HEALTH : New Fronts in the AIDS War : An Activist Group for the ‘80s Aims to ‘Shame People Into Action’

Peter Staley, a $200,000-a-year bond trader, was on his way to work on Wall Street one morning when he ran across a group of boisterous demonstrators.

Many carried black signs bearing pink triangles--the symbol of Nazi oppression of homosexuals--and the words “SILENCE = DEATH.” Others dramatized their rage at the slow testing of potential drugs for acquired immune deficiency syndrome by “hanging” an effigy of U. S. Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Frank Young. A handful blocked traffic on lower Broadway and were arrested.

“ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS!” the 250 men and women shouted. “ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS!”

“That night, when I turned on the TV, I was blown away by how they were able to transmit their anger to an entire nation,” said Staley, diagnosed with an AIDS-related condition in 1985. “I decided that these were my people.”

That was two years ago. Staley, 28, since has left Wall Street to become the unpaid fund-raising chairman of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a burgeoning alliance of elite professionals and street activists “united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”

The group includes art directors who design eye-catching posters, television producers who teach demonstrators to talk in “sound bites” and lawyers who defend group members arrested for acts of civil disobedience. There is even a pharmaceutical chemist, Dr. Iris Long, who critically analyzes research protocols for clinical trials of experimental drugs.

Taking Fight to Streets

At a time when other AIDS groups lobby quietly behind the scenes or tend to dying patients, ACT UP is taking the AIDS battle into the streets. Its members say they are fed up with a system they are convinced is not doing all it can to prevent the carnage.

Its activities range from guerrilla theater--tossing condoms at officials who oppose safe-sex education, say, or staging “die-ins” at offices of companies making exorbitant priced drugs--to elaborately choreographed acts of civil disobedience like last week’s siege of New York’s City Hall, where 200 were arrested.

ACT UP has supporters and detractors among other AIDS activist groups and the public. Critics say its tactics may do as much harm as good by alienating people.

“We are not out to make friends,” Staley said. “We are out to shame people into action.”

As the movement has grown, it has come to encompass women, blacks and Latinos, as well as the gay white men who launched the group two years ago. “We have tapped into the fear, anger and grief surrounding the epidemic, and have turned it into action,” said Avram Finkelstein, the art director who designed ACT UP’s SILENCE = DEATH logo.

Life-and-Death Stakes

It is as if the passion and activism of the ‘60s have been updated for the careerist and entrepreneurial decade of the ‘80s. And it all comes with an intensity of energy that could only be justified by the life-or-death stakes.

“I am getting tired of candlelight vigils when, in fact, blow torches may be necessary,” said Mark Sikorowski, 37, a managing partner of a New York design firm. Actually, while ACT UP members court arrest, the group eschews violence, preferring nonviolent civil disobedience in the Gandhi tradition.

Before last week’s demonstration in New York, its biggest action occurred in October, when demonstrators surrounded and shut the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Md., and 187 people were arrested.

Born, appropriately, in New York City, ACT UP now has chapters in two dozen cities and perhaps 5,000 adherents who regularly attend meetings and take part in its actions.

Trying to Change System

“We come from the system that we are trying to change,” explained Ken Woodard, an art director for DDB Needham Worldwide who designs advertisements for Volkswagen and Seagrams by day and for ACT UP by night.

Though of the system, ACT UP’s members work within and outside the system to achieve group goals. ACT UP’s initial goal was to increase availability of experimental treatments to people with AIDS and those infected with the virus. More recently, the group has sought better prevention and treatment services from cities like New York.

Woodard’s latest creation for ACT UP, which ran as a full-page ad in last week’s Village Voice, is an arresting portrait of New York Mayor Edward I. Koch in front of a sea of graves. “What does Koch plan to do about AIDS?” the ad asks. “Invest in marble and granite.”

Koch has drawn the activists’ ire for refusing to meet with them in the epidemic’s early years and for presiding over a crumbling health-care system in which patients must sometimes wait days for a bed in overcrowded hospitals.

Impact of the Group

While ACT UP has been unable to bring forth a cure for AIDS, whose death toll is approaching 50,000 in this country, some of its chapters around the country have started to have an impact:

-- In Los Angeles, the County Board of Supervisors voted to speed creation of a 20-bed AIDS ward at County-USC Medical Center after ACT UP staged a seven-day, around-the-clock vigil at the hospital.

-- In San Francisco, producers of the television drama “Midnight Caller” revised a script after ACT UP disrupted filming an episode that activists claimed would incite violence against gays.

