October marks LGBTQ History Month, and this week on At Liberty we are honoring the legacy of LGBTQ activism throughout the AIDS epidemic. <\/p>\n
Throughout the late \u201880s and early \u201890s, AIDS claimed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers per year, with city, state, and national governments doing little to address the crisis. In response to government inaction and homophobia, a group of New York City activists founded ACT UP, a grassroots, queer-led protest movement to urge action, call for change, and stand in the gap as thousands of queer people died. Due to their dogged persistence, steadfast unity in diversity, and pointed demonstrations, ACT UP achieved lasting victories in medical treatment, health care access, and more.<\/p>\n
Today, in classrooms across the country, this history has largely gone untold. In our broader public discourse, the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and the subsequent movement that rose to fight for LGBTQ lives is often overlooked. Enter Sarah Schulman, a novelist, journalist, playwright, and AIDS historian, who is fighting to ensure that we remember. <\/p>\n
Schulman is the author of 20 books, her latest being \u201cLet the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993,\u201d which documents the people and tactics behind ACT UP\u2019s success. Sarah is also the co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. She joins us today to share her expertise and remember the movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":137448,"template":"","series":[],"class_list":["post-137412","podcast","type-podcast","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":{"date":"20231019","audio":137433,"transcript":"[00:00:00] KENDALL CIESEMIER:<\/b> From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I'm Kendall Ciesemier, your host.\r\n\r\nOctober marks LGBTQ History Month, and this week we are taking an opportunity to honor the legacy of LGBTQ activism throughout the AIDS epidemic. In the late \u201880s and early \u201890s, AIDS claimed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers a year, with city, state, and national governments doing little to nothing to help fix the crisis due to rampant homophobia and bigotry. In response, a group of New York City activists founded ACT UP, a grassroots, queer-led protest movement to urge action, call for change, and stand in the gap as thousands of queer people died. Due to dogged persistence, steadfast unity and diversity, and pointed demonstrations, ACT UP went on to achieve lasting victories in medical treatment, healthcare access, and more.\r\n\r\n[00:01:08] NEWS SOT:<\/b> Today's demonstration is the latest of many staged by the militant group ACT UP. More than a hundred people were arrested during a protest. Demonstrators were demanding more money in the war against AIDS.\r\n\r\n[00:01:19] KENDALL:<\/b> Today, in classrooms across the country, this history has largely been left untold. In our broader public discourse, the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and the subsequent movement that rose to fight for LGBTQ lives is often overlooked. Enter Sarah Schulman, a novelist, journalist, playwright, and AIDS historian who is fighting to ensure that we remember. Sarah is the author of 20 books, her latest being Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993<\/i>, which documents the people and tactics behind ACT UP's success. Sarah is also the co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and she joins us today to discuss and remember the movement. Sarah, welcome to At Liberty, and thank you so much for joining me.\r\n\r\n[00:02:14] SARAH SCHULMAN<\/b>: Thank you.\r\n\r\n[00:02:18] KENDALL<\/b>: So, I want to start just with a little grounding, a little primer, if you will, on history. In 1981, Lawrence Mass, a journalist for a gay newspaper in New York City, was the first journalist in the world to write about AIDS. By 1987, AIDS activists founded ACT UP. Can you give us a broad overview\u2014and I know this is a difficult task given how much happened in these years\u2014of these first years of the AIDS crisis and the events that paved the path for ACT UP?\r\n\r\n[00:02:50] SARAH:<\/b> Sure. Well, we now know that AIDS is probably about a hundred years old. The first signs of it in the United States [are] from the 1940s. And we know it was in New York in the 1960s and 70s, but because of the lack of healthcare in this country, it was not identified until 1981. So 1981 is not the start of AIDS. It's the start of the recognition of the existence of AIDS. And the first public announcement was in the New York Times on July 3rd, 1981 with the famous headline: \u201c41 cases of rare cancer found among homosexuals in San Francisco.\u201d Now, just to interpret what that headline means for today, in 1981, gay men were a profoundly oppressed minority. Sodomy laws were ever present. In fact, gay sex was illegal nationally until the Supreme Court overturned it in 2003. New York City did not have an anti discrimination bill until 1986, so you could be fired from your job or kicked out of your apartment. And you could be denied public accommodation, which meant service in a restaurant or hotel. Familial homophobia was the cultural norm and had a huge impact on history. So, in 1981, there was an obsession with finding the \u201ccause of homosexuality,\u201d because today, we know that sexuality and gender are different in each person and can change over a lifetime. But in 1981, the idea was that everybody should be born straight and cis, and if you're not, something went wrong. So, when that headline came out, what it was really saying was: the biological disease of homosexuality itself. And this affected the way AIDS was understood from the beginning. The first name for the disease was gay related immune deficiency. Now there's no such thing as gay related immune deficiency. Or like it was called \u201cgay cancer.