00:04:01.880in 1961 in Sacramento, California. I'm a California boy. And my dad worked for Procter
00:04:10.500and Gamble as a plant manager and they would move him from plant to plant around the country.
00:04:16.340I had two older brothers at the time who had already gone through a series of moves. I went
00:04:21.380through a series of moves until I was eight when we finally settled outside of Philadelphia. And so
00:04:29.920I grew up on the main line, as it's called, in a town called Berwyn, Pennsylvania.
00:04:35.960I started realizing right around puberty that I was attracted to men, as it happens.
00:04:44.100And I also realized right away, it was kind of in the zeitgeist, I guess, was that these thoughts I was having were, to say the very least, frowned upon.
00:04:57.860I realized in order to survive, I'd have to keep it quiet. And then I got really unlucky from that point on in my youth. No opportunities came up to confirm the, you know, I didn't have, unlike you and many of your generation, I didn't get to enjoy gay sex in high school or junior high.
00:05:18.940I dated women and went to prom and all that stuff.0.95
00:05:24.840But it wasn't until my college years that I finally did the dirty.
00:05:46.420And they actually was one of the best campuses in the country at the time, known as being gay friendly.
00:05:53.120They had a gay and lesbian student union that had been started in the early 70s, post Stonewall, that was very active.
00:06:01.560They were known for doing, they had an annual gay and lesbian dance that the entire campus showed up for.
00:06:08.980So straight people went to this thing.
00:06:12.020And that was kind of the thing to show allyship.
00:06:15.660But I was so afraid of anybody finding out. Still, I had gone through, you know, by this point, it had been a decade of hiding, not only to the world, but kind of to myself. But I saw this flyer when I got to campus, all over campus from the Gay and Lesbian Student Union for this night of gay and lesbian videos and kind of little documentaries.
00:06:40.640and they were going to have a, in one of the theaters on campus. And I thought to myself,
00:06:47.020well, if I go late, I can sneak in the back and the lights will already be out. And I can like
00:06:53.440find a back seat in the back and nobody will know. Plus the flyer said it had one of the
00:06:59.280bullets on that flyer. It was like, one of these films is just so you know, it's X-rated.
00:07:04.220i was like that sounds good so they were doing a porn showing at your college
00:07:12.300well it was hysterical it was it was technically a kind of a documentary or a how-to it's 15 minutes0.98
00:07:21.580long on how gay men have sex how they meet up what gay sex is i feel like that would spark0.85
00:07:28.800outrage now i know the film is kind of like a nature documentary where uh like attenborough0.97
00:07:35.500saying and then the the male lion mounts the other lion
00:07:41.260i mean i get the utility because i remember being in high school and i was seeing a guy for the
00:07:50.800first time and i was getting ready like i needed to figure out like what is bottoming entail like0.95
00:07:55.300what does sex entail and i read an article in cosmopolitan that was like it was about anal sex0.97
00:08:02.500but it was targeted for like straight women and their boyfriends who like want to spice it up0.91
00:08:07.260yeah you know and i was like okay well this is this is my resource so maybe i mean like you said
00:08:13.020kind of ahead of its time it was hysterical it started with how we had our code this pre-internet
00:08:19.360obviously how we had a code of hooking up so it started with a party a cocktail party and it's
00:08:26.780two guys making eye contact across the room right you had to learn these signals because there was
00:08:31.660no grinder right so it was all about eye contact the the trick back then we all know it today too
00:08:37.920is straight men will when they have eye contact with another guy they both turn away before the0.95
00:08:46.840second hand hits the next second i mean it's that fast whereas gay men will maintain the0.85
00:08:54.340they'll do it for that split second longer and then they know that is our code which which0.97
00:09:02.100endures today which endures today for sure yeah for sure yeah and so it showed them and then they
00:09:08.040like they leave the party and then it just shows them going right into a bedroom undressing each0.99
00:09:12.560other and then it showed them sucking and then it showed them fucking wow it's totally x-rated1.00
00:09:21.120and with the narration which is hysterical and now they're gonna have anal intercourse1.00
00:09:26.820one man pendered he is called the top and the other0.98
00:09:31.920it was so funny but anyways i'm watching this thing in the back of the theater0.98
00:09:38.180Before the blowjob, as soon as they begin to kiss and one guy starts unbuttoning the shirt of the other, I am having to cross my legs.0.97
00:13:40.480Of course, I went back in the closet. I kind of come out my last year at Oberlin.
00:13:45.720And I just went right back in for work in New York. But on the weekends, I would explore the gay bars.
00:13:52.720And that's where I started having my first conversations about AIDS with other gay men was at a bar.
00:14:01.300What was the feeling among people at that point? Were people scared? Were they confused?
00:14:05.140They were scared, but also, this might surprise people to hear, younger gay men who were kind of clueless, like I was, and most of us were clueless, who weren't connected to the Larry Kramers of the world or weren't politically involved.0.77
00:14:24.580We were just interested in the bars and cock.
00:14:29.280We were very, our default posture was being dismissive of the risk.0.93
00:14:36.260My first conversation about AIDS with another gay man was at a bar and the guy said to me,
00:14:42.660well, I'm hearing it's only in older gay men who have slept with hundreds of guys.
00:15:18.040And there were all sorts of rumors. The theory was that it was sexually transmitted. That's what the epidemiologists were kind of making very strong guesses at. But it wasn't clear cut yet. And so there was no message, not even from the new AIDS groups like GMHC. There was no strong messaging around condoms in 83.
00:15:41.660People just didn't even know that they were effective against this?
00:15:44.400Right. We didn't know exactly how it was transmitted.
00:15:46.380My understanding of the cultural history here is that during the seventies with the gay liberation movement, there was such a push to make gay sex an acceptable, perhaps, you know, non-criminal thing to do consensually. And this idea that you should stop having gay sex to save yourselves was like, felt like it was going against the grain of, of the movement for sexual liberation and gay liberation.
00:16:09.440I think the majority of gay men back then, you know, had gone through hellas in their youth. And now they had moved to these gay ghettos in American cities where they got some semblance of freedom and self-awareness.0.98
00:16:27.940And they were finally free and living it up. And all of a sudden you have on bare minimum of evidence that they should shut it all down. I thought that was a pretty natural response. I don't chastise the gay community for being slow on the uptake, especially when the government was ignoring it.0.99
00:16:48.580If science had been as fast as it usually is with a new epidemic and politicians had reacted like they usually do during epidemics, we would have been given stronger, more informed warnings earlier on.
00:17:02.660And our behavior would have changed earlier.
00:19:53.420So it was soon after I came to New York.
00:19:55.340I got some STDs from it and, and HIV often piggybacked on STDs and those STDs kind of
00:20:05.100shut me down sexually for a while. It was two years later in the fall of 85 when AIDS finally
00:20:11.780became a national story four years into the crisis. And it all happened because of Rock Hudson.
00:20:18.620Do you want to explain who Rock Hudson is? Cause I feel like some people listening to this,
00:20:22.620I mean, I was going to say some people are listening to this are going to be too young to know, which sounds patronizing because I am also theoretically too young to know who Rock Hudson is.
00:20:31.260And the only reason I do is because of AIDS.0.57
00:20:33.220Well, who's the actor today who is the heterosexual heartthrob doing movie after movie after movie?
00:30:55.380And I was very lucky because most of my peers, those conversations could lead to being thrown out of the house.
00:31:02.040I think one of the things I credit for them embracing me and being my first support group was that we were not raised by any of the mainstream religions.0.80
00:31:17.880It was one of the main reasons Reagan never mentioned AIDS because he was elected.0.88
00:31:21.820His base was what was called the moral majority, which is the same base that gets Donald Trump elected today.
00:31:29.660Immediately at the beginning, was there that rhetoric and that cultural understanding of like, you know, like the moralism with HIV and AIDS?
00:31:38.100Like, oh, this is God's punishment for sin.
00:31:40.280Like, was that a prevailing thought from the beginning?
00:31:45.860I may not love the centers. I don't say that I can go that far. But I sympathize with anybody who has a terminal disease, however he or she gets it.