-- In Boston, the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. reversed its policy and began paying for treatments of aerosol pentamidine to prevent pneumocystis pneumonia, the biggest killer of AIDS patients, after ACT UP members blocked an entrance at the insurer’s headquarters.

-- And in New York, a sit-in at the offices of a Japanese pharmaceutical firm ensured that supplies of a potentially promising anti-viral drug sold over the counter in Japan would continue to flow to the U.S. The group’s ubiquitous posters and stickers have also forced into the public consciousness an epidemic that most New Yorkers would rather not think about.

Altered AIDS Debate

Perhaps more importantly, ACT UP has helped to alter terms of the national debate on AIDS. “We have refocused the discussion to the rights of people with AIDS to gain access to drugs and decent health care,” said Ann Northrop, a former CBS News producer and ACT UP member who trains fellow activists to deliver pithy sound bites.

Indeed, earlier this year, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute on Allergies and Infectious Diseases, took the unprecedented step of publicly urging the FDA to ease its restrictions on a pair of drugs that appear to prevent AIDS patients from going blind.

“You had Tony Fauci, the nation’s top AIDS official, sounding like ACT UP,” said Steve Morin, an aide to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

The FDA has also unveiled reforms aimed at speeding drugs to critically ill patients, though activists claim the changes are largely cosmetic.

Though mainstream AIDS groups sometimes cringe at ACT UP’s confrontational tactics, especially its penchant for personal attacks, they generally support it.

“The people with the power to change things must be made to know the extent of the anger and sadness and frustration,” said Dr. Mathilde Krim, the founding chair of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. “In a democracy, it is almost a necessity, a duty, to speak out.”

‘Rocks the Boat’

Urvashi Vaid, communications director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, added: “There’s a certain complacency that sets in as the epidemic drones on and on. ACT UP rocks the boat, and that is good. But tactics that confront and provoke can alienate too.”

FDA chief Young--who was hanged in effigy at ACT UP’s first rally two years ago--has mixed feelings about the group. “On one hand, seeing demonstrators can make people realize some of the deep, deep concerns,” he said. “I worry, on the other hand, that scientific decisions won’t be made objectively if they are subjected to political pressure. And that might slow things down.”

Still, he said, he fully understands the demands of AIDS patients and people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus for access to experimental drugs. “I had a melanoma myself. If it ever mestatasizes (spreads), do I want to have access to experimental drugs? Yes.”

ACT UP traces its roots to March 10, 1987, when playwright and activist Larry Kramer delivered a fiery speech to about 70 people at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center as part of its monthly speakers series. He had long felt that the gay community’s political energy was being sapped by grief and denial. His goal was to shatter denial about with the magnitude of the epidemic--with a sledgehammer, if necessary.

“Two-thirds of this room could be dead within five years,” Kramer thundered. “How many dead brothers have to be piled up in front of your faces in a heap before you learn to fight back and scream and yell and demand and take some responsibility for your own lifes?”

Politicized Gay Men

While Kramer supplied the rhetoric, art director Finkelstein had begun a separate effort to politicize gay men using visual imagery. He and a group of five friends came up with the idea of using the pink triangle, which homosexuals were forced to wear in Hitler’s concentration camps, over the words SILENCE = DEATH.

When Finkelstein’s group learned about ACT UP, the two groups joined forces. ACT UP printed 1,000 SILENCE = DEATH buttons for $160 and sold them for $1 apiece, clearing an $840 profit, “enough to finance a good-sized demo,” Finkelstein noted with satisfaction.

“The logo has turned out to be quite marketable,” said Staley, the former Wall Street bond trader. “We’ve put it on T-shirts, sweat shirts and, now, tank tops.”

Staley has used his financial acumen to build ACT UP into a $300,000 a year group, deriving roughly equal amounts from merchandising, direct mail and benefits and foundation grants.

More New Members

The group is constantly renewing itself with new members. In New York, about 4,000 people are on ACT UP’s mailing list and 300 to 400 attend its weekly meetings, where chaos often reigns; ACT UP has no president or board of directors and tries to operate by consensus.

Meeting are sometimes punctuated by the announcement that a member has died, reminding people why they are there.

“I am HIV-positive,” said Gregg Bordowitz, who trains ACT UP members for civil disobedience, “and I feel, very simply, that a war is being played out in my body.

“One of the ways I can wrest power from that situation is to literally put my body on the line, to be arrested. So let them drag me through the streets, take my fingerprints, put me in court. Because I am not going away.”