 Good evening everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Library Services at Roger Williams University, and I'd like to welcome you all to our first Talking in the Library event this fall semester. All of our Talking in the Library events are generously supported by an endowment to the library by an alumna of the university, Mary Teft White, Happy White as she was known, whose donation also made possible the program space in the University Library known as the Mary Teft White Cultural Center. This evening we are delighted to have Sarah Shulman with us, the AIDS activist and author of the recent book, Let the Records Show, a Political History of Act Up New York 1987 to 1993. Sarah will be interviewed by our own Dr. Jason Jacobs, Dean of Undergraduate Studies at RWU. Professor Adam Braver, our Library Program Director and Professor of Creative Writing, will be introducing them both in just a moment. I'd like to briefly mention our next two Talking in the Library programs coming this fall. On October 28th, we will host a virtual meeting with the novelist and memoirist Skolastik Mukassonga. Her title, I'm sorry, her talk is entitled On Warning and Exile Looking Back at Rwanda. And on November 10th, we will host the poet Michael Klein in person with a reading of his work in the Mary Teft White Cultural Center. We will be sending out information about these events soon and I do hope you can join us. And now Professor Braver will introduce our speaker. Thank you Betsy. It is a real pleasure to have Sarah Shulman here tonight. There are many contexts in which I could be introducing Sarah, the novelist, the playwright, the essayist, journalist, the polemicist, the public intellectual, and of course, as we will hear tonight, the activist. But it would be a mistake to isolate each of those categories as though they are exclusive of each other. In fact, I think we would all agree that it is the combination of all those roles and the often simultaneous exchange between them that has made Sarah such an important voice for more than 30 years. I think of her 1990 book People in Trouble, a novel of guilt and mercy and power and love set in the East Village at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It is not a novel in which our writer merely has done her due diligence as a researcher, setting out to get the facts and details straight in order to suit her narrative, but one instead that is part of the holistic conversation taking place between the fiction writer, the activist, the public intellectual, the witness, and of course, the human being. I might be arguing against myself when I say that the very act of putting words on paper, of giving shape to ideas, shape to imagination, shape to justice, and shape to the voiceless and the forgotten is more than just a conversation and is in fact a form of action and activism. And in Sarah's newest work of nonfiction, Let the Records Show, she does exactly that through chronicling the voices of the members of ACT UP and through them telling a history while creating a narrative, operatic and heartbreaking, that is equally as artistic as its fictive counterpart. A book that The New York Times called quote, a masterpiece tone, part sociology, part oral history, part memoir, part call to arms, and of which Vogue herald it as quote, a text that offers younger queer activists a rare study of their own history. And as you heard from Betsy, serving as our interlocutor tonight is Dr. Jason Jacobs. Of course, those of you in the RWU community know Jason as the Dean of Undergraduate Studies, as well as having taught courses in the gender and sexuality minor. Along with his questions for Sarah, there will be plenty of opportunity for your questions. And you can write them in the chat and we will do our best to introduce them into the conversation. So with that, please welcome Sarah Schulman and Jason Jacobs. Thank you so much, Adam. It's very kind of you. And thank you, Jason. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Oh, my thanks, Adam. And Sarah, thanks so much for making yourself available for this. And thanks so much for this book, which I told you before we started the session, that I found to be kind of an intimidating book to even think about and try to talk about. But I think it's especially appropriate, given the introduction that Adam just gave to start with some questions that I had on my mind throughout my reading of, you know, what is after all an extremely long and rich book. There are questions really for you as a writer, because, you know, as Adam was just saying, you're extremely prolific, you write novels and plays and books in various genres. But as a nonfiction writer, you really are a polemicist in the best sense. And I, you know, your voice comes through so loud and clear in the kind of public thinking that you do. This book is, this book is one that emerges out of the Act Up Oral History project that you played a major role in and therefore comes together through the voices of so many other people. You've put your voice in there in conversation in this really dynamic way. And I wondered if you could start by talking some more about why that was the appropriate formal choice for you and writing this kind of thing. And I was also curious, just as a writer, how'd you do it? How did you figure out how to insert your voice into this sort of major chorus while pulling off the kind of political and ethical work that I think you're doing by letting so many people have their say in the book? Well, I have to go back really far to start to answer that. You know, in the late 70s, I was part of this revolution of gay and lesbian and feminist newspapers that existed all over the country. And at age 21, I became a journalist in that movement. We didn't get paid, but we were out there covering the stories that were ignored by the mainstream press. And in 1981, as I was a few years into this is when AIDS was first detected by science and first announced in the New York Times, it's July 3rd, 1981. So I started covering it as part of my work for the gay press because notoriously, the mainstream media did not acknowledge the AIDS crisis. We called the New York Times the New York Crimes. And it