Fortunately, there are still ACT-UP chapters still in existence, trying to grapple with this issue. ACT-UP is an interesting example in many ways. The people who started the organization were primarily white gay men who had been used to certain structures of privilege before the onset of AIDS. AIDS made them radically rethink those positions. These issues came to head within the structure of ACT-UP, which had to deal increasingly with those issues of white privilege. This broke up some groups, but it also created some very interesting anti-racist alliances. Yes, some of them were satisfied with the solutions that were presented to co-opt them, but many weren't. But at the same time, the group forced the government to respond to the AIDS pandemic in a meaningful (if highly problematic)fashion, and also challenged many of the notions of how science was practiced. I think what we can draw from the example of ACT-UP is how a group was able to look to its own resources and see possibilities rather than limitations. ACT-UP could make a ten person demonstration into a media event, while the anti-war movement makes marches of thousands in marginalia. Also, the sense I get is that a lot of the positive effects of ACT-UP were localized around issues of housing and social services. Obviously, ACT-UP hasn't produced all the results that it is after (note the present tense used here), but this can be said of any successful social movement. If you want perfection, you might want to give up politics and take up theology.
Robert Wood
P.S. Here is a good website on the history of ACT-UP http://www.actuporalhistory.org
> Yoshie wrote:
>
>> AIDS activism such as that of GMHC, ACT UP, etc. has changed the lives
>> of the richer half of white gay men for the better, but it doesn't
>> work as a solution for poorer men and women, especially poorer people
>> of color, and statistics shows it[....]
>
> It's been a long time, but as I recall, ACT-UP did a splendid job of
> making the transition from activism on behalf of relatively well-off
> white men to not-at-all-well-off people of color, at least in NYC. Of
> course, The System was stacked against the darker and poorer, but
> there's only so much that a group like ACT-UP could have done about
> that. Maybe someone more familiar with ACT-UP's history can fill in
> the details, but this doesn't sound like a fair criticism.
>
> Doug