In This Broadcast

“If we don’t get our act together, we are as good as dead.”

By the early 1980s, Larry Kramer had become an unlikely revolutionary. Once a novelist and playwright embedded in the social world of Fire Island, Kramer was thrust into activism as friends and lovers began dying from a disease no one in power seemed willing to confront. His fury made him polarizing, but impossible to ignore.

In March of 1987, a single speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center ignited the formation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—ACT UP. Through their “zaps”, ACT UP forced real, measurable change in drug access, clinical trials, and AIDS research, and their message was simple and relentless: We are dying. Do something.

ACT UP left behind an enduring legacy. Its tactics reshaped patient advocacy forever, its imagery became a global symbol, and its insistence that affected communities deserve a seat at the table changed medicine itself. ACT UP is a successful case study for the effectiveness of advocacy-based activism, and as Dr. Fauci later put it, “American medicine exists in two eras: before Larry Kramer, and after.”

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Content Warnings:

This episode discusses illness, death, medical neglect, homophobia, transphobia, and the AIDS crisis, as well as the brief use of a (reclaimed) gay slur to refer to Larry Kramer’s novel by name. Listener discretion advised.