was up to us, these weird amateurs to figure out the stories. So by the time ACT UP was started in March of 1987, I had already been writing about AIDS for about five years. And then I was in ACT UP through its key years. It's dissipated after a split of 92. And 96 is when the good drugs came in, the protease inhibitors. And that was the first time that people who were infected knew that they could live a full life. But 1999 was the internet revolution because ACT UP was before the internet. We didn't have email or anything like that. And none of our materials were digitized. So it was like we had completely disappeared. If you had googled ACT UP, you would have found nothing. So in 2001, in reaction to that, Jim Hubbard and I started the ACT UP oral history project. And we interviewed 188 surviving members of ACT UP over the next 18 years. And we made these interviews, which were extensive, available for free on our website, actuporalhistory.org. And we've had like 14 million hits on that website. Now, we thought that some academics would come along and use this raw material and they would analyze it and see all the great stuff that was in it. But they never did. And we just kept doing the interviews and putting them up for free. And we made a film called United in Anger that came out in 2012. But at a certain point, ACT UP started to be mishistoricized. And what they did was there's this trend in American history. There's a myth of the white, heroic male individual, the John Wayne who comes in on his horse and saves the day. And this kind of got done to ACT UP. The story started to be told as though it was like five people who had created all of these huge transformations. And not only is that inaccurate, but it is impossible. So it became like a state of emergency. And this book had to be written. I didn't want to do it. We tried to find someone else to do it. But as the false stories started to get embedded, we realized that I had to do it. So I sat down and I started rereading the interviews that I had conducted over those decades. And the first thing I realized was that I could not tell the story chronologically because it wouldn't be accurate. Because so many things were happening at the same time. And in fact, the simultaneity of action was one of the reasons that ACT UP was successful. So I had to find a form that could meet the content. And I'm one of those people who believes that content dictates form. And that when you just get a formal idea and the content isn't resonant, it doesn't work. So I realized that the book had to be done kind of a horizontal structure where certain actions or key tropes or key themes would be highlighted. And then they would be placed next to each other and resonate with each other. And in that way, the reader could start to experience and understand this huge phenomena. And I had a long history of writing experimental novels. I've also written conventional literary novels and genre novels. So I had so much skill in working with formal invention that I had the ability to do this. And the book is 750 pages. But I don't think that it's hard to read. I mean, I've heard that it's quite easy to read. So my skill as a novelist, I think, really came in there. Yeah, I was just thinking, you published a book called My American History. This is decidedly not my history of act up, right? I mean, you really give so much room for the debates and for the differences of points of view. And that's one of the things that, you know, those of us who I think were not able to be part of act up, but sort of inherited the cultural impact of act up, you know, know about it is that's a group that was animated by various kinds of debates that that ultimately led to the dissolution in the early 90s, as you said. I'm just really interested in the fact that there's there's so much room given in the book for those differences of opinion. And I wondered if that was tricky for you in trying to think about, you know, situations in which clearly you would have had in the moment, strong feelings perhaps right about the priorities of the group or about certain of the certain of the personalities in the group who were in conflict with others. Because as I read through it, it's, you know, I hear you in the book, right? I recognize your voice in various places, but I do think that it's a very capacious book in terms of the room that it makes for the spotlight to travel to all these different things. Well, it was very important to me to be fair. And I think I was very fair. And there's people in this book who I don't like. And some there are people who say things that I don't even think are true. But that that I had a responsibility because for 18 years, people allowed me to interview them. And in fact, no one ever refused to answer a question and all that time. So that gave me a huge responsibility. And I basically just had to let everyone have their say. Now, one of the things that's really interesting about this group was very, very successful. Very few social movements are as successful as act up. And the people in it are very special people. They they're very individual. And they have their own point of view. And there's a lot of disagreement in this book. I mean, people are constantly disagreeing with each other. But it was that dynamic, the willingness to disagree and the willingness to work with people with whom you disagree is one of the things that drove the movement forward. I'll mention that my partner and I rewatched United in Anger this weekend, getting ready for this. And it's just a funny detail. Unless I missed something, I think the only time in that film where you are speaking to the camera is footage from after the stop the church demonstration in which you are expressing ambivalence precisely. And so, you know, you can sort of historicize yourself within this story that you're telling of the process of coming together because you showed me being wrong. I was wrong, but we decided to show it because we all make mistakes. No. Well, you mentioned in your answer to the first question, you know, this incredibly interesting fact that I think we have to, you know, confront head on, which is that act up is pre Internet. The book is so rich