Thursday, March 29, 2007

Reconstructing ACT UP


It would appear that reports of ACT UP's demise are premature. Today, hundreds of people joined in a protest at Manhattan's Wall Street to fight for healthcare.

New York's JoeMyGod has some nice pics of today's protest, as does Band of Thebes.

Andres Duque has photos and media links.

Michael Petrelis has coverage of the San Francisco protests.

POZ Magazine has a nice write-up, too.

There's even a video posted on YouTube.

Boy, this sure is a far cry from the days when we had to fax press releases, tape TV coverage on our VCRs and wait for news articles the next day like chorus boys and girls awaiting a theatre review.

Stalwart journo Rex Wockner dredged up some historic pics of early ACT UP demos, including pics and a write-up of the Dec. 1989 Stop the Church demo at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

You can read my (slightly) fictionalized account of being inside St. Pat's on that day in my third novel, Cyclizen, out, er, sometime in May. I'm finishing up copyediting and this weekend shooting the cover with the most perfect model, Patricio (named after St. Patrick; perfect again!).

Some people - younger ones, in particular - don't seem to understand what things were like then. Some even want to rewrite history, like naive self-promoting Cyd Zeigler, Jr. known more for his co-editing OutSports.com. Cyd wrote a laughably gullible Young Republican lionization of Reagan specific to his - and Reagan's - massive ignorance about the epidemic, and Reagan's culpability (see link).

(On a side note, it's also typical that Zeigler so strongly defended the Outgames over the seventh Gay Games last summer, considering that Outgames literally stole the concept, sold out Outsports with a year's worth of banner ads, and eventually made history as the worst managed gay event in world history, with a $5 million deficit. But I wrote about that quite extensively in Sports Complex via a series of articles from 2003-2006.)

Anyway, back to ACT UP, and people who know what they're talking about when it comes to AIDS.




In more worthy written pros and cons, Larry Kramer's on the cover of POZ, with a lengthy interview inside. "Anger is a very wonderful and positive emotion," he says. "Why should I want to let it go?" Do read more.

Kramer responded to a New York Review of the Books article about the book Russell Baker's Reconstructing Reagan. Kramer wrote:

It is always distressing to read "upgradings" by academics and journalists more determined to recreate history in their own imaginings than in the facts that are available for honest consideration [Russell Baker, "Reconstructing Ronald Reagan," NYR, March 1].

Ronald Reagan may have done laudable things but he was also a monster and, in my estimation, responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. He is one of the persons most responsible for allowing the plague of AIDS to grow from 41 cases in 1981 to over 70 million today.

He refused to even say the word out loud for the first seven years of his presidency and when he did speak about it, it was with disdain. He was, in the words of his domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, "irrevocably opposed to anything having to do with homosexuality."


Reagan's dead. Larry's not. Guess who gets the last word?

The Nation offers an inspirational wrap up of the group's history:

Twenty years ago, a furious speech by the playwright and activist Larry
Kramer at New York City's lesbian and gay community center birthed a new activist organization, ACT UP--the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

Within a month, weekly planning meetings were attracting 200 people, a motley mix of gay men, lesbians, recovering addicts with AIDS and the newly diagnosed, a great many of them just in their 20s. Though barely noticed in the pages of this publication, ACT UP would revolutionize AIDS research and treatment, as well as inject new life into the gay movement and infuse the tactic of direct action with its own style of theatrical militancy.

At the time, six years and at least 30,000 American deaths into the epidemic, Ronald Reagan had yet to give a public address on AIDS. Not a single drug was available to treat HIV. Prevention efforts had been left to volunteers and struggling nonprofits. The right's solution was epitomized by William F. Buckley's modest proposal that gay men with HIV have their buttocks tattooed.

For its first action, in March 1987, ACT UP sent some 250 activists to descend on Wall Street. Armed with cardboard tombstones and anti-Reagan posters, they chanted, "Release those drugs," lighting a fire under the Food and Drug Administration and drugmakers to speed up research and approval. Two years later pharma giant Burroughs Wellcome was finally marketing an HIV treatment but had priced it (AZT) at an impossible $8,000 a year. So ACT UP returned to Wall Street, but this time activists
didn't just picket.

As former bond trader Peter Staley recalls, "We [had] sealed ourselves into one of their corporate offices using high-powered drills. They didn't back down, so we upped the ante by shutting down the New York Stock Exchange, sneaking past security and using foghorns to drown out the opening bell. The company finally lowered the price three days later."

During the years that followed, ACT UP stormed the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control to protest their shortcomings. On the local level, Catholic dioceses and boards of education were targeted for blocking HIV information in public schools; city governments for failing to provide care and housing; jails and prisons for setting up segregation units. Some ACT UPers set up
guerrilla needle-exchange programs; others staked out the entrances to junior
highs to distribute condoms directly to students. Just as essentially, ACT UP
members became self-taught experts in such arcane fields as virology and patent law and in so doing rewrote the patient-doctor relationship and helped put the idea of universal healthcare--now favored by a majority of Americans--on the political map.

Along the way, ACT UP borrowed strategies from other radical movements: antinuke protesters for techniques on civil disobedience, antiapartheid campaigners for bringing political funerals to the streets. Many of its tactics--videotaping demonstrations as protection against police brutality, coordinated but autonomous affinity group actions--have become standard fare in the global justice movement, as has ACT UP's deeply democratic tradition.

ACT UP is now a shadow of its former self, but its alums have gone on to found Health Gap, a driving force for global treatment access; the Treatment Action Group, which continues to push the AIDS research agenda; and Housing Works, which has won housing for thousands of New York City's HIV-positive homeless. And true to form, the organization will mark its twentieth anniversary with a march on Wall Street March 29 to demand single-payer healthcare for all.