\u201d There's no such thing as gay cancer. Okay, cancer cannot be gay. But there was an assumption that there was something inherently biologically wrong. Anyway, in the first five years after this recognition of the existence of the disease, 40,000 people died in the United States. The government did absolutely nothing, and pharma did nothing. I mean, what they were trying to do was recycle failed cancer drugs that they owned patents for, hoping that something would hit. And their concept of what they were looking for was the pill you take to make your AIDS go away, which would have been a huge market for them. But, you know, AIDS is\u2014 like the word cancer, it's an umbrella term, it's different in each person. What it means is that your immune system stops functioning. So, each person would develop different symptoms of this. They were really horrible, like an AIDS death is a terrible death, and people really suffered. So very young people would become demented. Or go blind, or get the skin cancer called Kaposi sarcoma that basically ate you alive. Their nerves in their legs would swell and they couldn't walk. They couldn't process nutrition, and they would waste away. And these were the things that made people die. So you didn't die of \u201cAIDS,\u201d you died of an opportunistic infection. So, people with AIDS wanted treatments for each of these infections, but pharma didn't want to research them because they were smaller market shares. So, that's sort of where we all started. Now, the way the gay community responded in the first five years is trying to create some kind of facsimile of social services. And this is where familial homophobia is very significant. Because normally, if a person has something wrong with them, in many, many cases, family members will try to help them. But so many gay people had-had to leave their small towns or experienced familial homophobia, and they were out there on their own. So organizations like Gay Men's Health Crisis started something called the Buddy System, where people would volunteer, and you'd be assigned to a person with AIDS, and you would, like, hang out with them, or help them do their laundry until they died. There was a group called God's Love We Deliver that would bring people free food. And there was a group called Paws that would walk people's dogs. So this was sort of what the gay community was doing for the first five years. What really changed this was the Supreme Court Bowers v. Hardwick<\/i> decision in 1986 that upheld the sodomy law. So, that in the middle of a mass death experience, the Supreme Court decided that gay sex should continue to be illegal. And this made people very, very angry. This was a politicization moment. There were angry demonstrations in New York and Washington without permits, and then you start to see like small zap groups, and this was a tactic that came from the previous movement, the gay liberation movement\u2014 started to emerge. So, there was, for example, a graphics collective called the Silence Equals Death Collective that made that famous poster that everyone's seen with the pink triangle. It says silence equals death. And then on March 10th, 1987, the writer Larry Kramer gave a talk at the gay and lesbian center in New York and people in the audience decided that they wanted to start a group. So, they reconvened a few days later, and they started the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.\r\n\r\n[00:08:15] KENDALL:<\/b> Wow. And at what point did you join ACT UP yourself?\r\n\r\n[00:08:19] SARAH:<\/b> Well, I actually was involved very early because I was a reporter in the gay press and in the feminist press. So, there was like these underground papers, and I started in 1979 when I was 21, even before Reagan was elected. And every city had at least one gay paper and one feminist paper. And our job was to articulate these issues because there was a complete blackout in the mainstream press. Nothing about us was covered. We couldn't even be mentioned. So, in around 19\u2014 the early \u201880s, I started covering AIDS for Women News, which was a feminist newspaper. Gay Community News, which was a lesbian and gay left wing newspaper, came out of Boston. And then the paper you mentioned that Larry Mass wrote for, the New York Native, which came from New York. So, like the very first thing I covered about AIDS was the first announcement that there had been a case of AIDS in the Soviet Union. I covered women being excluded from experimental drug trials. This was a very early piece that I did. I think it was in the Village Voice. I covered pediatric AIDS, which was a huge issue in New York City at that time. That was a very early issue about women of color and the question of consent related to HIV. So, I covered that, I did the first piece on homeless people with AIDS. So, by the time ACT UP was founded in \u201887, I'd been on this beat for about five years. And ACT UP was founded in March and I joined in July of 1987.