Morning Comrades!
Today’s dispatch is an edited version of what the patreon’s of this project received yesterday. One the one hand I wanted to show what a paid subscription to this project, aside from the free weekly prints and discount codes for any and all merch gets you and also, I figured this topic to critically important today. With the semi-recent move by the powers that be that put a massive target on our trans comrades on their back I wanted to show how to effectively combat these hateful by looking at what happened during the AIDS/HIV pandemic in the 80s and 90s.
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Most of you are aware of the recent increase in hateful discourse and actions against trans people. Sadly, it was just a question of time until the conservative reactionary elements in politics and media jumped on the TERF bandwagon, made it their own and painted targets on our comrades. Even though I have said this multiple times, here it comes again: Transpeople are my comrades, akin to every one else, deserve all the rights, help, safety and support everyone else enjoys and deserves and their protection, support and inclusion is not only logical but part of this communities work. It’s really that simple.
Whilst I could go on about the topic of trans rights for some time I will leave that for more educated people and people directly involved, for my part I find it best to give support how and where it is needed. What we are going to talk about today is however, how the game plan behind this semi-recent increase in hatred is not only a carbon copy of the same hateful campaign and realities the gay community in the West was subjected to starting in the 80s and how it is linked to the AIDS pandemic of said time, but also how it was fought as I believe that the reactions against it all, specifically by ACT UP are directly relevant in today’s fight for trans rights/life’s.
I am too young to remember the hateful, ideological campaign against the “Gay Plague” and Gays of the 80s. I believe the first time my family and I spoke of AIDS/HIV is the day that Freddy Mercury died. I was semi-aware of the disease but not necessarily the consequences. Luckily, and this is one of the few instances when my parents didn’t fuck up, they weren’t homophobic and had no problem explaining what AIDS/HIV was at the time. This horrific disease and its consequences, one that could have been largely avoided had the devils that were the Reagan’s and their cabal of devil’s across their world taken a humanistic stance on the matter, reared its ugly twice after Freddy’s death in my life. A few years later when my Dad’s cousin, a big brother person to me, took his own life with a heroin overdose as he couldn’t deal with having contracted HIV and then again, a few years later in 99 when a dear friend at University died of it, as even then, the medicine for it wasn’t advanced enough and too expensive.
Now, the way how the AIDS pandemic was dealt with, especially in the US and subsequently throughout the West is one of the most brutal, hateful examples of Homophobia, Patriarchal Structuring, Capitalism, Christian Extremism and the ultimate and often repeated failure in integrity in Journalism.
For the sake of clarity and brevity, here is a timeline of the pandemic in the US that is very much worth your time. If you remember the 1980s, you will likely summon up the image of the Grim Reaper or a black tombstone when asked to think about AIDS. In the words of American scholar Paula Treichler, AIDS has always partly been an “epidemic of meanings”. Especially, in the earlier years of the pandemic, from the late 70s to the late 80s, AIDS/HIV was largely ignored by the people that could have helped prevent well over 100K deaths in the US alone, never mind the witch trials and stigmatization of the LGBTQ community at large with uncountable attacks, denials of civil rights and the subsequent violence that seeped through every level of our societies at the time.
If we take into account the highly homophobic and extremist Christian / Patriarchal social context in which news of the condition first started circulating, then its cultural dimensions become all the more important. We must consider what AIDS meant to people in the 1980s and 1990s, and what HIV still means today, at a time when antiretroviral therapies are being used successfully to manage existing infections and prevent new ones.
To give you an idea, watch the clip below, one that was made 7 years into a raging hate campaign and pandemic.
These videos highlight some of the key features of the publically - funded AIDS awareness campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s. Even if we ignore the fact that governments only publicly acknowledged AIDS years after the first known patients (homosexual men) started dying, these and other films of the time are evidence of the impact a homophobic mainstream culture had on the ways AIDS was dealt with in public.
Despite the fact that homosexual men had been one of the demographics most affected by the condition, these campaigns still refused to address homosexuals directly and communicate clearly to them ways in which homosexual sex could be made safer. Instead, they preferred to deal in visual metaphors and allusions aimed at an abstract general public.
Marked by a fear, on the part of the Thatcher and Reagan governments, that speaking directly to homosexuals could be seen as endorsing “deviant” homosexual behaviour, the often moralistic – and publicly-funded – health campaigns released during the peak of the Western AIDS crisis ignored the specific realities of those most affected by the epidemic.
Not only that, but health campaigns and news stories often played with metaphors that were not only deeply sexist and homophobic, but also inspired by the language of warfare. They also mostly chose to endorse celibacy or monogamy rather than educate people about risk-management and safer sex.
Ultimately, everyone in power looked at the gay community as a minority, ignored all calls for help, used and abused this killer virus ( As Dr Paul Volberding, a San Francisco medic who helped to set up America’s first hospital inpatient ward for Aids sufferers, recalled to The Guardian in 2016: “This is the most fatal infectious disease ever seen. Without treatment, 98% die. More than Ebola. More than Smallpox.” ) to create a scapegoat for the cultural wars, for power. Sadistic, evil bastards that they were and were are exactly back at that point once again.
