HERE, I finally managed to blog it, but it is very personal to me. I went to medical school from 1982-86. In early 1985, as a third year medical student, I was first to admit a man with AIDS into a hospital in Peoria. He was a patient of my clinic directors partner..who had refused to see him. The directed asked me to, so I did. A wonderful middle-aged man with British accent, very ill. The younger nurses did not want to care for him. The older ones told them, of course you will, that is your Profession. We can learn together, just as we did with polio and tuberculosis victims.
... He died.. They all did... ALL through my residency... It was horrific and no one was getting us meds! HERE is the story of how we got them.....
From the Democracy Now blog that embeds the full video of Amy Goodman's introduction and interviews.IN INTRODUCTION: She describes the very first demonstration:
This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — an international direct action advocacy group formed by a coalition of activists outraged over the government’s mismanagement of the AIDS crisis.
This demonstration was blogged here:
25th Anniversary: Act Up Demonstration at Broadway and Wall Streets
She then replays the interviews she did with David France, the movies director and longest lived Act Up member Peter Staley.
Amy Goodman interviews Peter Staley, and director David France.
We speak with ACT UP founding member Peter Staley, one of the longest AIDS survivors in the country; and David France, director of the new documentary "How to Survive a Plague," which tells a remarkable history of AIDS activism and how it changed the country.
Most pertinent, other than being a vivid reminder of that era, Peter says:
"I’m alive because of that activism," Staley says of the triple drug therapy he was able to take. "This was a major victory this movie tells about getting these therapies. But that was only the beginning of the battle. Now we have these treatments that can keep people alive, and there are still two to three million dying every year. There are more dying now than when we actually got the therapies to save people. So it’s a huge failure of leadership internationally. And it shows a failure of our own healthcare system." [includes rush transcript]
AMY introduces the interview portion:
A new documentary about ACT UP and the history of the AIDS epidemic is screening Saturday in Manhattan. It’s called How to Survive a Plague. It chronicles the rise of AIDS activism though the lens of those who captured it firsthand.
It tells the heart-wrenching yet deeply inspiring story of people organizing, marching, lobbying to curb a plague that vast swaths of society saw as just punishment for allegedly immoral acts. When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, I spoke to its director, David France, and Peter Staley, one of the longest AIDS survivors in the country....I began by asking director David France why he made How to Survive a Plague.
DAVID FRANCE: This is a story that I’ve known for a long time, and it seemed to me that the stories about AIDS have all been about the arrival of the virus and the way the virus impacted the community, and the devastation, really....
But the truth about the epidemic, especially those darker days of the epidemic, is that there was a lot of amazing activity that took place, and the community really rallied and made a difference. And that part of the story about the plague had never been told. So, that’s what I wanted to go and try to see if I could wrap my hands around.
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s really a story about strategy and about activism in the face of death, so it was a life-and-death struggle
More on the development of Act Up, how and why the different tactics were used, and on whom.
...As David says at the end of interview:
DAVID FRANCE: It seemed to me to capture not just the activity of the individuals that were involved in this movement, but it’s—it was a primer. It really establishes a paradigm for activism. And I thought the title kind of stretched its arms around larger issues or more issues than just AIDS activism. But at root, it’s really — How to Survive a Plague really is a story about how—how we attacked AIDS, not how AIDS attacked us, and what it takes to do that and what it takes to come up with just the desire or the thought that you could do that, and then how to refine your techniques along the way to actually make a difference.
HEAR THAT OCCUPY? GetEqual? Hear that, newest activist group 'Unite Against the War on Women'?
More MEAT below the squiggle...and in the full video and transcript of interview.
NOTE: he movie 'How to Survive a Plague,' is going to aired Saturday night at the Walter Reade Theater and on Monday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, before its fall release. This, on the 25th anniversary of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
DAVID FRANCE: This is a story that I’ve known for a long time, and it seemed to me that the stories about AIDS have all been about the arrival of the virus and the way the virus impacted the community, and the devastation, really....
But the truth about the epidemic, especially those darker days of the epidemic, is that there was a lot of amazing activity that took place, and the community really rallied and made a difference. And that part of the story about the plague had never been told. So, that’s what I wanted to go and try to see if I could wrap my hands around.
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s really a story about strategy and about activism in the face of death, so it was a life-and-death struggle
Here in brief is Peter's story of joining Act Up...
AMY GOODMAN: So talk about your journey of activism. You certainly didn’t start as an activist.
