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.
For permission to use any of the ACT UP Oral History interviews and for the proper citation format, please send a message to Sarah Schulman using the Contact form.
For more information about United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, the film directed by Jim Hubbard that uses extensive excerpts from the ACT UP Oral History Project, see www.unitedinanger.com
For more information about Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, Sarah Schulman’s new book based on the ACT UP Oral History Project, see https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374185138
This website was made possible by the generous support of the Red Hot Organization, thanks so much to John Carlin and Donna Matthew and by a donation from Dan Genetti. We received help and support from Visual AIDS thanks to Esther McGowan.
This project is a program of MIX—the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival and has been supported by major grants from the Ford Foundation. We received funding from Ford through the auspices of Urvashi Vaid, Gertrude Fraser, David Winters and Terry McGovern. We also received grants from the Gesso Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Harvard College Library, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the MAC AIDS Fund, the Open Society Foundations, the Robert L. Monette Trust, the James & Ruth Wilder Foundation, the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo and the Phil Zwickler Memorial & Charitable Trust and funding from hundreds of individuals. The project has also been supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. We are also grateful for the generous donations from our dear friends Philip Willkie and the late Larry Kramer.
The original tapes and hard drives of the interviews are preserved at the Harvard University Library.
They can also be accessed at https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/31/resources/6341