00:32:04.260but there is not one case of AIDS on record in this country or as far as I know anywhere else
00:32:16.100that did not have its origin in sodomy the backlash against gays was going through the roof
00:32:22.740like they've like you know they did they were doing gay liberation throughout the 70s and
00:32:27.520this is the punishment it's all gone too far right so you had the whole moral majority and
00:32:32.320the religious leaders were saying, this is God's punishment. And you had an entire political party
00:32:39.600laughing about it and saying, let them die. And it was just horrific. But my family rallied behind0.99
00:32:47.680me and I had that support. And then I put myself on a learning curve trying to find out what was
00:32:52.100going on politically, what was going on scientifically, what was going on in the gay
00:32:57.860world which i was the gay political world which i was completely clueless about you went from total
00:33:03.640kind of living in the the blissfulness of total ignorance to let me learn everything about every
00:33:09.400facet of this possible because i have no other choice right i need to buy myself time did you
00:33:15.120feel like knowledge was the only thing that could have saved your life yes well i had to start with
00:33:20.380that and then the more i learned it got actually scarier because i then i learned how much it was
00:33:26.880being ignored. I learned how really fucked we all were and how the homophobia was just getting worse0.99
00:33:34.420and worse and worse. Things were getting worse, not better. And not much science was happening1.00
00:33:39.140because the president and Congress weren't putting much towards it at all. And that just
00:33:45.420made me angrier. And I tried to figure out, okay, how are we going to change this? How are we going
00:33:51.520to change the trajectory so that things start becoming more promising, not worse and worse and
00:33:58.060worse. Right. Because something, I mean, flash forward of sorts, but drugs that were really
00:34:04.160life-saving didn't end up becoming available until 1996. And when you look at the death rate
00:34:10.880every year between 1981 and 1996, it got worse every single year until drugs became more available,
00:34:17.560like exponentially worse right when did you first hear about act up its first demonstration
00:34:23.180which was outside my front door at work actually i should i should say what is act up act up is the
00:34:30.460aids coalition to unleash power it's an acronym it's one of the most significant movements in
00:34:36.400american history and considered one of the most successful you have to remember that it happened
00:34:41.240really late in the crisis. Right. So cases start really showing up and being reported on in 1981.
00:34:49.020ACT UP was formed in 87. Exactly. Six years. Peter, I did my history. I did my research
00:34:54.820before you showed up. I couldn't be an idiot in front of Peter Staley. March of 87. How'd you1.00
00:34:58.960hear about it? So it was a year and a half after my diagnosis. I had already met some AIDS activists
00:35:04.700in New York. I had finally met other people with HIV. I went to a support group in the summer of
00:35:10.64086. Finally, I was getting some luck. A guy named Griffin Gold was in the room, who was one of the
00:35:17.040founders of the People with AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement and the People with AIDS Coalition in
00:35:22.280New York. He introduced me to Michael Callum. So I was meeting some of the greats of the early AIDS
00:35:29.240activism, but I was also learning that they were not having a lot of success. They were screaming0.95
00:35:34.420into the wind as it were and then um march of 87 comes around i'm heading to my job on wall street
00:35:42.320and i get handed a flyer at 7 30 in the morning by some gay guy by some random gay guy it's really
00:35:48.240hot and uh and i read this thing and it's like aids it's an aids flyer and they're having a
00:35:54.880demonstration that morning and i go up to the trading floor everybody else has been handed a
00:36:00.340flyer too. And there's a conversation about AIDS happening at my work. And my mentor,
00:36:07.260the lead bond trader, he shuts down the... God, I still remember this. He shuts down the
00:36:13.200conversation. He's like, he's sick of it. And he says, well, if you ask me, they all deserve to
00:36:19.340die because they took it up the butt. And even the other straight people on the trading floor1.00
00:36:25.040were like, whoa, okay. Even they were like a little shocked by the cruelty of this display
00:36:33.520of homophobia that we pretty much, I mean, we heard the F word every day. Yeah. And nobody
00:36:38.760knows about your status or even that you're gay. No. So, you know, I, I'm like stew about it for
00:36:45.520the rest of the day. Don't see the demonstration cause I'm working, but then I get home, turn on
00:36:52.040the national news. And there's the demo. And it looks powerful and exciting. And they actually
00:37:01.480combine it with some footage of the commissioner of the FDA does a press conference in response
00:37:08.580saying, you know, we're going to tweak some regs, regulations and try to speed up stuff.
