ACT UP Oral History Project Website Relaunch

Joining us to discuss the project and their newly launched website is film maker and activist Jim Hubbard who co-produced with author Sara Schulman “United in Anger” a film documenting various ACT UP campaigns.

The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. The project is coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, with principal camera work by James Wentzy.

ACT UP, founded in March of 1987, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.  Its determined advocacy and highly-focused demonstrations supported by innovative graphics utterly changed the world’s perception of people with AIDS and queer people. This description, on the actuporalhistory.org website introduces to some of the indepth coverage of the accomplishments of one of the most effective and influential left leaning LGBTQ groups in the US. The site is a great source of political and tactical decisions that challenged government policy and inaction at a time when the HIV epidemic was killing hundreds of thousands in the US and infecting more than a million young men and some women. It reveals some of the ways the group was able to capture the attention of the mass media and communicate to the public at large about government and corporate failures that jeapordized so many lives of people living with HIV and AIDS.
 

Twin Pandemics of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 Collide

Risk of more severe outcomes with COVID-19 may be more likely in HIV positive people. Yet around the world the COVID-19 pandemic has interfered with testing and treatment.  Health GAP, an organization dedicated to getting generic AIDS drugs to people with AIDS worldwide, sees President Biden’s FY22 budget  which includes funding for PEPFAR, a bilateral AIDS program, as deficient. It also sees failure to provide COVID-19 vaccines as hurting not only care, but care providers in countries receiving US AIDS funding.

According to Health GAP's Matthew Rose, “President Biden’s first detailed budget displays a lack of bold leadership motivated to end the HIV pandemic. Flat funding the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is deadly, particularly in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when the vast majority of people with HIV in most affected countries when COVID-19 has already harmed HIV treatment and prevention programs, and most communities have no access to life-saving COVID-19 vaccines and treatment. If the U.S. had continued fully funding PEPFAR since 2003 instead of letting funding levels slip into a flat-line for the last 11 years, the HIV pandemic would look remarkably different today. “

Watch video