 So, thank you all for being here this evening. We are very, very excited to welcome Sarah Schulman and Matilda Brinstein-Sickermore to the San Francisco Public Library's virtual stage. I'm Kevin, I'm a librarian from the LGBTQIA Center at the Main Library, and I'm going to start us off with some library updates and introduce our guests. And we do want to begin with a land acknowledgement. Welcome to the unceded land of the Ohlone tribal people. We acknowledge the many Rom Yutush Ohlone tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside. SFPL is committed to uplifting the name of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live together. SFPL encourages you to learn more about first-person culture and land rights, and we are committed to hosting events and providing educational resources on these topics. Summer Stride has already begun. Summer Stride is the library's annual learning, reading, and exploration program for all ages. Reading for just 20 hours over the summer gets you one of our much sought-after tote bags that you can see here. Go to our website or check the chat box for details on Summer Stride. And there are a couple of library events happening next week that we'd like to highlight. On June 21st, Kiese Lehmann and Tango Eisen Martin, the current poet laureate of San Francisco, will join Marlon Peterson in conversation to discuss Peterson's new book Bird Uncaged. And on June 22nd, Tom Amiano will be here to discuss his recent memoir, Kiss My Gay Ass, My Trip Down the Yellow Book Road, Through Activism, Stand Up, and Politics. And we'd like to thank Dogard Books Castro for cosponsoring tonight's event. Support your local queer independent bookstore. We will post a link in the chat where you can purchase Let the Records Show directly from Dogard Books. And now on to tonight's program. We are pleased to welcome Sarah Schulman and Matilda Bernstein-Sickermore as they discuss Schulman's Let the Records Show, a political history of Act Up New York 1987 to 1993. Based on more than 200 interviews with Act Up members, Let the Records Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of Act Up and American AIDS activism. Alexander Chi called it a masterpiece of historical research and intellectual analysis that creates many windows into both a banished world and the one that emerged from it, the one we live in now. Sarah Schulman is the author of more than 20 works of fiction, including The Cosmopolitan's, Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry. Nonfiction, including stage struck, conflict is not abuse, and the gentrification of the mind, as well as theater, including Carson McCullers, manic flight reaction, and more. And the producer and screenwriter of several feature films, including The Owls, Mommy is Coming, and United in Anger. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a distinguished professor of humanities at College of Staten Island, a fellow at The New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the McDowell Colony Yaddo and The New York Foundation for the Arts, and she was presented in 2018 with publishing triangles Bill Whitehead Award. She is also co-founder of The Mix, New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. And just to give a quick plug for the library, the San Francisco Public Library's LGBTQIA Center holds a collection of 67 of these unedited interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project on videocassette. The collection is available to view at the San Francisco History Center on the sixth floor of the main library. This evening, Sarah Shulman is in conversation with Matilda Bernstein-Sickermore. Matilda is the author of two non-fiction titles and three novels and editor of five non-fiction anthologies. Her new book, The Freezer Door, is a New York Times editor's choice, one of Oprah Magazine's best LGBTQ books of 2020, and a finalist for the 2021 Penn Jean Stein Book Award, as well as a Lambda Literary Award. Her previous title, Sketch to See, was one of NPR's best books of 2018. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award and her sixth anthology between certain depth and a possible future. Queer writing on growing up with the AIDS crisis will be out in October. Thank you, and I am now ready to turn it over to Sarah Shulman. Thank you, everybody. I wish I was in San Francisco, but this is second best. So thank you so much for having me, and I'm so happy to be doing this with Matilda. I don't know, Matilda and I talk on the phone all the time, so it'll be fun for us to bring it into the public. So I wanted to introduce, act up a little bit and introduce the book a little bit before Matilda and I start to talk, especially for people who didn't live through it and therefore have not had access to the information. So start in 1979. At that time, there was absolutely no authentic coverage of queer people in the mainstream media, and so we had our own sort of underground press, and there were newspapers like Gay Community News from Boston, which was the lesbian and gay left-wing newspaper, the New York native that was a gay male newspaper in New York, women news that was a gay and straight feminist newspaper in New York, and all of these papers, every city had them. They were staffed mostly by volunteer journalists, and I was one. I was a young girl reporter on the go, age 21, 1979, running around, you know, trying to figure out what are the stories and what's happening in our communities and what do our communities need to know. And in the early 80s, I was covering City Hall for the New York native. The issue at that time was that there was no gay rights bill in New York, and what that meant was that you could be fired from any job, you could be kicked out of your apartment, and you could be denied public accommodation. You could be kicked out of a restaurant and be kicked out of a hotel. So this was very important to our community to get a gay rights bill. We had the problem of our mayor was Ed Koch, who was in the closet, and so I was going to City Hall to cover this. And July 3, 1981 is the famous New York Times article, 41 cases of rare cancer found among homosexuals in San Francisco. Now it's inaccurate to say that that's the beginning of AIDS. It's actually the beginning of science observing the pattern that came to be called AIDS. We think that AIDS existed for 100 years. It probably was in the US in the 40s and certainly was in New York in the 1960s and 70s, but it didn't get noticed until 1981. And just to bring you back to that time, you know, white gay man is a privileged category today, but in the early 80s that was not the case. So not only did all gay people not have legal rights, but gay sex itself was illegal in many places, and sodomy laws were national. And in fact, federal sodomy laws were not overturned by the Supreme Court in 2003. Also, a familial homophobia was the status quo, and it was virulent. And it was a real force of history. It made a difference in people's lives and pushed people out of their countries, out of their hometowns and had a lot of consequences for the AIDS crisis. And street violence, if you looked gay, you could be subjected to gay bashing, which was a form of entertainment. Straight people would come into gay neighborhoods and beat people up. And of course, there was no protection. So it was a time of profound oppression for all group people. So when the newspaper said rare cancer in homosexuals, you have to remember that this