Today, anyone who gains access to an experimental drug before it's approved, or takes a life-saving medicine that was fast-tracked through the FDA--indeed, anyone engaged in the struggle for healthcare--is indebted to ACT UP's audacity and vision.


ACT UP ain't dead, but a lot of people are dead from AIDS, thanks to ignorance, silence, and dumbass Republicans like Zeigler, who were busy wanking off with their fellow closet cases while others were fighting AIDS.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Do do that Voodoo

As if the military these days wasn't awful enough; rapists convicted, troops in disarray, and pigfaced greedmonger Cheney claiming congress "isn't supporting the troops" by wanting them out of Iraq, now comes this seething diatribe.

Pam's House Blend
has the entire set of diatribes from the pig ignorant military bitch.

"Corey Andrew had his profile and resume posted at Careerbuilder.com, and it caught the eye of Army recruiter Marcia Ramode, who contacted him. He wasn't interested in a position in the military, particularly because of the ban on gays and lesbians in the military. When Andrew informed Ramode that he is gay, and believed that the DADT policy was wrong, the two engaged in a three-day email exchange that included statements by Ramode, in her official capacity as a recruiter, that boggle the mind. "

"GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE."
-- U.S. Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode, using her military email address to respond to Jersey City resident Corey Andrew, after Ramode learned Andrew was gay.


more:




It's also on Jersey Journal.

Convicted felons and rapists? Okay. Gays? No way.

Is this what some other rightwing president termed "gunboat diplomacy?"




Thursday, March 22, 2007

ACT UP at 20


ACT UP is 20 years old.

To commemorate it, ACT UP New York is holding a demonstration at the same place where their first demo took place: Wall Street.

It's amazing to think that 20 years ago, I was avoiding those persistent stickers and posters all over Manhattan, the passionate debates at parties, and the news articles, which were then then mostly in the New York Native, published by Charles Ortleb, which had frequently wacky headlines about swine flu, dolphin diseases, etc. Oddly, its new editor, Mike Salinas, wrote some of the first articles about ACT UP, if not the first one. Mike later became my editor here in San Francisco after we both moved to SF and worked for the BAR.

Anyway, something in me cracked around 1989 (read Monkey Suits for a, ahem, fictional version of that), when I had more friends who were getting sick, and I simply could not avoid doing something. I literally bumped into an ACT UP demo in Greenwich Village where half a dozen acquaintances were shouting at a small church. I was given a poster, held it up, and started shouting. Over the next four years, my life became woven into the ACT UP culture. More on that later.

Liz Highleyman's Bay Area Reporter summation of the history and highlights of ACT UP mentions that only Philadelphia, Paris, San Francisco and New York chapters still exist.

When I moved to SF, I only attended a few meetings and participated in only one protest with ACT UP Golden Gate, at an industrial park in Genentech's parking lot. It certainly didn't have the "gravitas" of the urban NYC protests of my NY days.

As for ACT UP/SF, they broke from all protocols and went overboard with the crazed animal rights frenzy, the "HIV is a myth" baloney, their half a dozen members have been arrested for assault or are now dead, and they're now just a pot store.

Thanks for ruining the reputation of ACT UP, ya freaks.

As Larry Kramer said (paraphrasing, and in a different context), "The best thing about ACT UP is that anyone can join. The worst thing about ACT UP is that anyone can join."

Stupid Polish Joke


Poland to ban schools from discussing homosexuality


Kate Connolly in Berlin
Tuesday March 20, 2007
The Guardian


The Polish government is to ban discussions on homosexuality in schools and educational institutions across the country, with teachers facing the sack, fines or imprisonment.

Poland's education minister, Roman Giertych, has said he hopes to introduce a similar ban across the entire EU.

Mr Giertych, the leader of the ultra-conservative League of Polish Families, a junior coalition partner in the government of prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said the aim of the proposed law would be to "prohibit the promotion of homosexuality and other deviance."

Radio Maryja, an ultra-nationalist Catholic radio station supported by the government, views the EU as a gay conspiracy and frequently refers in its broadcasts to "homosexual terror" and "sodomitical unions."

The European Commission has condemned the Polish government, whose motto is "moral renewal," for its homophobic views.

---

(No, you're not seeing double. The corrupt government in Poland is such that the doofus Prime Minister got his twin brother elected President.)

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Kramer's LA Times Op-Ed


Larry sounds off in an interview with Rex Wockner.

He also sent me and others his guest editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

A letter to America's heterosexuals
An aging 72-year-old gay man isn't hopeful about the future.
By Larry Kramer, LARRY KRAMER is the founder of the protest group ACT UP and the author of "The Tragedy of Today's Gays."
March 20, 2007

DEAR STRAIGHT PEOPLE,

Why do you hate gay people so much?

Gays are hated. Prove me wrong. Your top general just called us immoral. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is in charge of an estimated 65,000 gay and lesbian troops, some fighting for our country in Iraq. A right-wing political commentator, Ann Coulter, gets away with calling a straight presidential candidate a faggot. Even Garrison Keillor, of all people, is making really tacky jokes about gay parents in his column. This, I guess, does not qualify as hate except that it is so distasteful and dumb, often a first step on the way to hate. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama tried to duck the questions that Pace's bigotry raised, confirming what gay people know: that there is not one candidate running for public office anywhere who dares to come right out, unequivocally, and say decent, supportive things about us.

Gays should not vote for any of them. There is not a candidate or major public figure who would not sell gays down the river. We have seen this time after time, even from supposedly progressive politicians such as President Clinton with his "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military and his support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act. Of course, it's possible that being shunned by gays will make politicians more popular, but at least we will have our self-respect. To vote for them is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us.

Don't any of you wonder why heterosexuals treat gays so brutally year after year after year, as your people take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood? Why, even as we die you don't leave us alone. What we can leave our surviving lovers is taxed far more punitively than what you leave your (legal) surviving spouses. Why do you do this? My lover will be unable to afford to live in the house we have made for each other over our lifetime together. This does not happen to you. Taxation without representation is what led to the Revolutionary War. Gay people have paid all the taxes you have. But you have equality, and we don't.

And there's no sign that this situation will change anytime soon. President Bush will leave a legacy of hate for us that will take many decades to cleanse. He has packed virtually every court and every civil service position in the land with people who don't like us. So, even with the most tolerant of new presidents, gays will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate. Courts rule against gays with hateful regularity. And of course the Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality, and in the end, it is from the Supreme Court that such equality must come. If all of this is not hate, I do not know what hate is.

Our feeble gay movement confines most of its demands to marriage. But political candidates are not talking about — and we are not demanding that they talk about — equality. My lover and I don't want to get married just yet, but we sure want to be equal.

You must know that gays get beaten up all the time, all over the world. If someone beats you up because of who you are — your race or ethnic origin — that is considered a hate crime. But in most states, gays are not included in hate crime measures, and Congress has refused to include us in a federal act.

Homosexuality is a punishable crime in a zillion countries, as is any activism on behalf of it. Punishable means prison. Punishable means death. The U.S. government refused our requests that it protest after gay teenagers were hanged in Iran, but it protests many other foreign cruelties. Who cares if a faggot dies? Parts of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. are joining with the Nigerian archbishop, who believes gays should be put in prison. Episcopalians! Whoever thought we'd have to worry about Episcopalians?

Well, whoever thought we'd have to worry about Florida? A young gay man was just killed in Florida because of his sexual orientation. I get reports of gays slain in our country every week. Few of them make news. Fewer are prosecuted. Do you consider it acceptable that 20,000 Christian youths make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls? This is not free speech. This is another version of hate. It is all one world of gay-hate. It always was.

Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated. Don't those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce the hate? Why is it socially acceptable to joke about "girlie men" or to discriminate against us legally with "constitutional" amendments banning gay marriage? Because we cannot marry, we can pass on only a fraction of our estates, we do not have equal parenting rights and we cannot live with a foreigner we love who does not have government permission to stay in this country. These are the equal protections that the Bill of Rights proclaims for all?

Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love? I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don't see much change coming.

I think your hate is evil.

What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim.

And even if your objections to gays are religious, why do you have to legislate them so hatefully? Make no mistake: Forbidding gay people to love or marry is based on hate, pure and simple.

You may say you don't hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what's the difference? Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

ACT UP "Army"; post-activist ennui


In New York, only days after Larry Kramer's Mar. 13 speech, about 100 folks (several familiar faces among them) protested outside Times Square armed forces recruitment center today.

Read more at my BAR blog post.

Pics at JoeMyGod of this celeb-filled event; Mike Signorile, Gilbert Baker, Matt Foreman, even former NJ "love guv" Jim McGreevey.

The strong, brave military recruiters (like Matt Sanchez?) heard about the protest and ran away, closing and abandoning their office.

Maybe things will rev up; or maybe people will just blog about being revved up.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Greg Bordowitz and other ACT UP vets talked at a panel, Affect and ACT UP, about the emotional aspects of being in the group, and the burn-out effects of its passing.

Kendall Thomas, who was involved in ACT UP from 1988 to 1992, described meetings he attended as not only saving his life, but “exhilarating, enlightening … in a time when we knew we were living in the valley of the shadow of death,” he said.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Larry Kramer calls for a "New Gay Army"

Larry Kramer made a very long, very powerful speech in New York City last night. I wish I had been there.

Afterward, almost like in the old days, a bunch of people organized a protest at Times Square military recruitment center to protest the bigoted remarks made by Gen. Peter Pace about gays being 'immoral.'

Since blogger extraordinaire Andy Towle posted it in its entirety, I hope Larry doesn't mind if I do the same. It seems easier to read with a white page, but Andy has some good links, too.

Even at his most shrill, I always listen to Larry, because he literally saved my life, and was responsible for starting the activist group that gave me my voice, my strength, my guts during a desperate and difficult time in New York, heck, the world.

It's appropriate that I post it here, as part of Cyclizen is about my (okay, my fictional character's) dissolution with ACT UP, activist burn-out; a common symptom in the early 90s for those who did a lot of work during the years before.

Things aren't what they were. We don't -or can't?- do the kind of things we did then. Why? Well, let Larry share his opinions (with the help of some pivotal ACT UP co-founders who have kept up the good fight):



WE ARE NOT CRUMBS; WE MUST NOT ACCEPT CRUMBS

Remarks on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of ACT UP,
NY Lesbian and Gay Community Center,

March 13, 9007

By Larry Kramer

Rodger McFarlane, Eric Sawyer, Jim Eigo, Peter Staley, Troy Masters, Mark Harrington, David Webster, Jeremy Waldron, and Hannah Arendt contributed to the following remarks.

One day AIDS came along. It happened fast. Almost every man I was friendly with died. Eric still talks about his first boyfriend, 180 pounds, 28 years old, former college athlete, who became a 119 pound bag of bones covered in purple splotches in months. Many of us will always have memories like this that we can never escape.

Out of this came ACT UP. We grew to have chapters and affinity groups and spin-offs and affiliations all over the world. Hundreds of men and women once met weekly in New York City alone. Every single treatment against HIV is out there because of activists who forced these drugs out of the system, out of the labs, out of the pharmaceutical companies, out of the government, into the world. It is an achievement unlike any other in the history of the world. All gay men and women must let ourselves feel colossally proud of such an achievement. Hundreds of millions of people will be healthier because of us. Would that they could be grateful to us for saving their lives.