As mentioned before, culture wars, especially those instigated by the above mentioned forces, exist solely for power, not from conviction but the sheer abhorrent lust for power. Create a panic, a scapegoat and a viable solution ( Pat Buchanan, who served as the White House Communications Director from February 1985 to March 1987, described the crisis as nature “exacting an awful retribution against gay men” in a 1983 op-ed for the New York Post ) and you are sure to be given enough power to rule. Straight out of Hitler’s playbook.
However, two important events took place (clearly, there were many many more and all of them were / are important ) that over time and that involved a lot of bloodshed, tragedy, work and conviction.
Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart”. The play, which premiered off-Broadway in May 1985, viscerally chronicles the earliest struggles faced by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first Aids support clinic in the US, co-founded by Kramer in New York in 1982.
Then there was ACT UP, whose story and work is the point of this essay, as their work is directly related to how we can fight this new wave of hatred against a perceived “immoral” minority, which it is neither.
ACT UP ( AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power ) was formed on March 12, 1987, at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. Larry Kramer was asked to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer spoke out against the current state of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as politically impotent. Kramer had co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983. According to Douglas Crimp, Kramer posed a question to the audience: "Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?" The answer was "a resounding yes". Approximately 300 people met two days later to form ACT UP.
At the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, in October 1987, ACT UP New York made their debut on the national stage, as an active and visible presence in both the march, the main rally, and at the civil disobedience at the United States Supreme Court Building the following day. Following this, several high profile protests took place
On March 24, 1987, 250 ACT UP members demonstrated at Wall Street and Broadway to demand greater access to experimental AIDS drugs and for a coordinated national policy to fight the disease. Seventeen ACT UP members were arrested during this civil disobedience.
On March 24, 1988, ACT UP returned to Wall Street for a larger demonstration in which over 100 people were arrested.
On September 14, 1989, seven ACT UP members infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange and chained themselves to the VIP balcony to protest the high price of the only approved AIDS drug, AZT. The group displayed a banner that read, "SELL WELLCOME" referring to the pharmaceutical sponsor of AZT, Burroughs Wellcome, which had set a price of approximately $10,000 per patient per year for the drug, well out of reach of nearly all HIV positive persons. Several days following this demonstration, Burroughs Wellcome lowered the price of AZT to $6,400 per patient per year.
ACT UP held their next action at the New York City General Post Office on the night of April 15, 1987, to an audience of people filing last minute tax returns. This event also marked the beginning of the conflation of ACT UP with the Silence=Death Project, which created a poster consisting of a right side up pink triangle (an upside-down pink triangle was used to mark gays in Nazi concentration camps) on a black background with the text "SILENCE = DEATH".
In January 1988, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article by Robert E. Gould, a psychiatrist, entitled "Reassuring News About AIDS: A Doctor Tells Why You May Not Be At Risk." The main contention of the article was that in unprotected vaginal sex between a man and a woman who both had "healthy genitals" the risk of HIV transmission was negligible, even if the male partner was infected. Women from ACT UP who had been having informal "dyke dinners" met with Dr. Gould in person, questioning him about several misleading facts (that penis to vagina transmission is impossible, for example) and questionable journalistic methods (no peer review, bibliographic information, failing to disclose that he was a psychiatrist and not a practitioner of internal medicine), and demanded a retraction and apology. When he refused, in the words of Maria Maggenti, they decided that they "had to shut down Cosmo." According to those who were involved in organizing the action, it was significant in that it was the first time the women in ACT UP organized separately from the main body of the group. Additionally, filming the action itself, the preparation and the aftermath were all consciously planned and resulted in a video short directed by Jean Carlomusto and Maria Maggenti, titled, "Doctor, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists Say No To Cosmo." The action consisted of approximately 150 activists protesting in front of the building and whilst no one was arrested Cosmopolitan eventually issued a partial retraction of the contents of the article.
There are obviously thousands upon thousands other examples of the work that ACT UP did and still does but these three remain the most vivid in my memory/research. So much more happened outside of the public eye, self-made clinics, support networks, mutual aid financial bonds and more were created by this wonderful group of people and to this day I do find their work, ethos and will one to look up to, copy and use in our work today. The organization was democratic to the core, with departments including Issues, Action, Finance, Outreach, Treatment and Data, Media, Graphics and Housing Committee’s, all done non-transactional and purely out of need and solidarity.
There is so much reference material and history on their work that I cannot even start to assemble a list here, but get into it.
The point is, these culture wars, these attacks on minorities by the powerful can be combatted and ACT UP showed us how. In a time when Transphobia is replacing Homophobia and hate crimes are increasing we need to get together and fight.
In Travis Alabanza’s words “A society where we are policing each other’s gender, which is fundamentally what they want to enact, leads to violence for all of us” – and here is how to fight it.
Thank you for your time, support and attention,
Yours, without compromise,
V.