enoughtohold:ACT UP offered an alternative route for grief: confrontational AIDS activism. Conside
enoughtohold: ACT UP offered an alternative route for grief: confrontational AIDS activism. Consider the following example. Direct-action AIDS activists from across the country converged in Washington, D.C., on the weekend of October 10–11, 1988, to “seize control of the FDA.” That same weekend, the Names Project Quilt was displayed on the National Mall. As part of its mobilization for the FDA action, ACT UP passed out a leaflet at the quilt showing. One side blared, “SHOW YOUR ANGER TO THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED MAKE THE QUILT POSSIBLE: OUR GOVERNMENT.” Text on the reverse read, “The Quilt helps us remember our lovers, relatives, and friends who have died during the past eight years. These people have died from a virus. But they have been killed by our government’s neglect and inaction…. More than 40,000 people have died from AIDS…. Before this Quilt grows any larger, turn your grief into anger. Turn anger into action. TURN THE POWER OF THE QUILT INTO ACTION.” Here, ACT UP acknowledged lesbian and gay grief about the deaths of people with AIDS, and then attempted to transport them to another place, figuratively from grief to anger, literally from the quilt and the deeply felt grief manifest there to a demonstration at the FDA where that grief could be expressed in angry, confrontational political activism. The ACT UP leaflet located the source of lesbian and gay grief at the government’s doorstep, and then offered a clear, logical response: if you feel grief, as we all do, then you should also feel anger toward those who have caused you to feel grief; and if you feel anger, you should join us in confrontational activism to fight those who are responsible for turning a public health issue into the AIDS crisis. Rather than regarding the quilt as a memorial to gay men and others who had died, ACT UP suggested it be viewed as a chronicle of murder that necessitated a forceful activist response. In beginning with a prevalent and more or less acceptable feeling — grief — and then linking that grief to anger — a more disreputable feeling — ACT UP authorized anger. ACT UP’s emotional and political pedagogy both acknowledged and addressed lesbians’ and gay men’s ambivalence about political confrontation: given our grief and under these dire circumstances, where we and our loved ones are being murdered by our government, anger and defiant activism targeting state and society are not only necessary, they are legitimate, justifiable, rational, and righteous. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (2009). Ch. 4. -- source link