So many people have forgotten, or never knew what it was like. We must never let anyone forget that no one, and I mean no one, wanted to help dying faggots. Sen. Edward Kennedy described it in 2006 as "the appalling indifference to the suffering of so many." Ronald Reagan had made it very clear that he was "irrevocably opposed" to anything to do with homosexuality. It would be seven years into his reign before he even said the word "AIDS" out loud, by which time almost every gay man in the entire world who'd had sex with another man had been exposed to the virus.

During this entire time his government issued not one single health warning, not one single word of caution. Who cares if a faggot dies. I believe that Ronald Reagan is responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.

These are just a few of the things ACT UP did to make the world pay attention: We invaded the offices of drug companies and scientific laboratories and chained ourselves to the desks of those in charge. We chained ourselves to the trucks trying to deliver a drug company's products. We liberally poured buckets of fake blood in public places. We closed the tunnels and bridges of New York and San Francisco.

Our Catholic kids stormed St. Patrick's at Sunday Mass and spit out Cardinal O'Connor's host. We tossed the ashes from dead bodies from their urns on to the White House lawn. We draped a gigantic condom over Jesse Helms' house. We infiltrated the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the first time in its history so we could confetti the place with flyers urging the brokers to "SELL WELLCOME." We boarded ourselves up inside Burroughs-Wellcome, (now named GlaxoSmithKline), which owns AZT, in Research Triangle so they had to blast us out.

We had regular demonstrations, Die-Ins we called them, at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, at City Halls, at the White House, in the halls of Congress, at government buildings everywhere, starting with our first demonstration on
Wall Street, where crowds of us lay flat on the ground with our arms crossed over our chests or holding cardboard tombstones until the cops had to cart us away by the vans-full. We had massive demonstrations at the FDA and the NIH. There was no important meeting anywhere that we did not invade, interrupt, and infiltrate.

We threatened Bristol-Myers that if they did not distribute it immediately we would manufacture it ourselves and distribute a promising drug some San Francisco activists had stolen from its Canadian factory and had duplicated. (The drug, now known as Videx, was released. Ironically Videx was discovered at Yale, where I went to school and with whom I am still engaged in annoyingly delicious activist battles to shape them up; they too are a stubborn lot.) We utterly destroyed a Hoffmann-LaRoche luncheon when they delayed a decent
drug's release.

And always, we went after the New York Times for their shockingly, tragically, inept reporting of this plague. We plastered this city with tens of thousands of stickers reading, "Gina Kolata of the New York Times is the worst AIDS reporter in America." We picketed the Fifth Avenue home of the publisher of the Times, one Arthur Sulzberger. We picketed everywhere. You name a gross impediment and we picketed there, from our historic 24-hour round the clock for seven days and nights picket of Sloan Kettering to another hateful murderer, our closeted mayor, Edward I. Koch. 3000 of us picketed that monster at City Hall.

And, always we protested against our ignoble president: Reagan. We actually booed him at a huge AmFAR benefit in Washington. He was not amused.

And Bush. 2500 of us actually tracked him down at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, which did not know what had hit it.

And Clinton. I cannot tell you what a disappointment he was for us. He was such a bullshitter, as I fear his wife to be.

And Bush again. The newest and most evil emperor in the fullest most repellant plumage. We can no longer summon those kinds of numbers to go after him.

A lot of us got arrested a lot of times. A lot of us. A lot of us. We kept our lawyer members busy. It actually was a wonderful feeling being locked up behind bars in cells with the brothers and sisters you have fought with side by side for what you fervently believe is right.

Slowly we were noticed and even more slowly we were listened to. Along this journey some of our members taught themselves so much about our illness and the science of it and the politics of it and the bureaucracy of it that we soon knew more than anyone else did. We got ourselves into meetings with drug company scientists who could not believe our people weren't doctors.

I took a group to a meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom I had called our chief murderer in publications across the land. Dr. Fauci was and still is the government's chief AIDS person, the
Director of Infectious Diseases at NIH. We were able to show him how inferior all his plans and ideas under consideration were compared to the ones that we had figured out in minute detail. We told him what they should be doing and were not doing. We showed him how he and all his staff of doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians did not understand this patient population and that we did. By then we had located our own doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians to talk to, some of them even joining us.

When our ideas were tried, they worked. We were consistently right. Our "chief murderer" Dr. Fauci became our hero when he opened the doors at NIH and let us in, an historic moment and an historic gesture. Soon we were on the very committees we had picketed, and soon we were making the most important decisions for treating our own bodies. We redesigned the whole system of clinical trials that is in use to this day for every major illness. And of course, we got those drugs out. And the FDA approval for a new drug that once took an average of 7-12
years can now be had in less than one.

ACT UP did all this. My children--you must forgive me for coming to think of them as that--most of whom are dead. You must have some idea what it is like when your children
die. Most of them did not live to enjoy the benefits of their courage.

They were courageous because they knew they might die. They could and were willing to fight because they felt they soon would die and there was nothing to lose, and maybe everything to gain.

And of course funeral after funeral after funeral. We made funerals into an art form, too, just as our demonstrations, our street theater, our graphics, many of which are now in museums and art galleries, were all art forms as well. God, we were so creative as we were dying.
It is important to celebrate. But it is hard to do so when so many of us aren't here. At least that is the way for me. I know we are twenty years old. It seems impossible to me that it has been so many years.

I remember much of it as if it were yesterday. It is difficult to celebrate when one has such potent, painful tragic memories. We held so many of each other in our arms. One never forgets love like that. Make no mistake, AIDS was and is a terrible tragedy that need not have escalated into a worldwide plague. There were 41 cases when I started. There are some 75
million now. It takes a lot of help from a lot of enemies to rack up a tally like that.

