BOY WITH THE BULLHORN

A firsthand account from a frontline fighter against an establishment indifferent to those suffering from AIDS.

“Here we were, a brave new Queer Army ready to fight like hell for the living,” writes Goldberg about an early demonstration on the part of ACT UP, the activist group that, beginning in 1987, politicized the struggle to push medical research for AIDS into the forefront and to secure rights, medical and otherwise, for the ill and their loved ones. Drawing on lessons from the anti-war era, from sit-ins to guerrilla street theater, ACT UP was “bold, angry, and—unlike the other AIDS groups—dedicated to confrontation, not care giving.” Indeed, by the end of Goldberg’s years with the organization, the group had gone from marches to more provocative actions: “We’d held hundreds of die-ins, hoisted cardboard tombstones at the FDA, and carted empty coffins through the streets…we’d hurled ashes at the White House and carried a dead body through midtown Manhattan.” Spurred to turn a long-kept chronology of the movement into a book by playwright Larry Kramer, Goldberg, a thoughtful and capacious writer, allows that ACT UP may have caused divisiveness: “Strategic concerns aside, I don’t think it’s a good idea to shout people down, particularly when you’re a group always demanding to be heard.” Still, there was plenty of blather to shout down on the parts of Rudy Giuliani, Jesse Helms, and Ronald Reagan; even better-intentioned figures such as Bill Clinton and Anthony Fauci were not as helpful as they could have been. Whether sympathetic, indifferent, or hostile, the world stood by as millions died, just cause for anger. AIDS is still with us, but more manageably so, Goldberg closes in noting—a fact that owes at least something to ACT UP’s militance and refusal to go away, honoring its still-memorable slogan: “Silence = Death.”

A fine blend of history and memoir and a useful guidebook for activists.