PETER STALEY: No, I was a bond trader at JPMorgan on Wall Street, trading U.S. government bonds during the Reagan debt years. It was quite a heady job, and I kind of hated it, actually. But I found out I was positive and thought I only had a couple years to live. And then, a year—
AMY GOODMAN: What spurred you to leave that job?
PETER STALEY: Well, my immune system collapsed, and I went on disability. But by that time, I was already a member of ACT UP New York, who had its first demonstration outside the front door of the bank on Wall Street.
AMY GOODMAN: Actually, David, it’s described in the film, your—the bigotry you felt within at JPMorgan.
PETER STALEY: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: You weren’t out at the time.
PETER STALEY: No, I was deeply in the closet. And I got handed a flier for that very first demo, when we were all on the trading floor, and everybody had got handed the flier. And there was a discussion on the trading floor. And my mentor, the head trader, said, you know, "I think they all deserve to die." And I just—I just had to sit there at my desk and steam and fume about it. But I went home that night, and there we were, the lead—they were, those demonstrators, the lead story on CBS News, and—with Dan Rather, which I always watched. And I said, "I’ve got to join that group." And that’s how it started.
Do go to piece it has video of Peter and other talking at a demonstration.
Then a discussion with David how the ACT UP formula developed..and is pertinent today.
AMY GOODMAN: So let’s talk about ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and the strategizing. I mean, you’re talking about now a presidential election year. You’re talking about a year we’ve just come out of, a year of uprisings from Tunisia and Egypt to the Occupy movement all over this country. This, in a sense, is a kind of primer on what to do and maybe what not to do. David, talk about the whole trajectory of protest.
DAVID FRANCE: The ACT UP story, and I think the important part of the ACT UP story, is that it took almost 10 years for the kind of impact that they were looking for to actually be achieved. And I think, with those other movements, we’re impatient for victories and for well-defined strategies. And what How to Survive a Plague details is how those strategies developed and how—how an organization of people who were simply desperate and terrified became a movement that could really change the way healthcare is delivered, not just in America but throughout the world, how science is conducted, how drugs are researched and approved.
And the strategy that ACT UP developed was one which they call "the inside-outside approach": the people who were very well educated, self-educated, in the issues of science and regulation and the whole drug world—and Peter was a member of that aspect of the movement of ACT UP—and then the people on the streets, the soldiers who could bring thousands of people to bear to push forward the points that were being requested and demanded by the activists on the inside.
Further discussion on how the medica coverage was non-existent or just fear-mongering .... ACT UP helped changed the dialogue (sound familiar Occupy, Get Equal?)
DAVID FRANCE: I was covering it for the gay presses, when—and you may remember this back then, that the mainstream press wasn’t covering AIDS at all. And it was—the only place to find news about AIDS was in Gay Community News, the New York Native, very small-circulation gay publications. It was before the internet. It was before this ease of communication that we have. And I began to cover AIDS because I needed to find out what was happening. I wasn’t a journalist at the time. And ultimately, it gave me a path for how I could respond to the epidemic. And so, I kept at it starting in 1982.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did the coverage change?
DAVID FRANCE: There was really no coverage through 1985, '86, ’87. ACT UP, one of their first goals was to get AIDS into the national dialogue. And they did it pretty effectively. The coverage wasn't good in '87, ’88, ’89. There were AIDS panic stories. There were AIDS victim stories. At the time, people were still burning the houses of neighbors who had AIDS to try to keep their kids from going to public school. So there was—it was a kind of a wartime sort of coverage. The medical coverage, the scientific coverage, was just as spotty. And it turns out, and as you see in How to Survive a Plague, it's because there was very little medical and scientific work going on even to respond to the crisis.
....and here is how the Nonviolent Direct Action activism worked:
AMY GOODMAN: Peter, you were very much not only on the activist end, but the medical activist end and the research. Talk about what you were demanding. You were challenging the whole notion of what it meant to be an expert. You were taking on the bureaucrats, the corporations. How did you get in there? How many times were you arrested, by the way?
PETER STALEY: I was arrested 10 times. And thanks to a lot of great pro bono lawyers, I don’t have a record, but—and definitely attended many more demonstrations beyond that. But, you know, we started with mostly just an outside activism process at these huge demonstrations at the doorsteps of buildings in D.C., and then demanding meetings, and with that, the pressure of the demos, we would be granted these meetings. And then the dialogue would start, and we’d keep meeting and keep meeting and come up with lists of demands, and then demo—and demonstrate again when those demands were not met. So it was a real inside-outside process.