with details about the work of activism and of changemaking, which sometimes has to do with who can get their hands on a paper folding machine. Who's going to handle the photocopying? How do you disseminate information? How do you, you know, get things from here to there? We're on the other side now of, you know, a total transformation in terms of how information and communication works. And I think a lot of people have expressed skepticism about, you know, the the viability of direct action, you know, political work in the Internet era. Of course, I think we now have a summer of Black Lives Matter protests behind us to remind us that it's, you know, but just to go to that question in one of the first few pages of the book, you've got a, you know, beautifully put line. I just want to read, you're saying, you know, that the history of act up invites us invites all of us in the present to imagine ourselves as potentially effective activists and supporters, no matter who we are. There's something in that that kind of is that ring of the way that the, you know, the early promise of the Internet anyway was, you know, that we could all show up to some expanded and easily accessed public sphere at the same time that some days it feels like energies get dissipated, you know, through the Internet. And so if it is so clearly your intention to offer this history as an example for us to think about, right, and as a way for us to imagine political action, you know, what kind of difference do those changes in communication and information dissemination make? I wonder. Well, people and institutions act on and transform each other. And in every era, when people are resisting and when they're in opposition, they harness the tools of their time. So, you know, when act up existed and was founded in 1987, the camcorder had just been invented. Prior to that video was this very laborious process. You'd have a huge deck that was the size of a piece of luggage that one person had to carry. And then there were these boom mics that somebody had to hold. I mean, you know, and it was, and suddenly there was a video camera that a person could have in their knapsack. And because of the invention of this technology act up invented video activism. This is before YouTube. The only way that we could share our videos was by mailing them to people, you know, cassettes. But that was the technology and people who needed change figured out how to work with it. And now we're in a different era. But no matter what people, whatever, no matter what corporations invent to get our money, we can figure out ways to use those methods to move our society forward. We just have to constantly be creative. So the model of act up is not something that I think we should follow. It's something to inspire us to try to imagine what is going to help us be effective. It doesn't matter whether you're perfect. Doesn't matter whether you have the right line, whether you're the purest, most woke person or whatever, it doesn't matter. What matters is can you accomplish the concrete goals of change? And I just want to tell people a little bit what act up did accomplish, just so they can understand how impressive it was. In the six years that I covered my book 1987 to 1993, act up forced the pharmaceutical industry to change the way they researched medications so that it actually met the needs of people with AIDS. Act up forced the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration to make experimental drugs available, even if they hadn't been approved. Act up forced the CDC to change the definition of AIDS so that women could qualify for benefits and experimental drugs. Act up made needle exchange legal in New York City. Act up confronted the Catholic Church when they tried to stop condom distribution in the public schools. And in December 1989, act up disrupted mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral and stopped the Catholic Church. Act up also removed HIV as a pre-existing condition for private health insurance. It made hundreds of thousands of people eligible. So act up changed the way that queer people and people with AIDS saw themselves and were seen by the world. Now these are very substantial real victories that have impacted millions of people and continue to this day to save people's lives. So how they did it should be of interest to us because we also want to be effective and we also want to make change. Sarah, Jason, there's a follow-up question to I think what you were talking about being pre-technology from Harry Cooper, which says do you think act up would ever be effective in today's society? That's not really the right question. I think the question is how do we develop direct action movements today that are going to be as effective as act up was in our current context? So like I said, I don't think it's worth imitating something from another era. I think that one of the things that's interesting to think about in that context is that act up had a conceptualization of disruption as politically useful. And so part of what made the Stop the Church action so controversial among members and then in the media afterward is that it was a deliberate provocation and a willingness for the group and for members of the group to do something that people were really not going to like. And I think that that's one of the things that we really have a lot of arguments about now, right? That we saw last summer that there was a time during which Black Lives Matter protests happening all over the country were really changing, at least at the level that they get reported by polls and things like that, especially white Americans' attitudes. And then it went the other way after the representation turned around. And so it's very interesting to think about an organization like Act Up that had such a willingness to push hard and to do unpopular things or to do things that people were going to disapprove of as part of the strategy. Well, let me just say that in the 1980s, gay people had a very different experience of life than we have now. You would not be Dean and I would not be here. Openly gay people could not advance in academia and it was a very oppressive environment. And just so people