This Country Is Still That Country

Some Lessons I Learned From ACT UP That Have Stood The Test Of Time.

For the last few months as readers of this blog know, I have been reading blog drafts from my old blogs as a part of researching my own past. I came across a fragment that stayed with me from a 2008 New Dramatists fundraiser for my friend the playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, who had broken his clavicle.

Jorge and I had met 18 years before that on the media committee for ACT UP San Francisco. This was in 1989, 1990, when we were both in our first years out of college. I was charmed to be reminded that I met the late great Jose Esteban Muñoz at that fundraiser because he was selling the jello shots for Jorge. And so it is a good thing I am not above a jello shot.

This sentence from the draft post caught my attention and stayed with me.

Jorge and I reminisced a bit about memorizing sound bites for when we got arrested at protests, so that we could shout them at the cameras if reporters showed up while the police dragged us away.

When I reached out to Jorge to confirm this, he told me it was a standard ACT UP media committee procedure back then. And I can see at this distance it was a way of turning any arrest into a press conference, basically. As activists, you might not get attendance from journalists at a press conference but you might get journalists at an action.

An action is meant to surprise someone with the message you are bringing, someone who is not yet on your side. The ways to do this are endless and are not confined to street actions which might even be a small audience. Doing this meant getting the message out to that larger audience, available through the journalist. You are trying to get the message in front of as many eyes as you can. This can mean anything from a sticker, a slogan painted on a wall that is not easily washed off, a chant with a rhyme or meter that hits, memorized in an instant. Or talking points shouted at a reporter as you’re arrested.

Photo of me and my friend Ggreg Taylor at an ACT UP SF action in 1990, taken by Marc Geller

And so it had me in mind of what I taught myself back then, and what I was taught by other members. As I thought about what could possibly be helpful this week, here is my list. Much of this is perhaps familiar to folks with direct action organizing experience but there’s always someone who hasn’t seen it. I’m going to ask other activists about their experiences as well. Please add any thoughts you have in the comments.

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• This is almost never said when I read about protests, which have been demeaned in general for the last decade, but protests are expressions of love, of community care, of education. They are the way a community can assert values and demand change and accountability.

• I have met some of the best people at protests. They are not mixers, but it is a great place to meet friends and lovers who share your values and ideas.

• If you thought of an idea for a protest action or a community action and you want to see it happen, congratulations, your new job is to find the people who can help you, in the group and outside of it.

• Open up your sense of what a leader looks like to include both yourself and people unlike you, so that you do not ignore the leadership you need for it being unfamiliar—your own or someone else’s.  

• You may feel unprepared, or like maybe you have had no education in this community work when you join it, and yet you are capable of doing more than you know, and that will be true as long as you live—learn to have faith in that.

• The bitterness you will encounter in others was most likely once the enthusiasm you feel now. Try to have compassion for those who feel it, which will be practice for when you will need to find compassion for yourself when those feelings come for you.

• The radical and the liberal. when each thinks they do not need the other, the work usually falls apart and the conservative usually wins. The conservative only needs the liberal as a kind of patsy, branding them a radical as soon as they are not needed.

• There is a violence directed against you when the state does not see you as fully human that begins with the knowledge that this status has been conferred. Do not underestimate then the power of that which returns to you your sense of your humanity and that of others.

• If you have never tested the extent of the rights you have as an American citizen, you will be surprised at how often they are offered as a bargain, conditional in ways you never knew.

• Ideology used in the place of science to make public health decisions is state-sponsored assault, even murder, and calling it misguided or misinformed covers up for that violence.

• Make time to dance. To sing. To do it with others. Feel yourself in your body, feel your voice. The catharsis of dancing after an action reminded me of why I did it.

• You will have to rely on support networks that are often easily compromised and yet that is might be all you have. 

• An organized community can do what a government won’t and can even force the government to act. And no elections have to be held to have that happen. 

• Electoral politics are activism also. As many have pointed out over the years, this seems to be something the American Right understands better than the American Left.

• Burnout is high, and before it comes for you, you will be tempted to judge others as weak for ‘giving up,’ when in fact they have most likely exhausted themselves in the ways you are about to, if you do not take care of yourself in the ways they did not. This makes intergenerational conversations about that burnout and the stories of activists critical to the life of movements as well as the lives of those in those movements.

• Amid all the heartbreak and the destruction of what you love, the solidarity you find with others is either fleeting or forever and there’s no way to know it at the time. But it matters all the same.

• The great Dorothy Allison, who died this last week, described the next one well: “Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.” There is a loneliness to trying to belong to the American status quo that comes from how no one ever belongs, you can only try until you fail the tests put to would-be members through rituals of submission, self-censorship and violence.

And then the last one is perhaps the most important.

• If  you are someone from a privileged background, you are likely used to people responding to you being upset and acting to make you happy right away. I suspect this is why so many people post terrible news on social media expecting someone to act, as if that knowledge is enough. But bad news without an action freezes people instead of getting them to act, as Mariame Kaba has noted. People who are used to being pleased by their families, their government, their workplace, they may then be in some shock the first few times someone determines them to be outside of the protected status they had before this, and as a result, doesn’t do as asked. And so these former protectors may now ignore them or hurt them, targeting them the way they do everyone else who they have harmed or who they have determined is only an obstacle. If this is you, this will require you to build up the stamina to belong to a movement. If you don’t build up that stamina, you will slide back over the wall you climbed to escape and vanish back into the status quo, determined to protect it, because your perceived powerlessness terrified you. This will not be harmless, either, and may cause considerable damage.

These have helped me at surprising times over the years and have left me with some confidence in the difficult times that followed.

This last election was difficult to take. There’s still votes being counted in the House races and Senate races and there is still a slender chance of saving the control over the House from falling to Trump. Those races need your help. Do what you can while you can, as control over the House is a strong hope of slowing what’s coming. Many states are still curing ballots and need volunteers. Many lives hang in the balance as the human cost of Project 2025 comes further into focus.

Also? Please check out these bill put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders to stop arms shipments to Israel and call your senator to ask them to support them.

And call your representatives in the House about this bill, which is to be voted on this Tuesday in the House and would allow the secretary of the Treasury Department to “unilaterally revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit group they determine to be a ‘terrorist supporting organization.’” Many civil rights groups have already opposed it but your reps still need to hear from you, and after all of the text messages, it is time to message back.