ACT UP

From Homolexis Glossary

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was effectively formed on March 10, 1987, at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. Larry Kramer was asked to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended presentation focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer criticized the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as insufficiently activist and political. Kramer had co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983.

The group was suffused with an urgent sense of the need to intervene decisively in the AIDS crisis—to light a fire under the government and its agencies and to educate the gay and general public. It created the terse slogan “Silence = Death,” generating graphic logos to complete the message. The tactic of vigorous intervention recalled the zaps and other actions taken by the Gay Activists Alliance and other groups that sprang up in the wake of the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.

The acronym seems deliberately to evoke the common expression “acting out,” often used in pop psychology circles to stigmatize rebellious youth.

In the early twenty-first century ACT UP declined in prominence. However, there are still chapters in a number of American cities, as well as in France and Belgium. The group is still very much needed, and it may have an important future in blogging.