understand, in 1981, when AIDS was first identified, gay sex itself was illegal. The Supreme Court did not overturn sodomy laws until 2003. In New York City, you could be fired from a job for being gay. You had no protection. You could be kicked out of your apartment. You could be denied service in a restaurant. Familiar homophobia was the cultural norm. Families ejected their gay family members and pathologized them. And street violence against gay people, which was called gay bashing was like a form of entertainment. So gay people were a profoundly oppressed minority and certainly weren't represented in the media. When you are oppressed and you have a right to be heard, and when society needs to change to create some kind of equal access to opportunity and to protection, you have to find a playbook that's based on your social position. So if your position is right, is morally right, which is that in the case of AIDS, that you have the right to treatment. That you as a human being have the right to be cared for. And that is a morally right position. And if they don't want to listen to you, you have the right to disrupt, because they don't own the world and they're not the only ones with dreams. And that was very important and also liberating and truthful. But disruption for its own sake doesn't really get you anywhere. It needs to be part of a campaign. And interestingly, the way that active structured campaigns was very similar to the way that Martin Luther King describes in his 1964 article, Letter from Birmingham Jail, which is his famous work about direct action. And they kind of, we use the same method, which was, you see a problem, you design the solution. You become the expert on the issue. Don't be infantilized and ask the powers that be to fix it for you because they don't know how and they're not going to. You design the reasonable, winnable and doable solution. It presented that to the powers that be. When they say no, then you do nonviolent theatrical civil disobedience in a manner that communicates through the media to the public how reasonable your solution is. And that's where the disruption comes. But you don't do disruption unless you actually have a demand and a solution to present. I'm hesitating now because there's two different questions that I had anticipated that both would nicely follow on from this. Reading the book, I was reminded again of the fact that ACT UP doing this activism starting in 1987 is starting so far from power. The objectives that it had laid out for itself, maybe they developed more organically in the process, but you've got a coalition of stigmatized people in all different ways. People who are under provided for and alienated from government and from public accommodations in all kinds of different ways. And then also just despised. So there's something really interesting in thinking about what the feeling of doing that kind of work is when you really do have nothing to lose. I mean, that would perhaps be a recapitulation of a point you just made, which is, what are you going to do? Make them hate gay people? Like so, right? Well, people are dying and AIDS death is a terrible death. Just to explain to the students, AIDS is an umbrella term like cancer. It's different in each person. And what it means is that your immune system doesn't work. So when your immune system starts breaking down, people would come up with these symptoms that were called opportunistic infections that were very severe like dementia, blindness, they couldn't process nutrition. This would be like 20, 23 year olds, you know, your friends, you'd watch them go blind. So the feeling of desperation was very, very high. And it didn't matter if you got arrested or fired or your career was going to be ruined because people were dying who you loved and nobody cared. And the only way to make them care was to show that you had power. Um, let me go then to the other question that was on my mind. And I fear that this will be the kind of question that you're asked a lot as you, you know, as you visit different groups and talk about this book. But, you know, at the very beginning, you talked about being weird amateurs, right? Like I said, you described young journalists working in gay and lesbian media in the early days. And so one of the stories of act up is weird amateurs becoming experts. And it's one of the really compelling things about the act up story is there's a kind of citizen science thing that's happening. Just as you described on the recommendation of Martin Luther King, people mastering the scientific literature, people intervening in how scientists design clinical trials and drug testing, and then pushing back on the, you know, the CDC, the FDA, the presidential administrations that existed at the time. It's an incredibly heroic and impressive story. And I think when we read about especially, you know, in the parts of the book that are focused on what was called the treatment and data committees operating within act up. And there was a series of them. At the same time, it's we're living in a moment where it's very scary, right? The, you know, other examples that we can point to people deciding not to trust the government, not to trust the scientists, not, you know, to go off and kind of think about their own treatments and stuff like that. And, you know, it's a, it's an awkward thing to try to, you know, you know, to do that thing we do, right? When we're thinking about like how the lessons of this, of this history apply to the world that we're living in now that, you know, the horse dewormer story is one in which you've got people who've decided that, you know, they're being failed by a government that's being dishonest with them or something like that. So with all of that in mind, you know, let's talk about that fact of desperate, scared, often impoverished, marginalized and despised people taking it upon themselves to become experts in such a ways to actually be able to interface with government experts, including the now extremely famous Anthony Fauci. You know, that's a, that's a really interesting story. And I wonder if you could sort of tell us more about how that evolved in, you know, inside the organization. Well, Anthony Fauci was