with prices around ten thousand dollars per patient
annually. They were particularly incensed because,
though AZT was new to the market, some of the re-
search behind it came out of federally funded stud-
ies dating back to the 1960’s. ACT UP’s campaign
was successful. Seventeen ACT UP members were ar-
rested, and Wall Street had to push back the opening
of the day’s trading, garnering huge publicity.
The next month, ACT UP took advantage of the
standard media coverage of last-minute tax filers on
April 15 by staging a protest at the New York City gen-
eral post office. The news crews came to film down-
to-the-wire filers, guaranteeing attention for ACT
UP’s cause as well. It was at this protest that the
motto “Silence = Death,” still associated with ACT
UP, first appeared.
In 1988,Cosmopolitanmagazine published an arti-
cle about AIDS that implied the
disease was virtually impossible to
transmit via heterosexual sex, and
ACT UP had another significant
goal. The ensuing protest was or-
ganized by women involved with
ACT UP, and the group staged
protests outside the offices of the
Hearst Corporation,Cosmopoli-
tan’s parent company, leading to
mainstream media coverage of
the article’s inaccuracies.Cosmo-
politaneventually issued a partial
retraction.Impact Besides having a very spe-
cific impact on the prices of AIDS
drugs, which, though still quite
high, have been lowered since the
1980’s, ACT UP represented a new
kind of militant activism. It went
beyond the civil disobedience tac-
tics of its 1970’s forerunners in the
gay liberation movement to incor-
porate a more sophisticated un-
derstanding of mainstream media
practices, which were more than
capable of blunting the efficacy of
1960’s and 1970’s style protests.
The group’s militant approach,
which embraced almost any action
that would generate publicity for
its cause, alienated some potential
supporters, who did not always believe that the ends
justified the means. However, ACT UP consistently re-
ceived the news coverage it sought in the late 1980’s.
As a result, the group not only spurred a new age of
AIDS awareness but also spawned numerous splinter
groups—both within the gay liberation movement
and in other grassroots movements—that used simi-
lar tactics to achieve success.Further Reading
Cohen, Peter F.Love and Anger: Essays on AIDS, Activ-
ism, and Politics.New York: Haworth, 1998. Exam-
ines literary works surrounding AIDS activism and
includes several scholarly fictional works alongside
interviews with activists to broaden readers’ under-
standing of AIDS activism.
Hubbard, Jim, and Sarah Schulman.ACT UP OralThe Eighties in America ACT UP 11
On May 13, 2007, Larr y Kramer delivered a speech in New York City in
which he reflected on ACT UP’s accomplishments since its founding in- Kramer described some of the tactics ACT UP employed in its early
years to increase public awareness of AIDS:
We invaded the offices of drug companies and scientific laborato-
ries and chained ourselves to the desks of those in charge. We
chained ourselves to the trucks trying to deliver a drug com-
pany’s products. We liberally poured buckets of fake blood in
public places. We closed the tunnels and bridges of New York and
San Francisco. Our Catholic kids stormed St. Patrick’s at Sunday
Mass and spit out Cardinal O’Connor’s host. We tossed the ashes
from dead bodies from their urns onto the White House lawn. We
draped a gigantic condom over [former Senator] Jesse Helms’s
house. We infiltrated the floor of the New York Stock Exchange
for the first time in its history so we could confetti the place with
flyers urging the brokers to SELL WELLCOME. We boarded our-
selves up inside Burroughs Wellcome (now named GlaxoSmith-
Kline), which owns AZT, in Research Triangle so they had to blast
us out. We had regular demonstrations, Die-Ins we called them, at
the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of
Health, at city halls, at the White House, in the halls of Congress,
at government buildings everywhere, starting with our first dem-
onstration on Wall Street, where crowds of us lay flat on the
ground with our arms crossed over our chests or holding card-
board tombstones until the cops had to cart us away by the vans-
full.... There was no important meeting anywhere that we did
not invade, interrupt, and infiltrate.Looking Back at ACT UP