Director: Jim Hubbard (USA). Year of Release: 2012
Between 1981 and 1987, 40,000 US-Americans died from HIV-related illnesses. President Reagan did not even say the word “AIDS” in this period. When they were not attacking gay men, the media often published false information, for example that women could not contract AIDS. The political witch hunt of gays and lesbians reached beyond the Atlantic. Greater Manchester police chief James Anderton said that AIDS victims were “swirling in a human cesspit of their own making.”
This was the background against which AIDS activist Larry Kramer announced the formation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power – ACT UP – in 1987. Many gay and lesbian activists were too busy grieving for their loved ones and caring for the sick to get involved in political activity, but ACT UP became a focal point which showed not just that gays and lesbians exist (at a time when many were closeted in shame) but that they could be angry and have agency-
ACT UP meetings became both safe spaces and somewhere where activists could coordinate action. We see many people interviewed while footage of their younger selves plays in the background. They all tell similar stories of how political meetings became a second home – somewhere to organise, but also maybe to pick up a cute guy. As one of the interviewees says: “ACT UP was very sexy”.
From the start, ACT UP saw the AIDS problem was systemic and targeted institutions, making demands for real change. When the pharmaceutical companies charged prices for AIDS drugs which only the rich could afford, demos were held outside the Federal Drug Agency; when the government dragged their feet, or attacked gays and lesbians, ashes were spread on the White House lawn; when the media lied, chanting protestors invaded Dan Rather’s CBS show.
United in Anger contains plenty of vintage film coverage of angry demonstrations, held when there was a serious danger of AIDS victims being sent to Concentration Camps and a significant number of people believed that they could contract the disease by sharing the same air space as gay men. And yet despite the widespread public ignorance, ACT UP was prepared to address other campaigns and propose united action.
One of the key insights of ACT UP was the argument that AIDS was not just a gay issue. Gays and lesbians may have been a stigmatised minority, but they reached out to other groups who shared their enemies. They demonstrated with healthcare workers against poor provision of medicines, and with women’s groups against attacks on reproductive rights. When the war on Iraq started, they joined the demos calling for funding for AIDS drugs, not lethal weapons.
The film shows the birth of a movement which was just coming to terms with the activist possibilities of new technology. Whereas now it would be second nature to record a demo on your mobile phone, ACT UP activists were learning for the first time that you could film demos with a camcorder, then play it back at home on your VHS recorder. As time passes, we watch people learning by doing which activities could win and retain a mass audience.
More controversially, after yet another reactionary statement from a Catholic bishop, ACT UP organised a die in at St Patrick’s Cathedral. Different activists state different opinions about the efficacy of this action. Rather than joining with nurses or women, this time they risked pissing off working class Catholics who just wanted to pray in peace. The dilemma is not resolved, but you can appreciate the seething anger of those who said you can’t change anything by pleasing everyone.
Although some later actions are mentioned, the film effectively ends in 1992 with vague mentions of splits within ACT UP when “the movement began to eat itself up from the inside.” I’d have liked to hear more about the political differences which led to these splits, although this is outside the purview of this particular film. In the absence of any arguments put forward on-screen, permit me to put forward a couple of suggestions of my own.
1992 saw the election of Bill Clinton, with the support of many LGBTQ activists. Others were more sceptical – after all, ACT UP always stressed that the problem was systemic, but arguments around Clinton split the movement down the middle. Should we carry on organising mass demonstrations or do we need to put our energies into the campaign for Clinton’s election? And then, after he was elected, was there any need to continue protesting, now that “we” were in power?
To an extent, the fact that Clinton continually betrayed his supporters, whether they were active for gay rights or elsewhere, was neither here nor there. In the film we see masses of placards and banners attacking Reagan by name, and quite a few against Bush. We see nothing aimed at Clinton, and I do not think that this is just down to the time period covered by the film. The election of a supposedly progressive president wrong-footed the LGBTQ movement, including ACT-UP.
Maybe it is not fitting in a film which takes effort to stress the unity within the movement, but a sequel might help us learn not just from the clear successes of ACT UP but also of the things it did not get quite right. The film mentions the gay Wall Street brokers who were active under Reagan and Bush. With Clinton in power, these people had no more need for mass action. Working class gays and lesbians, on the other hand, saw no benefits from their new neoliberal leader.
Many of the people interviewed talk in the past tense. ACT UP is seen as a formative period in their lives, but, implicitly, something which they did in the past. This is a shame as the best way to celebrate ACT UPs gains would be to apply them to current campaigns. It was fitting, then, that tonight’s showing was at a fundraising event for Fund Healthcare Not Warfare, which is trying to coordinate activities in support of Gaza.
You might argue that ACT UP spent too much emphasis on spectacle and not enough on building a mass movement, but their experience contains many useful insights. Faced with a German public which is at best indifferent to the suffering in Gaza, the film shows concretely how you can build a mass movement by starting from a righteous minority then expanding outside your bubble. Sure, they made some mistakes, but these are mistakes we can learn from and do it better next time.
CinePhil 