My activist beginnings ...
"I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and there had been a systematic campaign of harassment against gay students and faculty and their supporters. This was before I arrived and at that time a couple of students were suspended for their suspected involvement in that campaign of harassment; the campaign included death threats. It was a pretty serious business. They were calling themselves the Great White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist.
"I think it was sometime in the spring of '89 that the University of Chicago administration said they were going to allow one of these students to graduate. So there was a series of protests that started and so I was involved with that. It was an ad hoc group that got thrown together. But really my first involvement with the queer community at that time was with ACT UP. It was actually at one of those demonstrations that Saundra Johnson, who was a member of ACT UP Chicago and also worked at the University, was watching the demonstration and must have gotten my name somehow, and someone from ACT UP called me and asked if I would come to speak to them about what was going on at the University and get some support. So I went and I kept going."
Pride Parade ...
"I got quickly involved and I remember marching in the Gay Pride Parade in 1989. As we marched up Halsted and down Broadway as an ACT UP contingent, the crowd cheered in a way that I'd never experienced before. There was incredible support for ACT UP. Although, from the beginning, there were detractors, there were always people who were skeptical about what we were about."
Zaps ...
"The first one that I participated in was in May 1989, and it was the CTA action. The CTA had refused to post safe-sex ads, saying they were a family oriented business. In particular they had denied Kupona Network an ad they had created. Kupona was a group in the African-American community. They had created a series of ads that they had tried to put onto the CTA, but were refused. We also, in connection with Kupona and VIDA SIDA, which was a Puerto Rican group, had created our own ads and were trying to put pressure on the CTA to put them up.
"During that action we stopped traffic, where Diversey, Clark and Broadway meet, we were walking through that intersection over and over again. People got onto buses and put the ads up and also on the trains."
"We did a number of actions at Holy Name Cathedral and also the Moody Bible Institute. There was a point where the federal government came out with some ads, and they were not great but it was the first time there was a discussion of condoms, and the ads weren't fear-based. They were better than some of the other mainstream safe-sex stuff that had come out.
"But the thing was that hardly any television stations were going to run them. The Catholic church also came out against them, saying that safe sex doesn't work and abstinence was the only policy. We protested that time, and received a surprising amount of vitriol directed at us from people coming in and out. I remember people being furious that we would protest the Catholic church."
The end of ACT UP/Chicago...
"It's a very complicated story, and the end came in stages. There were a number of internal conflicts within the group; conflicts that plagued ACT UPs across the country. The split is more complicated than this but just to give you some flavor of it, there was a group of people who were concerned about speeding up the drug approval process to get those drugs into people's bodies. That was an understandable position and they had a real sense of urgency about that.
"There was another group that felt that 'getting drugs into people's bodies' matters, but whose bodies are we talking about, therefore recognizing that not only homophobia but racism and sexism were also a crucial component of exacerbating the epidemic. Other people felt we had to tackle issues of access to drugs, not just getting the drugs, but who was going to get them."
The criticism ...
"The criticism was that we had gotten off the track of AIDS. The media played into that in a big way, but the real thing was...from an insider's perspective...there was never anything that ACT UP did that was not about AIDS. All the actions were about AIDS. They may not always have been about AIDS as they affected white gay men, but it was always about AIDS. So that accusation was disingenuous. So that was one of the things that was huge. I think that hurt morale and it was difficult to deal with those kind of conflicts over and over again. I also think there was a growing conservatism in the gay community, and to them ACT UP seemed to be overwrought, hysterical, and demanding things that we could sit down at the table with pharmaceutical companies, city and state government, and get what we needed. But our position was 'we've tried that and they won't listen to us, so the only way to get what we need is to fight this crisis by taking to the streets.'
"I think also that as the gay community became more accepted in certain spheres of society, there was some sense that we had made it. That those of us who were out there screaming in the streets were going to give everybody else a bad name and set back the movement. So there was a backlash against us."
