According to longtime AIDS activist Peter Staley, today's progressives need to be prepared for four difficult years while Donald Trump is president.
"Activism is about plowing through defeats," said Staley, on Feb. 18, in the second-night keynote address at the 2017 Midwest Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Ally College Conference ( MBLGTACC ) at Navy Pier. "Movements are made stronger by political backlash."
Staley, who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, was a member of ACT UP New York as well as one of the subjects of the 2012 film How to Survive a Plague. He also founded AIDSmeds.com, a website geared towards persons living with HIV, and has been in recent years working for expanded access to PrEP.
At the MBLGTACC talk, he discussed his diagnosis and subsequent activism, focusing on the lessons newly-energized progressive activists can draw from the ACT UP era to keep their momentum going while Trump is in the White House.
"Empathy must be the driving force that defines the resistance," Staley said, noting how many non-Muslims arrived at American airports to protest executive orders Trump issued Jan. 27. "Only a handful of people had skin in the game. It was not only beautiful, it was effective."
Empathy needs to be a progressive movement's "calling card," he added, recalling that about half of ACT UP's membership was HIV-negative and "driven by anger, loss and sorrow." Though ACT UP was by definition a product of the LGBT community's collective outrage, Staley said he would always remember it as a group defined by empathy and love.
Acknowledging the power of social media to wield popular influence, he further urged that young activists not completely rely on it for their organizational approaches.
"I have yet to see a piece of software or an app that can substitute for the brainstorming that can go on at [an in-person] meeting," he said, suggesting that people meet weekly to organize and try to cultivate a group of 10-20 regular, committed individuals for long-term planning. "The trick will really be keeping everyone from killing each other in years two, three and four."
Trump's election was partially a backlash directed against multiculturalism and feminism, Staley added, so it is necessary to publicly call out racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, even when it appears that the LGBT community is not on the president's immediate radar.
"Donald Trump thinks he can avoid our wrath by reading 'LGBTQ' from a teleprompter," he said. "He has completely underestimated our empathy."