"Remember when they burnt those people's house down?" Spencer Cox asks.
We are at a reunion dinner for about half a dozen people at a restaurant on the edge of Soho. I haven't seen him since the mid-1990s. He looks unwell. It's late September, 2012. On Nov. 30 we're on a panel together for World AIDS Day at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. By Dec. 18 he is dead.
I don't remember, so I look it up when I get back to D.C. In 1987, in Arcadia, Florida, Clifford and Louise Ray's house mysteriously burned to the ground after a court ordered the local schools had to admit their HIV-positive hemopheliac sons, despite community objections. Other families had already been pulling their kids out of the school, which also faced multiple phoned-in bomb threats. The family decided their only option was to give up and leave town.
This was right around the same time homophobia in America peaked, according to Gallup polling of the 1986-87 period. It was Reagan's second term, there were no AIDS treatments (AZT wasn't approved until March 1987), the Supreme Court had recently upheld state laws making gay sex a crime in the June 1986Bowers v. Hardwick ruling, and 57 percent of those surveyed answered yes when asked if gay and lesbian relations should be illegal. Several states were actively considering quarantine measures for people with AIDS, which is to say, tearing some of their most marginalized and frightened citizens away from the only people who loved them and locking them up with strangers who considered them freaks and pariahs, until they died.
It's no wonder that when Nora Ephron had to cancel a speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center of New York in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in March 1987, leading to playwright Larry Kramer subbing in for her, the gay and lesbian community in what was then the epicenter of the emerging global pandemic exploded. ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was born out of Larry's call to action.
"Others would talk about such experiences all the time," a friend IMed me after the September release ofHow to Survive a Plague, which tells the story of the ACT UP Treatment + Data Committee (of which I was the youngest member) and the Treatment Action Group (of which I was a founding member) and how they worked to transform the drug-approval process and AIDS research in this country, leading eventually to the availability of the only successful antiretrovirals in existence and, once the U.S. and other governments decided to put some money behind drug distribution, the saving of millions of lives around the world.
My only response to that expectation of chattiness is: not if you lived through it. I've written only one reflection on that era previously, for a book a decade ago; it took me two months to squeeze out about 1,200 words, because every time I turned to the subject I either developed such a colossal headache I had to stop, or burst into tears.
Many people who were part of ACT UP have tried to write about it in retrospect, but it took an outsider who was also invested in the story, journalist-turned-filmmaker David France, to bring the story to the mainstream, to the extent that has happened over the past year. France was one of the earliest chroniclers of the epidemic, first in the gay press and later for New York and national media outlets, and a man whose partner Doug Gould, to whom the film is dedicated, died of AIDS in 1992. France's documentary, distributed by IFC and Sundance Selects, has won a slew of awards since premiering in January 2012 in the documentary competition in Sundance, and then in theaters in September. (It's also now available on iTunes and Netflix). It's even been nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Feature category.
The movie focuses on three HIV-positive men to tell the larger story of the early years of AIDS treatment activism, when death came quick and violently: Peter Staley, a dynamic former bond trader who in his late 20s was given two years to live before joining ACT UP and undertaking some of its most daring and theatrical actions (if an action involved scaling part of a building or bolting yourself in somewhere with power tools, Peter was likely involved); film archivist and later MacArthur genius award-grantee Mark Harrington, the chain-smoking intellectual force behind T+D on whose amber-screened 286 computer most of T+D's giant technical documents were tapped out; and the late Bob Rafsky, a publicist turned ACT UPper who famously heckled then-candidate Bill Clinton in 1992 and was told in reply a line that would come to define the president, "I feel your pain."More ...
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