Documentaries about ACT UP

Fortunately for us, for you, for the gay and lesbian community, and for posterity, ACT UP is becoming well documented.

1. Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP (little known; James Wentzy, November 2002). DVD; online at Vimeo

2. Sex in an Epidemic (Jean Carlomusto, 2010). DVD; at the library

3. How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012; q.v.). DVD; at the library

4. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Jim Hubbard, 2012; q.v.). (Coming to the library)

The latter three can be watched at various online services, sometimes even Netflix. There is of course also the ACT UP Oral History Project, whose choice of formats ensures it will not last. You’d best mirror that site every month until it disappears (which it will).

Also of interest

• Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too (1993)

• Interview with Avram Finkelstein about the origin of the SILENCE = DEATH poster (q.v.)

We need this documentation

We need documentation of ACT UP because the following is happening and will continue: Genderqueers and trannies literally rewrite our history so we never existed, further lying that we were RAYSISS and cissexist. (We didn’t exist and we were deficient.) They lie that everything we accomplished matters nil because not enough of us were men with vaginas or nonwhites. ACT UP is the important gay and lesbian achievement following Stonewall – an event that was not led by transgenders, people of colour, women of colour, or transgenders of colour – and the truth must be preserved even in the face of queers’ and transgenders’ supremacist movement to wipe us out.