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Last night and this morning the Wendling and I watched How to Survive a Plague, a documentary about AIDS activism in the days before working treatments, and in particular the New York chapter of ACT UP. Basically, those working treatments wouldn't have come as soon as they did, if ever, without a lot of gay men - primarily, but with plenty of honorable exceptions - acting rude and learning a whole lot of science.
Some of those guys were mixing it up with the cops, NIH officials, and presidential candidates. Others were designing drug trials and saying to the scientific community, "Here, this is how you should run the research." Some of the heroes in this story are the scientists who listened. One near-tragedy of the movement was the fault line that developed in the early '90s between its political and technical wings as frustration mounted: in the late eighties a lot of ACT UPpers believed that just one of the dozens of drugs then known would prove to be the magic bullet by 1990.
I don't often cry at movies. Don't blame my Y chromosome, wise guys: my mother doesn't, either. But the footage of the AIDS quilt on the Mall in D.C. did me in. The Wendling asked me why I cried. Part of my explanation was that it's the same reason Aspiring Ex cries at Schindler's List.
I didn't cry about the quilt when it happened, and I might not have cried even if I'd had the hormone levels that I do now. I barely knew a very few angry young gay men, but I didn't feel then as if AIDS was my fight. If I'd gone to college in New York City instead of elsewhere in the state, it might very well have become my fight. It's disorienting to see news footage that I vaguely remember made into history, the history of people with whom I have way more in common than I realized at the time.
Some of those guys were mixing it up with the cops, NIH officials, and presidential candidates. Others were designing drug trials and saying to the scientific community, "Here, this is how you should run the research." Some of the heroes in this story are the scientists who listened. One near-tragedy of the movement was the fault line that developed in the early '90s between its political and technical wings as frustration mounted: in the late eighties a lot of ACT UPpers believed that just one of the dozens of drugs then known would prove to be the magic bullet by 1990.
I don't often cry at movies. Don't blame my Y chromosome, wise guys: my mother doesn't, either. But the footage of the AIDS quilt on the Mall in D.C. did me in. The Wendling asked me why I cried. Part of my explanation was that it's the same reason Aspiring Ex cries at Schindler's List.
I didn't cry about the quilt when it happened, and I might not have cried even if I'd had the hormone levels that I do now. I barely knew a very few angry young gay men, but I didn't feel then as if AIDS was my fight. If I'd gone to college in New York City instead of elsewhere in the state, it might very well have become my fight. It's disorienting to see news footage that I vaguely remember made into history, the history of people with whom I have way more in common than I realized at the time.