was a time when people were trying to find out the cause of homosexuality in a way that upheld the stigma. You know, nobody wants to find out why people like sports, right? But if something is bothering you, then you want to find out what causes it. And a lot of the theories at that time were that homosexuality was one thing, and it was caused by biology. There was a theory that it was caused by your hypothalamus. I mean, there's all kinds of weird theories, but homosexuality was considered biological. And so when there was a disease that affected homosexuals, it was really kind of seen as a metaphor for the disease of homosexuality, which was considered biological. And because of all this pathologization, that's why the first name for this disease was grid, gay-related immune deficiency. So in the first five years after the AIDS crisis was observed, 40,000 people died in this country, and the government did nothing. You know, to date now, we think 600,000 people have died of AIDS in the United States. But it was like a sudden wave of death that hit certain communities very hard and did not touch other communities. As Vito Rousseau said, it was like there's a war, but no one knows about it but you. And what pharmaceutical companies were doing was that they were recycling failed cancer drugs that they own the patents for, trying to find, you know, to reach this new potential market. So if they could find a drug that you could take that would make your AIDS go away, they could make a fortune. But AIDS didn't work that way. So just to explain what AIDS is, it's an umbrella term. It's kind of like cancer in that it's not one thing. It's different in each person. And what it means is that your immune system ceases to work. So you develop opportunistic infections, like people got dementia or they went blind or they were unable to process nutrition, things like that. And so people with AIDS needed treatments to be developed that would address the opportunistic infections. But that would have to be a smaller market share. So Pharma was after, you know, the big cure drug. So research was going nowhere. The way the gay community responded in the first five years was to try to create social services that were not available to queer people and people with AIDS. And this is where familial homophobia comes in, because a lot of queer people and especially if they had AIDS were abandoned by their families. And they didn't have any kind of family structure. They often were not living in the places where they had grown up. So you see organizations like Gay Men's Health Crisis started a buddy system where volunteers would be assigned to people with AIDS to come and talk to them, to hang out with them, to help them try to keep their apartments together. There was an organization called PAWS that would walk your dog for you. There was God's Love We Deliver, the founder, Ganges Stone, just passed away a few weeks ago, and they would bring free home cooked meals to homebound people with AIDS. So it was sort of like trying to fill in the gap of social services. But by the end of 86 and the beginning of 87, there was a beginning of a political response. And the first thing was the Supreme Court had the Bowers v. Hardwick decision, which upheld the sodomy law and maintain that gay sex was going to be illegal. And this was a blow to the community that people had been in the midst of a mass death experience now for five years, and that this was the last thing they needed. And there was an enormous amount of anger. In New York, there were demonstrations, angry demonstrations in the streets without permits. So that was a real turning point. And right before ACT UP was founded in March of 1987, there were two small collectives that emerged. One was an art collective called the Silence Equals Death Collective, and they created the famous logo of the upside down pink triangle with the word silence equals death against a black background. And then we pasted it all over New York. And the second group was a zap action group called the lavender hill mob. So zap action was a strategy that came out of the gay liberation movement. And in order to do a zap, you have to be pretty alienated from power, because it's what a zap means you're like bursting in and hooking up everything. And they wore concentration camp uniforms and burst into a meeting of the CDC. So things were changing and the community was getting more angry and more ready for political response. And then in March, the writer Larry Kramer gave a talk at the gay and lesbian center on 13th street in an old crumbling school. And he said half of you will be dead in two years. And the audience members decided that they wanted to meet again and try to form an organization. So let me just say clearly from the beginning, Larry Kramer was not the founder of act up, nor was he the leader. But his talk was the the the event that created the opportunity for him and other people to start act up. Now in the first six years, the years that I cover in my book, 1987 to 1993, act up won amazing victories. And let me just tell you some of them. So act up participated in enforcing science to restructure how they approach researching medications. Act up forced the food and drug administration to make experimental drugs available to people who needed them, even if they had not gone through the approval process. Act up ran a four year campaign that forced the CDC to change its definition of aids so that women could qualify for benefits and experimental drug trials. And in some ways, this is act up's most far reaching victory because today, every woman in the world who takes some medication for HIV is taking something that was tested on women because women were allowed into experimental drug trials. Act up made needle exchange legal in New York City. Act up changed insurance rules so that people with HIV were no longer unable to qualify for private insurance. Act up challenged a Catholic church when they tried to stop condom distribution in the public schools and succeeded. Act up started housing works, the organization for homeless people with AIDS and many other things. And also act up changed the way that queer people and people with AIDS saw ourselves and how we were represented in mainstream media. So there were very significant victories. So now in 1992, 12 people who were key to act up left and started their own organization treatment action group. Both act up and treatment action groups still exist. And although hundreds of people stayed in act up, the split was devastating emotionally and the organization started to dissipate. In 1993, there were no good treatments. Many, many people died. That was the year that act up started doing political funerals. It was a very depressing. And then in 1996 was the beginning of the protease inhibitors being available. So that was the start of the good drugs. Getting towards a place where if a person became HIV positive, if they had access to the drugs, they could live a normal lifespan. 