UNITED IN ANGER: A HISTORY OF ACT UP STUDY GUIDE

UNIT 2: PROJECTS AND EXERCISES

Individual Project #1: ACT UP in Context
United in Anger traces the history of ACT UP, which was formed in 1987, but the AIDS epidemic in the United States started in 1981.  In an interview with Laraine Sommella, ACT UP member Maxine Wolfe offers a history of pre-ACT UP years of AIDS activism.   Read the first half of that interview, then respond in writing to the following questions:

1.  Wolfe names a number of activist and community organizations in her interview.  What are these organizations, and whom did they serve?

2.  What picture does Wolfe paint of the early years of AIDS activism?

3.  Why is it important to understand the broader context of community activism out of which ACT UP arose?

Group Project #1: Writing Your Own Activist Statement
Write a identity statement or credo for an activist organization you would like to establish.  The statement should:

–state the group’s name
–define, even if loosely, its membership
–mention the social problem the group is responding to
–clarify the organization’s objectives and methods.
–convey the overall activist philosophy of the organization

Use the ACT UP statement at the beginning of this unit as a model for your own.

Individual Project #2: Extended Analysis: Race and Class
Watch the clip and read the transcript from Moises Agosto’s interview for the ACT UP Oral History Project.  Then, try to restate in your own words the complex gender, race, and class dynamics in ACT UP as characterized by Agosto.
Moises Agosto excerpt (video)

Group Project #2: The Problems with the “General Population”
Scientists believe that the first cases of AIDS appeared as early as the 1940s.  In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first reported cases of what would later be identified as HIV/AIDS in 1981.  But it wasn’t until 1987—and after 40,000 deaths in the U.S.—that President Ronald Reagan, who had been in office since 1980, gave his first major AIDS speech.  Indeed, the President didn’t even say the word “AIDS” in public until 1985.  At the time, one of his spokesman explained that silence by saying that “[AIDS] hasn’t spread to the general population yet.”

As a group, think about the term “general population” as a reason for the government maintaining a position of silence.

1.  Who did the Reagan administration mean by the “general population”?

2.  Who did the Reagan administration neglect because they were perceived as being outside the “general population”?  Why?

3.  What are some of the problems with this term, the “general population”?

4.  How was that term used to defend the Reagan administration’s silence around AIDS?

5.  Which health problems should the President of the United States care more and less about?

6.  When a government decides whose lives are important and whose lives don’t matter, are they representing the people of their nation?