\r\n\r\n[00:09:49] KENDALL:<\/b> And what were those early days of ACT UP like? How did people determine what the operating principles were going to be? How was it organized?\r\n\r\n[00:09:58] SARAH:<\/b> Well, it's very interesting because it really truly was a radical democracy and there only was one sentence of unity, principle of unity, which was: direct action to end the AIDS crisis. And that was as opposed to social service. So, basically, if you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, you could do it. Now, what's interesting about this movement is that it was very heavily influenced by the previous feminist women's health movement, which had been a patient centered movement since\u2014 when that movement started in the late \u201860s, there were hardly any women who were even doctors. And women who had come from that movement, like Marion Banzhaf or Risa Denenberg, and came into ACT UP, held\u2014 we used to call it\u2014 a teach-in very early on on this concept of patient-centered politics. So ACT UP's founding principle was [that] people with AIDS are the experts.\r\n\r\n[00:10:52] KENDALL:<\/b> Imagine that. Imagine an organization to try to end the AIDS epidemic and support people with AIDS and having the organizations of the movement center people with AIDS as if they knew something.\r\n\r\n[00:11:03] SARAH:<\/b> It had to be because there were no treatments and people were dying, you know, so they had very concrete needs. So these concrete needs determine the direction of the organization. And interestingly\u2014 so, because it was a radical democracy, a lot of things went on at the same time. It was a kind of simultaneity of action. So, like, let's say you had an idea. And I thought it was terrible. We wouldn't yell and scream at each other because\u2014 New York City, pre-gentrification, lots of Jews and Italians and people screaming, but that was fine. And then, in the end, if I didn't like what you were doing, I wouldn't try to stop you from doing it. I just wouldn't do it. And then I would just go do my thing with my five people. So this created all kinds of people acting at the same time in all kinds of different ways based on who they were, which really, I mean, to me, this is the way to go forward. Because people can only be where they're at, and people need to respond in a way that makes sense to them. Movements who try to force everyone into one analysis or one strategy have all failed. This is my study of history. I've never found an exception. You know, the only way you can succeed, and this is talking from a leadership point of view: real leadership is facilitating people to be effective from where they're at, instead of trying to force people into homogeneity. This just evolved naturally. In fact, nobody ever discussed that this was our structure. It just was. Maxine Wolfe, who was one of the leaders of ACT UP, made the point that, and this was retrospective, but that if you go action first, your theory will emerge because you have to make decisions about how you're going to do your action. And these decisions help you cohere your values. You know, if you go theory first, you're doomed because nothing is at stake and you're polarized over nothing. So it was a completely action forward organization.\r\n\r\n[00:13:08] KENDALL:<\/b> It sounds so simple in how you describe it, and yet it is actually quite radical in its nature. And I wonder what you think keeps us from-from replicating that in other movements or from just like\u2014 what about our human nature?\r\n\r\n[00:13:27] SARAH:<\/b> I mean, this is a weird answer, but I think AIDS made people grow up because the stakes were so high. I mean, you know, when AIDS started I was 23. And you're very young and you just realize \u2018wow if I don't get this medicine for this guy or he doesn't get this\u2026 he's gonna die.\u2019 So, you gotta do it. And there's-therefore there's less control because each person has a mission that is doable. The thing of trying to control everybody and telling them what words to use and\u2026 you know, this doesn't work. Like right now, every single community is under attack. Everybody. And if your idea is that you can only work with people who think the same way you do about everything, you won't be able to work with anybody. You have to be flexible and grown up. The goal has to be to win. The goal can't be to change and control everybody around you.\r\n\r\n[00:14:20] KENDALL<\/b>: Do you think that that's missing today?\r\n\r\n[00:14:22] SARAH<\/b>: I think people don't understand what activism is. They think that activism is taking people down, and it's not. Activism is opening doors and making things possible. Activism is designing solutions. Your own solutions, not asking the powers that be to fix things, but becoming an expert on your issue and designing solutions that are reasonable and winnable and doable, and then designing campaigns to win those solutions. So, that everything you're doing has a goal and is connected to everything else you're doing. You're not just screaming. You know, when ACT UP did civil disobedience, it's because we had a concrete demand and we knew who could help us get it. And so we would target them.