in power back then. I mean, this man has, he must be a very good politician because he has stayed in power no matter what all these years, but active was a coalition of different constituencies. And those constituencies had different access to power. Some of them were very elite and had an enormous amount of power. And some of them were very marginal and had very little access. And the different constituencies came up with different strategies based on where they were positioned. So the different constituencies had different relationships to Anthony Fauci. The most, most elite, there was, you know, active was primarily a gay white male organization, but it was mostly regular guys, you know, people from working class or middle class backgrounds, but there was a small group of people who came from the ruling class and were very elite and had gone to the most elite schools and were quite wealthy and had been stockbrokers and all that kind of thing. And those people got along great with Anthony Fauci. And, you know, back in the 80s, you have to remember that the whole government was pretty much white and male, you know, there was no AOC or anyone like that. And the media was white and male. There was no Rachel Maddow. And the private sector was white and male. I mean, it was a white man's game, even as a white lesbian, there was no one who looked like me in power back then. There's no Tammy Baldwin or anyone like that. So the guys who were the most elite really got along best with the white men in power. And they had a very good relationship with Fauci. Now, the women, so the constituency and ACT UP that represented women with HIV, women with HIV tended to be much poorer. And they tended to be women of color or poor white women. And they were diagnosed when they were much sicker than when gay men were at the level of disease that gay men were diagnosed. And their problem was that they had symptoms that were different than the men's symptoms. And the diagnostic requirement to have officially have AIDS was based on the men's symptoms. So women could die and never get an AIDS diagnosis, which meant they could never qualify for benefits. They could never get experimental drugs. So the people working on that issue were dealing with poor people and people who in some cases were incarcerated. And it took them two years to be able to get a meeting with Fauci. Fauci would not give women a meeting. And when they finally met with him, he was arrogant and he didn't care. And the men in ACT UP didn't help the women get the meeting either. Then you look at the really outside group, which was drug users, active and former IV drug users in ACT UP who very much won a needle exchange program in New York City. And they were the messiest contingent of all. I mean, two people OD'd and died while they were in ACT UP. One guy stole $10,000 from the organization. I mean, it was chaotic. But when they went to Fauci and said, how come drug users are not being allowed into experimental drug trials, he said, well, they're not compliant. They're not reliable. And people are like, wait a minute, you can't just say that a whole class of people have to die of AIDS because you think they're not reliable. So really ACT UP's relationship with Fauci depended on who you were. And that was true for a lot of things. Fauci now goes on the Rachel Maddo show and accepts the applause for having been a major AIDS researcher and having played such a role. Rachel Maddo should know better because she was in ACT UP herself. But somehow she has forgotten her own history there. Yeah. Well, there's a detail that has to do with ACT UP interfacing with science and with public health that I think is so fascinating from the book where it's in a section where you're talking about the enthusiasm of ACT UP, which did not endorse candidates either locally or nationally, but was enthusiastic about the David Dinkins mayorship in New York City replacing Mayor Cotch who'd been insufficient in lots of ways when it comes to the response to AIDS. And then it all comes to a screeching halt because it turns out that Dinkins is now going to appoint a health commissioner from Indiana whose crime, according to ACT UP, is that he was in favor of mandatory contact tracing, mandatory name reporting, and the quarantining of people with AIDS in Indiana. And I just quoted there from the book. So lots of our students who've joined us today know that here at Roger Williams University, we have very thoroughgoing contact tracing. It's been excellent for us. It's done a lot of work for us. We've got a computer system with everybody's name in it. We've got a quarantine procedure, et cetera. That now seems like standard and a good thing. But a few years ago, I had a student in one of my gender studies classes who was a public health major and was working her job at the time as she worked at the Department of Health here in Rhode Island on the contact tracing team for sexually transmitted infections. And it really kind of blew her mind when I told her, when I was your age, no one in their right mind would get an HIV test that their name was going to be attached to. And I still think about it when I get any kind of testing even through my doctor. It still crosses my mind that my sero-status is a vulnerability relative to the state. The conditions are completely the opposite of what they are now. Because if you test positive for COVID, no one's going to get you fired from your job or kicked out of your apartment. Or possibly arrested for something or exposed to your family who's going to reject you. That's not what's going to happen. But at the time, there were no treatments for AIDS. And many people didn't want to get tested because what if they found out they were HIV positive and there was nothing they could do? They would be depressed and they'd be waiting to get sick. So they decided not to test. And then there were these people going around saying, oh, those homosexuals, we should be putting them all in concentration camps. There was literally a politician who wanted gay people to be tattooed if they were HIV positive. So being exposed as HIV positive meant that you were vulnerable to punishment because based on stigma and not based