Authors: Martin Duberman
There was dissent within ACT UP/New York itself about the St. Patrick’s action, and the division involved more material issues than the fate of a communion wafer. In her brilliant book
Moving Politics
, Deborah Gould pinpoints a rift over priorities within the membership ranks of ACT UP that would grow over time. Some members insisted that ACT UP’s prime goal of speeding up medical research and getting more “drugs into bodies” should remain its singular focus. Others remained committed to the more expansive social agenda of combating sexism, racism, and classism within ACT UP itself and in the culture at large. The tension between the two positions would lead ACT UP/San Francisco to split into two organizations: ACT UP/
Golden Gate, focused on research, and ACT UP/San Francisco, concentrated on broad social change. Two years later, ACT UP/New York would see a comparable split when its Treatment and Data Committee (all white, all male, except for one woman, Garance Franke-Ruta) would split off into a separate entity, the Treatment Action Group (TAG).
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A significant number of those who joined ACT UP/New York had never been politically involved in the gay movement during the seventies—and in some cases (like Larry Kramer) had derided it. ACT UP would throughout its history remain predominantly white and male, but several of the lesbians who joined its ranks—preeminently Jean Carlomusto, Maria Maggenti, Liz Tracy, Sarah Schulman, Heidi Dorow, Ann Northrop, Terry McGovern, and Maxine Wolfe—brought with them considerable experience and savvy from having worked in other progressive movements, including the feminist one. Of the various committees that formed within ACT UP by the late eighties, the Women’s Caucus (mostly white at first, but subsequently with some influx of HIV-positive women of color), the Housing Committee, and the Majority Action Committee paid particular attention to issues relating to sexism and racism. The Women’s Caucus successfully pushed for a CDC redefinition of AIDS to incorporate the fact that for women full-blown AIDS manifested not as KS but as bacterial pneumonia, pelvic inflammatory disease, and cervical cancer.
Maxine Wolfe was perhaps the most vocal of these women. She challenged, often accurately, the political perspective of many male members of ACT UP. “I had assumed,” she argued at one point, that ACT UP “was a lesbian-and gay identified group, but people didn’t want to be called lesbian and gay activists; they wanted to be called ‘AIDS activists.’ And they seemed to believe in the health-care system, even if it had gone awry. They even respected doctors!” But if Wolfe didn’t think ACT UP was politically “the be-all and end-all,” she remained active in its ranks because she saw “people
develop
a political perspective,” saw “men who wanted to hide being gay behind their AIDS activism” do a teach-in on lesbian and gay history, saw more and more members “develop a gay-liberation and not a gay-rights perspective.” She believed that over time ACT UP’s agenda gradually expanded and more and more young people came “to understand that what we want is the right to exist—not the right to privacy; the right
to a life, not to a lifestyle; and a life that is as important as anyone else’s, but not more important than anyone else’s.”
The Housing Committee, the Majority Action Committee, and the Women’s Caucus tended to draw ACT UP’s most politically radical members, those who believed that issues like universal health care and decent housing were inextricably bound up with the effort to push for faster, more accessible drug research. The divisions within ACT UP weren’t always clear-cut; some activists whose focus was primarily treatment issues—Jim Eigo, for one—also worked hard for a more expansive activist agenda.
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If you were living at or below the poverty line, couldn’t afford to pay rent or see a doctor, or were an IV drug user, the development of more effective treatments was likely to be beyond your means in any case. This lack of resources may help to account for the willingness of some of the poor to believe in the miracle cure of Kemron (which consisted of a small amount of alpha interferon), announced at a press conference held in Nairobi early in 1990. Scientists who’d been experimenting with interferon dismissed the new drug as worthless in countering AIDS, but when the president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, praised it at a press conference as the long-awaited cure, interest in the African American press soared. The PWA Health Group, among other buyer clubs, jumped on the bandwagon and began hyping Kemron. The
Amsterdam News
accused white scientists and activists of downplaying the drug’s importance because it had originated in Africa. Kemron continued to have a following in the black neighborhoods of New York, L.A., Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.—that is, until additional studies failed to duplicate the original results, and Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, himself an African American doctor, publicly concluded that Kemron was worthless.