Rodger McFarlane made this list of ACT UP's achievements:
- accelerated approval of investigational new drugs;
- expanded compassionate use of experimental drugs and new applications of existing drugs;
- mathematical alternatives to the deadly double-blind-placebo-controlled studies of old;
- rigorous statistical methods for community-based research models;
- accelerated and expanded research in basic immunology, virology, and pharmacology;
- public exposure of and procedural remedies to sweetheart practices between the NIH and FDA on one hand and pharmaceutical companies on the other (now, with our own decline, unfortunately out of control again);
- institutionalized consumer oversight and political scrutiny of FDA approvals for all drug classes and for vast NIH appropriations for research in every disease;
- state drug assistance programs; and vastly expanded consumer oversight of insurance and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement formularies.

Each of these reforms profoundly benefits the health and survival of hundreds of millions of people far, far beyond AIDS and will do so for generations to come.

To this I might add that out of ACT UP came Needle Exchange and Housing Works and AID for AIDS and The AIDS Treatment Data Network and the Global AIDS Action Committee and HealthGAP and TAG, too, the Treatment Action Group.

Perhaps you did not know we did all this. As we know, historians do not include gay anything in their histories. Gays are never included in the history of anything.

Dr. Fauci now tells the world that modern medicine can be divided into two periods. Before us and after us. "ACT UP put medicine back in the hands of the patients, which is where it belongs," he said to the New Yorker.

How could a population of gay people, call us the survivors, or the descendents, of those who did all this, be so relatively useless now? Maybe useless is too harsh. Ineffectual. Invisible. No, useless is not too harsh. Oh let us just call ourselves underutilized. As long as I live I will never figure this out.

Then, we only had the present. We were freed of the responsibility of thinking of the future. So we were able to act up. Now we only have our future. Imagine thinking that way. Those who had no future now only have a future. That includes not only everyone in this room but gay people everywhere. We are back to worrying about what "they" think about us. It seems we are not so free, most of us, to act up now. Our fear had been turned into energy. We were able to cry out fuck you fuck you fuck you.

Troy Masters, the publisher of LGNY, wrote to me: ACT UP recognized evil and confronted it loudly.

Yes, we confronted evil. For a while.

We don't say fuck you, fuck you, fuck you anymore. At least so anyone can hear.

Well, the evil things that made me angry then still make me angry now. I keep asking around, doesn't anything make you angry, too? Doesn't anything make anyone angry? Or are we back in 1981, surrounded and suffocated by people as uninterested in saving their lives as so many of
us were in 1981.

I made a speech and wrote a little book called The Tragedy of Today's Gays about all this. That was about two years ago. Lots of applause. Lots of thanks. No action.

There was a Danish study a few weeks ago. The life expectancy after infection by HIV is now thirty-five years. Thirty five years. Can you imagine that? That is because of ACT UP. A bunch of kids who learned how to launch street actions and release a propaganda machine and manipulate media masterfully, and use naked coercion, occasional litigations, and adept behind-the-scenes maneuverings that led to sweeping institutional changes with vast ramifications. We drove the creation of hundreds of AIDS service organizations across the country, leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars a year and fielding tens of thousands of
volunteers, all the while amassing a huge body of clinical expertise and moral authority unprecedented among any group of patients and advocates in medical history.

We did all this. And we got all those drugs. The NIH didn't get all those drugs. The FDA didn't get all those drugs. We got all those drugs. And we rammed them down their fucking throats until they approved them and released them.

It was very useful, old ACT UP. It is no longer useful. The old ACT UP is no longer useful enough. There are not enough of us. Few people go to meetings. Our chapters have evaporated. Our voice has dimmed in its volume and its luster. Our protests are no longer heard.

We must be heard! We must be.

We are not crumbs! We should not accept crumbs! We must not accept crumbs! There is not one single candidate running for public office anywhere that deserves our support. Not one. Every day they vote against us in increasingly brutal fashion. I will not vote for a one of them and neither should you. To vote for any one of them, to lend any one of them your support, is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us. And we must let every single one of them know that we will not support them.

Perhaps it will win them more votes, that faggots won't support them, but at least we will have our self-respect. And, I predict, the respect of many others who have long wondered why we allow ourselves to be treated so brutally year after year after year, as they take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood. There is not one single one of them, candidate or major public figure, that, given half a chance, would not sell us down the river. We have seen this time after time, from Bill Clinton with his Don't Ask Don't Tell and his full support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act (talk about selling us down the river), to Hillary with her unacceptable waffling on all our positions. The woman does not know how to make simple declarative statements that involve definite details. (Read David Mixner on Hillary and Bill. It's scary. Go to his site.

To Ann Coulter calling people faggots and queers and getting away with it. As Andrew Sullivan responded to her: "The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest
bigotry!"

To this very morning's statement to the world by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, that he believes the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops fighting right this very minute for our country are immoral. That our country's top soldier can say something like
this out loud and get away with it is disgusting.

If I am going after Hillary and Bill Clinton it is because I think she just might win, or should I say they might win. Two for the price of one will prove irresistible. Thus it is important to go after the Clintons now, while it still might be possible to negotiate their acceptance and support of our concerns, nay our demands, instead of climbing on their bandwagon that is akin to a juggernaut smashing all in their way as David Mixner describes. Too many gay and lesbians and our organizations are giving her fundraisers and kissing her ass too unreservedly and way way too early.

As for Bill, yes, he is at last doing great work for AIDS in Africa, but it sure would be nice if we had his generics in America for all those who fall through the cracks of the Ryan White Drug Assistance Program. Have you noticed how fashionable it is for foundations and the two Bills, Gates and Clinton, to do AIDS good deeds in Africa and obviously much too unfashionable to do them in America? I don't like this woman, but I could, if she wasn't cockteasing us just like her husband did.

We are not crumbs! We must not accept crumbs!

The CDC says some 300,000 men who had sex with men have died during the past 20 years. If I knew at last 500 of them, I know this CDC figure is a lie. Just as I know the CDC figure of gay people as only several percentage points of the population is a lie, instead of the at least some 20% of the population that the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School calculates it is possible to maintain. Who says that intentional genocide of "us" by "them" isn't going on? They don't want us here. When are we going to face up to this?

We are discriminated against at every turn. As we prepare to die the older among us will be taxed beyond belief. That prevents us leaving our estates to our lovers or to gay charities. God forbid the latter should happen, that gays with any money should endow gay organizations with all their gay riches. Do you think I am being too elitist in this concern? Well, you are using this gay and lesbian community center now.

How do you think it supports itself? Taxation without representation is what led to our Revolutionary War. Well, way over two hundred years later gay people still have no equality. Gays are equal to nothing good or acceptable in this country. It is criminal how they treat us. We get further and further from progress and equality with each passing year.

George Bush will leave a legacy of hate that will take who knows how many eons to cleanse away. He has packed every court in the land with a conservative judge who serves for life. He has staffed every single government job from high to low with a conservative inhabitant who, under the laws of Civil Service, cannot be removed. So even with the most tolerant of new Presidents we will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate for as long as most of us will live. Congresspersons now call judges to pressure them, which is illegal, and if the President doesn't like a judge's record, he fires them, which is also illegal.

The Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality in any foreseeable future, and it is from the Supreme Court that it must come. They are the law of this land that will not make us equal. If that is not hate, if what I am talking about does not represent hate, I do not know what hate is. We are crumbs to them, if even that.

This is not just about gay marriage. Political candidates only talk about gay marriage, making nicey-nice maybes. But they are not talking about gay equality. And we are not demanding that they talk about the kind of equality I am talking about, marriage or no marriage. Gay marriage is a useful red herring for them to pretend they are talking about gays when they are not. For some reason our movement has confined its feeble demands to marriage. Well, my lover and I don't want to get married just yet but we sure want to be equal.

I wish I could make all gay people everywhere accept this one fact I know to be an undisputed truth. We are hated. Haven't enough of us died for all of us to believe this? Some seventy million cases of HIV were all brewed in a cauldron of hate.

Mark Harrington said to me last week that one of the great things about ACT UP was that it made us proud to be gay. Our activism came out of love. Our activism came out of our love for each other as we tried to take care of each other, and to keep each other alive.

No one is looking out for us anymore the way ACT UP looked out for us once upon a time.

ACT UP is not saving us now. This is not meant as finger-pointing or blame. It just is. No one goes to meetings and our chapters all over the globe have almost disappeared. And we must recognize this, I beg of you.

I don't want to start another organization. And yet I know we must start another organization. Or at the very least administer major shock therapy to this one.

And I know that if we do go down a new road, we must do it right and just accept this fact that the old ACT UP we knew is no longer useful enough to the needs that we have now and move on to reparative therapy.

I also know that any organization that we start now must be an army. You have resisted this word in the past. Perhaps now that the man in charge of America's army is calling you immoral you won't resist it army anymore. We must field an organized army with elected leaders and a chain of command. It must be a gay army with gay leaders fighting for gay people under a gay flag, in gay battle formations against our common enemies, uncontaminated by any fear of offending or by any sense that this might not be the time to say what we really need to say. We must cease our never-ending docile cooperation with a status quo that never changes in its relationship to us. We are cutting our own throats raising money for Hillary or Obama or Kerry or, God forbid, Giuliani, or anyone until they come out in full support of all the things I am talking about, not just some tepid maybe-maybes about second-class partnership pieces of worthless paper.

Immigration. Taxation without representation. Safety. Why aren't they all supporting Hate Crimes bills that include us? Twenty-thousand Christian youths now make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls. I am sorry but this is not free speech. This is another version of hate. If any organization sent 20,000 Christian youths to pray for Jewish souls they would lose their tax-exempt status, or they would have before George Bush.

Do we protest? It is very wearying to witness our carrying on so passively year after year, particularly now that all of us--and I mean all of us--have been given the gift of staying alive. I
know that young gays don't think this way, but many of us died to give you this gift of staying alive.

You are alive because of us. I wish you would see this. And we all owe it to the dead as well as to ourselves to continue a fight that we have stopped fighting.

We do not seem to realize that the more we become visible, the more that more and more of us come out of the closet, the more vulnerable we become to the more and more increasingly visible hate against us. In other words, the more they see us, the more they hate us. The more new gays they see, the more new ways they find to hate us. We do not seem to realize that the more we urge each other to come out--which indeed we must never stop doing--the more we must protect ourselves for and from our exits from our closet on to the stage of the world that hates us more and more. I don't think we realize this and we must. We must.

Why do I think we need the word "army"? Because it connotes strength and discipline, which we desperately need to convey. Because it scares people, and God knows nobody is all that scared of us. Which they were for a while. The drug companies were afraid of us. The NIH and FDA were afraid of us. Closeted everybodies were afraid of us. No more. Our days of being democratic to a flaw at those endless meetings must cease.

It has been a painful lesson to learn but democracy does not protect us. Unity does. United commitment to confront our many foes.

We never consider the establishment of a gay army, just as in the approach of the Holocaust the Jews did not consider one, even though urged, no begged, no implored to do so by their great philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who had the tragic misfortune to see what was coming and to not have her warnings heeded or even believed. Why only last week Mr. Obama implored his people, albeit with a certain timidity: "Put on your marching shoes! Go do some politics! Change this country!" If all the blacks in this country did all that, he would not only win but they would have the power they never have.

What we refuse to see is what is going on around us, believing it is happening to others but not believing that it can happen to us: the use and defense of torture, concentrations of prisoners regarded as threats to America in camps where they languish indefinitely beyond the reach of law; hidden "duplicate" governments existing under the auspices of the homeland security state, shadowing the constitutional government but secret and free of legal constraint." (Waldron). You don't think any of this can happen to you. I do.

