Act up
Act Up ( AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power “ AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power ”) is an interest group established in New York ( USA ) in 1987 with the aim of increasing the dynamism and politicization of AIDS through new publicity campaigns and exert political pressure through lobbying. Over time, the initiative found supporters around the world. The abbreviation Act Up is also a regular expression in the English language and means something like "rebel", "make theater", "cause trouble".
Origin and goals
Activists of the AIDS movement, which up until now had been mainly organized locally as Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC, founded 1982) and was mainly involved in the areas of prevention and care, became increasingly impatient with the supposedly apolitical attitude of this group. Reasons for this included the formalized institution and the fact that sponsors and government funding were on the lookout. On March 10, 1987, the activist Larry Kramer , who had also co-founded the GMHC, gave a fiery speech in front of an audience of 400 in the auditorium of the Gay Community Center in the West Village, part of Greenwich Village . He called for a stronger commitment to AIDS sufferers, who at that time were still heavily discriminated against by government, research and society. That same week, Kramer, his friend Eric Sawyer, and a handful of other activists officially founded the radical protest group, which later called itself Act Up. As a result, the organization grew rapidly. The group is organized as a leaderless and to a certain extent anarchist network.
The organization includes not only gays , but also liberals , feminists , lesbians and members of other social groups who identify with the political goals of the group. She actively works against the stigmatization of people with AIDS, a problem that was particularly relevant in the early days of the USA, where the disease was portrayed as a "gay plague" or "God's punishment". It also takes radical action against groups that oppose the use and distribution of condoms , such as the Roman Catholic Church . In the 1990s, Act Up was particularly critical of New York Archbishop John Joseph O'Connor , who spoke out against sex education and condom distribution in Catholic schools and hospitals.
The pharmaceutical companies were also targeted by the activists because of the pricing of drugs against the virus , such as B. AZT , which was newly launched when the organization was founded and cost up to $ 10,000 per year for those treated. Act Up claimed that by using their lobbyists they were hindering the approval of newer, more effective drugs in order to be able to profit from the initial defective productions for as long as possible.
Methodology and actions
In order to achieve their goals, Act Up tried to sensitize the population to the topic by forming massive opinions. In doing so, they particularly sought to appear in the mass media . The topic of AIDS had been largely avoided in the media until then; Isolated mentions of the new epidemic portrayed homosexuals and drug addicts rather negatively and linked the disease with a moral assessment and supposed personal guilt. Act Up , on the other hand, represented other approaches and represented them publicly with creativity and tried to use newspapers and evening news as multipliers of their messages.
The first demonstration took place on March 24, 1987. Around 250 protesters paralyzed traffic in front of the Wall Street stock exchange during rush hour , and some act-up activists pushed their way onto the trading floor. There was a demonstration against the high prices for AIDS drugs and the restrictive stance of the Food and Drug Administration , which was very reluctant to release new drugs while many people died. The police cracked down on the sit-in and 17 activists were arrested for “civil disobedience”.
One of the first positive results was that US President Ronald Reagan , who became known to AIDS after taking office in January 1981, first publicly pronounced the word AIDS in a speech at the end of May 1987, thereby acknowledging the epidemic. By then, around 60,000 cases had been registered in the United States and 28,000 people had died.
A demonstration on October 11, 1988 in front of the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) deserves special mention . In addition to media-friendly images, the demonstration participants received advance training on the FDA's work, which has been criticized as bureaucratic and slow, and which, according to the Act Up, blocks important drugs. The media were also informed and invited beforehand through hundreds of calls to journalists and carefully prepared press kits. The media reacted as hoped and brought the problem of AIDS and the demands of Act Up into the political field.
Silence = Death
The pink triangle was used in National Socialist concentration camps to mark gays, who usually belonged to the lowest levels in the prisoner hierarchy of the concentration camps. In the 1970s, starting from Europe, it became a positively reformulated symbol for the gay movement . In the USA he was only known to the "initiated" and above all to activists. In the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic became known (first reports of illnesses from 1981, naming in 1982), many individual gays and groups in the USA began it as a new symbol of "gayness" and gay pride to use. It served as a symbol of memory of the past and as a symbol of current oppression.
A year and a half before Act Up got together, a group of six gay men began to meet who became the project "Silence = Death" (pronounced: "Silence Equals Death", "Schweigen = Tod"). Avram Finkelstein , Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione and Jorge Soccaras wanted to talk to each other and with others about what should be done as a gay man in times of AIDS. Some of them were designers of different kinds and they chose to “sprinkle wheat” in the streets with the message: “Why don't you do something?” So they designed the poster and started hanging it in the streets from 1987 onwards. At the bottom it said:
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In the project's manifesto, comparisons were made between the Nazi era and the AIDS crisis, stating that “silence about the oppression and extermination of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a question of our survival.” The slogan protested against taboos in the safer sex debate and the reluctance of some to tackle social injustice and government indifference. The upside down pink triangle, now with the tip pointing upwards, is the conscious attempt to turn a symbol of oppression into a symbol of solidarity and resistance and a symbol of active action. Possibly there were similar isolated thoughts before, but with "Silence = Death" it became widely known, just as the Rosa Winkel in the USA generally experienced an increase in popularity. When Kramer gave his key speech a short time later, some of the six activists were present. The two groups began working together with the protest outside the New York City General Post Office on April 15. The activists later joined Act Up and offered the group the logo that it is identified with to this day. Oliver Johnston is the only one in the group who was no longer alive in 2005.
