Observing other movements – Case Study : ACT Up (1980’s)

I had a discussion this weekend with a friend who was heavily involved with the Radical Faeries and Act Up in the 1980’s.

At the time in San Francisco, gay men were being diagnosed with a newly discovered disease (called AIDS), and dying by the thousands. The city had declared the crisis a national emergency, but on the national level, with Reagan as president, the issue was being pretty much ignored.

The people of SF were pissed, and rally’s were being held constantly. Vigils, workshops, protests, you name it.

While the SF gay population is the hardest hit population in the entire country, what people were angry at was the response of the federal government. That is where the attention needed to be focused. But, DC is far away, and it’s hard for people to focus on something so distant. So instead, people started to look for things close to home they could focus this energy on. At time, the mobs would want to burn city hall (even though SF city hall was funding aids research), and riots would turn violent in the streets.

The black bloc was here as well. Showing up at rally’s, lighting cars on fire, smashing windows. The people were pissed, and without a direction for their anger, they lashed out. The larger group would often see this, and react with non violent tactics. Surrounding the violent protestors with dancing and flowers, distracting them, calling them out as they attempted to do their violent actions in anonymity.

After a time, people involved in the local community realized that the local people who were pissed needed some direction for their anger. Something they could focus on that was local, not some distant entity.

My friend had another good friend who was in the movement, who was an artist. Many artists at the time were looking at ways to use art for social change. So he made a quilt. And he encouraged others to make the same quilt. On each square of the quilt was the name of one person who died of aids. Together, all the pieces made one large quilt, now known as the NAMES project (Aids memorial quilt). This gave people some direction, something to focus on. And it also gave the movement something visual that people on the outside could see, that would visualize the scope of the project. For someone who’s straight, doesn’t really get aids, seeing a small square with a name on it, and then seeing a mile long quilt made up of these names, gave them a better understanding of the problem.

There were many other projects that sprang up. And after a while, people stopped blaming San Francisco city hall, and instead started to realize that the city was on the same page, and that the enemy wasn’t each other, it was the bureaucracy and government policies based 2800 miles away. And with better ways to manifest their energy and focus, they were not as divided any more, fighting each other.