OutCasting; LGBTQ women in AIDS activism (Part 2 of 2)

set i saw it's important to remember that the crisis is not over and that we are still facing enormous challenges in ending the aids crisis local lead nationally and around the world and i have many friends who were still deeply involved in all those areas fighting the crisis begging for more government help begging pharmaceutical companies to do more research be more reasonable in their pricing eighteen of the world to pay attention and to end the stigma that still exists out there and the ignorance so all of that is still going on this is our casting public radio's lgbt q youth program we don't have to be cleared to be here i'm casting his production of media for the public good listener supported independent producer based in new online testing media dot org hi hundred on this edition about casting these barges that loren thompson in the river up a journalist and activist that activism surrounding the aids epidemic we talk about her work and act out a direct

action an advocacy group that worked to improve the lives of people living with aids we discuss the many areas of life that the aids epidemic affected responses of the government and of the public and the long lasting impact of the epidemic this is the second part of a two part series both parts are available on a website address media dot org anne thanks for joining us again are now casting you're welcome thank you lauren when we left off last time we were talking about act ups purpose and we started to talk about how a plane its actions you explained that you target an agency and try to meet with them to negotiate an answer but if they weren't willing huge star playing an action to publicly shame them draw the public's attention to them and try to get them to do the right thing by exposing the issue to the public once he got to the point what happened next we would spend a lot of time figuring out all right what is the right way to get attention for this issue what exact action is going to make a difference with people so whether it was people barricaded themselves inside an office at a

pharmaceutical company or stopping traffic in the middle of fifth avenue or doing a demonstration outside the new york times to complain about their coverage or most famously going inside and outside st patrick's cathedral in december of nineteen eighty nine to expose the fact that the catholic church in new york city was sitting on the board of education the world for public schools and interfering with the public school's curriculum of sex education in those public schools which we thought was jazz i'm unbelievably her and that's why was the catholic church allowed to have a voice in sex education in the public schools of new york city not to mention their interference when a condom use of which we considered genocide alabama to be teaching people to use condoms

or their interference with women's reproductive rights all of which were on the agenda when we did our stop the church action but sometimes our actions we're two people going into an office and handing out flyers to all the workers they're telling them what we thought their company was doing wrong and we would just boldly walked into the opposite hand out our flyers and leave everything was just being fearless being truthful and being clear about what our goals were what other roles to act up out in the lgbt community other than being an activist group were there to be an activist group to be the cutting edge to be the front lines of activism but the people enact up came from or variety of places and jobs and many people may enact up were people who were working in social service

agencies during the day doing the work that needed to be done to help people in the aids crisis but activists role was not to be a social service agency accepts role was to be an activist group to effect change that was needed to save people's lives do you think that the aids epidemic changed the public's views on health care in the united states i think the aids epidemic had a huge effect on people's attitude towards health care in the united states first of all one of our are rallying cries was health care is a right and that was a new concept in the eighties and as not been fully realize to this day but that's a lot of what the obamacare a so called the affordable care act was supposed to be about although was really a half measure we haven't gotten there yet but the idea that health care is a right matt big government and the pharmaceutical companies should be trying to save

lives i think was a radical notion and beyond that the whole idea of patient knowledge and empowerment was also knew one thing we prided ourselves on was that we knew more than anybody else about the epidemic we had such smart people who were so committed to doing the work to study what the science was what the political issues for what the social issues work we knew it and so we would go into meetings with government officials or pharmaceutical companies or whatever i we would know more than they did and that kind of taking power by educating ourselves it was something it's fairly radically new i think i'm sure there are other examples before us but it was new to most of the world and i have to say that i have seen since then though the breast cancer movement certainly paid

very close attention to what we were doing and learned a lot from us and got a lot more energized and radicalized by watching what we were doing i got a lot of calls from people in various centers sectors lyme disease patients have called me for lessons on how to do direct action to get themselves listen to and paid attention to and certainly you know some of the people affected by a chevy you as strongly were human feel e x and i think the community of people with hemophilia got a lot more radical a working with backed up so i think that is demand major effect across the board it's really interesting how like how many different movements is affected yes fascinating and of course we were built on the experience of all those movements that came before us the tactics we used the attitude we had came directly out of the civil rights movement and the anti war movement and the