00:37:14.420AZT had just come out. AZT had just come out. Could you explain what AZT was and notably what
00:37:20.700it wasn't. ACT was the first drug to be approved to fight HIV AIDS. It came out the same month
00:37:28.140ACT UP was born. It blocked one of the processes, one of the many processes that HIV goes through,
00:37:35.820the HIV life cycle. And it does that effectively. The problem is that as we've seen with COVID and
00:37:43.520most viruses, if you target something that it does, it tries to keep mutating. And one of those
00:37:51.400mutations is able to get around that little action that the drug is doing to block it.
00:37:57.820Viral mutation creates what's called resistance to the drug. Initially, the drug will dramatically
00:38:03.340lower your viral load. And then the versions that can get around it take over and burst and
00:38:09.860your viral sores again. So it wasn't all that effective. It was effective for on average about
00:38:15.960six months. So you would have some people in a hospital who are like hospitalized, who all of a
00:38:21.680sudden within a week were looking alive again, and they could actually end up going home for a time.
00:38:29.940But then three months later, six months later, they were back in the hospital and then they die.
00:38:35.960It ended up feeling like a major disappointment, plus the fact that the initial dose that they selected for people with HIV, they wanted to really hit it hard, as hard as they could.
00:38:49.580But it ended up being more than was needed, and it was pretty toxic at the levels that they initially gave it to us.
00:39:04.100You combine that with the fact that people would end up dying anyway six months later and then feel shitty during those months from the drug.
00:39:12.640It got a bad reputation pretty quickly.
00:39:16.040So, OK, you see the first ACT UP demonstration on TV.
00:39:19.900I knew the equation, as we described before, things were getting worse and worse and worse.
00:39:24.720Something desperate had to be done to shake up that trajectory.
00:54:54.120So if that sounds good to you, all you have to do is go to hellofresh.com slash fruityfree and use code fruityfree for free breakfast for life.
00:55:03.220that's one free breakfast item per box for as long as you have a subscription at hellofresh.com
00:55:08.460slash fruity free with code fruity free now back to the show speaking of going to extremes uh our
00:55:17.800next image so this wow what are we looking at it's a house and covering the house is a giant
00:55:27.720yellow inflatable condom i want you to tell me about this because i know that you were there
00:55:33.540i was there i designed this action on the condom it says a condom to stop unsafe politics helms
00:55:39.860is deadlier than a virus who is jesse helms first of all jesse helms was he is like today's ted0.61
00:55:48.380cruz or desantis okay he's like desantis far right far right the worst of homophobes and he
00:55:57.220was a powerful U.S. senator from North Carolina. He actually harmed us badly. He would at the last
00:56:05.120minute pull out an amendment to some bill that was about to get passed in the Senate that would
00:56:11.160be an attack against gay people and people with HIV AIDS. The reason that the U.S. started banning
00:56:19.100people with HIV from traveling to the U.S. or immigrating to the U.S. was because of a Helms
00:56:25.520Amendment. And that banning of people with HIV from traveling here got replicated around the
00:56:32.880world after Helms did that here. Every other country did it too. So we couldn't travel.
00:56:39.420It was just horrible. He banned the CDC from giving any grants to any AIDS service organization
00:56:49.640that mentioned homosexuality, which gutted our ability to get out safe sex messaging,
00:56:57.980at least with government funding. So we had to do it all with private funding.
01:05:43.260And it was, it's a very emotional wallop.
01:05:46.960That demo was largely ignored at the time.
01:05:50.080And that's because five years in, we'd been doing demonstrations almost every month that made national news.
01:05:57.260We had become yesterday's news. We couldn't keep the nation's attention and the press's attention year after year after year. Even as we got more extreme and more creative with our actions, the country began to move on. It was a very difficult period in AIDS activism.
01:06:17.700all right next one so this photo you are being bent over but not in not in the way that you
01:06:26.680know i imagine you would have preferred uh you're being bent over what looks like the
01:06:31.120back of a cop car being handcuffed by well no all of those things are ways i would prefer
01:11:51.780or would you rather save those lives and let them have sex?0.96
01:11:54.460I think that, well, I don't think we've got time to go into that.0.93
01:11:58.320What was it like being invited to these places and these stages
01:12:01.660and having to argue with these people who had no regard for human life,
01:12:08.520for your life, for anyone's life, you're watching people die around you
01:12:11.820and they're just saying, well, you shouldn't have had sex.