on public health or common sense. So even though the two words are the same, the social phenomenas are completely different. Indeed. And I just think it's another interesting example of how ACT UP was able to under pressure and to rest sort of read the signs of structural, administrative systems, buildings and to very quickly calculate the impacts for the people involved. And I think reading the book, that was one of the things that really came through loud and clear to me is the incredible kind of creative and intellectual force of this group of people who are from this position of vulnerability and marginalization are able to, I don't know what's verb to pick, that they're just able to figure out what the impacts are going to be and how to intervene, even in things that might just seem like the most normal, make a list of everybody who tests positive or something like that. Like they're so conscious of the risks. And yeah. Well, I also, I mean, I want to say that I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration and I may have conveyed that, unfortunately, but actually in ACT UP there was not a consensus on most things. So people would say, this drug could give you this dangerous side effect. This drug might not work, whatever, but no one was saying we support you taking this and we tell you not to take that. People were encouraged to get very, very informed and make their own decisions. This was life and death decisions. And the same thing was true with social stigma. But as queer people, we had, we were queer people who were born in the 40s, 50s and 60s. We had all experienced profound oppression already from our families and from the state and from the media. So that was the status quo. Now, I see Harry's question here, which actually relates to your point, Jason, do you feel that the AIDS epidemic and the outrage of the community progressed gay rights a lot faster than if the epidemic never happened? That is a very interesting question because actually we don't have gay rights in the United States. We have the right to marriage. Right. We don't have a federal gay rights bill. So actually compared to some other countries, we still don't have gay rights. So actually what we want was the right to be like straight people. The parts of us that are similar to straight people, we want certain things, although in some states they still don't allow adoption and foster care and all of these issues are still controversial. But the ways that we're different from straight people, we have not won those rights. And it could be because the trauma and the cataclysm of AIDS was followed by a time of enormous assimilation. And there's a concept of collective unconscious. People weren't thinking, oh my God, we were dying and they didn't care. So I better start acting like them so that if something happens, they will care. But there's an unconscious feeling. And it's very similar to post-holocaust Jews who you see in the 1950s are going through a thing where people are getting nose jobs and changing their names and all of that trying to be as indifferent as possible. And so that I think has brought us to where we are. But we actually still don't have gay rights. Yeah, one of the stories that gets told by certain people, I think who have a lot invested in that assimilationist project that focuses to almost the exclusion of everything else on marriage rights for same-sex couples. One of the stories that gets told is that the lessons of the AIDS crisis taught gay people what we were missing, which was stability, access to health insurance and stuff like that. Now, of course, I look at this with a pretty skeptical eye. It's like gay marriage gave us the right to share our expensive bad healthcare with each other, two by two, and it kind of ends there in lots of ways. Well, I was going to jump on that point. If you analyze the campaigns for gay marriage, you can see how they really separated AIDS and gay and made AIDS this other thing, because none of the poster boys for gay marriage ever said I'm HIV positive. And there was an implication that gay marriage meant monogamy, which it doesn't mean to a lot of gay people, even though three people think that it does. And there was this implication that gay male sexual culture or non-monogamous sexual culture was the problem. And if gay people would just get married, they would be monogamous. And that is why a lot of straight people supported gay marriage, even though it doesn't really mean that for a lot of people. Well, let me loop back to this question around members of ACT pushing back really hard on this health commissioner that was going to bring a commitment to contact tracing, etc. One of the things that's so fascinating about the ACT UP story is how much ACT UP was a sex culture and how serious an investment a lot of the members of that community had in making sure that gay people's right to have gay sex was something that was kind of celebrated and actualized. I mean, I'm not going to fall into the trap of saying my favorite parts of the book because there are so many, but the part about the proliferation of gay and lesbian party nights that come out of ACT UP precisely because we're doing a lot of really hard activism and our friends are dying. We need to dance and hook up with each other if we're going to make it through this. And I think that's in a different way and a really moving response to think about, right, is that a stigmatized people who are being described in the media unrelentingly as getting what was coming to them, right? They were having like bad dirty sex and way too much of it. And now here's the inevitable consequence. And for them to be within the organization, this kind of defiant stance that says, and this comes through in the examples that you give from the Grand Fury Arts Collective, right? Where there's this notion of the sexuality being really out front and unapologetic as a way of saying, living with AIDS, meaning HIV positive and people with AIDS, but also living in a community in which there is AIDS does not back us into a corner where sex becomes not available to us and sex becomes, you know, a luxury that the community can't afford. Right. Because in the, you know, in