Subject: AIDS Activist Group Harasses and Provokes To Make Its Point Date: Published: 12/7/89 (281 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Shock Troops: AIDS Activist Group Harasses and Provokes To Make Its Point --- `Act-Up,' Gay and Yuppie, Uses Raids, Phone `Zaps' To Spotlight Health Crisis --- Intruders at Stock Exchange ---- By Cynthia Crossen Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal One morning last April, four clean-cut young men in business suits -- shock troops in America's newest radical movement -- walked into the North Carolina headquarters of the Burroughs Wellcome Co. and chained themselves to a radiator. The men had moved unchallenged through the front door and up to the third floor, where they ejected the startled occupant of an executive office and sealed the doors with metal plates and a high-powered drill. Outside, a cohort dialed the Associated Press and announced the news: Burroughs Wellcome, he declared, had been raided by Act-Up. This is civil disobedience for our times. Members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or Act-Up, look like Yuppies, act like Yippies and play the media like accomplished pols. Largely homosexual middle-class professionals, their clean-cut looks and natty attire gain them entry to the halls of government, finance and religion, where they halt the proceedings by shouting, playing dead or handcuffing themselves to a fixture. Their angry, and often overly zealous, mission: To force people to confront the AIDS crisis, and help get drugs for those dying of the affliction. "Most people have a hard time facing what's going on with AIDS because it brings up so many scary, personal issues," says Tom Cunningham, Act-Up's administrator. "If Act-Up doesn't keep screaming it, no one will hear." While Act-Up follows in the tradition of many militant social movements -- pushing the rules and forcing confrontation -- it has also grown into something much more. In just two and a half years, it has transformed itself from a small hit squad of angry men to a guerrilla army with real political clout. Its New York chapter has spawned some 40 AIDS activist groups throughout the U. S. and abroad. Act-Up's mail-order business -- posters and T-shirts promoting the cause -- brings in $150,000 a year, and helps feed an annual budget of more than $500,000. The group has a slick direct-mail fund-raising campaign; its copying and fax machines are rarely still. The results of this labor are abundantly apparent. On the streets of New York, it is virtually impossible to miss Act-Up's militant message: "Silence=Death," it reads, urging those who have ignored the AIDS crisis, or been cowed by it, to speak out. The slogan -- pasted over subway advertisements, slapped on the sides of mailboxes, affixed to the screens of automatic teller machines -- intrudes, provokes and disturbs. The group seeks to shock. "Queers Read This," one recruiting poster demands. "This is about constantly sticking it in the face of every single person you can stick it in," says Vincent Gagliostro, an artist and chairman of the group's outreach committee. In so doing, the group has gained remarkable influence. Act-Up is partly credited with Burroughs Wellcome's recent decision, under extraordinary pressure, to reduce the price of its anti-AIDS drug, AZT. (The group's occupation of the drug maker's offices was meant to spotlight the pricing controversy, and resulted in the arrest of four.) Act-Up has also met with top executives from Bristol-Myers Co. to discuss that company's AIDS drugs. And, remarkably, members of Act-Up now are invited to sit on some of the government panels they once attacked. Yet the group's methods, often obnoxious, other times downright harassing, have also at times alienated the very people it needs to persuade. "If people who have a good idea spend all their time beating you up, you're going to say, `Why am I going through this?'" says Lee Jones, a spokesman for New York Mayor Ed Koch, one of Act-Up's favorite targets. Adds Pierre Ludington, an organizer with the AIDS Health Project in San Francisco: "They mean well, but they have no finesse. If you confront the wrong person enough times, you're going to lose that person." Especially if the fight gets nasty. The group regularly heckles public figures at gatherings and deluges others with "phone zaps," campaigns in which Act-Up members flood a company or official with calls, often tying up switchboards. Roger Ailes, the political adviser, fell into a shouting match with Act-Up members who disrupted a fund-raising dinner for then-New York mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani. And when Act-Up crossed swords with Stephen Joseph, New York's health commissioner, it sparked a particularly bitter fight. Dr. Joseph incurred the wrath of Act-Up when he proposed that doctors be required