UNITED IN ANGER: A HISTORY OF ACT UP STUDY GUIDE

UNIT 3: DISCUSSION GUIDE

Discussion Section 1: Demonstrations, Zaps, and Direct Actions: An ACT UP Timeline
The ACT UP action timeline offers a chronology of AIDS activism over a 20 year span, identifies key moments, and suggests an overall trajectory of response to the crisis.  Use the official ACT UP timeline to consider the following questions.

 1.  Look at the action timeline as a whole.  What patterns do you notice in ACT UP’s actions?  What dates stand out to you as important?  During what periods was ACT UP most active, and why?

2.  What were three of ACT UP’s most important actions?  What were the goals of each of these actions?  What were their demands?

3.  How do ACT UP demonstrations change over the course of United in Anger?  Why did they change?

4.  Though ACT UP New York still exists, its membership has diminished.  When and why did this happen?
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Discussion Section 2: Strategies and Tactics: Stop the Church, Women and HIV, and the Ashes Action
ACT UP addressed problems at the conceptual level of strategy and the practical level of tactic.  “Strategy” describes an overall plan for achieving a goal, whereas “tactic” describes the specific action taken or task performed to implement the respective strategy.  For example, an important ACT UP strategy was to oppose profiteering by pharmaceutical companies in order to lower the cost of AIDS drugs.  One of the many tactics members used was chaining themselves to the VIP balcony of the New York Stock Exchange in September of 1989, halting morning trading and bringing nationwide attention to problem of corporate greed among drug manufacturers.  Different tactics can work as part of the same strategy and toward the same goal, but competing tactics can also conflict with each other in ways that undermine an overall strategy.  To understand ACT UP’s success, one must examine the relationship among its goals, strategies, and tactics.  Below are three of ACT UP’s most important strategic campaigns, each with different goals and tactics.

 Stop the Church
“Stop the Church” was ACT UP’s most controversial action.  Many members also felt it was the most effective.  It represents an example of how a shared strategy can inspire different and even competing tactics.  In December 1989, ACT UP chose to organize a direct action at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral when the Catholic Church spearheaded policies to keep condoms out of New York City public schools.  ACT UP felt that these policies would cause public school students to become infected with HIV and die of AIDS. They also felt that it was necessary to confront the church directly. But ACT UP members had a difference of opinion about how to carry out this action.  In United in Anger, we see the pre-action meetings where members debate tactics.

1.  Demonstrators shared the overall strategy of confronting the Catholic Church over the issue of condoms in New York City public schools.  Explain how “Stop the Church” was an example of a direct action.  Why did ACT UP choose this strategy?

2.  In its planning for the St. Patrick’s demonstration, what specific tactics did ACT UP decide to employ inside the church?
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3.  How did those decisions change once ACT UP members were actually inside the church on the day of the demonstration?
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4.  Why did some ACT UP members choose to employ the tactic of screaming in the church while others chose to protest silently through a die-in?  Are these tactics opposed?  How are they related?

5.  Today condoms are supposed to be available in New York City public schools.  One goal of the “Stop the Church” action has thus been achieved.  In what other ways did the action propel AIDS activism?
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Women and HIV
One of ACT UP’s most sustained campaigns involved improving the lives of women, who were often overlooked and underserved by HIV/AIDS research, media coverage, and health care organizations.  ACT UP’s longstanding Women’s Caucus became a full-fledged committee, the Women’s Action Committee (WAC), in August of 1989, and the following summer the ACT UP Women and AIDS Handbook was published.  United in Anger shows several initiatives that were directed at women and HIV, including the action at Cosmopolitan magazine and the four-year campaign to change the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) definition of AIDS so that women could qualify for benefits, research, and treatment.  The film also makes clear that there was a relationship among women’s health issues as reflected in the Women’s Movement and HIV/AIDS health issues in ACT UP.

1.  How did the specific issue of women and HIV intersect with more general concerns of women’s health care?  What underlying logic connects them?
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2.  What social issues made women and HIV such an urgent yet overlooked problem?  Why was AIDS so often thought of only in relation to men and not women in the early years of the epidemic?
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3.  The March 1989 and December 1990 actions at the federal CDC headquarters in Atlanta focused on saving the lives of women with AIDS.  These actions were part of a four year “Change the Definition” campaign.
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–Describe these actions in detail.  What do you see, hear, and feel?

–What were the goals of the CDC actions?
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–What was the overall approach or strategy for achieving that goal?

–What tactics did ACT UP deploy to enact its strategy?

–What was the actual outcome?
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The Ashes Action and Political Funerals
Made desperate by their mass death experience, by continued governmental neglect and underfunding, by disappointing progress in AIDS science, and by unabated assaults against PWAs by liberal and conservative cultural institutions, ACT UP members turned to more radical tactics to express their rage and grief and to voice their demands.  In the October 1992 “Ashes Action,” protesters scattered the ashes of their AIDS dead on the White House lawn.  That same year witnessed the first of ACT UP’s “political funerals.”  By violating the private act of memorializing the dead—by placing corpses in open caskets and on public display—these public demonstrations of personal grief powerfully implicated the government and the wider culture in those deaths.

1. Review footage of the Ashes Action and political funerals. Also, watch Joy Episalla’s interview about political funerals on the ACT UP Oral History Project website.

2.  What is your reaction to these clips?  Do you think this was the response ACT UP intended?

3.  Does Episalla’s commentary allow you to think about the footage of political funerals in new ways?  Why or why not?

4.  Initially, ACT UP used symbolic gravestones and “die-ins” to reference death.  As the years passed and the death rates climbed, desperate activists turned from the symbolic to the actual.  In the Ashes Action and political funerals, ACT UP carried the bodies and ashes of their dead friends through the streets and to the White House.  How does this change in tactic from the figurative to the literal change the meaning of the action?

 Discussion Section 3: Activism Past and Present
1.  Which ACT UP demonstrations seem most and least successful to you and why?

2.  Which ACT UP tactics appeal to you most and why?  What factors make a tactic successful or not?

3.  ACT UP believed that people must force social change because the dominant culture will not voluntarily grant rights to those who are disenfranchised.  What types of social changes did ACT UP compel?
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4.  What other changes are necessary today yet might require forced social movement activism to overcome resistance by those in power?