Other issues relating to race came to loom large in the tensions that developed within ACT UP. In New York, Allan Robinson, one of several black gay members of ACT UP, was scornful of the dominant white male sense of entitlement: “They were goddamned angry. They were angry because they thought they had everything—trips to Brazil and Fire Island, hanging in the clubs, boyfriends, drugs, money, and living perhaps on Eighty-First Street and Central Park West. They were angry because they were being treated like everybody else.” The
prominent Latino activist Moisés Agosto ultimately became disillusioned with ACT UP over race and class issues: “The majority of people I looked up to [in the Treatment and Data Committee] . . . were not really that much into doing work related to access to care and treatment for disenfranchised communities.” In 1992 Agosto shifted his energy to working with the National Latino Lesbian and Gay Organization.
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Members of the Majority Action Committee (MAC) were well aware that people of color were afflicted with AIDS out of all proportion to their numbers, not only in the United States but globally. In April 1989, only 9 percent of the participants in New York City’s AIDS program trials were black, though they accounted for 33 percent of the city’s AIDS cases; it hardly made sense to speak of blacks as members of a minority, even if that
was
true of their status within ACT UP. Jim Eigo, one of the more influential white members of ACT UP, spoke for the radical contingent in general when he argued that ACT UP should engage in a demand for universal health care. Members of the Housing and Majority Action Committees also put particular emphasis on meeting the needs of people of color and ending minority invisibility. They visited various black churches in order to promote ACT UP’s work, to provide information, and to broaden awareness of the widespread suffering that AIDS had wrought in communities of color. MAC members profited from the prior activity of San Francisco’s Third World AIDS Advisory Task Force, which as early as 1985 had pushed an agenda that foregrounded the enormity of the needs of people of color afflicted with AIDS, who often lay beyond the outreach of AIDS organizations. The San Francisco group had not only produced a brochure specially designed for people of color, but in 1986 had succeeded in holding the first Western Regional Conference on AIDS and Ethnic Minorities.
New York City’s MAC never fully matched that achievement, but it did come to understand and emphasize that a number of blacks and Hispanics had become infected as a result of IV drug use—and understood, too, that strong resistance would greet any attempt to establish a clean needle program; many black as well as white leaders denounced such a notion as sanctioning the spread of drug use. The members of MAC also came to realize that many minority members who’d contracted AIDS through same-gender sex didn’t necessarily, or even
often, self-identify as gay—it was the difference between behavior and identity: one did not automatically adopt a gay identity simply because one had had sex, occasionally or often, with members of one’s own gender. MAC and ACT UP/New York in general made enough strides in sensitizing themselves to the needs of people of color to lead conservative gay writer Randy Shilts, in a January 1991 cover story for
The Advocate
, to make the astounding claim that ACT UP’s “growing irrelevance” was primarily due to the fact that it currently seemed more concerned with poor blacks and Hispanics than with gay white men.
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That assessment would have stunned many minority members of ACT UP. While it was true that from the beginning ACT UP/New York had formally declared that AIDS “disproportionately affects men and women of color,” the acknowledgment had to some extent been pro forma. Mike Callen, for one, felt “there was a huge gap between ACT UP rhetoric and behavior.” Those ACT UP members who insisted on focusing their time and energy on pushing for faster research and better drugs tended to be the more privileged members—highly educated, middle-class white men. Those who chose instead to concentrate on issues relating to race and gender populated the organization but did not control its direction. In Mike’s view, ACT UP’s preferred description of itself as “multicultural, diverse, and democratic to a fault” was overstated. Perhaps unfairly, he felt ACT UP was essentially “a very hierarchical boys group,” and the leading “boys” had been raised to have “arrogant certainties.” If Mike was guilty of undercrediting the impact of the Housing, MAC, and Women’s committees in ACT UP, he never doubted that its direct-action tactics helped to awaken the nation to the plight of those suffering from AIDS.
