All movements for justice that have participated in direct actions have been maligned. Actions have been called misguided and worse by non-participants. There’s a place and time for righteous criticism but it’s not outside the doors of a movement. It’s inside, with the strategists and actors and real-world risk takers.

The last two days I have been thinking about when ACT UP burst onto the scene. I was young, a teenager, and a huge number of my friends then were gay and artists and musicians and most of them are dead. They died fast and ugly and with lesions and mostly alone. I remember how even hugging my friends in hospitals seemed like an act of resistance. That’s how deep the lies were, the fears.

And I didn’t know how to process so much loss before I was 21, but I do know how nasty the comments were when ACT UP disrupted Wall St trading for the first time in history, when they interrupted the nightly news, when activists got Body Positive naked in Manhattan. And I do know after there at least began to be a public discussion about how to save lives, a conversation that had previously been viciously squashed by the Reagan administration and stigmatized by the wider society. And then public and private funding increased for research. And more people lived. And we stopped having to whisper that someone we loved had AIDS. And there is so much more to do about HIV/AIDS especially for Black people, people living in the Global South and people living in poverty but there was also a beginning and it ACTed the fuck UP and every person in reach of this post who cares about Black lives should too and let the naysayers be damned.

(Photo Credit 1: Naomi Ishisaka / http://ijoarts.com) (Photo Credit 2: Queerty)