History Lesson: #BlackLivesMatter are simply taking a page of the ACT UP playbook

[RandySF]

Faced with what was literally a life and death issue, and faced also with political and medical establishments that seemed unwilling (in the first case) and unable (in the second case) to cope with a massive epidemic, ACT UP raucously–and occasionally, brutally–changed the whole debate in this country over AIDS. In doing so, they saved countless lives.

Once it started in earnest, ACT UP was everywhere. Its targets were huge, its activists unfathomably brave. They invaded the New York Stock Exchange and chained themselves to the VIP balcony. They organized a massive demonstration that shut down the FDA for a day. One year, they shrewdly scheduled an action at the Post Office in New York for April 15 so as to take advantage of the annual media frenzy over people fighting to make the income tax deadline. They were loud. They were uncivil. Larry Kramer and the rest of them were the modern embodiment of William Lloyd Garrison's statement of purpose, which is something of an avatar for this very shebeen, now that I think about it:

"Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD."



http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a37118/act-up-disruption-aids/

[mmonk]

1. I was unaware ACT UP would disrupt and disparage pro gay rights candidates.

Thanks for the info.

[Bluenorthwest]

2. ACT UP tended to disrupt and engage candidates that claimed to be on our side. Candidates did not

defer nor offer kid gloves. Here is Bill Clinton in 1992 being interrupted by activist Bob Rafsky.

I've posted this a few times the last few weeks. No one comments on it. DU straight sages pontificate about activist history but they always fail to mention the 80's or ACT UP. 'Back in the 60's when the last real movement happened' they lie, because they hate us.

[aikoaiko]

4. A few questions from the audience is not much of distruption.

ACT UP, if I recall correctly, saved their most disruptive actions for people or institutions that had a history of working against gay interests. Am I wrong?

I can't imagine the number of heads that would have explode if Bernie responded in a similar manner.

[Bluenorthwest]

6. Clinton was interrupted until he was stopped cold. He then says to a dying man 'calm down' and

shakes his finger at him, comes down off the stage to lecture him face to face. And if Bernie did that people would freak out you are correct, but it should be noted that the activist would live to see Bill inaugurated but not to see him carry out the promises he did in fact carry out to a large degree, and Bill Clinton, love him or hate him, certainly kept up his work against AIDS after his Presidency as well. I don't think Bill ever forgot that exchange.

Most of what ACT UP did was aimed at institutions, but Parties and elections, those are institutions. Elections had been used to put Reagan in charge, who did nothing at all as thousands and thousands died. It was Reagan's hateful in action that required the alarm to be raised.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. The times, the record of the times...

Paris

[bullwinkle428]

5. K&R, but I need to make the point that Charlie Pierce emphasized the idea

that BLM needs to be literally EVERYWHERE, the same way that ACT UP did. From the piece :

"Once it started in earnest, ACT UP was everywhere. Its targets were huge, its activists unfathomably brave. They invaded the New York Stock Exchange and chained themselves to the VIP balcony. They organized a massive demonstration that shut down the FDA for a day. One year, they shrewdly scheduled an action at the Post Office in New York for April 15 so as to take advantage of the annual media frenzy over people fighting to make the income tax deadline. They were loud. They were uncivil."

[Bluenorthwest]

7. WNBC-TV News 4 New York at 6:00 PM. Coverage of ACT UP's Target City Hall, March 28, 1989.

[Igel]

8. Boors are everywhere.

If every inappropriate action was justification for everybody else doing inappropriate actions, what a world we'd live in.

"Me, too! Me, too!" is hardly a reasonable thing. Look at the trouble it got the football players in Steubensville into.


I'd point out that ACT UP was also making a mostly invisible folk visible. Point to the history of laws, court cases, activism, that preceded their incivility. Anti-sodomy laws were struck down far later than anti-miscegenation laws were. And it stopped there.

People like to argue numbers. We insist on "BlackLivesMatter" and reject utterly the whole "all deaths matter" because it problem disproportionately affects POC, which is to say, blacks. We look at the numbers to not justify focusing on one group but to insist on focusing on one group and disparaging others. So, okay, let's look at numbers. AIDS deaths by the early '90s had topped 40,000 per year. We're not talking "it's horrible, the police have killed over 1000 people in the last year, and a disproportionate number of the unarmed have been black"--coming up to perhaps 190 by this point for 2015, perhaps 350 by the end of the year. They'd have surpassed the total number of "disproportionate" unarmed black deaths for all of 2015 by the end of the day, January 4 (Happy New Year!). They'd have far surpassed the number of black deaths with police involvement for any reason by mid-January.