the, this is before PrEP did not exist at that time and safe sex had just been invented and safe sex meant using condoms. But a lot of people didn't know their status. So many of the people that I interviewed said that in the early, excuse me, the early years of ACT UP, everybody used condoms. And there was an assumption that we all had AIDS that did break down after a few years. And then there was prejudice against people who were HIV positive, you know, and there still is a lot of magical thinking about that. Like people think they know that someone's positive and then they don't want to have sex with them. The truth is, if you're positive and you're on the standard of care medication, your virus becomes so suppressed that you couldn't infect somebody biologically, even if you wanted to, you're not infectious. So actually the safest person to have sex with is someone who's positive, but is on medication. Well, that stigma has come all the way around. We're probably getting close to, you know, needing to wrap up, but I want to ask you about something that I didn't plan to ask you about, but it's sort of come up in different comments that you've made. And I think it has to do with, you know, the hard work of coalition building under current conditions. And some of the preoccupations that I think we've come to have around, you mentioned, you know, perfection, purity, you know, standards, etc. One of your books is conflict is not abuse. This is something that you've thought a lot about. But you're quite forthright in the beginning of Let the Record Show about how little it mattered on the floor of ACT UP, which met every Monday night in a big group meeting. How little it mattered that everybody, you know, choose the right word every single time, you know, avoid mistakes, avoid hurting feelings, etc., etc. And so, yeah, that's a kind of, that's a thing that a lot of people, you know, kind of get nervous about these days is those precise questions. And so let's, let's talk about it. I mean, what is, you know? Well, so people were dying and they needed changes and they needed us to be effective to get those changes. Like they needed a particular drug or they needed a certain kind of insurance. So if I said this word or that word, or you said something that I didn't like, or I said something that somebody thought was sexist or whatever, that really didn't matter. Because we had to accomplish a goal. And so what's very interesting is if you look at the women and people of color in ACT UP, who were significantly influential in the movement but numerically small, they never stopped the action to try to demand consciousness raising on racism or sexism or to call somebody out. Instead, they were very much smarter than that. They set hard goals for their constituencies and they harnessed the ample resources of the organization. So for example, when women with AIDS need in money to travel to testify at hearings and then stay in a hotel, they just went to fundraising committee and got the money. And then they went and did their campaign. The elites in ACT UP were involved in fundraising and they raised money. But the poor people in ACT UP didn't have to raise the money for their own campaigns. So when the Latino caucus saw that people with AIDS in Puerto Rico really needed support, they got money from fundraising and they flew to Puerto Rico and they started ACT UP Puerto Rico. They didn't stay back in New York saying, you didn't say the right word. And so we have to stop everything until you say it. Because it doesn't work. You could spend your whole life trying to change one person and never change them. It's better to keep your eye on the prize and figure out how to get what you need effectively for your constituency. It's like Betsy might have a question she wanted to ask. I'm sorry it was an accident. Oh, she did not have a question. We do have time for a few more though. If anybody's interested, I think we have about nine minutes or so. Great. We've got our eyes on the chat. If people have their questions, we're happy to address them as they come in. Speaking of eyes on prizes though, another thing that's sort of threaded through the book, especially when it comes to the women activists, is the extent to which this was true in general and I think true for you personally, that work in the reproductive rights movement was really foundational for what ACT UP and its members then went on to know how to do. And it seems like within ACT UP, a lot of the teaching around how do you be an activist came from people who had been working on abortion rights. That's very plausibly the next prize that people are going to have to have their eye on as it looks like Roe vs. Wade is probably toast. And so if we could think about that same prompt that you give at the beginning of the book about imagining all of us as potentially activists with real political impact within our reach, if we do it, if we go toward these goals, do you have thoughts right now about what are reproducing right now? So abortion was the first movement that I was involved in. And when I was in high school, abortion became legal in New York City in 1971 and then nationally in 1973. But I'm still from that generation where a girl would get pregnant and then drop out of school. And then in 79, it was the Hyde Amendment where only seven states continued to offer supplementary funds for people who needed abortion. So since 79, poor people have not really been able to get abortions in the United States. And so women have done very, very poorly. Gay people have done much better. If you look at Supreme Court rulings, gay people have done better in the courts. Women have done terribly. And what's going on in Texas and Mississippi coming up, it's just salt in the wound of how the way it's been since the Hyde Amendment in 79. So there was, in the first round of illegal when abortion was illegal in this country, people resisted it. Women learned how to do illegal abortion. Women and doctors, because many women were not, many doctors were not women at that time, became service providers in an underground way. And people could get abortion from sympathetic practitioners, although they risked the law. And we, I guess, are