Last weekend, I attended a 25 year reunion of ACT UP activists, observing the anniversary of ACT UP’s historic actions in and around the 6th Annual International AIDS Conference held in San Francisco in 1990.
Time it was and what a time it was, it was a time of innocence a time of taking the streets and taking names. Long before I became a rabbi, I was already a social justice activist (SJW? Sure, why not?) and “alternative” journalist helping to enact and document the battle for treatment, research and respect fought by people with AIDS and their friends. Among other things, I was an ACT UP L.A. fellow traveler or, as I explained to my friends, “I’ll write the stories, I’ll get arrested with you, I will face those L.A. County Sheriffs—but I won’t face those 3-hour meetings.
Cute. Fortunately, my more dedicated friends did have the fortitude and commitment to face and participate in those meetings, the results of which reshaped AIDS care protocols and health policy. We remain better off for their work.
It’s hard to explain to those who never lived through it what the late 1980s and early 1990s were like for people in communities devastated by AIDS. 25 years ago, AIDS was a disease that pretty much guaranteed an early death. There were not enough drugs, not enough hospital or hospice beds. A disease that affected primarily gay men, people of color and IV drug users—in the days of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush—that’s just about the worst possible luck.
AIDS changed everything. People who wouldn’t look twice at someone whom they deemed to be a bit unattractive learned to bathe bodies riddled with lesions and to work with adult diapers. People with day jobs spent every bit of free time researching or protesting, creating policy because the government and the healthcare profiteers were not bestirring themselves.
For many lesbians like me, AIDS shifted our focus. My political work at the time had been just about entirely within the female feminist world. Until AIDS hit. Then I marked the indifference of many straight “sisters,” communicated often enough with a bit of a smirk and a callous reference to “lifestyles.” And my friends were suffering and dying. It was time to choose up teams.
Hence ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT UP was unruly, floppy in structure—and surprisingly effective. General meetings attracted as many as a 100 people. Anyone could bring in an idea for an action. If the group was interested, those who wanted to do the action formed a committee and did it. There were protests at insurance company offices, government buildings and in the streets, all in service of the demand for more: more research, more access to services, and more access to policy-making for people harmed by the epidemic. Famously, ACT UP staged at week-long vigil at County USC hospital. Prior to the activists’ demands, there had been no dedicated AIDS ward or outpatient clinic. People took their chemo in the halls, lying on gurneys, vomit bags at the ready. The vigil would help to change that.
ACT UP was loud, immoderate, and contemptuous of convention. I adored their tactical insouciance, even as their strategic fecklessness sometimes drove me crazy. (At that AIDS vigil, County Supervisor Ed Edelman, at the time an isolated liberal on the Board, showed up to offer support—and was heckled as an opportunist. Didn’t we want to offer politicians a little stroking for supporting us along with huge disincentives to piss us off? Fortunately, Edelman supported our demands anyway, because he was pretty much a mensch.)
ACT UP was also flashy, captivating and sexy as hell, making brilliant use of media to drive the epidemic onto front pages and news broadcasts. Yes, a lot of ACT UP activists were white and had known relative economic privilege. (Although, in L.A. there was visible and effective Latino/a and Asian-American ACT UP leadership, most Black activists chose to work in separate groups.) But they made the most of it—moving from the academy, the shmancy offices and even a few from boardrooms into the streets, armed with Foucauldian theory and marketing know-how. Silence=Death.
And we had to celebrate the sexy if we were going to save lives. One of the Reagan administration’s worst outrages was the Helms Amendment of 1988 that, “prohibits the Federal Centers for Disease Control from funding AIDS programs that ”promote, encourage or condone homosexual activities.” So no funding for safer sex information that actually taught people how to use a condom or explored the risks associated with particular sex acts (and suggested fun alternatives) or that indicated that gay people might have lives worth living. ACT UP’s poster art reclaimed the body as a site of resistance and joy, reminding us that only people who believe they deserve to live will fight for their lives.
In 1990, the 6th International AIDS Conference came to San Francisco, and so did ACT UP. There was a Women’s Demonstration, because, as usual, too much research was leaving the particularities of women’s bodies out of the data. Immigration activists protested because yet another “Helms Amendment” in 1987 had added HIV infection to the list of conditions for which immigrants and visitors to the USA were banned. As Jorge Cortinas reminded us at the reunion’s Living History panel, this amendment also undermined amnesty for undocumented workers, forcing them into either mandatory testing or a life of hiding from the medical providers whose services they needed. As Jorge testified, “the coalition held.” ACT UP did not sell out undocumented people but took up their cause, along with that of prestigious international experts who were excluded from the conference because of the travel ban.
So 25 years later, there we were, remembering our victories and remembering our dead. So very many dead. Chris, Mark, Gunther, Gil, Wayne, Connie…and Bill and Alvaro, and Rockabilly Dave…these memories are wounds that seemed to have healed. Until we touch them.
Why am I telling you this here? What does this have to do with being Jewish, with being a rabbi? Tzedek, tzedek tirdof—justice, justice shall you pursue.
Our prophets, of whom Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Z”L said, “To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world,” were immoderate and loud and very provocative. Yezkiel (Ezekiel) laid on his side for a whole year, cooked his food publically over dung, and burned his hair, because those in power had not, “sustained the weak, healed the sick, or bandaged the injured” (34:4). Hosea’s marriage to Gomer, a sexually active woman, was a Divinely mandated performance of inclusion and radical affection. True, our tradition is still working out issues of sexuality, homo and otherwise. As usual, we’re roiling with generative controversy on the subject. But on the subject of healing, visiting and caring for the sick, there is no disagreement. “Six things benefit us in this world and in the world to come: Hospitality to wayfarers, visiting the sick, meditation in prayer, early attendance at the study house, teaching Torah to one’s children, and giving one’s neighbor the benefit of a doubt.”Talmud Bavli Shabbat 127a. We study a version of this teaching daily in our prayers. It was good to be reminded by ACT UP about the actively prophetic, the Torah of outrage and love.
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