ACT UP (Organization)

The organization ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in 1987 to address the AIDS crisis through direct political action. The Oral History Project was created to document the work of ACT UP through interviews with surviving members, and to shed light on the process of making social change.

The organization ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in 1987 to address the AIDS crisis through direct political action.

The Oral History Project was created to document the work of ACT UP through interviews with surviving members, and to shed light on the process of making social change. The project was coordinated by filmmaker Jim Hubbard and novelist Sarah Schulman, with camera work by James Wentzy (in New York) and S. Leo Chiang (on the West Coast).

ACT UP Chicago (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) formed in the late 1980s as a grassroots activist group committed to direct action protest for people with AIDS (PWAs) and AIDS/HIV awareness. Angry at government inaction and indifference at the rapidly increasing number of AIDS deaths in the 1980s, ACT UP sought to turn fear and sorrow into anger expressed through political action. The slogan, “ACT UP, fight back, fight AIDS,” is emblematic of the ACT UP ethos. Part of a broader coalition of protests groups addressing AIDS and homophobia that formed beginning in the mid-1980s, ACT UP was a decentralized group made up of many branch organizations, with approximately eighty chapters by 1993. ACT UP New York was the founding branch, first receiving public attention for its Wall Street protest in 1987, which challenged the convoluted and slow FDA approval process for AIDS drugs, and the high price of the first generation of AIDS drugs like AZT. ACT UP was noted for its distinctive protest tactics including street theatre, zap actions, and bold graphics on visual materials like posters, stickers, and t-shirts. ACT UP also pursued legal, political, and research strategies, pressing politicians to provide support for PWAs and AIDS education, and seeking a voice in research and development agendas of drug companies.

ACT UP Chicago formed in the late 1980s and remained active through the early 1990s. Like other ACT UP groups, Chicago experienced internal struggles to define the mission of ACT UP, and the relationship between ACT UP and leftist and radical politics more broadly. Members experienced divisions between those who saw ACT UP’s sole mission as finding a cure for AIDS, and those who saw ACT UP within a broader challenge to structural oppressions with in the United States. Internal debates also focused on whether ACT UP should place special emphasis on the multiply marginalized like women, people of color, and the incarcerated. ACT UP Chicago was involved in protests against AMA policies, against political appointees in AIDS policy positions, for safe sex education in the public schools, and against mandatory HIV testing for health care workers.