, from the Black Panthers, from CORE, and certainly from the reproductive rights movement, the women's peace movement, those people came in with political ideas and also with ways of running movements that ACT UP really needed. a huge impact on the movement. But the influence is even larger. Because like I was born in 1958, and most people in ACT UP were born in the 50s or 60s and some in the 40s. So as when we were queer

kids, we didn't have any concept of a gay community or a gay movement. But we did see black resistance on television, or in Life magazine, or in Jet magazine, or a number of people's families were involved. And we saw black people standing up against the police. We saw black people sitting in at lunch counters, which is direct action. We saw nonviolent civil disobedience. And we internalized that. So later when I was researching the book, and I went back and reread Dr. King's letter from Birmingham jail, where he lays out what is direct action, it was exactly what ACT UP did, even though we never acknowledged it at the time. So we had clearly internalized that influence, you know, very directly. The other thing was that the

Monday night meetings would be mostly white gay men. But the people in that meeting, including many white gay men who have not been historicized and who I talk about in my book, were working with other communities. There were people at that meeting who would then go out and work with drug users, with homeless people, with Haitians, with HIV positive women, with incarcerated people with HIV, with HIV-infected mothers. So the reach of ACT UP is very, very broad. And the communities that were being served are very deep. Yeah. Well, and I love how you point out the ways that these various communities brought specific tactics and perspectives that were integral to ACT UP's success. You talk about how lesbians actually really taught white gay men how to be activists, the young ones at least,

how the ethos of the civil rights movement informed ACT UP. And I really loved how you pointed out how the idea of a patient's first approach, this idea that people with AIDS are the experts, that came out of feminism. That wouldn't have been there without that influence. I didn't know that. Well, the feminist women's health movement, you know, the medical establishment has always been so anti-women that when people start to think about a concept of feminist health, it was about putting the patient first. And that was paramount in ACT UP. You know, that was one of the reasons that ACT UP didn't like placebo use in experimental drug trials. So just to explain to the audience, sometimes when you're testing a new drug, they would test it against sugar, a pill that had no value. And the people in the trial wouldn't know which drug they were getting.

Well, that was so that science could get cleaner statistics. But if you're looking at it from the point of view of the person with AIDS, you don't want that placebo. You're like, don't give me sugar. Give me the medicine. Exactly. So ACT UP really fought for the comparative drug to be the standard of care, whatever that was, as opposed to something that was totally useless. You know, all of these different groups coming together in ACT UP, you could easily have written this as a story of kumbaya, but it's not that. You talk about how there were still these classes and strata within the group, and there was racism and classism and

sexism still there, but that marginalized people that wanted to be active and act up, they kind of just worked around it. How were they doing that? And what was that? What did that look like? Well, everyone was fighting against the clock, right? So people did not stop the action to have like consciousness raising on racism and sexism. That never happened. And also, you know, you could spend your whole life trying to change one person and fail. Instead, groups that were advocating for Latinos or for women with HIV would use the resources of ACT UP, whether it was people power or actual money, to help their constituencies. Yeah, yeah. There's a line that you have in the book talking about using resources and power. You wrote that women and or POC members did not stop the drive toward action

to correct or control language or call out bias. Instead, like you said, they were trying to get those resources and help actual projects. And when I read that, I said, I am not sure if activists today from marginalized communities would be okay with that tactic. There seems to be an extreme concern about language, about bias, about microaggression before the action can happen. I don't know.

One, do you see that to be the case? And which is the right approach? Well, I think that's a generalization, but I think that that does occur in places where people don't feel that they must have change immediately. When people need change right away, they become much more effective. And let me lay out a little bit how ACT UP was effective.

So the first thing is you become the expert on your issue. So you design the solution. Instead of being in an infantilized relationship to power, where you're saying to the government or to your school or whoever, please, please fix it. You figure out how the policy works, how the institution is structured, and you show them how it should be by creating a reasonable, winnable, and doable concrete solution. And ACT UP did that. They became experts in policy. They became experts in neal exchange, in housing, in drug creation, and they created solutions. Then you present your solution to the powers that be. And if they oppose you, you do what Dr. King called self-purification, or what ACT UP called nonviolent civil disobedience training. And you create theatrical and creative, nonviolent,

direct actions that attract the media, so that you can communicate through the media to the public that you have a solution to this problem and these institutions are not listening and that's how you pressure institutions yeah yeah one of the things that really blew my mind in the book were just the ways that you detailed how fragmented ACT UP was from the start and how that was the point. You talk about several affinity groups coming together, but also working on individual actions separately. And on top of that, there was this inside-outside approach, working outside of systems and also within. How diffuse, if you could describe for folks, was this movement?

Oh, it's incredible the range of work that people were doing. I mean, on one hand, you have people sitting down with pharmaceutical companies, you know, in their offices over a lunch negotiating, right? Then you have people, the Asian Pacific Islander caucus going to Asian gay bars and wrapping condoms in lucky red Chinese New Year paper and bringing safe sex information to communities to have condom distribution. Then you have people interrupting mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral when Cardinal O'Connor tried to stop that condom distribution. Then you have people trying to fight for housing for homeless people with AIDS. And then you have people going to the Lower East Side and illegally exchanging needles in defiance of the law, getting arrested and having a trial and winning

and making needle exchange legal in New York City. You have all these different actions at the same time. And what allowed that to happen was that people in ACT UP were not forced to agree with each other. Well, this is the thing that was so profound. No one would ever really say, you can't do that. They would just say, okay, do what you're going to do. That just blew my mind. There was a bottom line. There was one line, statement of unity, direct action to end the AIDS crisis. If you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, you could do it. And if I didn't like what you were doing, I would fight with you because ACT UP, we fought a lot and conflict was good and fighting was okay.

But in the end, I would not try to stop you from doing what you felt was right. I just wouldn't do it. And then I would find my like-minded people and we would organize what we wanted to do. We're the yawning leafers. We're from ACT UP New York. We're with the power tools. And we're the group that shut down the New York Stock Exchange. We're the invisible women. We're from Act of New York. We are Los Locas Radicales and war, which is

war is wipe out AIDS and racism. And this radical democracy and big tent politics allowed people to be where they were at, and people can only be where they're at. You cannot force people into one common analysis or one common strategy. So when your movement empowers people to respond in the way that makes sense to them, you get this simultaneity of response on so many different levels that really that's how the paradigm shift occurred. Coming up, the ins and outs of ACT UP's largest direct action. You know, I want to talk about some specific actions that really lay out what ACT UP was

doing. And there's two that I was really obsessed with in the book. The Stop the Church protest, which you've mentioned. And then the other one, the Seize Control of the FDA movement. Can we talk about that FDA one first? Because I think people have seen that church one, but that FDA one was really incredible to me. Well, these are two different actions that are as different as night and day. So Seize Control of the FDA was the absolutely brilliant concept of David Barr, who was one of the leaders of ACT UP and still is. So David Barr realized that demonstrations were repetitive

and people were always going to the Capitol or the White House, the Capitol or the White House, and it was getting boring and that we needed a target that was literally the people who were opposing us. And I was heavily involved in fighting with the FDA over expanded access and felt like that is our key issue, is access to experimental drugs and dealing with the FDA on this. We need to go there en masse. So he came up with the brilliant idea of going to the Food and Drug Administration, which was in like a crazy suburb of Maryland.

So he and Greg Bordowitz, who was a younger, very popular member of ACT UP, brought it to the floor. ACT UP decided to do it. And at that point, so New York was the first chapter. But at that point, other chapters had started to spring up around the country. And they wanted to bring in the other chapters and make it our first national action. So they went out to California and met with people and they were like, the FDA, we have to go there. This is the way to go. And they brought in national groups of people with AIDS who converged on the FDA. Now, at the same time, our brilliant media team had this idea that they would match people with AIDS from different cities with the reporters from those local newspapers. So people were there in their wheelchairs or whatever stage they were at with

a sign that would say like Minneapolis, Cleveland, Houston, and the media people would bring them to their local reporter. And that specificity makes a difference between page five and page one. Totally. And it was the first time that we really had national coverage that was coordinated where people with AIDS had a platform to speak. Now, the demand was that the FDA was filled with red tape, and there were all these drugs that were not being studied, and the ones that had some potential that people couldn't get access to because they hadn't been approved. So Jim Igoe, who's one of the treatment geniuses of ACT UP, he designed something called Parallel Track, where people could get

access to drugs that had not gone through the approval system. And so ACT UP designed the solution, went to the FDA. I was there. Shut it down. It was very theatrical. Peter Staley, one of the heroes of ACT UP, climbed up on the front piece of the building looking like the karate kid with a kerchief around his head and the police had to go up there on a ladder to arrest him. Fight back! Fight AIDS! ACT UP! Fight back! Fight AIDS! There were all kinds of affinity groups and the FDA, they didn't do any business as usual that day and eventually this proposal was accepted.

There was a really, really poignant speech given there that day by Vito Russo. Yes. Do you recall that speech? So Vito Russo was an older member of ACT UP who had come out of gay liberation. He was a very beloved person in the gay community. He was really known for his book, The Celluloid Closet. That was really one of the first books that showed hidden gay content and hidden gay messages in mainstream cinema. And in fact, Vito did not have health insurance. When I visited him in the hospital, he was on the ward. He did not have a private room. Anyway, Vito was a real

hero and people loved him. And he gave a speech about the experience of living with AIDS at a time when, as he put it, it was like being in a war. You know, living with AIDS in this country is like living in the Twilight Zone. Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes, you look around and you discover that you've lost more of your friends. But nobody else notices. It isn't happening to them. They're walking the streets as though we weren't living through some sort of nightmare. And only you can hear the screams of the people who are dying and their cries for help.

No one else seems to be noticing. And that was our experience. We were surrounded by a mass death experience that was not being reported in the news. You could be in the gay community and know hundreds of people who had AIDS, and then you'd have straight people who did not know a single person that they knew had AIDS. It was so divided. When future generations ask what we did in this crisis, we're going to have to tell them that we were out here today.

And we have to leave a legacy to those generations of people who will come after us. Someday the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes, when that day has come and gone, there will be people alive on this earth, gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white, who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and in some cases gave their lives so that other people might live and be free. What the FDA did was shift the group away from a defensive posture to an offensive posture.

The FDA action enabled us to come up with a vision for the way that healthcare should be done in this country, the way that drugs should be researched and sold and made available. The idea was to cut through the bureaucratic red tape of the Food and Drug Administration. But more than that, that people with AIDS should be involved in every level of decision-making concerning research for treatment and a cure for our disease. You write, when you talk about this. The whole point was that the target could not be generic. The target could not be a symbol. The target had to be actual, the place where the thing was or wasn't happening. That's right. And it seems 101, but it was really profound compared

to what kind of stuff was happening before. Exactly. And also people often do demonstrations on Sundays when the buildings are closed. But ACT UP did their demonstration while all the workers were there. And they were all at the window staring at us and they were scared. So no business went on that day. Wow. You write about how the folks in ACT UP working with the media had to really manage the media. And one of the most profound lines that I read in the intro to your book, you said that by the time that a feminist or a gay person or a person of color or a trans person makes it into mainstream media, that chosen person's perspective is often years

behind the movements they claim to speak for. Right, because we're still on a token basis and we don't have full access. And that's why, like in this book, I focus on 140 different people. Because we have this idea in America of the John Wayne white male heroic individual, and that's completely false. Nothing ever changes that way, and it can't. Things change because there's community that's built, and because there are coalitions, and it creates a zeitgeist in which there's a paradigm shift. No individual has clout unless they're part of a collective. And it's been interesting with the book because people of color and women already know that.

I want to talk next about a protest you've already mentioned. This was the now, gosh, iconic, dare I say, Stop the Church. Can you tell folks who might not know what it is, what it was? So at that time, this is before the pre-sex scandal, right? So the Catholic Church is at the height of their power. And we should say here, like these Catholic cardinals in big cities like New York, they had the same kind of clout and power as like a mayor. That's right. Or more. Yeah, or more. They were very powerful. People listened to them. They made things happen in their cities. And they were in power for much longer than a mayor. So anyway, the Catholic Church really had a huge amount of power in New York. And the AIDS activist movement was trying to get condoms distributed in the public schools

and needle exchange. And usually the Cardinal would stay in the Catholic schools, but now they started trying to get their people on local school boards of the public schools to stop this condom distribution. And we knew that if he succeeded, people would die because of this policy shift. So ACT UP really had to look at itself in the mirror and say, you know, do we really believe that our lives are important? And if we do, we can no longer obey this idea that you don't interfere with religious institutions because religious institutions are political and they're hurting us. This is not about people's right to practice their religion individually. This is about an institution, an institution that is spending millions of dollars a year to make sure that we do not live.

Cardinal O'Connor made an amazing series of statements which can be summarized in four words, and this is not an exaggeration, let them get AIDS. What I care about is making sure that David Dinkins doesn't listen to him, the city council doesn't listen to him, the board of education doesn't listen to him, and that he loses his political power in the city. And therefore, I don't think it's so crucial to confront him inside or the parishioners. We must put out the message that we are the ones who are fighting for people's lives, and they are the murderers.

So ACT UP decided that they were going to do a highly publicized action at St. Patrick's and disrupt mass, and this is December 1989. Now, most people in ACT UP, I think, were Catholic or Jewish, and then there was a substantially smaller but significant group of Protestants. The Protestants, I think, were very worried about ACT UP looking like an anti-Catholic organization. The Catholics and Jews were not concerned with this at all. But one of the compromises about these concerns was that we agreed as an organization to go into the cathedral with a demonstration outside and we would do a silent die-in.

The strongest thing we can do is something in silence, a mass in die-in that occurs two minutes, two minutes after he opens up his mouth. So the demonstration outside was our largest demonstration. And it was a coalition with a group called WAM, which was a woman's reproductive rights organization. And then we went inside. I was one of the people inside the church. And it came time for the silent die-in. And suddenly, this guy from ACT UP, Michael Petralis, jumps on the pew and starts screaming in his New Jersey accent. Stop killing us! Stop killing us! Stop it! Stop it! And it's total chaos. The police and people are screaming and people are throwing things and it's crazy. And people get arrested. We're fighting for your lives, too. We're fighting for your lives, too.

And it's a mess. Then we come out, and I came out, and I thought, oh, my God, that was so terrible. I can't believe that happened. My colleague Sylvie says that there's footage of you after this action talking about it. What did you say then? I said that I thought it was bad.

I'm Sarah Shulman. I was sitting in a pew, and I watched the die-in, which I think was pretty effective. But when people from ACT UP started standing on pews and screaming, it really alienated the people who were praying. I saw people get very angry and upset. Well, I was wrong, because we made the front page of every newspaper in the world.

That action did end up on the front page of every newspaper in the world. That action did end up on the front page of every newspaper in the world, I think, and mostly because Tom Keene crumbled the host. We had our affinity group at the demonstration and when communion came, we went up and I'm there, I put my hands out and suddenly I have the communion wafer in my hands and the priest says, this is the body of Christ and I say, opposing safe sex education is murder. In some sense, some part of me was sort of saying, well, fine, you guys think you can tell us, you reject us, that we don't belong, so I'm going to reject you. And so I took it and I crushed it and dropped it.

The Catholic Church has never in New York rebounded from that action. Never, no matter what. Even though they're very strong still. They have never had the same profile. I remember going to the meeting after it. Everybody was terrified after it because it had been in the paper and every editorial page in town had dumped on us. And people were scared.

And I remember saying, are you crazy? Are you crazy? They're afraid of us now. That's the best thing that could ever have happened to us. And it was true. My favorite story actually is from Gabriel Rotello, who several days after the action talked to his mother in suburban Danbury, Connecticut, who said to him, you know, my friends and I have been talking about this, and we've decided that before this demonstration, we thought gay people were sort of weak and wimpy, but now we think gay people are strong and angry. I just thought that was it for me. That did it. That was exactly what I wanted to accomplish.

