New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor

Author:Craig Taylor [Taylor, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393242331
Google: oCzxDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0393242323
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

JIM EIGO A gay-rights activist

By 1986 my neighborhood and my kind were being decimated by AIDS. So I, and a lot of people like me, were just searching for ways to help . . . What do we do? The first things we did were the GMHCs of the world. Take care of real day-to-day needs. We never even used the term “living with HIV.” You had AIDS. So we called them PWAs, because they were People With AIDS.

Every person who got AIDs could go to GMHC and have a one-on-one financial adviser, and you can imagine if you’re in your mid-twenties and have a salary one week, and the next week you’re in the hospital, and you’re told, “You’re never having a job again, kid. And not only that, you don’t have insurance anymore.” Health care in America was even worse then. Now you can get Medicaid, but it’s a byzantine nightmare to go through to get it. So you need what we now would call a navigator.

A whole bunch of us realized this was not just a health-care crisis—it was a political crisis. And certain populations were being left to die because they’re marginalized. Until we made a political stink of it and—by any means we could—gained a voice for ourselves, we would go nowhere.

We had the neighborhood, we had the art networks, we had the literary networks, we had the network of venues. Downtown New York was really networked pre-internet, a real physical interaction. We had our gay networks and we were starting to have our HIV networks with things like GMHC. When ACT UP came along, it was incendiary. It could combust immediately; almost from the beginning we had two hundred bodies a week, and after the first year we had five hundred bodies a week in that small room.

It was really almost a natural, given the theater space of downtown New York. Is there a greater theater space than the canyons of Manhattan? Just think of those acoustics. Just think of those backdrops. Just think of the havoc you wreak when you just block two streets. Imagine how it is when you can block six! Imagine how far the traffic is backed up into New Jersey when you can fan across Wall Street and Rector Street. . . . It all came together so quickly because of New York. Because of the networks we had, because of the setting, because of the theater that nowhere else in the world would have given us.

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