feminist movement and a lot of the women and act out the lesbians and straight women had come out of the feminist movement and these other movements the guy who got up at a meeting one night in anna rouse that he had been a national secretary of students for a democratic society and that was a fascinating conglomeration of people trying to save their own lives because they were living with h i v and then all of us who have been in various other movements who recognized the politics and the urgency h i'd be an aids and claims together with those people who are living with it to former arab very mighty movement that brought our experience together with bearer jin city and created something very very special and powerful i see that actually in some of the anti a gun movement these

days you have the people who've been directly affected to men you know the park when students who then threw a school massacre of the mothers whose kids have been killed by police or in other massacres and you bring them together with people who are just generally terrified by very dangerous gun culture in this country and they are trying to form a powerful and effective force they're up against very very large obstacles in their way but i see the same kind of coming together of those different communities to work together i was wondering about that earlier when you mentioned that one thing about activist that like we're not here to be liked or we don't expect to be liked because i think a lot of what the kids from parker and in the whole gun control movement that's kind of happening right now there is interesting not

hiding there a motions at all which is that it is very angry and they're upset and that's that shouldn't be heading i think that's absolutely true certainly we could debate this for years and many have been many will continue to forever people ask me for advice about what they should do and some people say oh i could never get arrested or i don't like street demonstrations or or whatever and i say look i don't care what you do you do what's right for you in our writing letters to remember congress is right for you in giving money to organizations is right for you it getting out in the streets is right for you it doesn't matter it what matters is that you do something and in fact we need all those things so people should do what feels right to them and they should not sit around saying i should do this that they really need to do what feels comfortable for them

but my hope is they'll do something please register to vote and vote give a little money to an organization you admired that you think it's attractive people showing up for all these demonstrations i think he's just magnificent and that is how the vietnam war ended because we got a critical mass of people out in the streets in peaceful demonstrations we brought a million people to washington dc repeatedly to demand an end to the war and ending the war was never and majority feeling in the country but the demand for its endless so origin and so large that eventually the war hat dance this is our casting public radio's lgbt to youth program produced by media for the public good in your online ad out testing media dot org on this edition of testing each participant warren is talking with journalist and activist about activism surrounding the aids epidemic your good friend of gilbert

baker the creator of the rainbow flag we interviewed gilbert and two dozen seventeen about a month before he died during that interview we asked him how the lgbt q community has recovered from the aids crisis and he said that the gay community has not yet recovered do you agree i absolutely agree it is not over for the lgbt q community we have not worked how bird instead of global ways and more person always those of us who were alive through the height of the epidemic our war veterans and we have various levels of posttraumatic stress and the epidemic is still on you know it has not ended and people are still becoming infected every single day and there is still rampant ignorance out there both among those who are getting at it and those who are far distant from it

now you cannot have the cohort of people who are younger who didn't live through at who seemed to be untouched by it but there are so many complex levels of this that it's hard to tease out where it starts and where it stops i think the experience of the epidemic continues to permeate our lives whether we know it or not now there is also a silver lining to the epidemic and i am reluctant even call it that but we have to acknowledge that one effect of the epidemic is that it accelerated the lgbt q liberation movement a million fold because people who were closeted were forced out of the closet by bean sec and couldn't hide anymore suddenly millions of people around the country and around the world found that they knew gay people when they hadn't realized that before in their families among their

friends in among their coworkers and then brought the issues of homophobia to the forefront and made people deal with these directly and in the context of a community that was really hit hard by something horrible that they had not created in were not responsible for so all the advances we've made legally socially personally in the last thirty years have a lot to do with the fact that to be chevy aids epidemic hit how does the epidemic affects lgbt q youth who are not alive for the fate of that well it's a good question and i wish i knew the answer i would be like i would like to be talking to more use now about that but unfortunately had a lot of them are getting infected because they're not getting aids education because that is being neglected by the schools and the government because society has put it on the back burner

