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This chapter demonstrates how ACT UP created a supportive queer community for people infected by HIV, as well as how the group changed the nation's response to the AIDS crisis. Through its art and actions, ACT UP developed an oppositional understanding of AIDS that rejected homophobia and sexual shame and instead called for universal health care and sexual privacy as human rights. Unlike MFY or NCNW, ACT UP generated a community based on affiliation, shared consciousness, and desire. ACT UP members embraced a fluid rather than fixed sexual identity, embracing the term “queer” to signify their rejection of normative sexuality, jettisoning binary understandings of sex and gender.

Although AIDS direct action is generally described as beginning with ACT UP, it first developed as activists drew tactics and ideas from Central American solidarity and the anti-nuclear movement. Anti-militarism catalyzed AIDS direct action in the Bay Area; its influences appeared in 1984, took on force in 1986, and by 1987 shaped national networks of AIDS activism. The groups Citizens for Medical Justice and the AIDS Action Pledge paved the way for the formation of ACT UP/San Francisco and Stop AIDS Now Or Else. AIDS direct action stood as the culmination of the gay and lesbian left even as it marked the start of a new queer politics. However, these radical genealogies were obscured with the deaths of many activists.

This chapter explores coalition between two reproductive rights activist groups—ACT UP and WHAM!. The two work for improved prevention and treatment for HIV/AIDS, and support women's rights to bodily autonomy. In the early 1990s, Operation Rescue and other antiabortion groups barricaded women's health clinics in often successful attempts to close them. Just as ACT UP had rejected sexual shame in relation to the AIDS epidemic, WHAM! protested that women should not be made to feel ashamed for expressing their sexuality and controlling their reproduction, including via abortion. Through their demonstrations, WHAM! illustrated a different model for thinking about reproductive rights as a necessary part of health care for women and of access to high-quality health care as a human right.

The historical narrative of the book starts in this chapter through a recap of the primary events in LGBTQ movement history in the United States leading up to the 1990s. The origin of the concept of ‘homosexuals’ in the medical research of the late 1890s, the firing of lesbians and gays during the Cold War for fears of communist association, the founding of Mattachine society, the development of distinctive lesbian and gay subcultures and urban communities in the 1970s, and the rise of AIDS and the LGBTQ community’s response in the form of ACT-UP in the 1980s are all discussed. ACT-UP’s response to the crisis proved to decisive turning-point in LGBTQ history. The chapter ends by presenting data showing that, by targeting the national news media, ACT-UP normalized media coverage of AIDS and LGBTQ issues, leading to increases in coming out.

This introductory chapter explains how social activism in New York has been able to appropriate new meaning to the city's landmarks, specifically the joint protest of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Women's Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) against a domestic ban on abortion, held on top of the Statue of Liberty. By selecting the Statue of Liberty as the site of their protest, these activists ensured that Americans would rapidly understand the connection they were drawing between individual freedom, misunderstandings of American exceptionalism, as well as women's reproductive autonomy. In relation to this, New York's many landmarks gave a range of unique venues for activism. Demonstrations, marches, strikes, acts of civil disobedience, and even poster campaigns provided global reach as print, broadcast, and online media inform the greater public.

Shilts steps out as a spokesman against gay bathhouses, admitting he once patronized them himself. ACT-UP members focus their vitriol on Shilts, Shilts turns his criticism on ACT-UP tactics. Although tapped to host a public television special, “Wrestling with AIDS,” Shilts ends a prolific year of writing about AIDS by announcing he was leaving the beat at the start of 1990. Shilts criticizes “lavender fascists” involved with the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association. Shilts states opposition to outing unless under specific circumstances. Shilts keeps focus on elimination promiscuous sexual contact among gay men as a means to stop AIDS crisis.

Chapter 7 develops a case study of The New Mutants (1984), analyzing how in the late 1980s the series reinvented the trope of demonic possession as a metaphor for American historical atrocities—including Native American genocide, slavery, and imperialism—simultaneously reframing the superhero’s body as a map of the violence inflicted upon those excluded from the dominant narratives of American historical progress. Facing the demonic avatars of their individual histories as a collective force, the group’s members offered a novel conception of the superhero not as crime-fighter or icon of identity politics, but as a vehicle for forging political alliances across multiple axes of difference and diverse spiritual and ethical worldviews. Rather than depict a utopian mutant kinship based on shared genetic difference, The New Mutants presented its young characters in debate over the meaning and purpose of hero work, interpretations of the historical past, and multiple loyalties to kind and kin. It modeled a form of democratic practice between diverse superhuman characters that echoed the radical politics of contemporaneous social movements like ACT UP and early third wave feminism by presenting racial, sexual, and gender identities as flexible categories of affiliation open to rearticulation, rather than fixed biological realities.

Narratives of the LGBT past have been constrained by exceptionalist narratives of Stonewall, the 1960s, and ACT UP. These narratives describe gay and lesbian radicalism as disappearing soon after 1969 and obscure the genealogies that fostered AIDS activism. The history of the gay and lesbian left counters these narratives, showing that across the 1970s and 1980s, radicals pursued an interconnected politics in which sexual liberation was the theory and radical solidarity the practice. Gay and lesbian leftists drew anti-imperialism from Black radicalism and the anti-war movement, engaged socialist and women of color feminisms, and redefined queer community by tying it to Central American solidarity. By the end of the Cold War these influences proved central to direct action against AIDS.

Shilts is elevated as the closing speaker for the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal, Canada in June 1989. Despite the esteem of the speech invitation, members of ACT-UP and others interrupt his remarks with heckles. The contrast of the prestigious speaking engagement contrasted to the simmering feelings of resentment and anger toward Shilts and his writing on/about HIV and AIDS is on full display. This conflict is symbolic of Shilts’s entire career where great honor and respect often resided alongside great scorn and vitriol. The complexity of Shilts’s attempt to be an openly gay reporter writing for a mainstream newspaper about gay subjects presents a need to more fully consider Shilts’s understanding of the societal or cultural role of the journalist.

Clark meditates on the Spanish artist’s “unsparing vision of the degradation of humanity.” Clark not only revisits the images of humiliation, torture, and horror that engraved in this series, he asks what it means to “think Goya” today, a Goya who “imagines the worst and dwells with it.” Clark not only looks at the artist’s images but reads them, including the simple but arresting caption about seeing that Goya affixes to the engravings: “I saw it” (Yo lo vi). Clark’s Goya is the artist who not only confronts us with a horror to behold but who demands that we tarry uncomfortably with the images we behold and with the act of beholding. Clark concludes with a reflection on the notion of the political funeral of ACT UP as a form of mobilization profoundly proximate to the kind of thinking that Goya allows.

Shilts joins The San Francisco Chronicle as its first openly gay reporter on the newsroom staff. Hired to cover the “gay beat” in San Francisco, Shilts also is given general assignment stories. Shilts coordinates Chronicle coverage of the deadly October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Newsroom colleagues overcome suspicions of the new “gay reporter” as Shilts lobbies publishers for non-discrimination policies and domestic partner benefits. Shilts picks up on rumors of a “gay cancer” affecting gay men in the Castro district. Reporting includes very first stories attempting to link exotic immune system related diseases with homosexual men in San Francisco and elsewhere. Shilts is becomes convinced the AIDS story is a major story and devotes himself nearly full-time to the subject.