to report positive AIDS tests to the state, and later when he reduced the city's estimate of the number of New Yorkers who carry the AIDS virus, a move Act-Up felt would result in less AIDS funding. Act-Up twice staged sit-ins in the bureaucrat's office, and flooded him with phone calls, some of which were obscene and threatening, Dr. Joseph claims. About 75 Act-Up members demonstrated in front of his Manhattan home, while others turned up at his public appearances carrying signs reading, "He's Lying." One especially tenacious demonstrator dogged Dr. Joseph outside a building where the official was about to speak, and finally ended up in the same wedge of revolving door. "I was very angry at some of the stuff they did," says Dr. Joseph, whose estimate of the number of cases of AIDS was later seconded by a panel of researchers and epidemiologists. "Their tactics are often irresponsible, and some of their approaches to drug deregulation are inappropriate." But these activists thrive on the unconventional and irreverent. Like the early feminists or civil-rights activists, who also shook a complacent society, they have concluded that, for them, traditional channels just don't work: To get attention, you sometimes have to grab it. Right or wrong, Act-Up's thesis has hit a chord, not only in the population with AIDS but in the broader homosexual community. In many respects, Act-Up is merely the latest chapter in the political mobilization of the gay community. On many college campuses, and in many cities, homosexual groups can already turn out demonstrations the way civil-rights, anti-war and feminist movements did years ago. Now the community, devastated by the AIDS crisis, has a new focus, passionately pursued by the small but growing cadre at Act-Up. "Act-Up has been my way of taking control of my life away from the AIDS virus," says Peter Staley, a 28-year-old former bond trader, who was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex in 1985. Mr. Staley, now on disability and working full-time for Act-Up, joined the group not long after it formed in 1987. At the time, a few promising AIDS drugs were moving through regulatory channels, but only one, AZT, was on the market. A supply cost about $10,000 a year -- too much for many AIDS sufferers. Mr. Staley was losing patience. All day he sat in the trading room of a large bond house, listening, he says, to his colleagues joke that "those people deserve to die." He realized that, at the rate AIDS research was going, he too would die before a cure was found. So he began attending Act-Up's Monday-night meetings in a converted school auditorium in Greenwich Village, drawing strength from the common concern in the room, and the promise of collective action. Mr. Staley, who grew up on Philadelphia's Main Line, the son of a chemical company executive, would lead the Burroughs Wellcome action, and then, this September, take his battle against the drug maker another step. Hoping to make Burroughs Wellcome a pariah on Wall Street, Mr. Staley planned a demonstration in the sanctum sanctorum of the financial world: the New York Stock Exchange. Act-Up staked out the exchange before the raid, videotaped members' identification badges and had knockoffs produced at a Greenwich Village novelty shop. Then, on Sept. 14, seven well-dressed young men walked through the doors of the exchange and onto the trading floor. Five of them climbed to a balcony where they handcuffed themselves to a chain wrapped around a bannister, sounding air-horns to attract attention. Two others took out cameras, snapped pictures and handed the film to a runner, who sped to the Associated Press. Within an hour, pictures of the event, and of Act-Up's latest publicity coup, were on the wire. "We had a nice couple of minutes while we were standing up there looking at the traders freaking out and screaming," says Mr. Staley. "It was a moment of such sweet revenge for me." While the raid got lots of attention, Act-Up's 2,000 members in New York usually pursue more traditional avenues of public protest: demonstrations or letter-writing campaigns. This Sunday, for example, the group plans to picket St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan over what it feels is discrimination against homosexuals in the Catholic Church. It also plans to continue handing out condoms and safe-sex information outside New York's public high schools. This sort of action has attracted many people like Mr. Staley to Act-Up's weekly meetings. Although the group is still overwhelmingly white, male and homosexual, the gatherings are increasingly heterogeneous. There are lawyers, artists, designers, teachers and writers -- successful men and women at the peak of life. Susan Sarandon, the actress, has attended meetings, as has writer David Leavitt and New York artist Keith Haring. Some members, like Mr. Haring, have