so the first level is that they are personally at risk with any luck there are and because they're better treatments they stand a much better chance of living in a a long and healthy life but they are at risk and they don't all know it and it is shameful that we are still having to demand that the government do the education and it has always failed to do adequately now they're also messina generation older than them they could be their mentor is in their friends and could teach them their history and that's it a lot of that is gone and so i think of them as says some odd at draft missing their natural generational flow and you know just the show a shock most of those who are their elders and deadly effects their relationships with them so i imagine it had a continues to have

major of facts rippling through the community on an ongoing basis although they might tell you otherwise adrift as a pretty accurate word one good effect i think for you that is that they are the next generation of activists and the self respect and pride and joy read we founded the movement has been transferred to many of them certainly we have been astonished over the last set couple of decades by how much younger people are when they come out and how powerful their lives have become and how much self respect they have and how they demand respect and demand justice and i like to think that is our legacy and i'm very proud of the work i see them doing in stepping out in stepping up on so i think that's a very positive effect of

the activism of the aids epidemic with advances in treatment each it is no longer the almost automatic death sentence that used to be what you think that the next generation of lgbt q u needs to know regarding stds an eternity in particular well certainly it's a very complicated situation these days with treatment advances and even trap pre exposure pro says nada animals are making people essentially immune if they take the pills regularly because then they stop using condoms and then we start the cycle all over again from the seventies of sexually transmitted infections and we see excel rating rates a gunnery and syphilis in committee and things like that and you know hp the human

papilloma viruses or cancer cause there and we know about it so we pay attention to it causing cancer when transmitted to gradually to women but we don't pay attention to the fact that it is transmitted and only two men and we start having epidemics of anal cancer grows we're not talking about that and a mennonite using condoms for anal intercourse so is this a an unstoppable cycle that will go on and on and on i understand the reluctance to use protection and the desire not to have to do that but now we wear seatbelts we pay some attention to speed limits if not entirely i we tried each in healthy ways and not put poison in our systems the words you are a smoke or drink to excess myra ended and yet were quite

cavalier about our sex lives and alan how intelligent we are about protecting ourselves they are so i think that's a big area to be examined long lasting impacts as the crisis had on the lgbt q community and on the world so there is an easy question i saw it's important to remember that the crisis is not over there we are still facing enormous challenges in ending the aids crisis local lead nationally and around the world and i have many friends who are still deeply involved in all those areas fighting the crisis are begging for more government help or begging pharmaceutical companies to do more research be more reasonable in their pricing now an egg dean of the world to pay attention and to end the stigma that still exists out there and the ignorance so all that is still going on so long lasting

effects are both good and bad there is the idea that be lgbt community has found in coming together to fight this epidemic and to find its own liberation there is the example we have set for the world i do this weekly news show gave us a google it you can also find it online and we report every week about liberation movement for lgbt people in the most unlikely places around the world these days were talking about pride celebrations in countries in africa and small towns in america and places all over the world where it has not happened before we're still in the midst of a great coming out and a great liberation movement so i hate long lasting impacts we're still in the middle of it i think it's far too

soon to judge that all we can do is to dive in and be part of it and make the world a better place by our participation is there anything else that you our listeners particularly young listeners who were not alive during the eighties and nineties to know about aids and the epidemic and activism mostly i want young people to know that speaking up and fighting back it brings joy i quit a job ads as a writer producer at cbs news because it wasn't fulfilling me and i went to work in the lgbt q community thinking that i was sort of retreating from the world and i'm not i've had my moment in the sun has a cbs news producer but what i found out much to my astonishment was how much more interesting and joyful of the work in the community was then working in the mainstream for cbs news so i want people

to find that joy you find that involvement that gives their lives meaning and that sounds cliche but it's been very real for me and i am so grateful to have stumbled into this i really didn't mean to who was totally an accident but on it was the most lucky thing that ever happened to me and i a just have had so much fun when you find out how much fun activism is you'll wonder why you ever wasted the moment not do and in activism is about as much fun as you can have in the world so why highly encourage people are dried out but please just do something to pay attention to the world what discourages me most these days is when i hear people say oh on a never pay attention to politics or i'm just not

