#AIDS #GayHistory #LGBTQIA+
reprinted verbatim as a service to history
ACT UP BEYOND NEW YORK: Stories and Strategies from a Movement to End the
AIDS Crisis
**CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS**
Please forward widely!
*ACT UP Beyond New York:*
*Stories and Strategies from a Movement to End the AIDS Crisis*
*Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore*
ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) started in New York in 1987 as
a direct action activist group “united in anger to end the AIDS crisis.”
Within a few years, there were over a hundred autonomous chapters in the US
and around the world, but beyond the story of the New York City chapter
this history has largely disappeared from the public record. *ACT UP Beyond
New York* seeks to change this—part historical corrective, part rallying
cry, and part activist handbook, this anthology will include essays,
conversations, and documentation from dozens of ACT UP chapters, from the
1980s to the present, in order to bring these crucial stories to public
attention.
*ACT UP Beyond New York* will consist entirely of writing by activists
about their experiences in ACT UP, on their own terms. Each ACT UP chapter
intervened in a specific cultural, political, and social environment, and I
am particularly interested in the specificities of each group. Each chapter
had its own methods of fighting for HIV/AIDS treatment and healthcare
access, resisting structural homophobia and discrimination against people
with AIDS, building community, and shifting consciousness.
What were the focuses of your group? The successes and failures? What
specific challenges did you face? What inspired you the most, and what let
you down?
I am interested in all the ways people came together (and failed to come
together) to fight for universal healthcare, racial justice, women with
HIV/AIDS, sex workers, gender transgression, disability justice, bisexual
inclusion, prisoners with HIV/AIDS, trans liberation, condom distribution,
needle exchange, housing, and a cure for HIV—not to mention all the
affinity groups and coalition actions to confront every issue of the day,
from anti-war activism to abortion access, police brutality to
gentrification.
I’m particularly interested in how ACT UP chapters made connections between
government inaction and structural homophobia, racism, classism, misogyny,
transphobia, and ableism. And, failed to make these connections.
What are your reflections on ACT UP Network meetings, experiments in
consensus process, intergenerational contact across the lines of identity
and experience, and strategies for organizing the most impactful protests?
What about organizing that centered HIV+ people and those with other immune
disorders (PISD caucus), the perils and possibilities of sex and activism,
and ACT UP chapters that continue today?
How did race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, religion, ethnicity,
indigeneity, and rural/urban experience affect organizing? What about
national origin, Global South/Global North perspective, HIV status, and
access to treatment and prevention, over time and in shifting contexts?
What were the dynamics within your ACT UP chapter? What forms of
collaboration, conflict, jealousy, trauma, and transformation emerged? What
surprising relationships became possible, and impossible? What was secret,
and what was public? What inspired you to organize, and how did you mourn
the loss of so many fellow activists, lovers, and friends? How do you
continue to mourn, celebrate, and intervene in the AIDS crisis today?
In our current dystopian moment, what can we learn from how ACT UP
organizers faced police repression, resurgent homophobia, right-wing
“family values” attacks, and brutal austerity politics? What are your tales
of camaraderie and desperation, bravery and commitment, creativity and
inspiration, success and failure?
People need to understand their own history in order to grasp what is
possible. I’m interested in your most intimate stories, in all their detail
and specificity—everything you worry the world refuses to recognize is what
I want to spotlight here.
*About the editor*: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
<https://mattildabernsteinsyca
is the award-winning author of seven books, most recently *Touching the Art*,
and the editor of six anthologies, most recently *Between Certain Death and
a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis*. She
has written widely about the AIDS crisis, including in her books *The
Freezer Door* and *Sketchtasy*, and her new novel, *Terry Dactyl
<https://mattildabernsteinsyca
*,* which will be out in November. Her time in ACT UP San Francisco changed
her life.
*About the publisher: *Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit
book publisher based in Chicago whose mission is to publish books that
contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. Haymarket strives
to make its books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the
education and development of a critical, engaged, and internationalist Left.
*Guidelines:* Please submit nonfiction personal essays of up to 4000 words,
as Word attachments (no PDFs, please), to nobodypasses@gmail.com. Short
essays are great, as are conversations in Q&A format, essays centered
around a particular action, and pieces that include visual elements
(especially flyers, posters, and other documentation). Feel free to contact
me with any queries. Contributors will be paid $200 for each essay
appearing in the anthology, and every contributor will receive a copy of
the book. The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2025, but the sooner
the better!
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