AIDS, others have tested positive for the AIDS antibody, but many others don't carry the virus. What these people experience when they meet in Greenwich Village is an almost painfully democratic process. The group doesn't have any official leaders. New initiatives must win the approval of the gatherings, which typically number 450 people. Any member can get an item on the agenda, and any member can speak for or against it. The debaters are eloquent, passionate, smart; the sessions, a mix of townhall meeting and theater. "I would very much like to start a riot," announces one member on a recent Monday night. "Riot is undirected power and energy," responds a man in the audience. "Then a revolution," the first agrees. Another man rises to suggest a way to raise society's consciousness: a "die-in" on Sixth Avenue. Members would stop traffic by lying down and holding up cardboard tombstones. "It's just a simple idea of getting a summons and getting out," he says. But the audience response is lukewarm, and the idea is scrapped. "Sometimes the room will just swallow them whole," says Mr. Cunningham, the administrator who tries to tame the Monday-night agenda. "The room will say, `What is this? You're wasting our time.' After a while, people learn to frame an action, to really bullet those issues." Concedes Mr. Staley: "Nine-tenths of our actions aren't very well targeted. But, so what? If we want to vent our anger, I say, let us. No one dies because of us." The meetings -- and the organization -- bristle with conspiracy theories and paranoia. The enemy is everywhere: Few people in government, business or the media mean well and their actions are almost always driven by malice or greed, or so the conspiracy theories go. "It is clear that billions of dollars of corporate ...funding rest on feeding people with AIDS ...a slow stream of expensive drugs," reads one Act-Up flier. In the "call-to-arms" at the beginning of meetings, a facilitator says, "United in Anger." Explains Mr. Cunningham: "Basically, we're angry against anyone who we think isn't doing everything they can." Drawn by this like-mindedness, it isn't surprising that Act-Up has begun to double as a social outlet, a singles scene where people can flirt, gossip and be entertained. "Lately I've been hearing, `This is boring,' or `This wasn't as much fun as last week,'" says a frustrated Mr. Cunningham. "They're like, `The seats were lousy, the sound was bad and you didn't do your greatest hits.' I say the issues couldn't be more exciting -- sexism, racism, needle exchange, homophobia, homelessness. These are the issues of our day." For all the diversions, however, Act-Up has had a big impact on public awareness of the AIDS crisis. It has become expert on the drug industry and regulatory process, so much so that there are now Act-Up members advising the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health on how and when some AIDS drugs should be tested. "When they were just protesting, they would often make medically or scientifically unreasonable demands," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which conducts most federally sponsored AIDS treatment research. "But over the past year, they've adopted a stance of well-informed, articulate activism. They give us a very good grass-roots perspective of the needs of the community and how what's available can best be applied to the people affected by the epidemic." That expertise has been hit and miss. The group, for instance, has something of a Drug-of-the-Month mentality. It latches onto new formulations with fervor, sometimes dismissing drugs it only recently championed. "We're becoming our own experts, and these are matters of life and death," says Larry Kramer, a playwright and one of ACT-UP's founders. "We have to be careful not to become doctors ourselves. We can push the promising stuff, but always saying, this is experimental." Act-Up's inconsistency, though, is of little concern to those who need the group's advocacy most. Johnny Franklin, a 30-year-old lab technician from Ponca City, Okla., credits the preservation of his eyesight to Act-Up. As Mr. Franklin began going blind as a result of AIDS, a drug that could treat his condition, gancyclovir, was working its way through the approval process at the Food and Drug Administration. Then word got out that the agency was considering a new round of tests, which would have stalled the drug's release. Act-Up and other groups put on the pressure, badgering officials and, in one instance, filling a meeting room with demonstrators. The drug was eventually released without the additional delay. "Without Act-Up, I would have gone blind," says Mr. Franklin. "Act-Up has helped me mentally -- just knowing there are people out there who will go to such extremes to make things happen." [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]