ACT UP Oral History Project
ACT UP Oral History Project Website Relaunch
Joining us to discuss the project and the newly relaunched ACT UP Oral History Project website, is film maker and activist Jim Hubbard, who co-produced with author Sara Schulman “United in Anger” a film documenting various ACT UP campaigns.
The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. The project is coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, with principal camera work by James Wentzy.
ACT UP, founded in March of 1987, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Its determined advocacy and highly-focused demonstrations supported by innovative graphics utterly changed the world’s perception of people with AIDS and queer people. This description, on the actuporalhistory.org website introduces to some of the indepth coverage of the accomplishments of one of the most effective and influential left leaning LGBTQ groups in the US. The site is a great source of political and tactical decisions that challenged government policy and inaction at a time when the HIV epidemic was killing hundreds of thousands in the US and infecting more than a million young men and some women. It reveals some of the ways the group was able to capture the attention of the mass media and communicate to the public at large about government and corporate failures that jeapordized so many lives of people living with HIV and AIDS.