going to have to return to that. There are already people organizing ways for women from Texas to go to other states to get abortion. And that's going to have to be paid for. But a lot of this is about the crumbling of our, of our government and the crumbling of our system. And that already established constitutional rights are being denied to women. So yes, it's a state of emergency and it's a life and death experience. But one of the things that I think defeated the abortion rights movement in the past is that men never got involved in it, even straight men. And you know, when you join a movement and you were talking about the sexuality and the fun and act up joining a movement has to make your life better. You can't just be in a movement because you feel guilty or something like that. And the abortion rights movement, although the women's movement for lesbians was like a sexual buffet, but for truly straight women, it was in some ways a lonely place because movements need to be places where you can also have sex and love. And as straight men had been in that movement, it could have, I think, been more revitalized and had a longer life. So I really hope that this time around, all men will be involved in the abortion rights movement. Yeah. And I appreciate so much that the detail that you immediately went to around, you know, how much abortion access is a money question, right, that beyond the law, that the resources are super crucial. My colleague, Annika Hagley has a question in the chat about whether or not social media, everyone recording everyone and the consequences of thoughtless language being so immediate and sometimes life changing. Does that scare people who would otherwise engage in activism? And she acknowledges that, you know, that's something that young people, students tend to say more and more. I know that's true for me as well. I know a lot of young people who say I'm very reluctant to put myself into a space where I might, you know, do something that has big social consequences for me. So is there any social consequences for you? Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. And what we have to learn is that the only thing you know when somebody's accused of something is that they've been accused of something. Unless you actually talk to them and ask them what they feel about what's occurred and why they think it's happened, you really don't understand what happened. And you could be accused of something terrible sitting at home. So you might as well be in a community and trying and being a person who's doing something that you can feel proud of. But, you know, if you can't live your whole life in fear of other people's false accusations, because there are so many of them. In some ways, I think, you know, several years ago, we had a difficult time here at Roger Williams where, you know, students were complaining about abusive language and sexist language that was appearing on this app called Yik Yak. That's like a location based thing that allows people anonymously to say hideous things. And our then president, who was a pretty buttoned up, you know, kind of guy, gave a speech with a bullhorn trying to calm people down. And I remember, you know, his moment of real emotion was, and when it comes to Yik Yak, get off of it. Don't go there anymore. It's horrible. It sounds horrible. What are you doing? Well, that's one of the things about it, you know, like on Facebook, if somebody writes something you don't like, I mean, I'm showing you how old I am because I'm still on Facebook and I know no one under 40 is on Facebook. But if you just wait, it scrolls away and then you forget about it, you know, and it's that delay is very hard. But delay gives you a lot more control. But one of the things that also I think is really interesting about, you know, you mentioned that it's upward of 140 chapters of ACT UP when all is said and done, right, all over the country and the world. Your story is the story of ACT UP New York, primarily, although we also see the formation of ACT UP Puerto Rico, etc. It's an awfully good example of how much it matters, whether there's a local context in which for our political work to happen in, right, that coming together in the big sweaty room, having the date, you know, cruising, I mean, all the ACT UP stories are about cruising because everybody says there were a lot of really cute people there. And, you know, how much it really matters. And I guess maybe that would be one lesson we could sort of glean from this is that, you know, the internet conversations don't necessarily do very much for us and can take us places we might not want to go. But, you know, the room, the room in its literal, you know, materiality and the presence of other people unmediated might really be where we need to go if we want to get work done. Yes. So it looks like it's 759. I think there's one question that came in the Q&A that might, we could end with that. It says, how do we make people stop and listen in a world where everyone is inundated with information and pleas for action and opinions? You can't make people stop and listen, but you can stop and listen. That's a good answer. Good answer. I'm going to do that personal privilege thing and say, as I mentioned, I was, you know, I was a young person during the years that are covered in your book. I was in high school from 89 to 93. I was in college from 93 to 97. There's a part of me that I think will always find it hard to believe that I will never have AIDS. So impactful was the crisis on my consciousness and on my development as a young gay man. That terror, you know, is in me, that legacy, that history is something that I've always carried around. And so in addition to thanking you for being with us tonight and thanking you for writing this incredible monumental book, I want to thank you for being an AIDS activist. Thank you. I'm very proud of it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah. It was truly inspiring to have you here and to speak with us tonight. Thanks, everyone. All right, everyone. Well, thank you all for coming and please come to our future events. Some might even be in person. It'll be great. Thank you. Okay. Good night. Thanks. Good night.