Re: Fw from David McR: "How to survive a plague"

 I want to add my words of respect for the folks who were the ACT UP activists and thinkers.  They were an amazing bunch.  I knew, and still know, some of them, as well as the equally amazing drug user activists of New York and many other places around the world. 

They have accomplished amazing things.

And some of them who have survived and have not turned away from the movement still keep on accomplishing amazing things.

I am less optimistic than David about the future of AIDS.  We do have wonderful technical tools, but the political and economic systems have proven (often against their leaders' wishes) effective at keeping them out of the hands of those who need them, not just in Africa, but in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and East Asia. And increasingly in South Asia.  

And the looming crises of global warming and continued economic retrenchment mean that even optimists agree we could snatch defeat out of the proverbial jaws of victory.

But thank you, David, for your always warm and human words for many friends of mine, many now unfortunately passed much too young

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Hunter Gray <[email protected]>
To: Bear Without Borders <[email protected]>
Cc: Redbadbear <[email protected]>; SycamoreCanyon <[email protected]>; marxist <[email protected]>
Sent: Thu, Mar 28, 2013 6:40 am
Subject: [marxist] Fw from David McR: "How to survive a plague"


  
    
                  

 
 
----- Original Message ----- 

From: David McReynolds 
To: [email protected] ; [email protected] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 11:12 PM
Subject: "How to survive a plague"



EdgeLeft - an occasional column
by David McReynolds

Review of "How to Survive a Plague"

Clancy Sigal's advice to me is to keep it short. - a skill he has mastered and I've not.
This is a quick review of the film (now on DVD) How To Survive a Plague, largely the
story of ACT UP. As short as I can make it, but still too long.

As films go, this feels almost like a "rough draft" of a documentary, but how could it
be otherwise? The technical limitations of this short documentary are overwhelmed
by a remarkable story, one that makes the film worth watching by anyone concerned
with social change. The producers had to hunt for bits and pieces of film over a period
of years - this was not a film which had been assigned a staff photographer to follow
events.

I've said to friends that if I were ten years younger I'd have been dead long ago - but
when AIDS was given a name, in 1982, I was already 53. It wasn't just a "gay disease"
- it was almost entirely a disease of the youth. It's first name was GRID  - gay related immune
deficiency - and even, when given a name a year later, no one had any idea what caused
it. Panic spread slowly. Rock Hudson's death gave the disease a public face, but
took us no closer to the cause.

My local bar - once probably the best gay bar in New York, right on my corner, at Fourth St.
and Second Ave - slowly emptied out. Bob, the sweet young bartender fell ill, and then
fell dead. Bar traffic slowed, as if perhaps breathing the same air would transmit
the disease.

By 1987 ACT UP was formed.  It had the enormous energy of youth. Watching this film
reminded me, again, of why the young are almost always the cutting edge of social change.
They are not always right - ACT UP made more than its share of errors, suffered the almost
inevitable splits - but to watch this film is to see young men and women, frightened by the death which was marching straight toward them, organize and act. And to act with imagination
and love - in things such as the moving "quilt" project.

They provided the peoplepower for major political demonstrations, but they did much more than that - they studied the disease, they examined alternative treatments, and methods for running trials that would speed up the information on what might work. In the end they cooperated with the scientists in finding the answer.

And that answer was not easy to find. The AIDS virus is remarkably tricky, defeating it
was an incredibly complex task. It was, for the men and women in ACT UP, a race against
time. 

Watching the film I felt a sense of guilt that I had not been more involved. AIDS, even though we didn't know its cause, was around me. A neighbor who lived a floor above me came down with it, and while I was able to visit him at first, simply walking into his room,(he had Kaposi's Syndrome) when he was taken to the hospital his room was guarded as if a particle of the disease might escape. One had to put on gloves, mask, a gown before going in, and they were taken off and destroyed when you left his room.

All of us have sins of omission, I won't belabor mine. I write this brief review because the 
beautiful young men and women in this film, so vital, so very young, so fierce in their
struggle, and most of them now dead, succeeded in pushing until the labs delivered the
drugs which have made it possible to defeat AIDS. It isn't, of course, defeated, not here
(where unsafe sex is sometimes seen as exciting), much less in Africa. But because of
ACT UP we have the means.  The film was made in 2012, is 1 hour and 49 minutes. You
can get it from Netflix.

- 30 -

(David McReynolds worked for many years for the War Resisters League and has been active in the Socialist Party.
Retired, he lives on the lower east side. He can be reached at: [email protected])