\r\n\r\n[00:15:02] KENDALL: <\/b>In that way, it feels very concrete.\r\n\r\n[00:15:05] SARAH:<\/b> It is. Because that's what this kind of politics has to be, you know, politics of human rights and survival. These-this has to be very concrete.\r\n\r\n[00:15:24] KENDALL:<\/b> I love that. And I think that there's a lot to learn here that can inform our current movements. I mean, ACT UP achieved remarkable success, impacting institutions from the CDC to social security to the pharmaceutical industry.\r\n\r\n[00:15:37] SARAH:<\/b> Would you like me to summarize some of their most concrete victories?\r\n\r\n[00:15:41] KENDALL<\/b>: I would love that.\r\n\r\n[00:15:42] SARAH<\/b>: Okay, so I'm going to say that ACT UP is one of the most effective social movements in American history. And it kills me that people could take courses like 20th century US history and not have ACT UP in it. It doesn't make any sense. So in six brief years, these were some of their major victories. ACT UP forced the Food and Drug Administration to change the way it approved drugs so that people who were very sick could get the drugs they needed. At the time, approval could take years and people only had months. And the way they [ACT UP] did it was that a playwright in ACT UP named Jim Eigo studied the FDA and designed something called parallel track that would allow drugs to go on their normal \u201cforever process\u201d while parallelly people who were really sick could get them. It's very simple. He designed it and then ACT UP did a demonstration and\u2014 a huge demonstration at the FDA and forced them by communicating through the media to adapt parallel track.\r\n\r\n[00:16:45] NEWS SOT<\/b>: Seize control of the FDA, seize control of the FDA, seize control of the FDA, seize control of the FDA, seize control of the FDA\u2026\r\n\r\n[00:16:53] SARAH<\/b>: ACT UP ran a four year campaign to force the CDC to allow women with AIDS to have benefits. Women with AIDS could not get benefits because the official diagnostic description was based on the gay male body and women had different symptoms that weren't on the list. I mean, it's so absurd. And women with AIDS tended to be poorer and also tended to be sicker. Now, this makes it, as far as I can see, the only white male organization in history that won very significant victories for women and people of color. In fact, today, every woman in the world who's taking an HIV drug is taking something that was tested on women. And this is the, you know, this is one of the most far reaching victories of ACT UP. So that happened. ACT UP won needle exchange in New York City. David Dinkins was the mayor. He was very nervous about needle exchange because the Black community did not support it. The ideology around drug addiction at the time was abstinence was the only idea. Harm reduction was just being introduced and was a very new and strange idea for people. So, the current and former needle users in ACT UP had started a needle exchange program committee, and they illegally exchanged needles in order to get arrested so that they could have a court case. And voila, they won and made needle exchange legal in New York City, which really changed the epidemic. ACT UP took on the Catholic Church. Now, this is before the priest sex scandal. So, the Catholic Church was so powerful in New York. And usually they had stayed in their lane with the Catholic schools, but this time they were sending people to school boards\u2014okay, now this is what they do all the time, the right wing is all over school boards, but this was the beginning of this\u2014to keep condoms out of the public schools. So, ACT UP realized that people would die because of the Catholic Church. So, in December of 1989, in this action called Stop the Church, ACT UP and a group called WHAM, Women's Health Action Mobilization, disrupted mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Now, this is an interesting action. There were 7,000 people outside, which is our biggest action, which is not that big. I mean, ACT UP was a small group. But some of the influential Protestants in the group negotiated that we would go into the mass and do a silent die-in, instead of, you know, interrupting the mass.\r\n\r\n[00:19:29] NEWS SOT<\/b>: I'm in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Sunday. We're here reporting on a major AIDS activist and abortion rights activist demonstration, which will be taking place here all morning. Inside, Cardinal O\u2019Connor is busy spreading his lies\u2026\r\n\r\n[00:19:42] SARAH<\/b>: Michael Petrelis jumped up on the pew and started yelling in his New Jersey accent at the Cardinals. \u201cStop killing us! Stop killing us! You're killing us! Stop it!\u201d\r\n\r\n[00:19:52] NEWS SOT<\/b>: Stop killing us! Stop killing us! We\u2019re not gonna take it anymore. You\u2019re killing us.\r\n\r\n[00:19:58] SARAH<\/b>: And anyway, this caused total chaos. There were police and everybody was screaming, throwing everything. A hundred people got arrested, etc. And I thought, \u2018oh, this is so terrible, because we all agreed we would do it one way, and this is horrible.\u2019 But, in the end, it turned out to be the best thing that ever-that we ever did. Because as outrageous it would be-as it would be today to do that action, in 1989, for homosexuals with AIDS to disrupt mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral was incredible. And it was on the front page of newspapers all over the world, like in Turkey, everywhere. And it really changed how we were perceived. It's very interesting because when I interviewed Donna Binder, who was a photojournalist at the time, she said that prior to the Stop the Church action, the only kind of photographs that magazines and newspapers wanted were helpless people with AIDS dying in their beds. But after Stop the Church, they wanted images of people with AIDS fighting for their lives. So, it really changed how we were represented around the world. And of course, condoms did get distributed in the public schools. So, all of these things were very significant, real victories that saved lives. But I think the biggest thing was that we changed how people with AIDS and queer people were seen all over the world and how we felt about ourselves. And that's been, you know, lasting.\r\n\r\n[00:21:18] KENDALL:<\/b> I want to pick up on what you just said, how we felt about ourselves. What was the change there?\r\n\r\n[00:21:21] SARAH:<\/b> Well, we would communicate through the media. Okay, so, like, [a] gay kid in some, you know, small town somewhere would be wearing, like, their baseball cap on backwards and wearing Doc Martens because that was the ACT UP look. You know, so it gave people an image of power that there were people who were fighting back and who were succeeding and who were fighting for their lives and that they were not alone. Now, New York was the mothership, it was the first branch, but ultimately there were 148 different ACT UPs all over the world. And, you know, people could just start it. I mean, there was no\u2014 there was a little bit of coordination, but there was\u2014 nothing was imposed or anything. So each ACT UP really reflected the needs of\u2014that\u2014 where they were, the country they were in.\r\n\r\n[00:22:07] KENDALL:<\/b> Wow. Thank you so much for just running through that list of victories because there are many, and it's also just really impressive to-to hear you kind of explain them one by one. I'm curious what role you personally\u2014 like, you said-you mentioned that you were at the church demonstration.\r\n\r\n[00:22:25] SARAH:<\/b> Well, I was just a rank and file person in ACT UP. I was never in leadership or anything, but I was in a lot of actions. I mean, I was at ACT UP practically every Monday night and I went to millions of actions. So, like I would say, Day of Desperation, which was the first Gulf War. ACT UP called for a Day of Desperation, and people disrupted Dan Rather and nightly news, saying \u201cfight AIDS, not Arabs.\u201d And then we occupied Grand Central Station. I was there for that. If you look at Jim Hubbard's film, United in Anger<\/i>, you can see footage from that action. I was arrested at that action. I was at Trumpsgiving against Donald Trump. And that was for housing for homeless people with AIDS, which I had to cover for The Nation magazine. There were just so many, you know, there were zaps and there were things every-every week, sometimes every day. We had big actions, we had small actions. It was a way of life.\r\n\r\n[00:23:25] KENDALL:<\/b> So, all of this is leading me to the idea that so many people don't actually know this collective history. And in the decades that have passed after you left ACT UP, you have said that you've noticed this stark lack of documentation of the movement's history. What led you to take on this documentation?\r\n\r\n[00:23:45] SARAH:<\/b> Well, what happened was that ACT UP was before the internet. So, when the internet revolution, which was really the end of the 90s, nothing that we had was digitized. So, if you had searched ACT UP on Google in 1998 or something, you would have found nothing. And this is why my collaborator, Jim Hubbard and I started the ACT UP oral history project in 2001. Which the original idea was just to create raw data so that other people could do something with it.\r\n\r\n[00:24:16] KENDALL<\/b>: Right, a database of sorts.\r\n\r\n[00:24:17] SARAH<\/b>: Yeah, so for the next 18 years, we interviewed 188 surviving members of ACT UP. Our website is actuporalhistory.org. We put up\u2014 Jim is a filmmaker, so he collected 2, 000 hours of archival footage, including 700 hours that were shot by James Wentzy. And then Jim has digitized all of this. It's available at the New York Public Library. You can-you can watch the AIDS activist video collection there. So, we put-we've put hundreds of hours of footage on our website as well. Everything is free and we've had almost 15 million hits on our website and hundreds and thousands of people have downloaded all the transcripts for free. Anybody can do that around the world.\r\n\r\n[00:25:05] KENDALL:<\/b> I know that you\u2019ve mentioned in the ACT UP oral history project that each interview took between two and four hours, meaning that you spent hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to the stories. What was that experience like? And I wonder what your biggest takeaways were from the library itself?\r\n\r\n[00:25:21] SARAH:<\/b> Well, so I conducted, I think, all but two of those interviews. And, you know, it's very interesting because it's over 18 years, you know, so my approach changed as things went along. The very first thing we realized was that because there was no internet, the only way you could get information was if you were in a room and someone said something to you. So, everyone only knew what they had experienced and everybody thought that that was ACT UP. And Jim and I were the same. When we started interviewing people, we started to realize that there were so many different things going on at the same time and nobody had a big picture. Because there was no documentation. So, we started trying to just figure out what did ACT UP do? And that led us to all these arenas. Like, there were people who were involved with, you know, Haitians with HIV were interned in Guantanamo, and there were people from the housing committee who were helping people from Guantanamo get housing in New York so they could get out of incarceration. I didn't even know that that even happened. That's its own story that needs to be told. There's just so much-ACT UP did so much. The Asian-the API caucus was doing like translations and doing safe sex stuff. So, there's just so much that happened.\r\n\r\n[00:26:44] KENDALL:<\/b> Yeah. It sounds like it. When you've gone through, you know\u2014I know this could be tough given the over 200 interviews you've collected\u2014but I'm wondering if there's any interview that like stands out to you or has been on your mind right now.\r\n\r\n[00:26:56] SARAH:<\/b> They're all amazing. I mean, one of the things that's really interesting is that ACT UP people are very interesting people. They're very, like\u2014 they came from all walks of life. You know, we started each interview with a shot of the exterior of wherever this person was living. Some people lived in mansions. Some people lived in boarding houses with bathrooms in the hall. It was a very wide range of people. But they were all very sophisticated to their material because ACT UP used to do these educationals and there was no official spokesperson. Any person could be a spokesperson, to be honest. Most of the interviews were fascinating.\r\n\r\n[00:27:37] KENDALL:<\/b> This platform that you've built through the ACT UP Oral History Project is so important, especially because it's likely that today's students are not learning this history. Like I've said, given the rise in educational censorship and campaigns against using or including racial and gender justice movements in school curricula. What do you make of this moment that we're living in right now?\r\n\r\n[00:27:57] SARAH:<\/b> I think the thing to see is that censorship controlling information is pervasive in every element of our lives right now. You could focus on Black history. You could focus on enforced silences around gay experience. But it's a much larger phenomenon of keeping us from being able to think for ourselves and have dissenting opinions and hear a wide range of information. It's very hard to get information. So, we have to understand that people's rights across the board are suppressed. Even though it impacts different communities differently.\r\n\r\n[00:28:41] KENDALL:<\/b> Considering we are just talking about what voices are included, what voices are excluded, you've named that ACT UP was notably a white male movement. How did you ensure that diversity was represented in the oral history project and the stories that are told about ACT UP?\r\n\r\n[00:29:04] SARAH:<\/b> Well, first of all, let's just talk about how it functioned organizationally. So, you know, when ACT UP started, there were\u2014 it was a white gay male organization primarily, right? And there were older men who had been in gay liberation, but the younger men had not been politically active and, for the most part, did not have much political experience. But the people of color and women who were in there, even though they were smaller in number, came from previous movements and had a lot more political experience. And it's interesting to look back and see how they operated. Nobody ever stopped the action to say we have to do consciousness raising on racism or something or sexism. That never ever happened. Because frankly, I think it's a waste of your time. Because you could spend your whole life trying to change one person and never change them. What people did instead was they marshaled the ample resources of the larger organization for their constituencies. And ACT UP achieved an enormous amount for women, even though there were not that many women in it.\r\n\r\n[00:30:07] KENDALL:<\/b> So Let the Record Show<\/i> is a print version, a collection [of] stories from the Oral History Project. In addition to more context, obviously, it casts a very wide net. It also, I think, you know, details a little bit what we were talking about closer to the beginning, which was about why ACT UP was so different in its kind of organizing nature. We talked about radical democracy, not forcing consensus. You don't need permission, localized movements. Since Let the Record Show<\/i>, your work has also explored new approaches to resistance in both the pro-choice and anti-police violence movements, which are movements that I think are very notable today. Can you tell us about those tactics, about the new approaches to resistance?\r\n\r\n[00:30:54] SARAH:<\/b> Well, these are old subjects for me because in 1979 when I was 21 and I was reporting for Woman News, my beat was the new right wing, the new evangelical Christians who were about to bring Ronald Reagan to power. And I, like, covered right wing anti-abortion activism. And so I've been following this my whole life. You know, I'm 65 now, so it's 45 years later, whatever. My approach to these movements is always very similar, which is, you know, look at how issues are affecting people, real people. What do they actually need? Design a solution, even if it's a small one, and try to build towards that goal. And use the media and direct action to help you go forward. So, these have been ideas and tropes that I've been working with my whole life.\r\n\r\n[00:31:47] KENDALL:<\/b> And I guess if you look at the movements as they exist today, what are your suggestions? What are your criticisms?\r\n\r\n[00:31:55] SARAH:<\/b> I mean, I don't have criticisms. I just think, you know, we have to always be open to looking at things in a new way. I mean, one of the weird ideas that I've had is more involvement by the private sector. You know, there are people who have a lot of money who\u2014are\u2014 support abortion rights. And they could build facilities in blue states. They could financially provide abortion[s] for every person in this country who needs it. But in order to do that, they would have to create their own structures and the way the philanthropists think now is they give money to already pre-existing organizations and that may not be the right way to go. Now, I mean, this is the first time in my life that I've been strategizing for capitalists, but this is the world we live in, you know. The other thing is, you know, I-I think we need to reconceptualize abortion as a collective experience. For years, we've seen women going out there on their own, confessing that they had abortions. But actually, abortion improves the lives of a lot of people. Not just the woman. The man, her other children, her parents. It helps a community advance. So we should be reconceptualizing it as a-as-we\u2014 people say we had a baby, we got married. Why not show a multi-generational family saying we had an abortion? And take it away from the woman out, you know, left out there on her own. We have to reconceptualize a lot of this.\r\n\r\n[00:33:21] KENDALL:<\/b> Lots of very interesting ideas, Sarah. I really appreciate them, and I think, like, we need more people like you that are just, like, drumming up interesting, different options for how to show resistance on these issues. Because they are so complicated, and I know that I will be taking away from this\u2014 a lot of the model of ACT UP that seems like it's really been embedded in your spirit and your way of looking at the world, your viewpoint, which is to say that everyone has a role and everyone can kind of take the role. I really appreciate you joining and giving us a little bit of a brief overview of ACT UP and the AIDS epidemic as you experienced it with feet on the ground in New York City. It's been really a pleasure to hear from you.\r\n\r\n[00:34:10] SARAH:<\/b> Thank you.\r\n\r\n[00:34:13] KENDALL:<\/b> Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to At Liberty wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review the show. We really appreciate the feedback. Until next week, stay strong. At Liberty is a production of the ACLU, produced by me, Kendall Ciesemier and Vanessa Handy. This episode was edited by Cary Daniels. Julian Silva-Forbes is our intern.","components":[{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":{"text":"October marks LGBTQ History Month, and this week on At Liberty we are honoring the legacy of LGBTQ activism throughout the AIDS epidemic.\r\n\r\nThroughout the late \u201880s and early \u201890s, AIDS claimed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers per year, with city, state, and national governments doing little to address the crisis. In response to government inaction and homophobia, a group of New York City activists founded ACT UP, a grassroots, queer-led protest movement to urge action, call for change, and stand in the gap as thousands of queer people died. Due to their dogged persistence, steadfast unity in diversity, and pointed demonstrations, ACT UP achieved lasting victories in medical treatment, health care access, and more.\r\n\r\nToday, in classrooms across the country, this history has largely gone untold. In our broader public discourse, the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and the subsequent movement that rose to fight for LGBTQ lives is often overlooked. Enter Sarah Schulman, a novelist, journalist, playwright, and AIDS historian, who is fighting to ensure that we remember.\r\n\r\nSchulman is the author of 20 books, her latest being \u201cLet the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993,\u201d which documents the people and tactics behind ACT UP\u2019s success. Sarah is also the co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. She joins us today to share her expertise and remember the movement."}}],"we_want_to_hear_from_you":"","participants":[137419,42886],"links":{"spotify":"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/45utD1gZC6REVIgOgTOiIc?si=C0JzHu-NQIuKmbVweG4GCg","apple_podcasts":"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/how-act-up-changed-the-face-of-aids-and-activism\/id1396174920?i=1000631831049"},"related_news_articles":"","issues":[46567,46503,46775,46581,46587,46427,46519,46523,46485,46687,46499,46781,46637,46373,46391,46507,46569,46785,46695],"related_content_cases":"","related_affiliates":""},"yoast_head":"\n