The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. The project is coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, with principal camera work by James Wentzy (and additional camerawork in California by S. Leo Chiang and Tracy Wares and in London by Souleyman Messalti.)
ACT UP, founded in March of 1987, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Its determined advocacy and highly-focused demonstrations supported by innovative graphics utterly changed the world’s perception of people with AIDS and queer people. It radically altered the medical research and drug approval processes in the United States, and the doctor/patient relationship, while its 4-year campaign to change the CDC definition of AIDS to include opportunistic infections affecting women and injection drug users saved millions of lives across the world. The Latina/o Caucus fostered not only AIDS Activism, but also jump started LGBT activism in Puerto Rico. For that reason and many others, we’re delighted that we could include the Latina/o Caucus Archive, a mixed media archive developed by Julián de Mayo and sourced largely from the personal collections of surviving members of the LC.
The ACT UP Oral History Project makes evident the full, diverse, richly-multifaceted history of the organization. We want to disseminate this information as widely as possible, to foster study, research and discussion of ACT UP’s legacy in order to promote greater civic engagement based on that legacy and to present comprehensive, complex, human, collective and individual portraits of the people who have made up ACT UP/New York. These men and women of all races and classes have transformed entrenched cultural ideas about homosexuality, sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art, media, and the rights of patients. They have achieved concrete changes in medical and scientific research, insurance, law, health care delivery, graphic design, and introduced new and effective methods for political organizing. These interviews reveal what motivated them to act and how they have organized these complex endeavors. We hope that this information will de-mystify the process of making social change, remind us that change can be made, and help us understand how to do it. (ACT UP continues to fight to end the AIDS epidemic. For more information on ACT UP's current activities, see their websites www.actupny.com and www.actupny.org.)
This project is designed to remind us that ordinary people can change the world and to explore and make known exactly how they did it.
