A Good ACT To Follow

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forty years ago this month, the CDC reported on patients with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. for the very first time. In the years since, LGBTQIA+ Americans have been fighting for treatment and recognition of a disease that was understudied, under-reported, and deeply stigmatized. On this episode, our friends at It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders delve into the history of ACT UP — an organization that transformed the way the media, the government, corporations and medical professionals talked about AIDS.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gene Dumbi and this is Code Switch from NPR.
0:06.2	Looking back at this past year, we've seen a whole lot of protesting and organizing against racism and police brutality.
0:14.2	I mean over the past five years we've seen an even broader array of social movements and protests.
0:20.0	Remember, back when Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, almost immediately there was the women's march.
0:30.0	Protests for the rights of immigrants and against the so-called Muslim ban.
0:38.0	March is for environmental justice and for science, writ large.
0:42.0	We're going to look back at an activist group that helped transform the country during an earlier public health crisis, the AIDS crisis.
0:57.0	That group will be familiar to a lot of y'all and it was called Act Up.
1:01.0	Act Up was an organization that relied on direct action and they could be really provocative and in your face.
1:07.0	They were trying to change the way that medical research was done on AIDS patients.
1:12.0	They were trying to braid together these diverse groups of people with the purpose of drawing attention to the death and suffering that the AIDS crisis was causing.
1:22.0	These were tactics that many of the people in Act Up learn from people who have been in previous movements like the Civil Rights Movement and their tactics that are still being used by activists and organizers today.
1:34.0	So to close out prior month, we're turning the show over to our play cousins at its been a minute with Sam Sanders.
1:39.0	And they bring us the story of how Act Up came to be, what they learned from the social movements that came before, and what today's organizers can learn from that approach.
1:48.0	So to start, we got to go back to 1987 when Act Up was a brand new organization.
1:55.0	And they held weekly meetings on Monday evenings at this place called The Center, an LGBT community nonprofit in the West Village.
2:03.0	At the time, it was a crumbling old school.
2:07.0	Paint was peeling off the walls and it had never been rehabbed.
2:11.0	That is Sarah Schulman. She's a writer and activist and she joined Act Up in 1987.
2:17.0	And you know, even though that building was raggedy, those meetings, they were really something else.
2:22.0	I was hanging around the center on the Monday and there was a lot of noise coming from room 101.
2:30.0	Because I saw so many people there, I knew something really big was going on.
	...

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