ACT UP
An intimate memorial for Pride-June 2026
“If we ignore something, then we’ll pay the price. Governments love to ignore things that are not convenient. No one gains anything by pretending it isn’t there. We all suffer for it. The AIDS pandemic asks our leaders to help, to invest in a cure. It takes compassion to lead. Some of our politicians do care. Most of them don’t. And some of them don’t even pretend to care.”
-Aristotle And Dante Dive into the waters of the universe
“It was happening to a convenient population or convenient populations. It was gay people who were just getting what they deserved.”
-Ron Goldberg
A Los Angeles Times Poll showed that 50% of Americans believe that Quarantining AIDS to be the best course of action. 48% believed that they should be given special identification, AND 15% said that AIDS victims should be tattooed.
“PLAGUE. 40 MILLION PEOPLE IS A FUCKING PLAGUE. AND NO ONE ACTS AS IF IT IS.”
For many, the acts of organizations such as the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, The Janus Society, etc, were not only acts of awareness for those outside the LGBTQ+ sphere but for those inside. Before Stonewall, the pin drop heard around the world had been speakeasies (such as the Stonewall Inn itself) and societies, handing out posters and information which served as fuel for the fire before 1969.
This flyer was most probably distributed in East Coast Homophile societies in the 1960’s, outlining the legal penalties of Homosexuality in different states. These penalties included fines of $5000 (an exceedingly large sum in 1964) and life imprisonment (Nevada). Punishments for so-called ‘crimes against nature ’ just happened to be on par with the punishments for heinous crimes of murder and rape (though the death penalty was not practiced for sodomy; life imprisonment was a common punishment).
The state jurisdictions certainly didn’t care for sodomy, with the sole exception of Illinois, where it was legal, but what about the presidency and the white house?
In 1947, at the start of the Cold War, the State Department began issuing a set of ‘security principles’ to ‘heighten security’. They began ridding their offices of communists and homosexuals, and between 1947 and 1950 over 1700 applicants to federal jobs were denied the positions due to allegations of homosexuality. This purge was known as the ‘Lavender Scare’ and implicitly regarded homosexuals as ‘moral weaklings’, ‘misfits’ and ‘unusual morals’. In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, “SECURITY REQUIREMENTS FOR GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT,” which alleged the security risk of employing LGBTQIA+ Americans.
Larry Speakes,1982, October 15, when questioned on the Reagan Administration’s take on the AIDS pandemic which had now crossed 600 cases, by Journalist Rev.Lester Kinsolving, claimed to have never heard of it. The press pool then proceeded to laugh when they found out it was known as the ‘gay plague’
Unable to provide any answers, Speakes shifts the topic towards agriculture. It wasn’t until 1987 that Reagan finally spoke up; much later than organizations such as AID Atlanta, Jerusalem House, and of course, ACT UP did. “I know that everyone here understands how dazzling the progress against AIDS has been. It took 40 years of study to learn as much about polio. It took 19 years to develop a vaccine against hepatitis B,” claimed Reagan on July 23rd, 1987. Well, Ronald, our great communicator, why did it take you 6 years to address it?
From AIDS to Stonewall, the LGBTQIA+ community has not only been an afterthought but also a foe. For the scornful, we are sinners; for politicians, we are stats; for media, we are unimportant. That’s what it was, just a bunch of dykes getting what they deserve. Yet, we had the community as a whole. How many people did ACT UP bring together? How many lives did they save? Did the queens at Stonewall not fight back? Did they not protest for days, for which we now have enough pride to have a month for ourselves?
“There was a man from the Mattachine Society in NYC talking about gay people. I thought to myself, ‘There are homosexuals in New York. There are people like me.’” -Mark Segal.
And Then I Danced.
We no longer have to move our lives to NYC, travel to San Francisco, visit illegal bars just to meet other gays, lesbians, transgender people, etc. Though homosexual literature and media have existed for ages, just how many people had access to them back in the 1960’s? Most queer people didn’t even know that others like them were out there somewhere.
The internal struggle that accompanies most homosexuals regarding their sexual or gender identity, or simply just not being a part of the majority, is overwhelming on its own. That too with lack of awareness, but not so much that to be oblivious to the hatred and prejudice for people like us, would have been bearable. ack of information was the sharpest dagger than hatred bore for our community. Was it not Reagan’s silence which led to AIDS becoming more lethal than it already was?
“It was terrifying. Probably the scariest period of time in the gay community was before there was a test, and before they really knew what it was. We had all kinds of theories: that it was a consequence of using poppers, which were popular in dance clubs; that if you had lots of sexual partners, you would get it, and if you didn’t, you wouldn’t. And so people stopped having sex.”
Franklin Abbott, September 30, 2011
Media and information were what helped us stand ground. With the Mattachine Society’s flyers, The Ladder’s lesbian and feminist magazine, and secret meetups on Times Square which were orchestrated by large groups, queers found their way around the complicated, dangerous, and lonely life they lived.
There is definitely no masking the hidden bigotry of the community itself. Gay men who invalidate lesbians, lesbians who invalidate gays, transphobic queers, and the list goes on and on. I’ve had my experience with gay men invalidating women like Sylvia Rivera and women claiming lesbians to be above gays. I’ve met women who support gay men but find lesbians ‘unsettling’ and ‘weird’ and men who think Bisexual women are ‘not really gay’. I’ve seen people call trans men misogynistic and trans women violent, inside and outside the community.
I’ve argued with people on whether ‘yaoi’ or ‘yuri’ is better (it’s a personal preference) and have been left feeling dejected by people who I believed would get it. I’ve felt unseen with my gender identity even around queer friends, and I’ve felt cut off from what’s going on in my own society.
Though I will never fully understand the trials of those who weren’t fortunate enough to have a medium of venting, i.e the internet, and I will never understand the lives of those who’ve lived in fear for their lives simply because of their love, my struggles aren’t nothing. And neither are the struggles of those more fortunate than I to freely embrace their gender and sexuality. How much longer would it have taken for me to realize my sexuality without the internet? How many more years would it have taken for me to realize that there’s a reason I feel uncomfortable in my own skin?
Information is often half-assed. It’s easy to look at what the biggest woke community you follow has to say about the Russia-Ukraine war, the Iran-Israel-America war, Afghanistan, pride, deportation, the current political scene, feminism, and so many other problems that we are drowning in. But how easy is it to be gay or black or a woman or any discriminated-upon race, or to live in a war-torn state, or to live in poverty or be sexually exploited or to be abused? Just because you saw something and the majority thinks it’s right doesn’t mean it’s right. Even if it is, to blindly follow is not to know. Oh, so you’ve been seeing a lot of gay pride and representation (which I truly am so glad for). You might think that it’s good (which it is) but do you actually think that, or does the comment section think that? I’m not saying that awareness is bad. It’s amazing, but the consumer’s attitude towards it is not always positive. Because sure, to my face you’ll be supportive and an ally, but the result of not forming your own opinions is always going to be that you don’t truly understand. You might mean no harm, but in the end, if you don’t try to understand or form your own beliefs, you will hurt my sentiments.
You don’t need to be gay to be an ally. You just need to try to understand.
Happy Pride.
“It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice