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Alix's avatar

Thank you for this. I’d be grateful if you could share some thoughts about doing organizing work with and for people who live with illness that can sometimes preclude their presence in public spaces. I wonder how ACT UP structured organizing and labor around disability as the AIDS crisis progressed. As we have lived through a pandemic and mass disabling event, there is huge, mostly unacknowledged wreckage in the wake. I have community that is immunocompromised from long covid and unable to get their bodies to protests and actions, but whose interests are more at stake than ever. So I’m just curious to think this through with a lens from past movements.

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Colleen Higgs's avatar

So much to think about in this post, loved this bit. "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. "

Made me think that as ordinary people we perhaps have more power to shape the narrative around us by being focused and active rather than responding to what comes at us. The results of the US election made me feel sick to my stomach, but we have to get up and act up again. From Cape Town, South Africa

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