1999 is the internet revolution. And this left act up in the dust because none of our material was digitized. So if you had searched act up at a certain point in 99 or 2000, you wouldn't have found very much. And act up really started to disappear. In 2001, I was driving and I was listening to the radio and they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of AIDS. It was not the 20th anniversary of AIDS. It was the 20th anniversary of science recognizing AIDS, but whatever. And the guy on the radio said, at first America had trouble with people with AIDS, but then they came around. And I almost crashed the car. I was like, oh, no. It's going to go down like this. They're going to just claim American benevolence and the natural progress of the American way and all this crap. What actually really happened is that thousands of people fought until the day they died to force this country to change against its will. So I pulled the car over. I called Jim Hubbard who I had been collaborating with on the queer experimental film festival mix. And we decided that we had to do something about it. And I think that this sense of responsibility was because we felt a lot of us felt responsible to our dead friends. It was like a personal thing. And so we consulted with one of the great leaders of our movement, Irvashi Bad, who at that point was at the Ford Foundation, and she gave us, she got us funding and we started the Act Up Oral History Project, which you can go to at actuporalhistory.org. In the next 18 years, we conducted 188 interviews with surviving members of Act Up New York. And there was no criteria. If you felt that you were a member of Act Up New York, you could be interviewed. And we put the full transcripts up on the website and you could watch them for free. And we had 14 million hits on this site. And our thought was that some academic somewhere or whatever would come along and analyze all the transcripts and see all the treasures that we knew were in there. But that wasn't what we were going to do. We were creating raw data. And then in 2012, Jim made a feature film United in Anger, a History of Act Up, which he and I co-produced. And you can see that for free on YouTube and Canopy. And United in Anger used archival footage Jim had preserved almost 2,000 hours of archival footage that is available open access at the New York Public Library. And we literally took this film all over the world. We took it to Russia right after the anti-gay laws were passed. We took it to Brazil, to India. We showed it in Palestine and Lebanon. And we met people with AIDS all over the world. But something started to occur at this point, which was these false histories that had always been lingering and started to get solidified. So everywhere you looked, it was Larry Kramer, the founder of Act Up. Larry Kramer, the leader of Act Up. And then work started to come out that picked on a handful of treatment activists who were very important people in the movement and brilliant leaders and incredible activists, but they were not the only ones. And the story started to get whitened and narrowed to a handful of individuals and it started to fit this American trope of John Wayne, the white male heroic individual, not the white male, the white male heroic individual who's going to rescue us. And of course, this is a myth and this person doesn't exist. But even more important than the fact that this was not true was how dangerous this was because young activists did not have access to the actual activist history of Act Up. You know, what the strategies were and what the tactics were because nothing had been cohere, but they were being told that a handful of people created a paradigm shift. And let me tell you that that is impossible. It cannot occur because change in this country is made by coalition and by communities and by collectivity. And it was just what part of that American myth. So at this point, Jim and I felt that it was an emergency and I was going to have somebody was going to have to write this book using all the materials. And we tried to find people to do it and nobody wanted to do it. And so we agreed finally that I would do it even though I didn't want to. So I sat down for three years and I reread the transcripts. And the first thing I realized when I started writing the book is that there was no way that it could be chronological because if it was chronological, it wouldn't be accurate because things in Act Up happened at the same time. And this was like an incredible revelation to us because Jim and I, like everyone else in Act Up, we thought that what we and our friends did was Act Up. I mean everyone we interviewed thought that what they and their friends did was Act Up. Nobody had an organizational overview. But when we started to create new areas of understanding and see actually how the organization was structured because there was no document of structure. There was no timeline. Nobody had, Act Up had never theorized itself. It was so focused on action. And we realized that one of the strengths of Act Up was the simultaneity of response that it had a radical democracy in its structure, which was that it was not a consensus-based movement. And so people did not all have to agree on everything. So if a group of people wanted to do needle exchange and other people thought needle exchange was terrible, they would fight about it. I mean, it was a pre-dentrification New York culture. There was a lot of expression. But ultimately, you wouldn't try to stop somebody from doing something. If you didn't like it, you just wouldn't do it. And said you'd go off with like-minded people and create your own project. And so as a result, there was so much going on at the same time in so many different levels, so many different social strata. And that this is really what created the paradigm shift. So in writing the book, I had to create a kind of horizontal structure to tell the story accurately. Now, fortunately, I'm a novelist. I've written a lot of different kinds of novels with a lot of different kinds of structures. Many of them were formally inventive. And also, I had had this long history being exposed to experimental film. So I had a lot of knowledge and a lot of skill about how to use form. And I've always believed that the content should dictate the form. And that different kinds of content needs different forms to illuminate it. And a traditional narrative structure sometimes cannot tell the truth. And it's interesting because when Jim and I went to try to get funding for the film, we went to these people who fund documentary films. And they said a documentary film has to have five characters on a journey. And Jim was like, no, we can't do that because that's not the story of Act Up. It's right back up to the story of the group. And so we never got any film money. The money that we got came from AIDS and social justice funds and also 400 individuals in the community who donated to our film. So they try to force a kind of structure on you that changes the content and gives you a false content. So anyway, that's how I got here. And the book came out May 18. And here we are. So Matilda, are you still there? I know I went on for a long time. Of course, I'm here, Sarah. And thank you for that wonderful introduction that really gives us a lot of context. And yeah, one of the things I was thinking about as I went back to the book before our conversation was how exciting it was to read. And I think part of that is that it feels so intimate because you are drawing from the personal stories of so many people who were active participants in Act Up. And so we get this sense of that culture of resistance. So like you're saying, it's not just individuals, and it's not even just individuals together. It's this whole culture that has been created. And I felt, I feel like that intimacy is present in the book itself. And then at the same time, of course, that