OutCasting; LGBTQ women in AIDS activism (Part 1 of 2)

by the end of the seventies game and we're starting to see themselves and their friends get sick in ways they didn't understand we didn't know what it was we didn't even know it was a virus we just knew that people were getting sick in ways they shouldn't be getting sick and mortars dying things they did this is our casting public radio's lgbt youth program we don't have to be clear here are casting this production of media for the public heard a listener supported independent producer based in your online testing media dot org hi andrea on this edition about casting his bridges different parts of interest up a journalist and activist that activism surrounding the aids epidemic we talk about her work and act up a direct action advocacy group that worked to improve the lives of people living with aids we discuss the many areas of life had the aids epidemic affected responses of the government and of the public and the long lasting impact of the epidemic but this is the first part of a two part series ann thanks so much for joining

us to share or hi lauren right and you're involved with activist movements before the aids epidemic can you tell us a little about that yeah i come from a fairly as standard conservative republican background ellison a classic new england republicans who don't exist anymore i guess so i had a great curiosity about the world to end said but someone who has some conservative leanings but i watched the civil rights movement on television i watched protesters in the south getting attacked by dogs and fire hoses and marching in the streets demanding justice and equal rights and that actually appealed to mine a sensitive truth and justice that i had been taught and my republican household and i also started watching things like senate hearings on the

vietnam war in the early days and and that was a fast certainly educational and pretty appalling to hear what our government was doing and then i went off to college and that was at the height of the vietnam war and i very quickly became radicalized and speakers would come to campus and tell us about atrocities in vietnam why aig read the new york times every day and discover a world that i hadn't really understood before and so soon i was marching in the street with all my classmates against the war and feeling quite passionate about it and feeling really that my mind and heart were changing and becoming much more radical and in many ways a coming out of college i came right smack into the middle of the a revival of the feminist movement in the seventies and then i got even more deeply involved in i wrote for ms

magazine i marched in the first big feminist march in new york and on women's equality day in august of nineteen seventy and continued to work pretty hard in the feminist movement for years led off to do my professional journalism career in the eighties i laughed mainstream journalism i walked away from cbs news cause i was fine you know it's so stupid and i went to work as an aids educator and educator and homosexuality two teenagers in the new york area one of the earliest articles in the mainstream media about what became known as the jb aids was in the near times in july nineteen eighty one what was the sense among lgbt q people and years before then in the years before nineteen eighty one of the and the seventies were very particular time because don't forget stonewall was nineteen sixty nine there were some actions before then too but the movement for

freedom and justice was very young at that point and it was just after stonewall in the seventies they had people felt a sense of freedom and liberation so the seventies were evidently a pretty new wild time i was just coming out of the middle of that and actually with my first girlfriend and her two kids on the upper west side of manhattan so i was more of a pta mom at that point been a crazy liberation is but it was a great sense of freedom and the seventies and discovery and joy and celebration but by the end of the seventies gay men were starting to see themselves and their friends get sick in ways they didn't understand so when the report came out in nineteen eighty one it began to explain what they had already seen now before their eyes for several years but was it like in those

first years afterward well and if i made guys started to get observed an unnamed unlabeled and investigate it was terrifying because it confirmed what people have started to see so certainly every gay man i knew when i was working at cbs news at the time and there were certainly gay men there one in particular who was a very close friend of mine was just terrified all day long every day it was all he talked about and i think that was generally true in the community because first we didn't know what it was i we didn't even know it was a virus we just knew that people were getting sick in ways they shouldn't be getting sick and word dying things that there should have been curable line and there were all these wild rumors going around their word you know they would try

desperately to identify cohorts of people who were getting this illness in an attempt to define it so at one point it was haitians at another point it was none speakers they've discovered a group of nuns who were sick but at the new york city yeah health department a few years into this had to go back and re classify about ten thousand deaths so poor and homeless people who they had just thought well they're poor and homeless they got pneumonia they dyed it hadn't occurred to them until this became identified that day it was an actual virus spreading so there was great confusion and great terror for several years because it took several years to pin this down as a virus and to figure out how it was communicated between people you know there was all the stigma and panic about catching

people with h ip we didn't even know about a chubby at the time but just people who were sick people and one attacks come people don't want to be in the same room with them they were afraid it was spread through the air they were they wouldn't eat off the same plates it was people were who were sick were just getting rejected by their families send by society in general hospital's would day quarantine them in ways that were completely inappropriate but they just didn't know any better because they didn't know it was going on but there was a lot of cruelty to people who were sick and i'm all because of the terror not knowing what specifically got involved with its activism i had come out and mainstream journalism i had worked it to abc's good morning america i had worked at the cbs morning news in the eighties and i quit cbs in nineteen

eighty seven because i just thought it was getting stupider instances here and there and therefore wasn't interesting to me and it was in fact kind of shameful to be part of that so i decided that there had to be some place in the world i could be happy or working and i quit and i walked out without any real idea what i was going to do and i just started talking to people about various ideas into what it was i was looking for and someone finally suggested that i check out what is now the hetrick martin institute for lesbian and gay youth and the iaea went down there to talk to people and i said today you know i'd love to run a sports program here yeah and they almost laughed me out of the place but they said they're going to have a contract from the city department

