Aids Coalition to Unleash Power

AIDS COALITION TO UNLEASH POWER. The leading grassroots movement in the struggle against AIDS, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded in New York City in 1987 and quickly spread to dozens of cities around the United States. Because of its large-scale, militant demonstrations, ACT UP developed a reputation as the “radical” front of the lesbian/gay and AIDS movements. Nonetheless, for much of its early history, ACT UP focused primarily on producing moderate reforms within government bureaucracies and pharmaceutical companies. While a number of ACT UP/New York members had prior involvements with the New Left and the feminist, gay, and antiwar movements, most of ACT UP’s membership consisted of white, gay, professional men with little or no previous activist experience. ACT UP/New York deliberately kept its focus narrow so as to create a broad coalition, and it fought off early attempts by the New Alliance Party and the International Socialist Organization to seize control of the group’s agenda.

By 1988, however, ACT UP began to expand its focus. Prodded primarily by women and people of color in the group, ACT UP came to recognize the ways in which issues of poverty, sexism, and racism intersected with AIDS (“What good is a cure if people can’t afford it?” members would ask). ACT UP chapters nationwide became involved in the fight for universal health care in the early 1990s, and in 1993 ACT UP/New York released a proposal that challenged the capitalist underpinnings of medical research in this country. The “Barbara McClintock Project to Cure AIDS” called for the centralization of government-sponsored AIDS research, the delinking of such research from private profit, and the seizure by eminent domain of privately funded discoveries whose release was being unnecessarily delayed (e.g., because of market considerations). While ACT UP chapters continued to exist well into the 1990s, by 1995 most had either collapsed or were a fragment of their former size.

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Crimp, Douglas, with Adam Rolston. AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.

Wolfe, Maxine. “The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP): A Direct Model of Community Research for AIDS Prevention.” In AIDS Prevention and Services: Community Based Research, edited by Johannes P. Van Vugt. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1994.

ACT UP, New York. Historical Archive. https://actupny.org

AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, 1985-2000. Archives and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library. http://archives.nypl.org/mss/3622