intimacy is possible because of the trauma of mass death. That's why people are coming together to organize together. And so I wondered about that dichotomy and how it felt for you in writing the book. I don't think that that's what brought people together. I think there was a queer community that this is before gay marriage, right? So there was a queer community where the relationship was a community-based relationship. It wasn't privatized family units. And queer people were very alienated from dominant culture. They weren't welcome, not only in dominant culture. We weren't welcome in the left. And so this is like before the rainbow flag. This is when the queer aesthetic contribution was more advanced and creating new art ideas for the world and political ideas. So there already was a cohere connection. And then also there was a sexual connection. Because when AIDS came in, there was a lot of fear about sexuality. And there was a conflation. Even when safe sex was first invented by Dr. Sahnabend and Michael Callan and Richard Berkowitz, there was a moralistic conflation between promiscuity and safe sex. But actually, if you used condoms at the time, it didn't matter how many people you had sex with. But there was a whole fear about sex. And part of ACT UP's culture was bringing back this kind of pro-sex culture. A lot of people that I interviewed said that in the early years of ACT UP, everybody used condoms. And of course, a lot of people didn't know their status because there were no treatments. So for a lot of people, why would they get tested if there were no treatments? So I think there were a lot of things that were bonding people. Yeah. Well, I like that invocation of the culture of promiscuity because when I joined ACT UP when I was 19 in San Francisco in 92, which is the very end of the period that you're talking about in the book, that culture of, it felt in some ways, I felt the most liberated in my sexuality ever in my life. Which people think, of course, of that trauma, but also there was that liberation in resisting it and refusing to die without fighting for what we believed in. And so I think also in the book, you really do a great job of what I would call people's history in the sense that there are these 188 interviews that you're drawing from and then your own experience as well. And I wondered if in creating a book like that, what did you, were there things that you had to fight to include that the publisher didn't want to be in there? I don't think so. Oh, one thing, there was one thing, it's not that he didn't want it there. I have a great editor, Jackson Howard, and he's very young, you know, he's like half my age. So I interviewed this guy named Ainer Candelario, who was a member of ACT UP, and when he was 16, he was one of the very early members of gay youth, which was the first, one of the first young gay organizations, because don't forget that at that time, there was no concept of being a queer child. I mean, queer children knew that we were queer children, but society had not recognized that children are queer. And so to organize gay youth was very radical. And gay youth had relationship with Nambla, the North American Man Boy Love Association. And they would work together to try to change the age of consent loss. And he was telling me all about this, it's a fascinating interview. And my editor suggested that I could take it out, because it was so controversial. And I was like, no, no, no, this is very important, because you're getting this point of view. And then the copy editor also suggested taking it out. We are not taking it out. But that was the only thing. That's interesting. So the copy editor was even aware that it would be controversial, or was it a different issue? Because I feel like Nambla, again, when I moved to San Francisco in the early 90s, there was that huge controversy about Nambla and Pride. And I feel like now Nambla has been banished. I don't hear anyone talk about it. So it's interesting that people are still aware of that controversy. Although, of course, you face that controversy, just the idea of sex between a minor and an adult with your book, The Child, that you struggle for so many years to get published. And that's after already publishing a dozen books. So that's how much, I guess, people are afraid of that. Yeah, keep going. It's interesting that you bring this up. I mean, I think, and you also are right, fiction and nonfiction. And I think one of the things that we share, correct me if I'm wrong, is that I think we're committed to representing life the way people experience it, not the way we think they should experience it, not the way we wish they would, but actually how they do. And this is very threatening for some people. Yeah, I agree entirely. And also what you were saying about how the content should always dictate the form, rather than the other way around, which is what we're always told, especially as novelists, right? You create this form and then you fit everything into it, right? And the form has to follow this kind of redemptive path, which I think you're also resisting in this book, you know, because you're still talking at the end of the book about the continuing trauma of AIDS. So it's not just this triumphant arc. And of course, it couldn't be a triumphant arc because the book ends in 93 anyway. But I think I wonder if you want to talk about that continuing trauma. Well, let me just connect to the formal thing for a second, because one of the things that Jim Hubbard and I realized when we created the MIX Festival, which was the queer experimental film festival that lasted 33 years, until we finally got a board that we weren't on and COVID came and they killed it. But one of the things... So it's gone now. I didn't realize that MIX was gone. It currently has gone because the board does not answer our emails. But at the time, there was a traditional narrative arc to straight life, which was romance, marriage, motherhood, or for men, romance, army, military, marriage, fatherhood. But there was no queer marriage at the time. And that was not the normal wish. So for the queer person, the shape of the narrative arc of your life was completely unknown. And that's why we found that in the 80s, especially in the chaos of the AIDS crisis, formerly inventive films spoke to very broad audiences, queer audiences, because they more accurately represented emotionally what people were experiencing. You know, it was very exciting. So the book ends with this conclusion where I'm talking to Cesar Carasco from the Latino Caucus in ACT UP. And let me just back up to say that there was a really significant Latino participation in ACT UP. There were... In my book, I have three chapters on... I have one chapter on Latino Caucus starting ACT UP Puerto Rico. I have a chapter on Ray Navarro and his mother, Patricia, who was a working class Chicana from California, who was the only parent of a person with AIDS in ACT UP. And then I have the conclusion, this conversation with Cesar Carasco, who was from Chile. And he's now a psychiatric social worker. And he talks about the myth of resilience and how the first generation of gay men who survived AIDS, that there's this idea that if you lived, you survived. And that's actually not true, because so many people have had... So many people from ACT UP have had horrible meth problems, have seroconverted late in life, have had what Cesar says, you know, lives that don't make sense. Because their experience, the initial experience, so brutal. And because of the successes of ACT UP, no subsequent generation ever had to have that same level of brutality. And so there's this alienation there that's really profound. And that's where the book ends pretty much. Yeah. And I think that alienation, I think, has been transferred kind of intergenerationally, you know, for also like the generation I grew up in, which is we grew up with AIDS, suffusing our desires, and no way to imagine any future but certain death, right? So we didn't have a history of sexual liberation to draw from, and we didn't have any drugs that we could ever imagine keeping us alive. And so I think that trauma has been transferred intergenerationally. And so I think it's really important, actually, that you end the book on that level with those questions. And also by talking about the sort of intergenerational experience of AIDS in your own life. And I think, I guess I'm thinking about this quote from Zoë Leonard in your book, where she says, what AIDS revealed was not the problem of the virus, what AIDS revealed was the problems of our society. And I think it's almost chilling to me to read that now, especially when I went back to the book, and how much it connects to this current moment we're living in with the coronavirus pandemic. And I can even think of like a popular mutual aid slogan right now, which is the virus is capitalism, right? So there is this virus, but what's killing people is the lack of access to what will save our lives and or at least help us, you know, in that path. And I think in your book, you talk a lot about the conflicts in the group in Act Up, you know, between 1987 and 1993 over this very issue of access. And I think a few people, several people actually in the book, in some ways, talk about that as maybe the greatest failure of Act Up, that, yes, it made, it changed the path of, you know, drugs in this country and made drugs that actually saved people's lives instead of killing people faster, you know, like the early drugs. But who has access to those drugs still means, you know, like you point out in your introduction, like black gay men in the South have, you know, a higher rate of HIV infection than any country in the world and also speaking more globally. And I think we're seeing the same thing, of course, it's totally different pandemic, but the same thing in terms of access with COVID-19 and, you know, vaccines where, you know, they're being hoarded by rich countries and then the rest of the world just, you know, oh, just let them die, you know. And so I wonder actually, if you, to speak specifically to the question of Act Up, do you think that dynamic between not just drugs into bodies, but access to these drugs for everyone, do you think there could have been a different path in terms of a broader fight against, you know, the virus of capitalism that could have changed that trajectory in a certain sense? Well, I mean, I agree with you that COVID and AIDS resonate in certain ways that they both reveal enormous economic inequality and racism, as every disaster in this country does reveal. And they both are making a huge amount of money for pharma, and there's lack of global access to drugs that work in both cases. But there's also a really significant difference, which is that COVID is a collective public experience that we're all sharing. It's on TV every night and everyone's talking about it. AIDS was like our private nightmare, you know. We couldn't, our fight was to get it into the public. And that's a really different experience. Yeah, that, oh, I should remind everyone that if you have any questions, feel free to throw them in the Q&A. We'll bring them into this conversation. And I think, yeah, another question, I guess, I was thinking about the way that you, I think you challenge this sort of nostalgic vision, because I think there is this nostalgia right now for ACT UP, you know, among people you talk in your introduction about people who didn't know the history of ACT UP, didn't know, you know, and I think that's actually a really interesting point where you talked about this transition from public activism to social media. And I remember, you know, when I moved back to San Francisco in 2000, and I was meeting, you know, activists then, and I remember a friend of mine was like, oh, ACT UP, wasn't that just like gay men in the 70s? And I was like, the 70s? You know, and so I think, and I think there is a lot of things that have been lost that is strangely not things that are in the distant past, but things are in the 80s and 90s, because they're like right before social media. Yeah, let me, let me speak to that and also I think that Vimeo has their hand up. But well, you know, the history of movements and what strategies people use and what discourses we have are histories that we have to tell, because the dominant culture will never tell them accurately, you know, and that's, that's very clear. And it's information that's really hard to get. I mean, I had to cohere and pull out what were the tactics, like for example, I was reading, rereading the interviews, and like somebody would say, oh, I was hanging out at the center on a Monday, and I thought, who are those people over there? Oh, it was ACT UP. Or somebody else was like, oh, I went to the center for my healthcare, and there was an ACT UP meeting. And I realized like, if you meet in a place that your community identifies with and trusts and goes to, you can attract your community in a much easier way. And that's, that's a coherent theory that no one in ACT UP ever said, but that became apparent by studying the materials. So if you're not oriented towards that, you would never historicize that kind of information. Yeah. And that's actually a good point also just about public space itself, because the center, you know, I remember even when I lived in New York in the late 90s, I would go to the center just because there was nowhere, you know, to sit, you know, in New York and not pay for something. And so I would just go and sit in the main room. And it was mostly queer youth of color and older gays, mostly white. And there was this interesting mixture that people would actually interact, they wouldn't have interacted otherwise. And so I think that is something that public space allows. Now, of course, the center is, you know, has doesn't even have that space anymore, where you can just, you know, like go into this huge room and just be hanging out. And that, of course, was the room where ACT UP meetings took place. So people would just be in that room and then suddenly hundreds of people come in. And it wasn't like in this, it wasn't separate in that sense. It wasn't casual. It wasn't so controlled, you know, and the lack of control is an important factor. Like for example, in ACT UP, like people would say, oh, we need someone to write a letter to the commissioner. And some guy would say, I'll do it. And that was it. You never saw the letter again. Nobody, you know, micro managed it. You just trusted the person that they would do it. There was a, there was a belief, there was a need to move forward. And people couldn't waste their time on bureaucratic things. And the kind of people who came into that room stepped up and met that expectation. And so the less control that we had, the more productive we were, you know, and it's only when we really started trying to control each other that a lot of things broke down. I