United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (review)

“Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!” screamed approximately seven thousand protestors marching along the sidewalks and lying in the streets surrounding St. Patrick Cathedral in November of 1989. Inside the church, men and women lay down in the aisles silently for a “die-in” accompanied by the screams of fellow protestors. One activist stood on a pew yelling, “We’re not going to take it anymore! You’re killing us! Stop it!” Just days earlier Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York, had condemned the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV. O’Connor had also attacked state abortion laws. The Catholic Church, which wielded significant political and financial power in New York at the time, had endorsed the death of thousands of Americans and the spread of AIDS through its statements. The interests of women’s rights groups and AIDS activists overlapped, bringing gay and straight men and women of diverse backgrounds together in solidarity to protest church policies. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM) organized the largest picketing and protest action that the Catholic Church in New York City had ever experienced. O’Connor sat at the altar and waited while police picked up the passive and limp bodies of the “dead” demonstrators from the floor and arrested them.

The 2012 documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP is the product of the ACT UP Oral History Project that documents ACT UP, the New York-based grassroots gay activism group founded in 1987 that demanded wider awareness and governmental response to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Director and producer Jim Hubbard first began filming the gay movement in the 1970s. In the 1980s he experienced AIDS both as a political and personal reality. In 1985, Hubbard’s partner died of AIDS, leaving Hubbard hours of his recorded experience. In 1987, ACT UP was formed, capturing the attention of Hubbard’s lens and producing hours of documentary film footage. Fellow producer of the project and early member of ACT UP, Sarah Schulman, is an accomplished writer and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. While a reporter for The New York Native (the gay newspaper which ran from 1980–1997) and other local newspapers, Schulman was one of the first to cover the emergence and explosion of the AIDS crisis in a time of near silence and willful blindness to what was dubbed the “gay cancer.” By 1996 AIDS activism had produced greater awareness and better treatments that allowed many with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) to live long lives. In 2001, Schulman and Hubbard decided that the ACT UP Oral History Project, briefly attempted by Hubbard in the 1980s, needed to be revived to serve as a corrective for the trivialized and often suppressed history of AIDS and AIDS activism in America.

Schulman and Hubbard stand with other activists, academics, and artists working to bring this history to the forefront. In 2012, the same year of United in Anger’s release, multiple documentaries on the subject of AIDS activism debuted, including David France’s award-winning and oft-reviewed How to Survive a Plague, Jeffrey Schwarz’s Vito, and David Weissman’s We Were Here. These documentaries, unlike many journalistic AIDS films of the 1990s, have a greater historical distance from the passing of over thirty years and improvements in HIV and AIDS treatments in America. Although historians differ on the appropriate amount of time that must pass before an event or topic is considered history and open for interpretation, the time had come for therapeutic reflection and historical interpretation of the human loss, struggles, and activism of the AIDS crisis.

Hubbard and Schulman emphasize the scope of involvement and nature of ACT...