01:12:14.620How did you not lose your mind talking to these people?
01:12:19.780Well, I mean, it was a prevalent view,
01:12:22.820so it was job number one to push back against it.
01:12:27.940We couldn't ignore that elephant in the room
01:12:29.960because it was he he wasn't a sole voice it was the thing that we had to defeat and if we didn't
01:12:38.380have our rhetoric down for how to push back against that in a way that at least a plurality
01:12:45.660of americans would kind of understand at least then we were going to lose i think sometimes when
01:12:54.680people talk about the AIDS crisis or those early years of the AIDS crisis as this historical event
01:13:01.280it's like the timeline gets collapsed in a way but you know like I said earlier 1981 is when the
01:13:08.900public starts largely becoming aware that something is happening and it's not until 1996 that the
01:13:15.320life-saving drugs become available and so that's 15 years I mean it was a long time I don't have
01:13:21.240to tell you that. And year over year, the amount of deaths are going up exponentially. For you
01:13:26.720living through that, and I mean, getting increasingly sick yourself, how did you keep
01:13:32.600the fight going? What was it like to have to continue fighting to be seen and fighting for
01:13:38.740treatment while so many people are dying around you? Well, it was a roller coaster,
01:13:48.200emotional roller coaster. And I think for those of us who survived, there are two things we can
01:13:55.780feel at the same time. It's encompassed this surreal existence that we went through. It was
01:14:01.760the most painful period of our lives that most of us have some PTSD around, but it was also the
01:14:07.600most beautiful and alive periods of our life. Just extraordinary to see the queer movement at its
01:14:14.280best and strongest. The only way we could get through it was to not be 100% serious,1.00
01:14:22.100angry activists every hour of the day, year after year. As I wrote in my memoir,
01:14:29.600show me an activist who can no longer feel joy, and I will show you a useless activist.
01:14:37.140We upped the volume on that, so upped the volume on everything. We were angry and we were doing
01:14:45.420these incredible actions and winning great victories, but then turning around a month
01:14:51.300later and the death count would be even higher. So you were losing the war while you were winning
01:14:56.620these political victories. And every weekend we would have to, Sunday night or Wednesday night,
01:15:04.140you'd be going to a memorial. How many funerals do you think you went to? I have a low count
01:15:09.540because I avoided them. I'm ashamed of it. Because it was too hard? It was a self-protective
01:15:14.840mechanism. I didn't want to confront what was my very likely future. I avoided hospitals. I avoided
01:15:24.500memorials. Shamefully, I did a lot of self-protection by trying to avoid the death and
01:15:31.400dying. My whole life became act up. It was church. All my boyfriends were act up members,
01:15:39.860my sex life, every moment. So on the weekends, we'd let loose and the dance clubs in New York
01:15:46.380were, they were at their peak. Younger boys think you got fun nights in Brooklyn these days,
01:15:53.200but it was nothing compared to what we were doing in the late eighties in lower Manhattan.
01:15:58.440ecstasy had just come out it wasn't called molly back then the new drug was ecstasy
01:16:04.160and madonna was the new pop star i've heard of her i've heard of her and so that all these
01:16:12.380beautiful things aligned and we just had these beautiful communal experiences extremes we were
01:16:22.740burning this candle at both ends in the worst times and the best times of our life at the same
01:16:29.080time. But that's how, if we didn't have that other end of the candle burning, we would have burned
01:16:34.260out really fast. But there's also this reality of, as things got really depressing in 92 and 93 and
01:16:43.84094, when we had scored so many individual victories, but the top line number was just
01:16:50.020getting worse and worse and worse of deaths that uh what's the alternative you're gonna just close
01:16:56.680up shop and wait to die that it was it was either just keep on keeping doing as if you might win
01:17:05.120and you might get to a moment where the deaths decline or you close up shop and the alternative
01:17:11.360is worse so you just kept kept at it and you plow through the pessimism and ultimately activism if
01:17:19.160done really well is about plowing through pessimism. And ultimately you did. Some of us.
