Maxine Wolfe News Today

They were secretaries, cab drivers, teachers and artists — brought together on a mission for lesbian visibility and political change.

They were secretaries, cab drivers, teachers and artists — brought together on a mission for lesbian visibility and political change.

In the lengthy Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, author Sarah Schulman documents and analyzes the ideals, actions, successes and failures of the people who made up the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power.

How ACT UP Shook the Straight Power Structure Sarah Schulman has written the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and AIDS activism in the U.S. The accomplishments of the direct-action HIV organization, ACT UP, are staggering. Over the course of six years, from 1987 to 1993, ACT UP designed a fast-track system where those who were sick could access unapproved experimental drugs, ran a four-year campaign to force the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change i...

Sarah Schulman Discusses Her Massive ACT UP Tome ‘Let the Record Show,’ Coming This May Book design by No Ideas; portrait by Drew Stevens It’s fascinating to watch how traumatic and fraught events get historicized, isn’t it? Think the Holocaust. Think the Vietnam War. And think the U.S. 1980s and ’90s AIDS crisis and the furious activism that rose up to meet it. Only in the past decade have we started seeing major nonfiction works of film or publishing take on that seismic era (which,...

Design by Ingrid Frahm There’s something powerful about wearing a message on a T-shirt; something vulnerable about putting it on your body. You’ve committed to your message, and it’s there in plain sight across your chest for everyone to see. Feminist activists have been using T-shirts to challenge a culture that denies women and others their basic rights for decades—and to keep pushing social justice movements themselves to be more inclusive. In the same way that posting a feminist o...