A Brief History of the ACT UP Movement
By Ethan Alexander
The ACT UP Movement was established in March 1987 in Manhattan, New York, making it 31 years old, and still existing to this day. ACT UP is an acronym standing for “AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power.” The movement originated during the height of the AIDS crisis in order to raise awareness in a non-violent manner.
The first intervention came in the form of a protest on Wall Street due to outrage at the government’s mismanagement of the AIDS epidemic. Due to misinformation about how HIV and AIDS were spread, the illness was being labeled as a disease exclusive to homosexual men, increasing the already prevalent homophobia at the time. By the time ACT UP came to be, there were around 39,000 reported cases of AIDS worldwide, and about 32,000 of those cases were in North and South America. A small group of people chose to protest and demand that Burroughs Wellcome, which was the company manufacturing the medication for AIDS (azidothymidine or ATZ), make the medication more available. In this first protest, seventeen people were arrested, but, the protest was successful.
The next major protest began on June 21st, 1987, at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City, one of four units that were treating and evaluating AIDS in the city. The protest went for four days, around the clock, non stop, depending alternative drugs to ATZ be used in an attempt to combat aids. By this point, ACT UP was labeled as a national activist group.
On January 22rd 1991, ACT UP created the “Day of Desperation” through the entirety of NYC. On this day, members of the movement invaded PBS and CBS news, saying that when you were in the POZ community (an LGBT colloquial term for HIV Positive), every day was desperate. The following day, over 2000 protesters marched, delivering coffins to government offices that held irresponsibility for the mismanagement of the epidemic. In one of the largest movements thus far, the movement took over Grand Central Station, hanging a banner saying “One AIDS Death Every Eight Minuets.” 263 people were arrested this day.
On both April 24th and 25th of 1993, ACT UP participated in the March on Washington, where millions of LGBT marched demanding equal rights at the White House. ACT UP continued to speak about the corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, saying that they were prioritizing money over the lives of dying people. They fake bodies off of buildings in order to represent the lives that had been ignored by major companies in favor of their finances.
In the 21st century, ACT UP has begun to work with the Medicare for All movement in demand for universal health care. Together, they have protested some of the largest medical insurance companies demanding health care. On October 15th, they protested the UnitedHealth Group where 14 people were arrested, and 100 different protests occurred across the United States. The most recent protest they have participated in was in 2011, where almost one thousand activists marched at the Unite Nations demanding that world leaders follow through on promises that were made in 2005 to put more funding into AIDS research that have at this point, not been followed through on.