help to do advocacy for aids education in schools and so we're starting this education department and we think you would be good for this and i said well you know why it's now nineteen eighty seven i have certainly been covering the epidemic and one where another at these mainstream jobs since it was first you are written about in nineteen eighty one but i really don't know that much about a listener out or ego oriented will be fine so i signed up and i went to work there and they immediately send me to classes they sent me to department of health class is gone how to be a sex educator they sent me to classes at gay men's health crisis about the aids epidemic and it was utterly fascinating to me to realize how little i knew is a journalist and how much there was to learn and what i learned was that everything that was

going on with the h ide the aids epidemic was exactly what i had seen me in watching the civil rights movement marching against the vietnam war are working as a feminist it was all about the power structure and with aids it was sort of the nth degree of the government knowing that there was an illness out there and not being willing to do anything about it we used to make comparisons about how there'd been this outbreak of legionnaires disease in philadelphia i think and twenty three people got sick and the entire weight of the federal government was put into figuring out how to fix this immediately but when gay men and homeless people and people of color and injection drug users were getting sick and dying by first the hundreds and then thousands of them the tens of thousands of the government did nothing the president wouldn't even talk about it

the money was not there for research and the stigma was allowed to continue and it was it was a genocide of those who were getting sick now that was extremely compelling to me because that was there the political angle and that is actually what to react out back and the fact that as a lesbian this was my community and so it felt even closer even more important than all the other movements i've been a bargain each of which felt very intimate an important to me that this really was just that much more compelling so i a when someone told me about act out by decided to check it out and i knew within thirty seconds of walking into my first act of meeting that that was exactly where i needed to be but for me it was as much the politics and the personal issues about being a lesbian that made it

important to me it wasn't because i last set close friends or or or any of that kind of personal connection although that certainly then came because then i knew everybody but today it was the political angle it really drew me in what drew lgbt q woman especially and aids activism all don't forget that i was working at hetrick martin i was going out into the schools teaching about homosexuality i didn't feel any more than i do on a daily basis and a particular separation between you know i'm not a separatist i have my own questions about men but it you have worked with men all my life i grew up with four brothers i had two steps unset i don't set of the white man and i identify with and lgbt community which includes everybody so my

job at hetrick martin was first of all to go out and teach about a chevy an aids to teenagers and the professionals to work with teenagers but it took us barry little time to realize that the barrier to doing that education was homophobia and that we couldn't just go out into aids education we had to deal directly with the homophobia of the students and the professionals before we can even get to a discussion of a job in eight so we developed a little routine about how to teach about homosexuality and go into classrooms is a male female team you know hi i'm your local as he and as anything so i was very connected to the idea they're talking to the world about these issues and i brought that into the room and act up as a very necessary part of how we were going to conduct

activism on hft and aids than attacking homophobia was certainly a major part of what accepted to this is a casting public radio's lgbt to use program produced by media for the public good in your online that have passed in media dot org on this edition of testing you practiced that warrant was talking with an author a journalist and activist about activism surrounding the aids epidemic the author historian and activist peter russo said that living with aids is like living through war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches or the difficulties of those living with aids beyond having a terminal illness well there's a long list of things that people face turned that stigma ignorance ira cruelty i would say we're at the top of the list aside from an opportunistic infections and all the daily drudgery of having to try to cope with truly life threatening illness

and that was very fatal for many people for many years but it's an interesting statement by the girl who i knew well because in fact while we were totally immersed in the epidemic and its issues obsessed with it on a daily basis for a great deal of the world we were just invisible because it was sort of a roped off mentally by the rest of the world as those people and so they exonerated themselves from having to pay attention one reason we adopted such a confrontational approach in doing aids activism was to get people to pay attention because if we had just sat back and then sort of nice about what we were doing but we got nowhere no one would have paid attention it makes me very interested in the current debates about whether democrats or are people on the left

should be confronting trump and those who work for him in public into directly and having lived through the aids crisis and knowing what direct confrontation can accomplish i'm very tempted by that approach and i think to sit back and say all we you know we have to be nice we can't sink to their level we can't we are unlikable that will hurt us i think there are several questions to be asked about that one of our mottos enact up was that we did not expect to be light we needed to be directly confrontational we needed to upset people we needed to stop business as usual in order to get people to pay attention and do something about the epidemic because our problem was that we didn't think the government or the pharmaceutical companies or the medical profession were doing enough to save people's lives so

all of that was because of the stigma that people faced and the downright ignorance having come out of the mainstream journalism where i had supposedly been covering the epidemic for six years before i went to work in the community i knew how profoundly ignorant the news media were about these issues so it was clear to me that we had to fight very hard to be paid attention to and two get any action and a lot of the people were sick were too sick to fight so those who could did enter that was our approach one thing that struck me a lot when i watched the documentary unit at an anger about act up was that arm how many different parts of life the aids epidemic affected like housing discrimination was an