interested in any of that and i just wondering the next thing as the farm very important life altering things going on out there and if you're not involved you're responsible for this and it's just shameful so please pay attention what's the news our look at it or find it in whatever way you can and do your part you got to do it all you don't have to do it all day every day but do something and you'll find great joy in that and you'll help the world be a better place anne northup is a journalist and activist she was an educator and a member of act up the aids coalition to unleash power she is the cohost of gay usa tvs weekly lgbt news hour and thanks so much for joining us this has been a great conversation thanks for an uninsured or after topic then i started thinking about our conversation the thing that surprised me most of this interview was just

too much of the information and it was new to me in school i learned about some of the sigh and spiny jovi and wasted veterans addition as target the epidemic affected many gay men that i didn't learn much more than that in terms of its relevance in the lgbt q community this isn't surprising considering the controversy over teaching anything related to lgbt issues in schools it'll be taboo for teachers to discuss these issues the testing didn't episode on this topic you can find it on those same page of their website out casting media dot org look for episode ten i was like you know an eternity education at all only thirty four states and the district of columbia mandate only education and even fewer require at the education to be medically accurate and unbiased even so when i joined up casting and started to learn more about lgbt q history it became clear that i had missed something big some of our custom guests who are not constrained by the taboos we see in schools regarded the aids epidemic is it there was a war i had not learned about the epidemic in the context of history and the window is that each day the spread but i

have learned the ways that i heard people or how many people affected i have to learn the personal side of it lgbt q you've typically were not a job he needs from outside of our community much of the time we're taught about aids by people who don't have personal connections with the aids epidemic or the lgbt q community so sometimes they will teach us either the context for example i was taught about ryan white a boy who had hemophilia and it got through a blood transfusion he was stigmatized because he had but it too never got into the actual reason for this digitization which is that aids was primarily scene and vilified as a gay disease there is also a generation gap in our community sadly much of the generation of gay men who would have the most qualified to pass on knowledge of aids at the hague the epidemic is gone so we learned that it's as bad for people in other countries or for gay men in america or for drug users we learned that something bad happened years ago somewhere else to people who are not us and who here

seemed to have no connection to it but we don't get the perspective of those people themselves to explain to us why was so awful we don't get a prospectus of activists who work to solve the problem states brought up you don't hear from people living with a jam in the present day you really got a primary sources so you miss important perspectives without those perspectives it's difficult to fully understand the present during our interview and mentioned that she thought of my generation of lgbt cheese as being somewhat adrift i agreed with her because i felt that way before i started studying lgbt q history i grew up in a period of time in which acceptance of lgbt q people increased tremendously i watched state's gay marriage equality and watched others didn't stop using day as an insult and begin to support the lgbt q pierce and if that life is much more difficult for the lgbt community before and it was getting better without those perspectives from the past i can see clear picture of what exactly was happening working on this episode i'm talking with ben is obviously and understand perspectives that i hadn't known before elvis done the same for you

that's it for this edition of the outcast in public radio's lgbt chief berger we don't have to be cleared to be here this was the second part of a two part series both parts are available on a website how casting media dot org this program has been produced by a casting team including participants lauren alex andrea dante griffin truly a max sophie when nikko lucas and the truth our assistant producer is josh kelley and our executive producer is mark's of this podcast is a production of media for the public good a listener supported independent producer based in new york more information about our casting is available and cast media dollars to find information about the show with some links for all our past episodes and the podcast live podcasting is also on social media connect with us on twitter facebook and youtube and outcast media if you're having trouble whether it's a home or school or just with yourself call the trevor project hotline at eight six six for a date seventy eight six or visit them

online at the trevor project our the trevor project is an organization dedicated to lgbt youth suicide prevention call them if you have the problem seriously don't be scared even have an online chat you can use if you don't want to talk on the phone again the numbers eight six six for a day seven three basics being different is no reason to hate or hurt yourself you can also finally got our site outcast media dollar under out casting lgbt huge resources and drew thanks for listening