[ACT Up D-Day demonstration outside Flinders St Station, 6 June 1991], unidentified photographer,
courtesy Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
So if you’re “lucky” enough to be born hetrosexual, you are part of a class of people who have, on a whole (yes, there’s some MASSIVE exceptions and I wish no ill will or dismissal of their own fights), haven’t really ever had to fight for the existence to live, to fight for your existence to be seen as a human being nor for the right to be treated humanely and compassionately while you’re fighting an aggressive illness that is out of sight, out of mind because you’re just a useless faggot.
With the monkeypox outbreak being just the latest in the line of apocalyptic scenarios that humanity is facing itself in, I wish to discuss and highlight the groundworking work that my gay and lesbian forebears have done with groups such as ACT UP.
To give context, it was the early 1980s and first cases were initially reported in New York City. This is only about 12 years from the infamous Stonewall Riots, which thanks to our forebears, was the catalyst for change in the rights and acceptance of LGBT rights. This is a VERY simplistic view of things, but bare in mind that the 1960s was the decade of flower power which ended in those infamous rights, which while progressed the gay rights movements, it was still “out of sight, out of mind” sort of thing.
In fact, when the amount of cases were simply too much to ignore, society found itself in a catch 22- it’s something that couldn’t be ignored, but yet how does one try to keep it limited to a hated caste of people? Why that’s easy- we shall call it gay cancer or GRID (Gay Related Immunne Deficency.) That ought to do it!
Again this simplifies the situation, but you can make the logical conclusion- with an out of sight, out of mind view and the labeling of the initial disease as gay whatever, there was going to bne that inference that gays are going to hell and why spend money on them? The hatred and homophobia was still there, but there were slow signs that something had to be done.
Again condensing the timeline, we fast forward to 1987 and the founding of ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York- a new famous organisation. They hit the ground running and over the years they did protests from anyone to everyone.
They protested the big pharma companies to make the drugs cheaper- at $10,000 a year who the hell could afford it? And it worked- the fuckers “reduced” the price of the drugs to an “affordable” $6,400! Baby steps I guess?
Over the years they continued to badger and harass. From the United States Postal Service, the Food and Drug Administration, to the church. No one was safe and the activism for change and recognition progressed- after all who doesn’t love a protest involving the covering of a politician's house with a 15 foot condom?
ACT UP eventually kept growing and even had chapters in Australia.
The point of this post is to show that the LGBT has had a history of radical protests and we need that back. We need to go back to being out loud and proud and yelling at the tops of our voices that we demand more- we have TERFs attacking our trans brothers and sisters and a lot of people are keeping quiet.
Well I say fuck that!
We are already turning on people for being bisexual and doing our best to erase their existence because we don’t consider it a valid sexuality- again fuck that! If you’re bisexual, whatever you do and wheover you end up with you’re fucked and not in the good way- if you end up with someone of the same sex you are accused of being gay and if you end up with someone of the opposite sex, you are accused of being part of the heteronormative patriachy! The irony is that by accusing our bisexual brothers and sisters of that, we’re literally being part of the heteronormative patriachy ourselves!
We need to fight and yell and continue to do so- not only for our rights as people, but to support our fellow brothers and sisters in the class struggle against the big business; they’re literally achieving their goals of divide and conquer while we turn on each other for our sexuality, our rights to make money, hell even our rights to withdraw our labor at any time!
We need to learn our lessons from the past , from organisations such as ACT UP in their miltiency to push the fight for our rights going forward. We can learn from Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM); who took the fight for the working class to both the frontlines of the coal mines in Wales while actively shoving it forward and raising money in London; supporting the fight and the existence of their working class cymrody.
And guess what?
When LGSM needed help themselves, the same cymrody turned out for them- they protested out the front of parliament, they marched in the London pride parades and using their numbers, achieved change as part of the Labor party by achieving meaningful policy changes.
I’ll leave you with that to ponder- the need for militancy and to continue to be militant.
I’ll also leave you with some posters from the ACT UP Melbourne chapter.
Sources
Reason in Revolt- Source Documents of Australian Radicalism- https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/biogs/E000731b.htm