politricks and other distractions

Where is ACT UP When You Need Them?

I had two chores growing up: setting the table for dinner and dusting the 1st floor furniture on Saturday mornings. I learned to plan my dusting around the Saturday morning movie, which was always black and white and frequently featured the two stars above. Love always started out on the wrong foot and ended up in heaven, or at least marriage. There was one that ended with Doris Day seeming horny, an image that led me to become the woman I am today.

In acting school, I fought believing the rumors that Rock was gay, but I was working coatcheck at a Broadway Bar. Charlie's on 45th. (Some nights I'd take a minute and just lean back into the minks. It felt fabulous.) It was the kind of place that put "reserved" signs on all the tables and sat people as they came in depending on their fame.

One night, Rock Hudson came in with his entourage of about 6 handsome young gay men. He was a towering figure, 6'4" if he was an inch. Broad-shouldered, deep voiced, flashing eyes... and gay as the Queen of Hearts. Oh my god. None of his boys were allowed to walk in front of him (the waiters told me) because Rock always came first.

This was one of my first moments of awakening.

It didn't make me love him any less, however. My best friend since high school was a gay guy, so that was a culture I knew. In the early 1980s, there were also rumors about a "gay cancer." My friend started to have friends who became mysteriously ill with a wide range of symptoms, all of them grosser and more debilitating than the last. In Hollywood once, we went to visit a friend of his who'd been one of the Marlboro Men. His chiseled handsome image had long adorned a huge billboard at the curve in Sunset Boulevard by the Chateau Marmont. By the time I met him in 1986, he was skinny as a rail, blind from some disease, and showing signs of carposes sarcoma.

It took a long time for Rock Hudson to come out and admit he had AIDS and he only lived a few months after doing so.



Elizabeth Taylor came to his PR rescue and stood up bravely for her long-time friend. It took guts to deal with AIDS victims in those days. The world made a big deal about the time Princess Diana was photographed touching a baby with AIDS in Africa. That one shot changed how people saw AIDS victims.

The government ignored AIDS for a long time. Reagan was president and things were somewhat like they are today under Bush (though not quite so crazy nutso insane). What turned the tide on getting AIDS addressed as I remember it was a "radical" group of gay activists called ACT UP. These guys were sick of watching their friends die around them in increasingly large numbers. They'd all gone from having fun at the baths to being afraid to help their friends eat because it was all so mysterious. Rumors were rampant.

So this group of annoying, fervent, devoted, theatrical (mostly white, I think) gay men took center stage. They showed up at government PR events and tried to disrupt them. They did street performance. They got in your face any way they could. They were media hogs. I don't know all the details of how they did it, but I've seen what gay men have done for urban renewal across America and they sure started that kind of genius coming together to fight AIDS.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the first news announcements about people dying from a newly discovered disease called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Its discovery was one of the most drastic changes to hit my life. Suddenly, everyone could kill you. We weren't even sure how it was transmitted, but men who slept together seemed to be a key target.

Not surprisingly, gay men would simply not shut up and sit in the back of the bus. In the face of every evangelical in America screaming about God's wrath for sin, his Divine Retribution, these men said, "Fuck You! Cure this disease! We will not stand for this, for being ignored, for having our deaths celebrated by the likes of you."

I bring this up today not only because of this anniversary, but also because this story is one of the few examples I can think of where the left got actively engaged - and enraged enough - to demand societal and governmental change.

Today, the conservative side gets rallied by something as simple and blatantly pandering as a "fight for a Constitutional Amendment against Gay Marriage" or illegal immigration or gays in the military or gay adoption. It only takes getting an initiative on state ballots to energize the base who harbors these kinds of hatreds.

What does it take for the Left to find that fervor? The issues we have that concern us are some of the most important I can think of:

• The lack of health care for 40 million Americans
• A failing education system
• Endangered Social Security
• Protecting pensions from corporate bankruptcies
• The death of unions
• Insane national debt to countries that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart...

I could go on, but you get the point. I could write a tome of sadness on any one of those bullet points, but somehow I don't think anyone on the left who's not politically engaged would necessarily stand in line to vote on these issues. Not if it took more than 10 minutes. I hope I'm wrong, but this feels right and I'm so far left you can't see me anymore.

So here's my solution: get all those guys from ACT UP to help us out. Lots of them must be retired by now. Let's use their expertise, enthusiasm and community organizing talents to help us all. In exchange, we'll keep fighting as we have for their rights. Seems fair to me.

I believe in the power of gay men. I am proud of them. I thank ACT UP and everyone who worked so hard to make AIDS not the death sentence it once was. (insert standing ovation here... along with Donna Summer's "I Will Survive.")

Please Help us now. We need you.

posted by dcnative @ 9:15 PM