Since its introduction, the logo has appeared in many different forms, including a button that is often worn (also in the German version) or as a neon sign as part of an art exhibition. The slogan was also the forerunner for similar sayings like "Action = Life" ("Tat = Leben") and "Ignorance = Fear" ("Ignoranz = Furcht"). The logo was also the forerunner for a whole genre of protest graphics, the most famous of which was a poster with a bloody handprint that proclaimed: "The government has blood on its hands."
Act Up in Germany
Even if the ignorance and threats were not as strong in Germany as in the USA, there was enough discrimination in the clinics and pressure to soon form the first groups here too. In addition, Andreas Salmen came back fresh from the USA and was massively committed himself. Groups were founded in Berlin, Bonn, Dortmund, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Munich, Nuremberg and Würzburg. They carried out many local and some nationwide campaigns, some of which were very well perceived. Among the most famous of activity are the ins against Lufthansa, the Marlboro -Boykott because of the support of Jesse Helms by Philip Morris and the occupation of the cathedral at Fulda in September 1,991th
In Munich there were B. anxious rejections has been advised of AIDS patients in private clinics, in this press relations campaigns, and later police abuses in the drug scene, which was concerned with the time more of HIV, in this action from the circle of Aids has been responded .
In the mid-1990s the groups no longer played a significant role in Germany, the Frankfurt group still existed until the end of the 1990s. Ondamaris attributes the short flowering and the imminent end in Germany to several factors: a) In 1992 Andreas Salmen died of the crystallization point. b) Many campaigns dealt with issues set in the USA and the situation there. c) As in the USA, the medical situation changed slowly at first, then more quickly , primarily due to the approval of didanosine . This reduced the existential pressure to act. d) Some activists turned away from political activism and towards therapy activism out of a feeling of changed necessity. e) The political landscape and society in Germany, which is more shaped by consensus politics - in contrast to the USA (and also France) - do not form a sufficient basis to intensify, polarize and provoke the act-up tendencies to support for a long time.
Persistence
The organization, which is now active worldwide, celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2002. For the occasion, the film Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of Act Up by director James Wentzy was released. The film is a documentary about the network that brought about a decisive change in the treatment of AIDS. But it is also a warning that education and prevention work on AIDS must still continue unabated.
literature
- Andreas Salmen (Ed.): ACT UP. Fire under the ass. The AIDS action groups in Germany and the USA. (= AIDS-Forum DAH special volume ). German AIDS Aid, Berlin 1991, DNB 920307469 .
- Patrick Hamm: Trigger - Gays in the fight against AIDS since 1983. German Aids Aid, 1997, OCLC 863306089 .
Movies
- Rosa von Praunheim : The AIDS trilogy (2nd part): Silence = death - artists in New York fight against AIDS. 1990.
- Rosa von Praunheim, Patrick Hamm: The AIDS Trilogy (3rd part): Fire under the ass - about the life and death of gay men in Berlin. 1990.
- Robin Campillo : 120 BPM ( 120 battements par minute. ) Feature film. 2017.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Marc Pitzke: 20 years Act Up - anger of powerlessness. In: Spiegel online. March 17, 2007.
- ↑ This Is about People Dying: The Tactics of Early ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers in New York City. based on an interview by Laraine Sommella with Maxine Wolfe. In: Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, Yolanda Retter (Eds.): Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance . Bay Press, Seattle / Washington 1997.
- ↑ Valeria Fabj, Matthew J. Sobnosky: Responses From the Street: Act Up and Community Organizing Against Aids. In: Scott C. Ratzan (Ed.): AIDS: Effective Health Communication for the 90s . Taylor & Francis , Washington (DC) 1993, ISBN 1-56032-273-X , pp. 91-110.
- ↑ Harald Neuber: AIDS Policy in the USA: "The Wrath of God". on: aerzteblatt.de
- ↑ Mirjam Bromundt: DATE Knowledge Worlds . ( Memento of June 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: Datum. 05/2006.
- ↑ Jörg Hutter: Deutscher Faschismus (German fascism). on: joerg-hutter.de
- ↑ a b Tina Gianoulis: Pink Triangle. on: glbtq.com , 2004. (PDF)
- ^ A b Raymond A. Smith, Kevin E. Gruenfeld: Symbols. In: Raymond A. Smith (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of AIDS: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Scientific Record of the HIV Epidemic. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998.
- ↑ "via ACT UP NY Documents" Tactics of Early ACT UP "", SILENCE = DEATH ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , actupny.org
- ↑ Ondamaris: ACT UP - Myth or Model? Conceived for the event '25 Years of German Aids Aid 'of the Waldschlößchen Academy, ondamaris.de, December 21, 2008.