mean, that's one of my theories. I can't prove that. Well, that's an interesting, I think also a lot of your points are really interesting in the sense because ACT UP New York was its own world that was so much larger than any other ACT UP chapter, you know, especially like even San Francisco, which, you know, like was a few hundred people when it was really big. Now, when I was involved in ACT UP San Francisco, which was after it split into two groups in 92, there would be like the maximum will be like 50 people we would have in a meeting. So I think there is a different possibility for autonomy and for affinity groups. I mean, we had affinity groups too, but they, like this is with a group of 50 people, right? When you have a group of 500 people, I think there is, there are a lot more possibilities in that sense. But there's other factors. One is that the city government in New York City was Mayor Ed Koch, who was in the closet, right? And so he was an incredible problem for us. You know, he was hostile to us, but I remember being in San Francisco in both Houston, when I stayed at both Houston's house. And when he got sick and he went to the hospital, there was a special triage entry system for people with AIDS. And then when he came home from the hospital, someone from the hospital called to find out how he was doing. In New York, people were dying on gurneys and hallways. You know, so there was a better relationship. I think gay people had more political power in San Francisco. Certainly at the time, San Francisco was much more out. Like, I remember coming to San Francisco and noticing that in New York, lesbians would get dressed up to go to work. And then they, looking closety, and then they would come home and change their clothes. But in San Francisco, people look gay even when they were going to work. So there was a different culture, you know. Yeah. And I'll remind anyone, if you have any questions, just throw them into the Q&A, and then I'll bring them into the conversation. Feel free to ask anything you want. I think, actually, that points to something that you talk about at the end of the book, which is the beginning of target marketing to gay consumers. And you talk about how, you know, the first, how AIDS drugs were marketed, and how viaduct insurance, which was insurance that you would buy when you were dying, so you could sell the, or you could sell your life insurance before you died, basically. And how that was the beginning of target marketing to gay consumers. And I wonder if you want to talk about that and how it continues to impact us today. Well, I originally went into this in my book in the 90s, stagestruck, Theatre AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America. And that was right at the moment when the gay community was being transitioned from being a political movement into a consumer group to be niche marketed to. And so that book covers the early phases of that. So like, for example, one of the first commercial products to be niche marketed to gay people was absolute vodka, right? You know, it's like, because we were a community that lived in bars and had very high alcohol alcoholism rates. And they were selling us vodka. But they had that they made deals. So the advocate magazine out of LA, absolute vodka bought the back page, but they had to lose their sex ads, in order to get those ads. So it changed the way the gay media looked. But what happened with AIDS drugs, is that in my interview with Sean Struve, it was a fascinating interview. Paws magazine was not created to give information to people with AIDS. It was created to sell AIDS drugs directly to the consumer. Because the AIDS patient was one of the most informed patients in history. And they knew more than their doctors. So companies pharmaceutical companies started direct marketing drugs to the patient themselves. And Paws became the the venue for that. And the articles were like fluff. The point was the the ads, which used to show like, really hunky guys climbing mountains and stuff like that, because they were on Crixivan. Anyway, the the legacy of that is like Viagra ads and all the ads on television now, that sell drugs directly to the consumer. The Crixivan was really probably one of the earliest drugs that that was done with. Yeah, that's interesting. You also bring up, of course, the target marketing of alcohol. Do you remember Zima? What was the course product that they they created to break the course boycott? Because of course, there was this boycott of course, because of the right wing foundation that, you know, is one of the most damaging foundation still exists, you know, still is. And it was in the early 90s, when I moved to San Francisco, and suddenly there was this new beer, it was like had this, you know, pretty can and it was every gay bar. And it was a course product. And that was the beginning, actually, of what broke the course boycott, because all these gays were like, I have to have my Zima. Because now nobody even thinks we have course Miller, it's all over, you know, they're like, whereas in the past, those were companies that were sort of outside that everyone knew they were the right wing, right. And I see we have a question in the Q&A, a simple, direct question. What advice do you have interesting to community organizations today, so not to individuals, but to organizations? I mean, I don't have any advice, but I can tell you what the takeaways from studying act up are. So I think, like I said, the most important takeaway is to not have a consensus based movement. I'm not trying to force homogeneity, and try to force everybody into one analysis of one strategy that historically movements that do that do not work. So radical democracy and big 10 politics, but with a principle of unity, you know, act up had a one line principle of unity, which was direct action to end the AIDS crisis, as opposed to social service provision. So if you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, basically, you could do it, and allowing people to express themselves with actions that are effective, based on where they're at, is a great leadership, you know, facilitating that in your rank and file. Another great takeaway from act up is act up did not have theoretical conversation. As Maxine Wolf, one of the leaders of act ups often said, your theory will emerge from your action. So, you know, the traditional left approach was like a grand she kind of praxis that you have your theory, and then you apply it. But this was the reverse, because the constituency was a constituency movement of people with AIDS and people with AIDS could not waste time. And they had very specific concrete needs. And that determined the agenda of the organization. So you had to be effective to win those needs. So you would do an action. And as you're organizing your action, you have to make decisions. And in those decisions is where you cohere your values. So that's how your theory emerges from action. Another lesson from act up is that, so act up was primarily a white male organization, but it was not exclusively a white male organization. And women and people of color and act up never stopped the action. This is act of New York to have everybody do consciousness raising about racism or sexism, never. What they did instead was they marshaled the great resources of the organization for their constituencies. So for example, act up had an art auction that raised $650,000. And that's a lot of money, especially