Fighting the scientific, governmental, and pharmaceutical establishments through confrontational activism did remain ACT UP’s number one priority, especially during the first four or so years of its existence. The starkest contrast within ACT UP involved the opposing priorities of the Treatment and Data (T&D) Committee and those of MAC (as well as most of the Women’s Caucus). T&D focused on getting “drugs into bodies,” MAC on getting minority, female, economically disadvantaged bodies access to health care—and then taking on additional institutional inequalities. For some, the whole business of ranking oppressions was offensive, especially since the mounting conservative
tide in the country as a whole lumped them all together as an unsavory collectivity, a distasteful Other.
But thanks to the ACT UP demonstrations, the country’s conservatives could no longer ignore the tremendous toll that AIDS was taking, nor continue to assume that gay people were a tiny, cowering minority. Media coverage of ACT UP demonstrations was considerable, and the images many Americans saw on television or in their newspapers contradicted the long-standing stereotypes of frightened sissies and their roughneck sisters. By 1990, there were fifty openly gay elected officials around the country (compared with half a dozen in 1980), and the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay lobbying group, ranked twenty-fifth on the list of the country’s most powerful fund-raising organizations. In 1987, only one-third of adults believed that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal. By 1989, a Gallup poll revealed that the figure had jumped to 47 percent.
It would be a mistake to draw too rosy a picture. Draconian sodomy laws still remained on the books in twenty-four states, and the legislatures of only two states—Wisconsin and Massachusetts—had passed laws barring discrimination against gay people (and only seven U.S. cities had as yet put “domestic partnership,” which granted gay people some of the same rights as married couples, on the books). Additionally, gay people were seven times more likely to become victims of violent assault than other Americans; for trans people, the numbers were still higher. It would only be with the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 that the American Psychoanalytic Association would hold its very first forum on homophobia (there had been countless ones through the years on the “causes” and “cures” of homosexuality).
Yet the softening of homophobia was real. In a culture with a profoundly contradictory heritage of conformity and innovation, the way forward would necessarily be gradual (though only if the demands were for full and instant change; you ask for the whole pie in order to get a slice of it) and would periodically be marked by retreats. Yet nowhere else in the world was there a comparably vibrant and effective gay rights movement. In the 1970s, when the first gay civil rights measures were submitted to public referendum, only 29 percent of the voters
reacted to them favorably; by the early nineties, the percentage had risen to 39 percent—and would continue to climb.
Had ACT UP been more centrally concerned with feminism, poverty, and racism, both Mike Callen and Essex Hemphill might have been tempted to join. But Essex was probably too disaffected (“The absence of willful change / And strategic coalitions . . . will not . . . save us”) to participate in any white-dominated organization. And Mike, as editor of
Newsline
and president of CRI, already had his hands full, even as he tried to somehow fit in music making and the maintenance of his own health. He admired ACT UP’s many achievements but had his doubts about its attitude of “damn the FDA and full speed ahead: drugs into bodies.” He wasn’t interested in CRI “undertaking ANY trial which, from the outset, it believes will not contribute to FDA approval and therefore the wider availability of promising therapies.” CRI, like ACT UP, was centrally concerned with trying to find effective drug therapies but felt that could best be achieved through community-based trials, not confrontational street actions. In this regard, the radical-minded Mike was tactically to the right of ACT UP—but not consistently so, since he’d been involved in any number of demonstrations and had several times been arrested. He was also a more committed feminist and more racially conscious than many of the white men in ACT UP.
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By 1989, CRI was having internal troubles of its own. Critics charged the organization, and Sonnabend especially, with failing to write up the results of some of its trials, and in particular those involving Antabuse, lentinan, and the egg lipid, AL-721. Some of the criticism of CRI was more broadly gauged—and more hurtful. At the start of the year, Lou Grant, a quiet, unassuming African American board member, unexpectedly issued an “open letter” that produced a shock wave in the organization. Prior to the letter, Mike had made several efforts by phone and in person to allay Grant’s apprehensions about CRI’s direction. In response, Grant had told Mike that his work had been “extraordinarily important . . . in many ways I owe you my life.” Yet in his open letter Grant now called Mike “a self-appointed leader/hero . . . an AIDS pimp . . . [who didn’t] respect the members of the board” and had misappropriated funds that NIAID had awarded for minority outreach.