.... These were eventually carried on to the POLITICAL FUNERALS...
I asked David France to talk about the political funerals that activists held on the streets to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS.
DAVID FRANCE: The political funerals are kind of these stunning manifestations of grief and anger and desperation. And surprising, to me, about those events were how they went uncovered. The media didn’t cover them. These are events in which corpses are carried through the streets, carried to Washington, to make public statements about the urgency of the need for medications. And literally, there’s no television coverage of those, there’s very little newspaper coverage, as though these things hadn’t happened.
And the way we are able to present them in the film is through the archival footage that was produced by the activists themselves. In fact, the film is largely composed of that footage. So it’s really deeply behind the curtain of AIDS activism. And it shows kind of a stunning view of a movement that would have gone unrecorded if it weren’t for the knowledge of the organization that it needed to record its own history, to really historicize for itself its role and its mechanisms and its angers and losses and gains.
BOB RAFSKY: A political funeral for Mark Fisher, who wouldn’t let us burn or bury his courage or his love for us, any more than he would let the earth take his body until it was already in flight. We asked for this ceremony not so we could bury him, but so we could celebrate his undying anger. This isn’t a political funeral for Mark; it’s a political funeral for the man who killed him and so many others, and is slowly killing me, whose name curls my tongue and curdles my breath.
....FINALLY the meds come, but aren't being distrubuted to those who need them most!
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, seeing you in one scene—it’s what? Addressing the International AIDS Conference?
PETER STALEY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And talking to the different parties involved. Can you remember that speech?
PETER STALEY: Yeah, it was in San Francisco in 1990. It was the last AIDS conference in the U.S. before they started boycotting the U.S. because of our immigration ban. And the previous year in Montreal, we had invaded the conference, so this time they decided to invite us in. And they had a—they decided to let ACT UP have a moment at the podium during the opening plenary.
AMY GOODMAN: And what you said?
PETER STALEY: And I tried—at that moment, there was just a tremendous amount of conflict between the activists and the scientists, a lot of fear, a lot of finger pointing. And I tried to bridge those differences so that we could start working together, and I tried to make ACT UP more comfortable for them. And I tried to tip my hat to what the scientists were there to do and to say, "Listen, we know you’re here to do good.
way more here on the mechanics of Act Up.
....I would also like to add this comment from Michael Bedwell, who speaks to the need for continued NonViolent Direct Action (NDA) to eventually realize LGBTQI Equality in the US and globally. Many groups rationalize that they are helping by not being active, Michael and I and Peter and David and possibly Amy, beg to differ:
note I WAS THERE and HAVE been watching since! "EARTH TO HRC, NGLTF, GLAAD, SLDN, SERVICEMEMBERS UNITED, OUTSERVE, MARRIAGE EQUALITY INC.—to all the LGBT "advocacy" group "leaders" no matter how long you've been in business: watch this and hang your heads in shame at how some of you either helped outright kill belief in nonviolent direct action even after ACT UP proved it could work even for we Sodomites or have been too new and young and lazy to even learn about it.
....even as, first, members of Soulforce and, more recently, GetEQUAL and Dan Choi have begged you again and again to participate. DADT could have ended much sooner [and with ACTUAL equality for LGB service members IN the military], the ban on open transgender service could be gone, DOMA could be gone, ENDA could be law, and universal marriage equality much closer.
He also notes:
Skip forward to the 11:00 mark for the beginning of Friday night's interview with the film's director & ACT UP veteran Peter Staley. Gentle correction: contrary to a statement about how long it took monster Reagan to first speak publicly about AIDS, he actually spoke about it in his 4th year in office albeit solely in response to a question in a 1985 news conference. That's NOT meant as any excuse as the plague came to light in his first year, AND we were worse off after his first remarks because, against the information in a CDC advisory, he reinforced parents' fears of casual transmission (at the recommendation of...wait for it...drum roll: then White House Counsel/now Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts).
We got the Matthew Shepard Act (after 10 years) and DADT repealed (after 17) Now it is past time for DOMA to go, for there to be a fully inclusive ENDA, for Dream Act, and Immigration Reform and .... we are having to almost start over in our Women's WAR against white,male chauvinism and misogyny! But ACT UP shows us how to do it!
Will I be able to see the movie? I hope so, it makes me cry to even think of those dark days..and darker nights.