And I couldn't have been happier. Anyways, after the action, ACT UP always had a post-action meeting. And people came and they were really nervous and they were really excited. And a lot of people were mad at Michael because he went against what the group decided. But no one ever suggested kicking him out because nobody could be kicked out. Because it's only people with dominant view of themselves with some kind of supremacy ideology that kick out and exclude other people. If you're a highly oppressed group, you see yourself as a community and a community is for better or for worse. So that's really interesting. Anyway, years later, I got to interview Michael. And I asked him, you know, why did you do that? And he said that he was angry because nobody would let him in their affinity group. And he just acted out. And it was one of those human moments of vulnerability

and rage and loneliness. And there was a lot of that in ACT UP. ACT UP really recognized that we were all going through something that was a disaster and a cataclysm. People were young, they were suffering and dying, and nobody cared. And there was a lot of acting out in ACT UP, but we accepted that because we know that people are complex. You know, it was not all respectability politics. Yeah. You know, there are so many questions to ask about what lessons can be applied from ACT UP to activism today. But there's also the question of whether or not we actually see that same kind of activist energy anywhere right now. Are you seeing the same kind of bold, whatever it takes, tactics happening in activist spaces

in 2021? And are you hopeful about that, if you see it? I see the beginning of a very strong people's movement in this country. But, you know, we are in a period of great repression and backsliding and Black people losing the right to vote, whatever had already been won. And yet, there are some really important radical movements in this country right now. The movement against police violence is a crucial national movement that's locally based with local leaders in every city. The movement for black lives, the movement for immigration reform, the movement for solidarity with Palestine is growing and growing around the world. And what's really interesting about these

movements in relationship to queer people is that even though in the past, the left did not want gay people in their movements. Now they run it. Now the queers run these movements. That's right. That's right. Openly queer people and trans people are in leadership of all of the radical movements right now, you know, sharing leadership, but right out there.

And so it's a very exciting time. And we have to learn to have big tent politics, you know, so that we're not constantly trying to force each other into our own analyses or trying to force each other into one strategy. But it said that we're facilitating people like ACT UP to have radical democracy so that everyone can respond in an effective way from where they're at. And that's how we'll build it. So would that be your biggest lesson to offer to these activist groups today? If there's one big overriding lesson from ACT UP for them, would that be it? I think the biggest lesson is design your solution, become the expert on your issue, and build campaigns around things that are reasonable,

winnable, and doable. And we're seeing that. You know, the movement against police violence, it's different in every town, right? It's different in every city, and it has local leaders, and people are working with their municipalities or against their municipalities, but they're coming up with plans for where they live that are reasonable. And that's what we need to be doing. I have learned so much from reading your book and for asking you these questions now. And I'm going to take off my interviewer hat and just say, thank you.

You know, I am a gay man who was on PrEP and I've been taking it for a few years. And for the longest time, it was free for me. And now it's like 10 bucks a month. And that kind of privilege to have that kind of health care and that kind of safety and freedom. I owe so much of that freedom to you and the other activists doing this work. And, you know, for me, the overriding lesson of all of this is like every bit of comfort I have as me in this world right now in 2021, somebody, a lot of bodies fought really hard for all of that. And I want to tell you that I'm grateful. Thank you so much.

Yeah. Thanks again to my guest, Sarah Schulman. Her new book is called Let the Records Show, Thank you so much. Sarah and Jim conducted with ACT UP members, including Ken Bing, Greg Bordowitz, Michael Petrelis, David Barr, Maxine Wolfe, Bob Rafsky, Ann Northrup, Jim Igoe, Robert Hilferty, Tom Keene, and Larry Kramer. You also heard an excerpt from Vito Russo's speech, Why We Fight. You can watch more of these interviews at www.actuporalhistory.org or in Jim and Sarah's documentary, which is called United in Anger. Listeners, we want to know how we're doing making this show for you. What do you like? What do you not like? What do you want more of? What do you want less of? What keeps you coming back or turning us off?

You can tell us all of this by taking a short anonymous survey. It's at npr.org slash podcast survey. Again, that's npr.org slash podcast survey. It will really help us out. All right. This week, It's Been a Minute was produced by Janae West, Andrea Gutierrez, Sylvie Douglas, and Liam McBain. Our intern is Manuela Lopez-Restrepo. And special thanks this week to Susie Cummings of NPR's research team.

Our fearless editor is Jordana Hochman. Our director of programming is Steve Nelson. And our big boss is NPR's senior VP of programming, Anya Grundman. All right, listeners, till next time. Happy Pride. Happy Juneteenth. I'm Sam Sanders. Till next time, be good to yourselves. We'll talk soon.