01:17:25.500Right. In 1996, antiretroviral therapy becomes available, which is the drug that we know now to
01:17:32.600be life-saving and life-preserving if you're HIV positive. You had been living with HIV for about
01:17:39.460a decade at that point, right? What was it like taking that drug? And I imagine at this point,
01:17:46.080you've you had taken so many drugs experimentally on the market off the market what was it like
01:17:51.640among you and your peers realizing that it was working we had a hard time believing it and we
01:17:57.720had so many letdowns in the 90s early 90s you said in interviews from the 90s that you didn't
01:18:05.560you weren't expecting to outlive i've been saying that for years and drugs kept coming out and we
01:18:11.200were combining them and that was buying me a little time. That kept resetting my two-year
01:18:17.000clock. I was one of the lucky ones that made it to 96. And then all of us at the same time,
01:18:23.680I mean, the science was clear and we had really adopted science as our religion by that point.
01:18:30.480We knew logically our brains were like, we've been saved, but emotionally we just couldn't
01:18:38.800believe it it just been too stung you'd spent so long preparing for death yeah and there was
01:18:46.720we had had too many we'd been disappointed too often we all went on the drugs that were in that
01:18:52.900study that showed this remarkable success and within months all of us went undetectable one
01:19:01.060after another which which means that the viral load of hiv in your body is so low that it doesn't
01:19:07.100get picked up by tests exactly uh it doesn't mean you're cured you still have the virus
01:19:11.680but the viral load test it needs a certain level before it starts be able to count them
01:19:18.280and when you're undetectable it's impossible to transmit via sex yeah even if you got a very low
01:19:24.120viral low detectable viral load uh it's actually impossible to transmit you need a which people
01:19:30.980still need to learn it was people still need to learn we all went on and it's like whoa and then
01:19:36.800you go from this surreal existence to something completely different. You're confronted with the
01:19:43.660fact that you have a future you didn't think you ever have. Your movement begins to collapse
01:19:50.220because it scored such a huge success. Your community turns its back on HIV AIDS as an issue
01:20:00.460because it's been a hundred percent focused on it for 15 years and it's exhausted and it's
01:20:07.140mentally damaged by what it's gone through that very natural responses please can we not think
01:20:16.560about this for a while can we move on to something else and they moved on very quickly to gay marriage
01:20:22.500gays in the military etc with this new found power that aids activism gave it this new this
01:20:30.120realization that as an organized people, we could win victories on a national stage. They started
01:20:36.260using that for issues around gay rights. But to us, it felt like not only was that a mental health
01:20:42.760break that was necessary, it also felt like the community turning its back on us because we had
01:20:48.960been the center of attention. Now we were the uncomfortable people in the room. A lot of people
01:20:55.720who survived in the way that you had, who lived through those early years and then made it to
01:21:00.9401996, have described a sort of survivor's guilt and a kind of PTSD as if having come home from a
01:21:10.000war that your peers didn't survive. Absolutely. I've often analogized with the Vietnam War where
01:21:17.160those who came home in the 70s, the country didn't want to think about it anymore because
01:21:23.240it had been such a painful experience. So those who did survive and came home had no victory
01:21:30.480parades. They were the uncomfortable people in the room that would kind of force you to think
01:21:37.120about it again. So you were almost avoided. Combining that with the movement kind of
01:21:44.340collapsing and like, well, what do you do now that you have a future? You've got to return to
01:21:49.620the real world i had been on disability a lot of us had or we had been doing odd jobs and giving all
01:21:58.000our free time to a movement what next how do we survive what kind of career do we replace that
01:22:05.640with a lot of people like the younger ones like spencer cox had gigantic holes in their resume
01:22:12.380you know they could they had a hard time getting a real job because at this point people are in
01:22:18.240their thirties yeah forties right having never really worked because this all started when they
01:22:24.060were in college a lot of people with that had advanced hiv what we called back then full-blown
01:22:30.860aids they thought the end was so near that they had blown through credit card limits and they were
01:22:37.140in a real financial mess and they had to return to the they had to try to find a career and it was
01:22:43.360very difficult adjustments. You'd think, you know, you'd be like, oh, yay, I'm going to live
01:22:49.520forever. But this is the other stuff that was coming on our plate. And it was not easy. It
01:22:57.940was a spectrum of a fallout and who landed on their feet and who didn't. And a lot of people
01:23:03.880didn't land on their feet. And I didn't land on my feet easily. I tried to, I did, you know,
01:23:08.940I did fulfill a dream of being an entrepreneur and launching a business on my own. I stuck with
01:23:15.700AIDS. I created a website for people with HIV that explained the complexity of HIV treatment
01:23:23.100and became a community with bulletin boards, et cetera, for those living with HIV. But at the
01:23:30.360same time I was trying to do that, I escaped, you know, the part of the queer community,0.90
01:23:36.160The only part where I, this is sad to say, the only part of the community I could find at that point where I felt wanted, frankly, as I was turning 40, was the crystal meth underground.0.98
01:26:47.580I learned just true love and empathy for each other.
