Today in Gay History

On March 10-12, 1987, ACT UP is founded by Larry Kramer.



Credit to GayWisdom.org
1987 - ACT UP was formed [on March 12,1987 following a meeting-speech on March 10th] at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. The writer Vito Russo wrote at the time that "living with AIDS in this country is like living through a war that's happening only for those people in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes you look around to discover that you've lost more of your friends. But nobody else notices, it isn't happening to them." Larry Kramer had been asked to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer spoke out against the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as politically impotent. Kramer had actually co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983. According to Douglas Crimp, Kramer posed a question to the audience: "Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?" The answer was "a resounding yes." Approximately 300 people met two days later [March 12] to form ACT UP.

They became confrontational about the government's complete lack of urgency towards the plight of the thousands of Gay men dying of AIDS. That was the face of AIDS at the time and no one seemed to care that so many were dying. And many were actively blocking (as many still do) the use of condoms for AIDS prevention. They called out Ronald Reagan and Cardinal O'Connor and Pope John Paul for their responsibility in the deaths of millions while they prevented treatment and prevention. Because of ACT UP, political leaders and the media were forced to pay attention to what was happening. Because of ACT UP things moved for the care and treatment of people living and dying with AIDS. Their work is not finished and their model is one that has been replicated by many dealing with entrenched hostility and animus.

Today in Gay History

Happy 65^th Birthday

(October 16, 1945-1995)

Paul Monette

Writer, Chronicler of AIDS

Paul Monette & Roger Horowitz >

this from glbtq:

In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.

Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1945. He was educated at prestigious schools in New England: Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University, where he received his B.A. in 1967. He began his prolific writing career soon after graduating from Yale. For eight years, he wrote poetry exclusively.

After coming out in his late twenties, he met Roger Horwitz, who was to be his lover for over twenty years. Also during his late twenties, he grew disillusioned with poetry and shifted his interest to the novel, not to return to poetry until the 1980s.

In 1977, Monette and Horwitz moved to Los Angeles. Once in Hollywood, Monette wrote a number of screenplays that, though never produced, provided him the means to be a writer. Monette published four novels between 1978 and 1982. These novels were enormously successful and established his career as a writer of popular fiction. He also wrote several novelizations of films.

Monette's life changed dramatically when Roger Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s. After Horwitz's death in 1986, Monette wrote extensively about the years of their battles with AIDS (Borrowed Time, 1988) and how he himself coped with losing a lover to AIDS (Love Alone, 1988). These works are two of the most powerful accounts written about AIDS thus far.

Their publication catapulted Monette into the national arena as a spokesperson for AIDS. Along with fellow writer Larry Kramer, he emerged as one of the most familiar and outspoken AIDS activists of our time. Since very few out gay men have had the opportunity to address national issues in mainstream venues at any previous time in U.S. history, Monette's high-visibility profile was one of his most significant achievements. He went on to write two important novels about AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991). He himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. . . .

Monette's harrowing collection of deeply personal poems, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, conveys both the horrors of AIDS and the inconsolable pain of love lost. The elegies are an invaluable companion to Borrowed Time.

Before the publication and success of his memoir, Becoming a Man, it seemed inevitable that Monette would be remembered most for his writings on AIDS. Becoming a Man, however, focuses on the dilemmas of growing up gay. It provides at once an unsparing account of the nightmare of the closet and a moving and often humorous depiction of the struggle to come out. Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, a historical moment in the history of lesbian and gay literature and culture in the United States.

Prior to his death, Monette established the Monnette-Horowitz Trust “to ensure the continued fruits of their activism as well as the memory of their loving partnership.”

The Monette-Horwitz Trust provides annual awards to individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations who are, through their work, making significant contributions to eradicating homophobia. The Trust acknowledges the accomplishments of organizations and persons working in arenas ranging from academic research and creative expression to activism and community organizing.

For more, see:

http://www.monettehorwitz.org/about.html

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Guerilla Theatre as Effective Peaceable Assembly

Today in Gay History

June 5, 1981

The Centers for Disease Control announced that five previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles had been diagnosed with PCP, a very rare form of pneumonia that did not ordinarily infect people with healthy immune systems. This announcement was the first official warning of what would become known first as the "Gay Cancer," then GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and finally, AIDS.

The CDC's mortality statistics, calculated through 2007, the last year for which compilation is complete, shows:

The cumulative estimated number of deaths of persons with AIDS in the United States and dependent areas, through 2007, was 583,298. In the 50 states and the District of Columbia, this included 557,902 adults and adolescents, and 4,891 children under age 13 years.

Today in Gay History

Happy Birthday

Michael Callen b.April 11, 1955

d. December 27, 1993

Singer, songwriter, AIDS activist

Michael Callen was born Michael Lane Callen on Monday, April 11th, 1955, in Indiana.

His career as a singer, songwriter was cut short in the early 1980s when he was first diagnosed with Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) in 1982. He quickly became a leader in the response to the epidemic, and an author. He is recognized as a co-inventor of safe(r) sex promotion and co-founder People With AIDS Self-Empowerment.

In 1983, Callen co-authored the book How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, which outlined the tenets of safe sex, developed in collaboration with Richard Berkowitz and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend. In 1990, he wrote Surviving AIDS, which received an Honorable Mention from the American Medical Writers Association. He was frequently seen on television talking about AIDS. Appearances included Nightline, Good Morning America, 20/20, and The Phil Donahue Show. He wrote for several newspapers and magazines, including the Village Voice, The New York Native, and Outweek; some of his articles are collected in Surviving and Thriving with AIDS, published by the People with AIDS Coalition in 1988. Callen publicly denied the HIV as cause theory of AIDS and was especially critical of AZT mono-therapy when it was first introduced: "The HIV paradigm has produced nothing of value for my life and I actually believe that treatments based on the arrogant belief that HIV has proven to be the sole and sufficient cause of AIDS has hastened the deaths of many of my friends." see the video interview @ http://www.immunity.org.uk/videos.html. As an actor, Michael Callen was seen in a small supporting role as an AIDS patient in the movie Philadelphia, released in 1993. He died of AIDS-related complications in California December 27, 1993 at the age of 38. Had he lived another couple of years, he would have undoubtedly been convinced of the HIV cause of AIDS when Dr. David Ho pioneered the use of multiple drugs at the same time, setting the standard that thrives today and has saved the lives of millions of people.

Rest in peace, Michael, rest in peace.

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