Sarah Schulman

May 12, 2003 

In June 2001, I was in LA doing a play. One day, driving around in a white rental car, I accidentally tuned in to NPR's commemoration of the 20th anniversary of AIDS. 

"At first America had trouble with People With AIDS," the announcer said. "But they then came around." 

I had long been disheartened by the false AIDS stories told in the few mainstream representations of the crisis. Gay people are alone—hurting each other and causing our own oppression—until benevolent straight people bravely overcome their prejudices to help us. 

Bravo! 

But now, that lie was being extended beyond the arts to actual history. We were being told that AIDS Activism never existed. Instead, the dominant culture simply "came around." 

That is not what happened. I know, I was there. 

As I drove, listening to the radio, I realized that in the years since I had left ACT UP, I had seen no major history of the movement emerge. I had seen no mainstream documentation, and that the knowledge of what we achieved was rapidly fading from public memory. 

Actually, what really took place was this: thousands of people, over many years, dedicated their lives to achieving a cultural and scientific transformation. In other words, a nation that had always hated and humiliated and violated gay people, was forced—against their will—to behave differently than they wished to, because activists intervened and took control of a terrible situation, thereby changing it. 

I know that people with AIDS, are not just gay. But homophobia was the prototype of the oppression that people with AIDS experienced. Active neglect. Cruel exclusion. Dehumanizing abandonment. From friends, family, class, job, race, neighborhood, religion, and country. Now, add history. 

When I came back to NY, I did a quick survey of the academic work that had been done on ACT UP. There was little of it. And what did exist was often paltry, and miscomprehending. When I spoke to some of the researchers, I realized that they did not have adequate raw data from which to understand what had occurred. And that, sadly, many had been trained to not talk to the actual people they were studying in order to find out what those people did. I actually found academic work that used The New York Times as a source about AIDS and ACT UP. It was completely self-defeating. Researchers could not figure out how ACT UP worked, what it did, who was in it (if I saw ACT UP referred to one more time as a white, middle-class, male organization, I was going to lose my mind.) Most importantly, the younger researchers could not conceptualize the level of oppression that we lived with. The cruelty that we were subjected to, and how very, very much alone we were. 

I had to do something to change this. 

I called Jim. 

In 1986 Jim Hubbard and I said to each other "formally inventive gay and lesbian film more accurately evokes our experiences than conventional narrative." So, we founded the Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now in its seventeenth year. We know how to get things done. Jim and I have a successful working relationship because we each operate on the same system. 

I tell him what I am going to do, and then I do it. He tells me what he is going to do and then he does it. It works every time. 

We had dinner and agreed that the situation of unrepresentation for ACT UP NY could not continue. We had the responsibility and the desire to change it. 

We decided to create a raw database of video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York, so that they can say what they experienced and created and how they feel about it. And that in this historical moment, in 2003, when many of us feel that we cannot make change—we can watch people who did make change and find out how it's done. This way, basic information on the many, many areas of activity that made up ACT UP, its structure, strategies, subculture, its emotional style could all be articulated. Researchers and activists interested in vaccine history would be as served as those interested in the history of AIDS prevention for Asian gay men. People interested in AIDS and the Catholic Church would have data, as well as people interested in AIDS and the Black church. The social universe that ACT UP engaged would be cumulatively available to inspire and inform the future. 

We went to Urvashi Vaid, who was a program officer at the Ford Foundation at the time, and she helped us secure our first grant from Ford to start the interviews. They gave us funding for the project, and we started to do the interviews. One by one. This is a long, laborious process—and one of the most fascinating emotional/intellectual experiences I have ever had. It will take us a few years to complete this work, and I look forward to experiencing every step of its growth and development. 

Today, I was looking at one of my most beloved books Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland. The way I was raised to think about the Holocaust: documentation, responsibility, truth-telling, identifying perpetrators, refusing revisionism, remembering the names of the murdered, engaging the consequences of cruelty and abandonment, the mass death experience. All of this legacy is fundamental to my participation in this project. And the energetic willingness of these men and women of ACT UP to give honest, personal, detailed interviews, I think resonates with these themes. 

Here we are. Here's what we did. Here's how. Here's why. In our own words.

Jim Hubbard

This project represents both a continuation and a radical shift of my work as a filmmaker. 

I've been making films since 1974. In 1979, I went with my Super-8 camera to a national conference in Philadelphia to organize the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. At the beginning of the first session, there was a strident and heartfelt 45-minute debate over whether there should be pictures taken at all. On one side were those who felt most strongly the historic nature of the meeting and wanted it documented. On the other side were people who could lose their jobs, their lives or their children if their homosexuality became known. I immediately realized that I had to film people for whom the making of images was a life-or-death issue. I have been filming the queer movement ever since. 

In 1987, ACT UP emerged not only with the determination to end the AIDS crisis through non-violent civil disobedience, but also with a knowledge and understanding of the mass media that enabled a small group of people to utterly change America's view of AIDS. In 8 years, the lesbian and gay movement had gone from deathly fear to master manipulator of the media. ACT UP's remarkable success and its notable failures must be documented, explored and analyzed in all their complexity. 

In late 1988 and early 1989, using a Video-8 camera I had gotten as a grant, I interviewed 7 important members of ACT UP. At that point I had 10 and half hours of videotape and the filmmaker in me said, "How am I ever going to edit all this?" Not recognizing the historical importance of simply recording the thoughts, feelings and insights of people in the moment, I stopped taping and edited the tape. This project serves as a corrective to that early lack of understanding. 

Despite this earlier venture into video, the straightforward videotaping of extended interviews utilizing a tripod-bound camera (although I am shooting with a second, hand-held camera), feels like a sharp departure from my previous work because, except for that one videotape, my work had all been in film, first in Super-8 and then in 16mm. Although I filmed demonstrations and other public events, my primary interest was never in simply documenting those happenings, but in discovering the meaning of people's participation in them. Most strikingly, perhaps, all my celluloid-based films are self-processed, striving for a non-naturalistic beauty and extracting a metaphoric significance from these actions. (See jimhubbardfilms.com for numerous examples of my work.)

The more we do this project, the more important it seems. The people we are talking to did vital work and made this a better country. They are heroes of a war that, as the late Vito Russo said, was invisible to those who weren't fighting and dying in it. The purpose of this project is to ensure that their legacy remains and is properly recognized. 

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer and AIDS historian. Her 20th book, LET THE RECORD SHOW: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993 was published in May 2021 by FSG.

For more information about LET THE RECORD SHOW, see https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374185138

James Wentzy was born October 21, 1952, in Brookings, South Dakota, and moved to New York City after graduating the Southern Illinois University film program in 1976. Early on in his New York life Wentzy worked as a film cinematographer for the porn industry, then later as a printer for various photographers. In 1990 he was diagnosed with HIV. That year he joined ACT UP.

He has been a producer and director for DIVA TV since 1991, and is also a video archivist for the Estate Project's AIDS Activist Video Preservation Project for the New York Public Library. Fight Back, Fight AIDS was his first feature-length documentary.

He served as cinematographer on the 2012 documentary film about ACT UP, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP.