Abstract
Their friends and lovers were dying. A virus was threatening their lives and their community. They did not have time for what they saw as a slow, ineffectual, and criminally negligent response by public authorities. While some gay men were working to be taken seriously in the polite circles of ministry representatives and health agency officials, a group of activists had no patience for such respectability politics. AIDS was killing gay men, and they would break the silence, spectacularly and without reserve. In 1989 they founded Act Up-Paris to disrupt the status quo, pushing AIDS activism and the gay movement in France beyond its comfort zone. What they did would become the stuff of legend.
Like the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969, some events in social movement history become myths. The stories about what happened, the divergent accounts between people who were there—or who claimed to be—and the inevitable debates over its representations become just as important for shaping future collective action as the event itself. While not an event per se, the story of Act Up-Paris, from its origins to its major rise in popularity in the 1990s and eventual decline in the 2000s, has left an indelible mark on French and international activism. Now over thirty years since it was created, some of its former leaders have gone on to found other organizations or play key roles in mainstream politics and publishing, weaving their own narratives about their involvement. Its story is also being told in critically acclaimed films, autobiographies, and other artistic works. These accounts have helped create a legend of Act Up-Paris, shaping its legacy.
That Act Up-Paris would become legendary is no accident. Indeed, storytelling is no doubt one of the organization’s key strengths. Many of its actions, from die-ins to zaps and other acts of civil disobedience, mobilized language and symbols—think of the upside-down pink triangle or phrases such as “silence=death”—to shape public perceptions about AIDS, HIV-positive gay men, and ultimately the group itself. Getting noticed, including by making people angry and uncomfortable, was precisely the point. Its members did not claim to want to make friends but rather to make people take notice and to give a voice and sense of community to those directly affected by the epidemic. Act Up-Paris has become akin to social movement mythology in part because its members have always been committed to telling the story of what they were doing, even as they did it. In other words, Act Up-Paris made itself impossible to forget. But how we remember it, particularly the years when it was most active and had the most members, is another matter.
Contending with the legacy of Act Up-Paris, still an active organization today, requires carefully unpacking its mythology. Christophe Broqua’s Action=Vie: A History of AIDS Activism and Gay Politics in France does just that. Originally published in 2005, this translation (by Jean-Yves Bart and Kel Pero) is forwarded by David Halperin. English readers now have access to this work that has already made significant contributions to the sociology of social movements and sexualities. In this book, organized thematically and chronologically, Broqua answers a series of interconnected questions: How and why was Act Up-Paris founded? What explains the evolution of its strategies and popularity? What were its ideological underpinnings, and who created them? Who were its members, and what did their involvement mean to them? What impact did the organization have both on AIDS activism and on gay activism? To answer these questions, the author draws on a variety of data, including years of participant observation—Broqua is a socio-anthropologist—interviews with activists, and surveys of the membership, as well as analysis of the literature produced by Act Up-Paris, people associated with it, and its rival organizations.
The richness of these sources deeply immerses readers into the cultural and political context of the time Broqua focuses on, which extends between the mid 1980s to the early 2000s. Many of the sections include long excerpts from interviews and published works by activists and their detractors. The emotion, urgency, and tension of their words gives readers an opportunity to feel some of what people at the time who might have been handed a leaflet at a demonstration or opened the gay newsletter they subscribed to might have felt. Broqua makes clear that conflict—between Act Up-Paris members, between Act Up-Paris leaders and those of other AIDS and gay groups, between Act Up-Paris and the press and the authorities—was omnipresent. These conflicts were interpersonal, intellectual, and always political. Importantly, they are difficult to describe. Yet, Broqua carefully provides readers with his own evaluation of the situation without appearing to pick sides, letting readers face for themselves the same set of complex choices that people concerned with AIDS also had to face: radical versus incremental action, encouraging risk reduction or condoms only, emphasizing hope or despair. We learn about how activists thought—and fought—through these choices, doing so within the particular constraints of their context. Broqua helpfully breaks down the evolution of Act Up-Paris into distinct periods, tracing its rise and fall in popularity and influence, detailing at each stage how activists constructed their identities and strategies in response to politics and epidemiology. As treatments diminished the lethality of the virus, the group and its members had to contend with the changing meanings of death and survival.
Readers unfamiliar with contemporary France will learn about the particular situation of gay, lesbian, and queer politics at the time. Unlike in the United States or the United Kingdom, for example, the 1980s were somewhat of a low point for French gay mobilizations. Socialist President François Mitterrand, elected in 1981, equalized age of consent laws for homosexual and heterosexual sex. Meeting this key demand of gay organizations coupled with the relative leftward political shift of his presidency made mobilizing more difficult. While the United States was seeing a rise in the influence of the Christian right, anti-gay politics was comparatively less central in France. Thus, at the start of the AIDS epidemic, existing gay movement infrastructure was weak. Activists were also facing a French hurdle to identity politics. For example, one of the early collectives created to fight the outbreak, AIDES, went out of its way to de-emphasize gayness even as gay men were the hardest hit. Despite being run mostly by gay men and founded by Daniel Defert in the wake of the death of his partner, Michel Foucault, from AIDS, the group presented a sexually neutral public image. They were responding to French republican universalist exigences that discredit demands formulated in the name of communities. Universalism also shaped and continues to shape anti-racist and feminist organizing in France. This universalist stance contrasts markedly with the first AIDS responses in the United States, which were also founded by gay men but made their community orientation clear.
It was in part in reaction to these circumstances that Act Up-Paris was created. One of its founders, Didier Lestrade, had lived in New York, knew Larry Kramer, and witnessed the founding of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) there. In returning to France, he and his friends decided to import that model, duplicating its symbols and tactics, and transforming them in the process. Their goal was to create a group that would center HIV-positive men, at least symbolically. In so doing, they created a stark contrast with rival organizations, a stance for which they were both admired and admonished in France. Because of their success, by the early 1990s American activists were looking to their French counterparts for inspiration. This cross-Atlantic circulation of people and ideas is one of the many compelling aspects of Broqua’s analysis. Indeed, in addition to teaching us about the international history of gay and AIDS mobilizations, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the intellectual history of queer theory and Foucault, to the spread and critique of which Act Up is an important contributor.