You don't think that any of those "political" prisoners shipped off to camps are gay? You're wrong. Much of the Episcopalian church is now aligning itself with Nigeria. Homosexuality is
a punishable crime in Nigeria, in Ghana, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in a hundred different countries, as is any activism on behalf of it. Punishable means prison. Punishable means death. The Nigerian head archbishop of the Episcopalian church believes we should be put in prison.
Episcopalians! Whoever thought we'd have to worry about Episcopalians. Well, whoever thought we'd have to worry about Wyoming. Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming.

When will we acknowledge that we are constantly being lied to? We must have fiercely observant eyes. We must understand and confront the unprecedented, with "attentive facing up to, and resistance of, reality--whatever that might be."(Arendt) Intelligent people--and gays are certainly that--have proved more than once that we are less capable of judging for ourselves than almost any other social group. When a conservative columnist can get away with calling presidential candidates "a faggot" and "a queer," without any serious reprisals, than why can't we see that we are in trouble? When the New York Times does not run an
obituary on quite possibly the most famous lesbian in modern times, Barbara Gittings, then we are in trouble. When I can't get US News and World Report to publish a letter about an insidiously homophobic cover story they wrote on Jamestown, we're in trouble. When our country's top military officer can call us immoral, we're in trouble.

No, ACT UP is not saving us now. No one is saving us now.

We all think we have straight friends. We think if we have straight friends then everything is OK. But these friends are not protesting with us. They aren't fighting with us. They enjoy the freedoms they have with their marriages and all their fringe benefits. Yes, they like us but are they going to sacrifice any of their freedoms to get us ours? Of course not. And what's more we should not expect them to. Even though it sure would be nice; we've fought for them and theirs often enough.

The old ACT UP model served us well but it is time to take the next step. I am not saying that there are not more fights to be had for AIDS. There are and we must continue to fight them. Infections are up again. Prevention efforts are not good enough. It is still illegal for HIV foreigners to enter America. But these issues no longer appear to excite sufficient participation. Few people come to meetings and our chapters have disappeared. Many of us have tried to figure out what happened to us and why we ceased to be what we were. We all have thoughts about what happened but as I said I think its time to stop trying to figure it out
and just move on. Expanding our demands will hopefully not silence our past concerns but invite increased numbers to meld these newer concerns I am talking about into a stronger, total mix.

ACT UP requires a new model to do this. A new model that will allow for different kinds of actions, tactics and issues, not just HIV. I am not asking you if you even want another organization. I am hoping that you are smart enough to realize--eureka!--that the great deeds we once accomplished which changed history can be accomplished again. For we are still facing the same danger, our extermination, and from the same enemy, our own country, our own country's "democratic process." Day after day our country declares that we are not equal to anything at all. All the lives we saved are nothing but crumbs if we still aren't free. And we
still aren't free. Gay people still aren't free.

Go to Queens, go to Jamaica, go to Iran, go to Wyoming, we still aren't free. How many places in this country, in this world, can we walk down a street holding a beloved's hand? I went to my nephew's wedding in Jamaica twenty years ago. They are out for blood against gay men in Jamaica now. They do it to you the minute you get off the plane. There are men with iron crowbars waiting to maim you at the airport. Does our government protest? Of course not. Who cares if a faggot dies. They are actually beheading gays in Iran. This is progress?

The European Parliament which in the past had played a key role in advancing gay rights worldwide, is about to be taken over by conservative delegates that will strengthen their neo-fascist bloc, which will actually call for capital punishment for homosexuals. You don't think that any of this can't happen here? I do.

Our country's top soldier said so this morning. We are immoral. The Mayor of Moscow calls us dirt. Polish leaders call us scum. Ann Coulter calls us sissies. General Pace calls us immoral. Who cares if a faggot dies. A gay person murdered in Iraq or Libya or Nigeria or Jamaica or Ghana or Saudi Arabia is the same as a gay person murdered here. Why do I harp so on gay murders in foreign countries. Because gay murders in Iran have a way of becoming gay hate in Paris and London and Chicago and in the highest rank of US Army. Particularly when our own government ignores all attacks against us anywhere. Who cares of a faggot dies. It is all one world now.

The disposal of gay people is an equal opportunity employer and hate is a disease that spreads real fast. I repeat: a gay kid murdered anywhere is a gay kid murdered here.

Yes, we have many things to worry about now besides HIV. You can get married now in New Jersey but New York judges handed down some of the most bigoted "legal" hate outside of Iran, where as I have just said they are now actually decapitating gay men. They are stringing up gay boys and putting masks over their heads and hanging them as Saddam Hussein was hanged. For being gay. Does our government protest? Does any government protest?

Of course not. Who cares if a faggot dies. Do you have friends in love with partners forbidden from entering America? To be separated by force from the one you love is one of the saddest things I can think of. What kind of police state do we live in? This is not right.

This is wrong. It does not happen for straight lovers. It can only happen to gays who live in a country where we are hated. How many years do we have to endure being treated like this? If countries like Australia and New Zealand recognize relationship residencies for mixed nationalities, why can't we? There was not one single demonstration against those New
York judges, or indeed against any judges who are such dictators of our lives, where they work and live and sleep each night. They cannot be allowed to continue to hate us so legally. America cannot be allowed to continue to hate us so actively. It is not right. It is wrong.

Don't right and wrong mean anything anymore? Why are we not specifically included in Hate Crimes laws in many states? How many Matthew Shepherds must there be before we are specifically included in Hate Crime laws in every state? We have right on our side and we must make everyone know it. If ACT UP is to stand for anything, let it stand for our Army Corps to
Unleash Power.

Think about it. Think about all of this. Please.

We are the only people in America that it is socially acceptable to hate and discriminate against. Indeed so much hate of us exists that it is legally acceptable to pass constitutional amendments to hate us even more.

