by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, September 30, 2012

The operative word is "fight"

Edit Post

Before AIDS, people got sick, went to their doctors, were told what to do, and got better—or worse and died—and that didn’t change until HIV had been among us for five years or so. Since the drug companies weren’t coming out with effective medications, and since the federal medical establishment seemed to be in no hurry, and since the government didn’t seem to have a plan, gay men and women stopped looking to others for a solution in their fight against AIDS. They started making noise, joining together and making a loud noise, making charges against the pharmaceutical companies that they were making obscene profits off ineffective drugs for AIDS. They fought against the FDA, which had no sense of urgency about releasing drugs that might be helpful to persons with AIDS, and against the whole medical establishment, which didn’t understand that it would practice medicine better if it worked with the affected populations instead of only operating on them. Gay men and women came together at a meeting in New York in March, 1987, and heard the irascible Larry Kramer make the charge that if AIDS was a medical crisis, it was also a political crisis. They formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in March 1987, and on March 24, 1987 stopped traffic on Wall Street to demand greater access to experimental drugs and a coordinated national policy to fight AIDS. This was the beginning of AIDS activism. It happened during the Reagan Administration and during the George H W Bush administration, both of whom had allowed conservative attitudes against gay people to infect their response to AIDS.

How to Survive a Plague is a documentary by David France that opened last Friday in New York and on Thursday here in Boston. It appears to be made up of videos made by participants in these meetings and demonstrations, using handheld videocams. The documentary is about ACT UP and its fight against the federal government. The documentary is messy, immediate, clear, and extremely powerful. If you don’t know this story, you should see this documentary. If you want to be reminded of it—it’s been a long time—then get yourself to this movie. 

Much of what happened as a consequence of AIDS and ACT UP and Larry Kramer proved that Larry Kramer was right. He was the nearest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet. It’s never comfortable living at the same time as an Old Testament prophet. People get tired of being bullied by a man who says he speaks for God. But when Larry Kramer shouts out into the middle of a meeting of ACT UP that has lost its way, “PLAGUE!” and all go silent, it is clear that Larry Kramer was right, The reason our medical research establishment operates the way it does today and the reason clinical research is conducted the way it is today, is, in large part, because of Larry Kramer and ACT UP. They didn’t mind being rude if they could save our lives. How to Survive a Plague makes clear that there are millions of people who are alive today because Larry Kramer and ACT UP learned how to push the federal medical establishment, including the FDA, and the pharmaceutical companies, to keep searching for effective drugs that would save our lives. The ACT UP motto is ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS. In case you missed it, FIGHT is the operative word.
0 comments
Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The effects of the life I've led

Edit Post

I told him I didn’t trust therapists. The young man said he didn’t know why a person wouldn’t trust therapists. I reminded him that half my life the American Psychiatric Association had in its diagnostic manual that gay people suffered from various kinds of mental illness because they were gay, and they didn’t change that diagnosis until 1971 when the Gay Liberation Front broke into their meeting and stopped the proceedings. Psychologists and psychiatrists were the source of all those things floating around in the culture that said, gay people are sick. At the APA meeting, Frank Kameny of the GLF cried out, “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you!” And it was then that the APA agreed that gay people were OK.The young man that I was talking to didn’t know about this and said therapists were not like that anymore. He was sympathetic and seemed interested in what I was telling him. Here in the city, at meetings, and in our bookstores, and everywhere else, gay men and women who have spent half their lives coping with the abuse they got from the APA mingle with everybody else.

This experience—this kind of experience—had a profound effect on the generations who came to adulthood before Stonewall. Many older gay men and women are wary of the recent gains of our community—DADT and what’s happening with DOMA and the various court cases around Prop 8 in California and recently even the football players in the NFL. Are these successes going to last? When the Republicans get in next time, will they chip away at our rights? Or revoke them entirely? These gains aren’t necessarily permanent. Older people sense the tentativeness of our existence.

One of the effects of the life we’ve led is a self-protectiveness that characterizes many older gay men and women, an unwillingness to give up the protective styles and attitudes they developed when it was hard and dangerous to be gay. They may need them again some day. I have an anxiety that is difficult to convey to my children or my partner—who is a different generation—or to younger friends, and I have a need to say, But you don’t understand. 

So, aside from the need to re-elect Barack Obama, the gay community faces a fault line between the generations which is going to stay with gay people until the older generation gradually dies off. I suspect this fault line between generations may make us less effective as a community. But then, in our effort to overcome it, we may learn something very valuable about love. 


For more on the war between the gay liberation movement and the American Psychiatric Association, see:

Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2005.

Clendinen, Dudley & Nagourney, Adam. Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
0 comments

Designed by Edward Wharton.