Direct Action by L.A. Kauffman

Author:L.A. Kauffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The San Francisco chapter was the first to split: the trigger was a proposal, supported largely by white men, to replace the chapter’s consensus decision-making process with “super-majority rule,” in which a motion would carry with an 80 percent vote. After the Sixth International Conference on AIDS was held in San Francisco in June 1990, and greeted with huge and deftly organized protests, the chapter’s membership tripled. For the most part, these newcomers were white men, many of them HIV positive. Members of the Women’s and People of Color Caucuses felt that their issues were being pushed aside by these recent arrivals, and countered their sense of marginalization by using their power under consensus process to block proposals, including the proposal to scuttle the consensus process. These maneuvers in turn angered a large number of white gay men, who walked out of ACT UP/San Francisco and formed a separate chapter, which they called ACT UP/Golden Gate.53

The real divisions, however, went far deeper than process. “There is a split in this organization—if I may be so bold—among those of us who want to focus on the top quarter with AIDS and those who want to focus on the bottom third,” declared ACT UP/San Francisco Women’s Caucus member Kate Raphael. “If you do the latter it leads you to look at AIDS in the broader context,” which, for Raphael and others, meant addressing race, class, and gender issues both within the organization and in society at large. “You have a group in ACT UP of white men who had a great deal of privilege until they got sick, and a lot of them still have a lot of class and white skin privilege,” said Deeg Gold. What they failed to acknowledge, she added, was that solely “finding a cure for AIDS will not stop the epidemic,” because in a vastly unequal healthcare system, only the privileged would have access to a cure.54

Those who left the San Francisco chapter viewed the matter quite differently. Explained one such activist, Bill Struzenberg, “Put very succinctly,” he said, “we have to find a cure before we fight for access. The other people are coming from the other side; they want us to find access before a cure.” For many who formed ACT UP/Golden Gate, personal mortality loomed—quite understandably —far larger than any broader political considerations. “If we have to deal with racism and sexism and homophobia, we will not start moving forward until I am dead,” said Jesse Dobson. “I am not proud of [downplaying those questions], but I will not let my growth in those areas stop me fighting AIDS. I will not build a coalition on the dead bodies of my community!”55

Meanwhile, in New York, parallel tensions led members of the Treatment and Data Committee to separate from the chapter and form their own organization, the Treatment Action Group (TAG), in January 1992. Mark Harrington, one of the most prominent treatment activists to leave ACT UP, recounted how the experience of a first major meeting with government officials transformed some activists’ perspectives.

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