Today in Gay History

March 24, 1987

ACT UP demonstrates

for first time

On this day in Gay History, ACT UP staged its first major demonstration demanding the establishment acknowledge the AIDS crisis and do something about it. On March 24, 1987, 250 ACT UP members demonstrated at Wall Street and Broadway to demand greater access to experimental AIDS drugs and for a coordinated national policy to fight the disease. An Op/Ed article by Larry Kramer published in the NY Times the previous day described some of the issues ACT UP was concerned with. Seventeen ACT UP members were arrested during this street theatre form of civil disobedience.

This notice had been posted all over the GLBT neighborhoods of New York:

NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL!

Come to Wall Street in front of Trinity Church
at 7AM Tuesday March 24 for a

MASSIVE AIDS
DEMONSTRATION

To demand the following

1. Immediate release by the Federal Food & Drug Administration of drugs that might help save our lives.

These drugs include: Ribavirin (ICN Pharmaceuticals); Ampligen (HMR Research Co.); Glucan (Tulane University School of Medicine); DTC (Merieux); DDC (Hoffman-LaRoche); AS 101 (National Patent Development Corp.); MTP-PE (Ciba-Geigy); AL 721 (Praxis Pharmaceuticals).

2. Immediate abolishment of cruel double-blind studies wherein some get the new drugs and some don't.

3. Immediate release of these drugs to everyone with AIDS or ARC.

4. Immediate availability of these drugs at affordable prices. Curb your greed!

5. Immediate massive public education to stop the spread of AIDS.

6. Immediate policy to prohibit discrimination in AIDS treatment, insurance, employment, housing.

7. Immediate establishment of a coordinated, comprehensive, and compassionate national policy on AIDS.

President Reagan, nobody is in charge!

AIDS IS THE BIGGEST KILLER IN NEW YORK CITY
OF YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN.

Tell your friends. Spread the word. Come protest together.

7 AM ... March 24 ... You must be on time!

AIDS IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS NOW.

The AIDS Network is an ad hoc and broad-based community of AIDS-related organizations and individuals.

THE NEXT YEAR, on March 24, 1988, ACT UP

returned to Wall Street for a larger demonstration in which over 100 people were arrested.

This activism, modeled on Ghandi and MLK’s Soulforce principles, did much to direct much needed popular and government attention, and eventually action to making HIV treatments more widely available and earlier.

Today in Gay History

HAPPY 74th BIRTHDAY
Larry Kramer
(born June 25th 1935)

Largely unlikable, hugely admired

Controversial playwright, novelist, and essayist Larry Kramer has been a pioneer political activist in the gay political response to AIDS in America.

Born into a well-to-do professional family in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1935, he completed a B.A. at Yale in 1957 and served in the army for a year after graduating. In 1958, he began a career in the entertainment industry, working first for the William Morris Agency and then for Columbia Pictures. His first professional writing was the screenplay for the 1969 movie adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, which he also produced and for which he received an Academy Award nomination.

In 1978, Kramer published his first novel, Faggots, an important breakthrough novel for gay publishing, Kramer himself will most likely be remembered as an AIDS activist. In 1981, he cofounded Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, the first community-based AIDS service organization in America. Disenchanted with what he perceived to be the lethal dangers of an uncontrollable AIDS bureaucracy, he founded AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1988, which became and remains one of the most powerful direct action political groups in America.

Spurred by his own HIV positivity and his work in the AIDS field, Kramer wrote The Normal Heart in 1986, one of the first artistic responses to the AIDS crisis. The play, which established Kramer as a dramatist, received the Dramatists Guild Marton Award, the City Lights Award, the Sarah Siddons Award for the best play of the year, and a nomination for an Olivier Award.

Michael Petrelis wrote a note to Kramer after the November 2008 passage of Prop 8 repealing marriage equality in California:

"What exactly would be lost in our struggle for equal treatment and a bit of respect from voters, if this worthless-for-decades Democratic Party front group [The vaunted Human Rights Campaign] were to close up shop?"

Kramer's acerbic response:

i have been saying things like this and writing things like this, about HRC, (then HRCF) since the beginning of hiv in 1981 when i discovered-- really fast! -- how useless they were in our fights against this plague.

who gives a flying fuck what this still useless organization says at its hastily summoned emergency meetings, all camouflage to make the world think they are doing something.

THEY DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING.

it is just a big bunch of stupid people running a big machine that sucks money from uneducated naive donors and then throws it away. every time i see the letters HRC i want to puke. they could be so wonderful and they are such a waste.

god help the gay population because HRC won't. if they disappeared tomorrow we would be better off. we might even have won against proposition 8.

s/larry kramer