01:26:50.680And I've been on a mission ever since to stay tapped into that
01:26:54.720and add that to my activism and make it a central focus
01:27:00.340of how I relate to people in general and conduct my life.
01:27:05.380And I fundamentally changed by recovering from a crystal meth addiction.
01:27:11.380I do feel like such a lost part of the story of the AIDS crisis is, I mean, we talk about the lost generation, which I think that rhetoric serves its purpose to convey the magnitude of what happened. But in reality, not everyone in the generation was lost. And what about the people who survived? What about people like you and this expectation that people go through the most unimaginably traumatic 15 years and then are expected to reintegrate into society without fault?
01:27:41.380right i'm grateful that you were able to will it and i grieve those who weren't yeah and we lost
01:27:48.340some we lost a lot back then and we lost some after like spencer cox yeah who never figured
01:27:55.540out how to reenter the so-called real world over the last couple years you know as well as anybody
01:28:03.080in this country that we've dealt with such an extreme uptick in homophobia and transphobia
01:28:10.340the resurgence of those forces as a political weapon. Do you see any parallels or potential
01:28:16.840parallels between the kind of like anti-gay and anti-trans panic and hysteria that we're dealing
01:28:24.260with now and that of your young adulthood? And, you know, are there any lessons that you would
01:28:31.080want to bestow upon the queer youths of today? Sure. With some major, major caveats. You know,0.98
01:28:39.540I think one thing we got really right in ACT UP is we did borrow a lot from history. We had that
01:28:48.080historical memory from the lesbians who were in the room from day one, and we borrowed the best
01:28:54.200of prior movements. But we also were, there were a lot of young people in the movement,
01:28:59.940a lot of arrogance that comes with youth, which can be very helpful. There was a lot of,
01:29:05.660you know, we're going to try new stuff. We're going to try new things. We're going to tweak
01:29:13.460prior movements. We're going to create new things that will be copied in the future.
01:29:18.560That is necessary with all activism. I remember there was a couple Stonewall veterans in ACT UP
01:29:25.080who are my age now. I'm an old guy now. A couple of them had a wrong approach of saying,
01:29:31.960In my day, we did it like this and you should be doing, you need to listen to me.
01:29:53.320And I think that needs to be encouraged.
01:29:55.900So I can offer advice, but I want to lead with the fact that young people today shouldn't be listening, shouldn't be looking for some sort of strict playbook from a 63-year-old white guy, right?
01:30:12.800With the exception of every moment is going to require you to write a new book, a new playbook, because the time is different, the tactics are different.
01:30:24.620If ACT UP happened today, we would fail because it's harder now. There was no Fox News back then. We would have been branded terrorists like Black Lives Matter was branded terrorists by Fox News.
01:30:38.640We wouldn't have gotten 80% of the country calling for an increase of federal tax dollars spent on AIDS research, which is what happened shortly after our demonstration at the FDA.
01:30:51.680We convinced 80% of the country to do something right about AIDS.
01:31:05.460It's going to require some more creativity.
01:31:07.480If you just borrow our book and only do that kind of activism, you're going to fail. It's going to have to be something more different. Personally, I get hope from some of the nerdier stuff I see out there.
01:31:24.580Like instead of the people who are gluing their hands to paintings for climate activism, I see the activists who are actually working with the scientists and the technology side and leveraging the fact that there is money to be made from reducing carbon emissions.
01:31:47.880leveraging all that power with science kind of this geeky stuff they give me hope i know some
01:31:57.900of those activists and they're and they realize they're up against it we all realize it's really
01:32:04.260really scary on the climate front but they get up every day fighting it with that model so maybe
01:32:11.040gluing yourself to a really beautiful painting is you're not a fan i'm not a fan you're not a fan