Around the time AIDS crisis in the US began to shift from the gay white male community, and to communities of color, most chapters of ACT UP failed to shift with it. While this partially speaks to the composition of the original movement, it also partially speaks to the fact that most of the first generation passed away at this time. I personally was politicized attending a lot of political funerals in the mid 90s. However, two chapters did make the shift (or one and a half)--- Philadelphia, (and much later and less so, New York). In Philadelphia, a few folks who did not pass away, developed remarkable relationships with AIDS service providers and the burgeoning 'recovery houses' where people, largely HIV+, were in recovery from substance abuse. These relationships were developed partly because people worked as staff for some of these groups, and were strengthened by the fact that when ACT UP NYC was going comatose in the early-mid 90s ACT UP Philly fought a series of local successful campaigns for funding etc for these groups. The bonds that developed between these primarily afro-american ASOs, needle exchange programs, recovery houses etc became very, very strong; the new generation of ACT UP leadership (John Bell, Melvin Watkins, Shaheed, Jose DeMarco) emerged from these programs; in addition, in Philadelphia to this day, part of the program in groups like Project TEACH and most recovery houses is a commitment to political education and action--- the whole group, HIV+ and not, attends ACT UP teach-ins and busses to protests. This is why, while the antiglobalization left was talking itself in circles about oppression and priveledge and failing to develop a constituency beyond mostly white subcultural cliques and NGOs, ACT UP was the rare organization mobilizing protests of thousands of poor people of color from PA, NJ, and eventually NYC.
Around that time, ACT UP Philadelphia, after a lot of soul searching and internal discussion, became the first grassroots US organization to tackle global AIDS as an issue. In 1998 its Global Access campaign began, first with an all out assault on then-candidate Al Gore's hypocrisy on global AIDS, and from there expanding into working full-time with partner organizations in the global south like South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign and Zimbabwe's GALZ and Brazilian gay groups. In contrast with Yoshie's factually incorrect claims, this campaign was a massive success in many respects--- establishing the thousands dying daily of AIDS because cheap existing meds to treat them were kept out of their hands by medical apartheid as THE holocaust of our time; and smashing price of full treatment AIDS cocktail all the way down to cost! These victories have actually made a massive, enormous impact for millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa who have begun to receive life-saving treatment as a result. However, since then the fight has shifted to equally important battles: 1, getting the US to fully fund the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria (our contributions to THE funding source for stopping this holocaust have been in the billions, but are still many billions short); and 2., much more difficult, getting the debt dropped, structural adjustment rolled back, and changing the terms of trade and finance flow between the rich and poor nations so that those governments in sub-saharan Africa currently in possession of reasonably responsive governments can actually treat everyone. Since then, the pace of victory has slowed somewhat from the heady days of 2000; funding commitments from the US, though grown vastly, are nowhere near where they need to be, and the issue is complicated by the fact that both the left and progressives are far less interested in global AIDS treatment than a subset of principled, but rightwing, evangelical Christians are; and of course, ending the economic apartheid between the rich and poor nations will take something on the order of transformative change worldwide, although there is definitely more that can be done specifically today on debt especially. In addition, our brothers and sisters in sub-saharan Africa have their own work well cut out for them in many countries, dealing with some governments whose reaction at times to their own peoples' catastrophic die-off has made Ronald Reagan look like a champion humanitarian (however, as long as Zuma is the emerging voice of the left opposition in the ANC, this challenge will remain cut off from the left in many places as well).
The accomplishments of ACT UP and SA's TAC on crashing the price of treatment to cost and changing the entire debate are in fact monumental, almost unequalled in post-80s activism. This was done not by the theatrical organization of gay whites in the first generation of ACT Uptivists, but with mass mobilization of poor people of color, both in the US, SA, Brazil a bit. Facts are important. I don't know about many things, but in my only two or so areas of general knowledge, I am stunned by the frequency with which psuedo-expertise pontification is uninformed by any actual factual knowledge or personally involvement in struggle. Like claiming that 1199 OH's membership does not much live in the exurbs and steel suburbs of the buckeye state--- having an opinion on everything one doesn't know about doesn't make one look smart. ??? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20070213/237b33e0/attachment.htm>