issue i never would've thought that that would be an issue for people with an illness but in this kind of situation doesn't happen housing discrimination is a big one because when you have the terror of people not knowing how the eu that it is a virus in that the virus is communicated only with great difficulty and landlords don't want you quote contaminating unquote there or apartments so they don't want to living there and if you are living there and you become sick the first thing they want to do is throw you out so housing was a really really important issue and still is an act up had many different committees dealing with all these different issues insurance was an issue we had an insurance committee their work scores of different committees the housing committee eventually decided to professionalize itself and became a non profit called housing works that exist to this day and it's a

very major agency providing housing for people living with a chevy and a that came out of the activists in act up a who were still running the place two dozen years later we had to take it responsibility for these issues ourselves because others would not but they were crucial issues in how people live their everyday lives that hit roadblocks at every step of the way and we had to go out and help them how hospitals treated patients how government agencies processed there are leads city it was just endless marriage equality is obviously relatively new out at the lack of legal status for gay couples at the time act is a barrier for infected man and the partners centrist and he's a marriage equality is a relatively new of course it is but did you know that the first couple's flu got themselves legally

married in this country were in fact in the nineteen sixties and seventies when a few rogue same sex couples found states where there was not an actual prohibition against it and of course there are those who say that the catholic church was performing ceremonies of the union for some of its priests in same sex couples thousands of years ago couple thousand years ago so it's not an entirely new concept but i digress the lack of access to legal rights for same sex couples was a huge obstacle for people living with a chevy and aids they could not inherit they could not take care of each other's said medical needs they couldn't make decisions for each other they couldn't hold on two apartments one one died they were rejected by their spouses their you know partners

family meyer and who would come in and take all the dead person's belongings leaving me and kicking out the surviving partner from the apartment it was just a cruel c actor cruelty and cruelty from the government that would recognize these relationships i'd never heard that about same sex couples in the sixties and states are there is no law against it but that's really interesting that boulder colorado there's a very famous case and men in wisconsin and is a case when there were so there was a clerk in boulder who realize that the law did not explicitly prohibited and she was quite bold in handing out a few marriage licenses those were later invalidated but one of the couples sued and that case went on for quite a long time and i looked up and saw an interesting history so we've been talking about act up the aids coalition to unleash power which starred in nineteen eighty

seven can you tell us a little bit about some of the actions that i did we could be here all night yes or or more in general why purpose the group had well there was very very deliberate sequence to planning actions and the first was to identify an issue we would have equally meetings at the lgbt community center on west thirteen street in manhattan and when i joined the group a little less there when i was a little less than a year old there were about two hundred people we coming to meetings we got to a point where we had as many as six hundred appeal people week showing up that is actual human beings coming to a weekly meeting every week garrett which does not happen anymore but the internet we were kind of lucky to be doing this before the internet before there are real widespread computer uses

certainly before cell phones a mass in communicating but before sell guns in the internet and that we weren't actually going to copy shops but i have so unused del close to talk to each other and landmines so we would start at a meeting that weird an issue someone read raise an issue and they say this terrible thing is happening out there and we would all say okay tell us more about it and they would have researched it and so they get up at the front of the room and we have a very open discussion about our eye what's going on and people would ask questions then and so we found we really understood the issue and then we would talk about aright what needs to happen and we would figure out a goal what was it that we wanted to have happen and then we

would go to the sec agency involved if we wanted something to happen say in the realm of housing or drug research or something we figure out who the target is i we want this government agency to change its rules about making housing available to poor people with h i d and so the first thing we would do is we would call up that agency and we'd say we want me with you to talk about this because we think there's something wrong and we think it needs to be changed and we'd like to discuss that with you and if they were willing to talk about it greatly when talk to them and tried to negotiated answers that we thought was satisfactory but if they wouldn't talk to us or they wouldn't do what we wanted them to do then we would start when in action and the basic idea that action it is to force only encourage someone to do something you want them to do that can be done through public shaming

well that's the basic idea if you're going to do a public demonstration you're trying to draw the public's attention to this issue and make at the agency or company or whomever do what you think is right by exposing this issue to the public so that's why you do in action and when you do an action thanks and we've run out of time so we'll have to leave it there for now and pick it up on the next edition of outcast and northrop's a journalist and activist susan ades educator remember back to the aids coalition to unleash power he's the co host today usa tvs weekly lgbt news hour she joined us from her home in manhattan and this has been a wonderful conversation thanks so much for joining us thank you lauren that's it for this edition about casting public radio's lgbt q you are we don't have to be cleared to be here but this was the first part of a two part series this program has been produced by an outcast and tv

including participants lauren alex andrea dante griffin julia max sophie when nato because endangered our assistant producer is josh valley and our executive producers marc service podcast is a production of media for the public good a listener supported independent producer based in or more information about our casting is available at casting media dollars to find information about the show with some links for all our past episodes and the podcast link how casting is also on social media to connect with us on twitter facebook and youtube and outcast media if you're having trouble whether it's a home for school or just with yourself call the trevor project hotline at eight six six or eighty seven created six boarders them online at the trevor project our the trevor project is an organization dedicated to lgbt youth suicide prevention call them if it's a problem even have an online chat you can use if you don't talk on the phone

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