This is democracy? This is how our courts and laws protect us? These are the equal rights for all that America's Bill of Rights proclaims for all?

The biggest enemy we must fight continues to be our own government. How dare we stop? We cannot stop. We are not crumbs and we must not accept crumbs and we must stop acting like crumbs.

ACT UP is the most successful grass roots organization that ever lived. Period. There never was, never has been one more successful that has achieved as much as we. We did it before. We can do it again. But to be successful, activism must be practiced every day. By a lot of people.
It made us proud once. It united us.

I constantly hear in my ears the refrain: "an army of lovers cannot lose." Then why are we losing so? We must trust each other to an extent we never have, enough to allow the appointment of leaders and a chain of command to stay on top of things and keep some sort of order so that we not only don't self destruct as we seem to have more or less done, but also, this time, as we did not do before, institutionalize ourselves for longevity.

I am very aware that as I spin this out I am creating reams of unanswered questions. Well, we didn't know when we first met in this very room twenty years ago what we wanted ACT UP to become. But we figured it out. Bit by bit and piece by piece we put it together. We have a lot to
thrash out and codify in a more private fashion. Armies shouldn't show all their cards to the world. Many parts of the old ACT UP will still serve us: the choices of a variety of issues to obsess us in the detail that we became famous for; the use of affinity groups that develop their own forms of guerrilla warfare. Our call for Health Care for All must still be sought.

I have a personal bug up my ass that gay history is not taught in the schools. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were gay. It may be up to activists to ram this truth down the throats of America because gay historians are too timid to. Timidity is so boring, don't you agree?

Much of what I am calling for involves laws, changing them, getting them. We need to cobble together an omnibus gay rights bill and then hold every politician's feet to this fire until he or she supports it. We'd find out fast enough who are friends aren't. TAG and AmFAR once cobbled together a bunch of research priorities into a bill that they got through congress.

How about this: Jim Eigo wrote me: "a full generation after AIDS emerged as a recognizable disease, having sex still poses the same risk for HIV infection or reinfection. Having a sexual encounter with another person--a central, meaningful activity in most people's lives--has been
shadowed by fear, by the prospect of a long-term disease and by a whole new reason for guilt for more than a quarter of a century now. How have we allowed this unnatural state of affairs to persist for so long? Where are the 21st century tools for preventing the sexual transmission of HIV: cheap, effective, and utterly unobtrusive. Lovers deserve nothing less.

Instead of sinking time, effort, and money into excavating the fossils of its ancient achievement, ACT UP might consider marking its birthday by mounting a fresh drive to remind government and industry that people have a right to sex without fear, without being forced to make a choice between pleasure and health. It's an issue that might actually speak across the
divides of generation, race, gender and sero-status. And it might regain for the organization some measure of the relevance it once had for the grassroots activists that gave of themselves as if their lives depended on it, because they really did."

Jim is calling for nothing less than the reclamation of our sex lives. What an utterly fantastic notion, or shall I now say goal? Why even raising this issue will find us hated even more. I
am so ready for another organized fight.

Are you beginning to see how all this that I am talking about can be streamed into one new ACT UP army?

I have asked Eric to convey the main difference of what is available to us now that we did not have to work with in the past: "In the age of the internet we can do much of what we did in our
meetings and on the streets, on the world wide web. The information technology available today could help end the need for those endless meetings.

"Creating a blog could, in fact, incorporate even more voices and varieties of opinions and ideas than any meeting ever could. Where ACT UP once had chapters in many cities, we could now involve thousands more via simple list-serves and blogs. We can draw in students and schools and colleges all over the world. It is the young we have to get to once again.

"Creating a blog would allow for expression and refinement of ideas and policies, like a Queer Justice League for denouncing our enemies.

"A well organized website could function as an electronic clearing house for sharing information, for posting problems, for demanding solutions, for developing and communicating action plans. List-serves and a website could coordinate grassroots organizing
and mobilize phone, e-mail and physical zaps or actions. They could also be used to spotlight homophobic actions, articles, movies and tv, and laws.

"Why aren't we fighting fire with fire? Where is our radical gay left think tank? We need our own "700 Club" and our own talk radio show. Developing such gay content programming for the LOGO or Here Networks or for streaming on-line is completely possible today. Why are all the shows our community is producing about fashion, decorating or just another gay soap?"

Why even Time Magazine is now stating as a fact that websites drive the agendas of political parties. I know that even without these tools we reordered an entire world's approach to a disease that would have killed us all. Surely with these tools and with all our creativity we can start to take control of our destinies again.

With these tools, and with a renewed commitment to love and support and to fight to save each other, with a renewed commitment to the anger that saved us once before, with the belief that anger, along with love, are the two most healthy and powerful emotions we are good at, I
believe that we could have such a historical success again.

May I conclude these thoughts, these remarks toward the definition of a new ACT UP that will hopefully begin to be discussed forthwith, with this cry from my heart:

Farewell ACT UP.

Long live ACT UP.

Thank you.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Crown Jewels


Prince William, proving why I'm averse to wearing Spandex; Hey, wait! I wrestled for 14 years and danced for 10 years before that!

Okay, I'm not wearing Spandex any more.

Monday, March 12, 2007

The First Pedal


So, I've started a blog about cycling and my third novel, Cyclizen. For several years I maintained two websites, first about my first novel, PINS (and later, Monkey Suits), and my column Sports Complex.

I have a feeling blogging is going to be a much easier ride! A lot less old-fashioned HTML, but I know how to do the simple formatting, if needs be.

Yes, this is primarily to promote Cyclizen (out May 2007, hopefully, since it's National Bike Month!).

But it'll also include topics of interest to GLBT cyclists, athletes and other themes. I'll probably post links to my weekly arts column and calendar in the Bay Area Reporter, and blog posts I write for the BAR's blog.