Watch: United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Full Documentary, 2012)
For Sarah Schulman, still being alive is a responsibility. As a young journalist on a New York gay paper when AIDS began, the vast human losses of the 1980s were experienced as emotional trauma: “In the first five years of AIDS 40,000 people died and the President never said the word ‘AIDS’”, she tells me.
This raises an obvious question. If so many AIDS activists died young, who else will recount their history?
Schulman’s recent documentary United In Anger: A History of ACT UP – directed by Jim Hubbard – situates the AIDS activist movement ACT UP within its rightful past, revealing its political force again to the present. Immediately the immensity of the task is clear. Footage from a primetime news report reveals that 50 per cent of Americans at the time wanted people with AIDS (PWA) quarantined – while 15 per cent favoured tattoos.
Though doctors made the first ‘official’ AIDS diagnoses in 1981, it wasn’t until 1987 that ACT UP, or the ‘AIDS coalition to unleash power’, was formed in New York City as an organized LGBTQ resistance. Contrasting against today’s gay assimilationist turn towards institutional acceptance, United In Anger’s collage of video footage shows the vitality of queer life at a time when it was widely acceptable to describe HIV and AIDS as a “gay cancer”.
The film is frequently tough to watch. On-screen, speakers appear with their dates of birth next to their dates of death. A bitter dichotomy emerges: the fire, community and affinities of ACT UP’s packed Monday night meetings are depicted starkly against the police violence, governmental neglect and medico-capitalist profiteering that contributed so greatly to the rapid spread of HIV and AIDS. Though ACT UP still exists today, we see its rawest moments, perhaps most emotive when a giant “Money for AIDS not for war” sign is released above uproar in an occupied Grand Central Station.
Mostly, United In Anger is an archive of collective and individual bravery. Its creation is a transformative act, a refusal to allow the suppression of knowledge about radical politics. It is about how it feels when politics are literally enacted on your body and the bodies of your friends. Schulman and Hubbard refuse to conform to established narratives: AIDS activists weren’t just white gay men, they were women of colour, homeless people, drug users, lesbians. They make clear that broad coalitions enable radical change.
Today over 35 million people live with HIV or AIDS globally, and if you have access to healthcare, it is no longer a death sentence. But how many cases would there be if governments had responded with alacrity to the earliest reported cases? United In Anger shows how important it is not just to remember, but to refuse to stay silent.
Interview with Sarah Schulman on openDemocracy
Further resources:
- ACT UP Oral History Project
- AIDS Activism in the Epicenter online exhibit from the Greenwich Village Digital Archive
- ACT UP NY historical website
- ACT UP NY contemporary website and Facebook page
- ACT UP NY meets Monday nights at 7 p.m. at The Center, 208 W 13 St. in NYC, and welcomes new members!
THIS DOCUMENTARY IS AMAZING. It doesn’t just escape the ‘act up was about white gay men’ stereotype, it takes extensive time to talk about the fight for women with aids and the conversations that ACT UP had within it’s own ranks about privilege. It also explains in detail for the ACT UP affinity group system works, how their media strategy worked, how they organized and in practice this documentary provides tools for effective intersectional activism today. The
ACT UP Oral History Project is also made by Sarah Schuman and just as amazing.
QueerAnarchism 