Some, such as author Sara Schulman, blame the problem on the “homocrats” seduced into inaction by Bill Clinton. In the years since the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall in 1994, the split between the gay assimilationists and the queer activists has only grown and grown. The Millennium March illustrated the ways an increasing number of gays have turned their backs on the lessons of AIDS activism, gay liberation and their links with broader social justice movements. And you had to really search to find any mention of AIDS in the march. Queers, who envisioned their movement as a critique of social, sexual, and economic “regimes of the normal” rejected the Millennium March, while mainstream gay groups who sought to portray the gay community as “just like everyone else” turned to corporate sponsorship for the event.
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On one side were queers who sought to link the GLBT movement with broader social justice issues, and on the other were the by now professional bureaucratic cadre of single issue gay assimilationist organizations aspiring for place at the national policy table. The 2000 march didn’t reflect a unifying issue so much as a profound chasm within the movement itself.
Then there was the Millennium March on Washington held on April 30, 2000. The 1979 march, held a decade after Stonewall and within months of the White Night Riots in San Francisco, focused on themes of visibility against homophobia the 1987 march targeted a mounting AIDS crisis and in 1993, gays in the military. Each event marked a dominant issue in the history of the GLBT movement. Before 2000 there had been three national gay and lesbian marches on Washington. As the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement has gained visibility, commercialization threatens wholly to subvert the movement’s substance.Ī case in point was last year’s bland Millennium March on Washington.
Yet, with the health brought by the life saving drugs in 1996, the urgency of the queer social justice activism which made those medications available in the United States became an inconvenience that gay assimilationists, such as Andrew Sullivan, felt privileged to ignore. And battling drug companies was a cornerstone of the group’s work. While Russo did not live to see it, ACT UP spent the next twelve years living up to his words. “After we kick the shit out of this disease I intend to be alive to kick the shit out of this system so that it will never happen again,” Vito Russo, an HIV-positive gay man who unlike Sullivan did not have health insurance, pledged in October 1988. Fighting AIDS meant fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and the lack of access to health care in America.
This meant challenging a system that allowed the AIDS carnage to spread. Before protease inhibitors, gay people with HIV/AIDS were forced to fight for their lives. Protease inhibitors transformed HIV/AIDS from a disease that brought almost certain death within a few years to a possibly chronic disease. The problem was that Sullivan was not alone. And he seemed to be saying now that “I’ve got mine,” the ongoing AIDS epidemic-now predominantly affecting poor people, drug users, minority women, and those in the developing world who cannot afford the life saving drugs-no longer mattered. Sullivan explained that his medications cost his insurance company some $15,600 a year. If ever there was a beneficiary of ACT UP’s work, it was Sullivan, yet on more than one occasion in the mainstream press this gay, HIV-positive man has flaunted his contempt for their legacy. The question was, how had this free-market loving Tory Thatcherite become a spokesman for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement? Sullivan’s cavalier boast neglected the point that ACT UP, the pro-queer AIDS direct action group, had not only spent almost fifteen years fighting to get expedited approval for life saving medications, but had put their bodies on the line to get drug companies to lower prices so people could actually afford them. As one of the most visible gay journalists in the nation, the statement spoke to a core dilemma within a gay and lesbian movement split between gay assimilationists, such as Sullivan, and social justice minded queers. “I’ll say it loud I’ll say it proud: I love drug companies,” HIV-positive Andrew Sullivan recently boasted in The New York Times Magazine. Shepard is a social worker, activist, and author of White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997), and co-editor of From ACT UP to Seattle (Verso, forthcoming).