Activism
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March 13, 2025
This is no time to sit idly by. People’s lives are at stake. We have to put our bodies on the line.
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Police officers remove members of ACT UP who have staged a sit-in inside the hallway of the New York State Capitol in Albany in 1990.
(Bettmann via Getty Images)
Back in the 1980s, I was a young gay man struggling to come to terms with my sexuality. By 1986, I had dropped out of college and moved to London. I ended up working in a factory as a clerk, and, far away from home. I was reveling in exploring all that gay London had to offer. One evening, I went to the Royal Court Theater to see a production by a gay playwright named Larry Kramer called The Normal Heart.
Little did I know that a few years later I would join ACT UP, meet Larry, and count him as a friend and comrade over the rest of his life.
I am thinking of Larry and The Normal Heart lately because of the tale it tells. Largely, well, almost entirely autobiographical, it’s about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, the establishment of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which was set up to serve the needs of those living with the disease, and Larry’s growing estrangement from his peers as he excoriates them for their genteel timidity in the face of this new plague. In a pivotal scene, just before Ned Weeks, Larry’s alter ego and the play’s main character, is booted off the board of the organization he helped found, he screams at Bruce Niles, the organization’s president: “It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit. I swear to God I now understand… Is this how so many people just walked into gas chambers?”
I remember the audible gasp in the theater at that line, with its ugly insinuation that Jews and other exterminated by the Nazis didn’t fight hard enough to avoid their fate. Ned Weeks continued a few minutes later: “Until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we’re doomed. That’s how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.”
I am thinking of Larry now because he was right: It wasn’t until gay men and their allies organized in ACT UP—the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—that our community broke through. We couldn’t be ignored any longer. We scared the leaders of federal agencies, challenged politicians on their doorsteps, took on media giants who ignored the epidemic. And we changed the world.
We’re now faced with a new existential threat in our midst, and I wish Larry was here to call us out. I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’ve been in with leaders of different groups,