Read: ‘The disease of the century’: reporting on the origin of AIDSĪmid a growing calamity, queer communities had to fend for themselves to ensure their survival. It was commonly dubbed “gay cancer” and “gay plague” at a time when sexual minorities faced vicious forms of legal discrimination and extralegal violence. Although by 1987 the modes of HIV transmission had been properly identified-and the initial medical designation gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) had officially been changed to acquired immune deficiency syndrome-AIDS was still widely believed to be a gay disease. Their illness and death were shrouded in shame and sensational media coverage. From 1981, when the disease was first reported in the national press (though undiagnosed cases likely existed even earlier), to 1987, the year ACT UP was founded, thousands of Americans had died of AIDS-related complications. Abandoned by their families, government, and society, they joined together and forced our country to change against its will.” These activists’ work saved-and will continue to save-countless lives, she writes, even if many of them lost their own lives to AIDS: “The dead and the living ultimately transformed the crisis.”Īs Schulman emphasizes, ACT UP was born out of dire emergency. The history of ACT UP, Schulman writes in the book’s introduction, “is the story of a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments.

The result is an expansive portrait of the people, principles, and campaigns that made ACT UP the most formidable political organization to emerge from the AIDS crisis. Her voice and those of a chorus of activists cohere in the book, which draws both on her experience as a veteran of the political-action group and from lengthy interviews she conducted with nearly 200 other members. In writing Let the Record Show, published earlier this year, Schulman has orchestrated a people’s history of ACT UP New York. For an outstanding chronicle of the early years of AIDS activism, look no further than Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, which is also an exemplary model for telling a more complete story of a political movement.

Let the record show book