at that time. So, for example, the women's committees had a four year campaign to change the CDC definition of AIDS so that women could get access to benefits and experimental drugs. So they needed to bring women with AIDS to hearings, to demonstrations, to provide travel and hotel and all of that. Well, that money came out of act of general fundraising. Or when the Latino caucus, which is my opening chapter, when they realized that people with AIDS and Puerto Rico needed support, they got money from act up to go to Puerto Rico and start act up Puerto Rico. So it was a very smart approach to getting your job done. So another really interesting lesson comes from one of the leaders in act up David Barr, who had the brilliant idea to do the action of the Food and Drug Administration. And this is about picking your target. Traditionally, the left had always picked symbolic targets. Like I know when I was a kid and my mother took us to demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, they were either at the White House or the Capitol, the White House or the Capitol. But David had the idea to move away from the symbolic target to the actual target. So to do the action at the Food and Drug Administration and some weird suburb in Maryland, because they were the people that were opposing us. And it had to be very successful to go right to the source. And it also had a big impact on the NIH. And we did an action there. So there's a lot of concrete information to be learned from act up. Yeah, just a random thing is that the action at the NIH, and I'm not sure if this is true, but when I was a kid, you were growing up in D.C., driving to high school, we would pass the NIH. And I remember this giant, some sort of action. I didn't know what it was. Their traffic was stopped, and there were all these people. And when I watched the footage, I always wonder if that was the action that I saw. Now, there's no way for me to know. It would have been when I was in high school. Did it have multicolored smoke? I didn't see the details. I just saw all these people at the NIH, and I thought, oh, something's going on. But so just a reminder, if anyone has any, we're winding down pretty soon. So if you have any other questions, just throw them directly into the Q&A. I see someone has a question in the chat. So let's see. I would love to hear you talk more about the intergenerational aspect of act up, since so many of us younger people benefited from meeting older gay liberation front and Stonewall gays who had been active for years. Right. So act up was a mix of people who were politically active and people who had never been politically active. But there were very young people in leadership. I mean, one of the most important campaigns was called countdown 18 months. And that was to try to push pharma and science to do the research to address opportunistic infections. And that was run by a 17-year-old named Garance Frankie Ruda. And a lot of the young people who were teenagers when they were in act up, when you interviewed them, people were valued based on the work that they did. It wasn't about your age, because people with AIDS were desperate. And when people are desperate, the way they treat other people changes so that, you know, men who could never listen to a lesbian in their lives were willing to have lead, take leadership from lesbians because they came in with experience from the feminist movement. And if a 17-year-old knew how to get you a drug for your opportunistic infection, that was all that mattered. So young people were treated with a lot of respect if they, you know, people did the work. And one of the interesting things about act up is people did not know what each other did for a living. And they did not know each other's last names. They only knew people based on how, what kind of good work they did inside the organization. Yes, that's actually interesting, because when I was in act up, I was 19. And I remember that we had a lot of coalition actions in San Francisco then. So it would be act up and women's action coalition and Bay core, which is the radical abortion rights group and roots against war, which was people of color against war. And the people, the coalition action basically meant the youngest people in every group would get together at a coffee house and we would plan everything. So it'd be like all these like 19, 20, 21-year-olds. And that was the coalition. And no one ever, like you said, there was never, whereas when the first time I went to a gay bar when I was 19 in San Francisco and someone was like, how old are you? I'm like 19. It was like this whole catastrophe. And so I feel like you're right in act up. There wasn't that, that particular, it was whoever wanted to do the work did the work. And I think what you're saying actually about gay men who were, never had listened to lesbians before, willing to listen to lesbians ties into the next question we have, which is, if there was sexism, maybe you've already answered this in a certain way. If there was sexism or anti lesbian attitudes within act up, that's a question from the Q&A. Well, anti lesbian attitudes no, but there was not as much support for women with HIV as there were for men with HIV. You know, so I would say that sexism, right? But it played out politically. And it also could be class and race there as well. Yes, what else? Another question we have, can you speak more to the notion about how act up's fluid solidarity was sustained and what made it, I guess, eventually unsustainable? I mean, I go into the demise of act up in great detail and you can draw your own conclusions, because it's very complex. But I honestly believe, having interviewed everybody and studied everything and heard everything, that actually what happened was that we all went crazy, because it was so painful. And I think people couldn't sustain it anymore and started, you know, eating each other alive. That's what I think. The official reasons, it all came down around this trial called 076, which is a trial for pregnant HIV positive women who were being offered a drug that could keep the fetus from seroconverting. Because at that time, a lot of people were born HIV positive. And there was a lot of controversy over this trial, because the drugs that the women would be taking would make them resistant to the next level of HIV drugs that were about to come down the pipeline. So basically, these women were not were being treated as vectors of infection, instead of as people with AIDS deserving treatment. And there was a lot of guilt involved, if you were pregnant and HIV positive. Most of these women were women of color and poor. And the only way that they were getting health care was by being in this trial. I mean, there was a lot of problems with this trial, and it really divided act up. And it became the catalyst for the split. But the split was in process from the beginning, because there were all kind, you know, at that time, the government was entirely white and male, the media was entirely white and male, the private sector was entirely white and male. And gay men who were in that power apparatus were mostly in the closet. So even me, like a white woman here, there was nobody in power who even looked like me. So when act up was going to sit at the table with the people in power, the men who were elite, and there were some white men in act up who were quite elite, they had a better rapport with the men in power. And, you know, those of us who no one looked like us, which was most people in act up, probably could not have accessed that kind of influence. So there are a number of questions. I'm going to consolidate a few of them together, since we just have a few minutes. But here's a quote from your book directly, you state toward the beginning of the book that a unifying factor for everyone involved in act up was their unwillingness or inability to, and this is quoting you, sit out a historical cataclysm. They were driven by nature, by practice, or by some combination thereof, to defend people in trouble through standing with them. And so the question is, in movement work today, is there a way to develop this characteristic in people? Or is it something that is inherently characterological? You know, that's an interesting question, because the thing I did after act up was the lesbian Avengers. And so I was one of the five founders of the lesbian Avengers. And the reason we started was because when we first came into act up, my generation of women already had incredible skills from the feminist movement. But as the years passed in act up, we saw that younger women who had never been in the feminist movement and came into act up as their first movement, were not accruing the same leadership skills as the older generation. And so we decided to start the lesbian Avengers to try to, you know, get younger women leadership skills. And so you're working with the constituency, lesbians who were trained to not have power. I mean, they were completely out of power. And what people do who have never experienced power is that they get into this obstructive behavior where the only way they have power is to say no. So our job in leadership was to help people transition from just saying no to actually like having an idea that would solve something and seeing it through imagining what they had to do to realize it and then getting the support to realize it. And so in that process, it became really clear to me that you can develop implementers, you can teach people skills, and you can give people the confidence and support to use those skills, but conceptualizers you cannot produce. It's a certain type of person who can see a solution and see what has to be done to get there. And what gives them that? You know, what is character anyway? Is it nature or nurture? Is it neurology that I don't have an answer for? Well, that actually connects to a question about what lessons from ACT UP have been most helpful in your activism for Palestine? This is for someone who, from someone who just recently read Israel Palestine and the queer international. Well, I think that everything, you know, I think I was action oriented before I came to ACT UP. And I've always been able to, especially with Jim Hubbard in our 37-year relationship, we've been able to create community institutions, conceptualize things out of thin air and make them happen. And, you know, I've just always been that kind of person. And I ACT UP spoke to me because it did that. But I think I already had that. And, you know, the movement, the Palestine Solidarity Movement is a very, very interesting movement because absolutely everyone is welcome. I've never seen a movement where anyone who supports Palestine is welcome because they're desperate, you know, and they need support. And so it's a very open movement. There's all kinds of people, not just queer and trans people in leadership, there's all kinds of people welcome in that movement. So I think I had those instincts before ACT UP. I was not in leadership in ACT UP. I was a rank and fall person and I had a lot of other things going on in my life as well. So I wasn't one of those people who lived and breathed ACT UP 24 hours a day. And actually, I found that interesting. The way you distinguish between people who you describe as leaders of ACT UP, which I think you say is like 100 people, and people who you call rank and file members. And I think in this moment, I'm just thinking about something you just said about how ACT UP wasn't about theorizing and then taking the theory and implementing it in this hierarchical way, but about creating, you know, the action is what created the knowledge, right? And I think that's actually something I had never thought about how I, you know, that I mean, I agree entirely with that. But I think that I might have learned from, you know, my immersion in ACT UP, you know, when I was 19 in San Francisco. And I think I'll just, maybe we can end with this, I'm going to fuse two questions together that I think connect and let's see. So one of them is, do you think the coalitions that formed through ACT UP spilled over to other social movements of today? Or did they stay within? Well, I feel like you have spoken to that already. But if you have anything else to say about that, the other question is whether you mentioned how your work as a novelist influenced your study of ACT UP. And do you think your study of ACT UP will influence your work as a novelist? I think I know that quite answer that question. But if you want to speak maybe to the blending of, you know, writing fiction, writing nonfiction, being an activist and working in coalition. Well, you know, it's interesting because I think that the the creativity and the amazing success of ACT UP went far beyond anything I could have imagined. Because when I wrote my novel People in Trouble, which was before I joined ACT UP, I imagined a small group of people going to St. Patrick's Cathedral, entering in during a mass and standing up and turning their backs. And that was my fantasy of what we were going to do to resist the Catholic Church. And when it actually occurred, it was like 7000 people outside and people inside screaming and the reality was so much better and so much bigger than anything I could imagine. And this, you know, was repeated. I was just talking to a friend about Pose, the TV show Pose. So they have been taking ACT UP actions and kind of mangling them and putting them in the plot because the writers can't imagine their own actions. You know, so there's a way that the reality of people coming together for change produces things that for writers are completely unpredictable and are so much more exciting and more wonderful than anything we can think about when we're sitting home alone. Oh, I love that. That's the perfect way to end, I think. Well, thank you for this amazing conversation. Congratulations on the book. I'm so glad it's getting the attention it deserves. I recommend that everyone read it. It's 800 pages and you should read every single page because there's such a great, like conversational, it's a history formed by conversations, right? It's not just knowledge. It's actually, you know, learning from other people's voices and intimacies together in the room of this book. So thank you for creating it even though you didn't want to do it in the first place. I'm so glad it's here and it's a benefit for us all. Thank you, Matilda. Thank you, everybody. Yeah, thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Matilda. Thanks for the great conversation and thanks to our audience and all the great questions. I do have one last very quick update, something for your calendar. Just to let you all know, Matilda will be back at the library on October 20 virtually to discuss her new anthology between certain deaths and a possible future. So yes, October 20th, marking calendars. Okay, thank you all. See you next time. Good night.